Brona’s Reading George Orwell 2024
As you can see from the date on the cover, Orwell is writing in the last two or three years of WWII. The essay I am reviewing here, Antisemitism in Britain, was written in February 1945, and appeared in Contemporary Jewish Record, April, 1945, a month before the end of the War in Europe.
Orwell himself sometimes appeared antisemitic, especially early on. In his first work, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), there are unnecessary references to Jews, perhaps reflecting his upbringing, the times, a lack of thought. But it appears it was a tendency he became aware of and battled with.
Anshel Pfeffer, in the Jewish magazine Forward (4 Aug 2012), reviewing Christopher Hitchens’ Foreword to Orwell’s Diaries, writes, “Even in his last years (he died in 1950) Orwell was always quick to identify people, gratuitously, as Jews, in a way in which their Jewishness is seen an explanation to their situation, actions or appearance.”
But happily, for Orwell’s admirers, Pfeffer eventually arrives at the conclusion:
“Orwell was nothing if not honest, and Hitchens is right to defend him. He did try to educate himself away from his native prejudices, and even if not entirely successful in defeating them, he was scathingly honest about them. And how many other writers can we say that about?”
Antisemitism in Britain begins: “There are about 400,000 known Jews in Britain, and in addition, some thousands or, at most, scores of thousands of Jewish refugees …” and goes on “… there is no real Jewish ‘problem’ in England. The Jews are not numerous enough or powerful enough, and it is only in what are loosely called ‘intellectual circles’ that they have any noticeable influence. Yet it is generally admitted that antisemitism is on the increase …”
It’s an odd essay, or it feels odd to me. There’re no figures, no surveys, no evidence, just the general feelings we all get, talking to others, as I, for instance might in talking about racism amongst truck drivers. A milkman says to him: “A Jew don’t do no work, not the same as what an Englishman does. ‘E’s too clever,” and so on. One conclusion Orwell draws from these remarks is that there is a certain intellectual level above which people are ashamed of being antisemitic.
He then goes on, that causes of antisemitism are hard to determine, but that one might be the perception that victory (against Germany) will benefit the Jews. [Victory was probably the least we could do, given the huge numbers of Jewish refugees turned away from Britain and the USA before and in the early years of the War.] but also that Jews were perceived as profiteers and as cowards during the blitz.
Then, as though to answer my arguments above, he writes: “One effect of the persecutions in Germany has been to prevent antisemitism from being seriously studied” and that after the War it must be.
Sympathy for Jews means “there has been conscious suppression, by all thoughtful people, of anything likely to wound Jewish susceptibilities.” The ‘Jew Joke’ has disappeared from the stage and postcards; no writer would put an unsympathetic Jewish character into a novel. [So what does that say about Georgette Heyer who did so in The Grand Sophy just five years later.]
On the Palestine issue, too, it was de rigeur among enlightened people to accept the Jewish case as proved and avoid examining the claims of the Arabs … you had a situation in which the press was in effect censored in favour of the Jews, while in private antisemitism was on the up.
Orwell concludes he doesn’t know where antisemitism comes from, and that it was probably more blatant in the 1920s and 30s, eg. in the writing of GK Chesterton, his “endless tirades against Jews”; but he thinks that it is a consequence of “nationalism” – presumably the concepts Briton and Jew each exclude the other. “I defy any modern intellectual”, he writes, “to look closely and honestly into his own mind without coming upon nationalistic loyalties and hatreds of one kind or another.”
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George Orwell, Antisemitism in Britain, from S Orwell & I Angus (ed.s), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 3, Penguin, London, 1970 (first pub. 1968). pp 378-388.
See also my reviews of:
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Preface to Animal Farm, Ukraine edition (1947)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)