Anti-Semitism is an evil that still requires examination

Can you explain, briefly, why some people are prejudiced against Jews? It’s an interesting question. My late mum was a bit anti-Semitic, and I always found her mild animus incomprehensible and indeed weird, as did my father. It surfaced during the Yom Kippur War, when I was 13: my dad and I were urging on the Israelis — in a slightly detached way, as if it were, say, Leeds playing Chelsea in a football match and through default one found oneself supporting the lesser of two evils, i.e. Chelsea. Mum was cheering on the Arabs because, she admitted, she wasn’t ‘keen on’ Jews. We were both surprised, my Dad and I. Not so much because she had shown prejudice per se — I think we largely concurred with her dislike of Japanese people, southern Europeans (especially the Spanish, but excluding the Portuguese), Finns, Biafrans, the Ceylonese, all Indo-Chinese and Irish Catholics. It’s just that we tended to think of Jewish people as the good guys in what was a simpler, more Manichean world than the one we have today.

Of course there has been a long history of anti-Semitism in Great Britain; my mum’s antipathy drew upon this, not least the disquiet occasioned in the East End of London, where she and her own dad had lived, by Oswald Mosley. Jews were disliked then because they were ‘clever’, my mother opined — and she would not budge from this as a valid reason to bear some grudge against them no matter how cogently I argued that paradoxically she disliked Africans because they were ‘very stupid’. Other peoples, it seemed, couldn’t win either way.

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But that ‘clever’ was a loaded charge. It summoned the idea that they had money, that they involved themselves in money and, simultaneously, controlled international capitalism while sponsoring international bolshevism (which seemed to me then, as now, self-defeating activities and not remotely ‘clever’); that they had their paws in everything and, being rootless aliens, held allegiance to no one but themselves.