Introduction: Conspiring to Be Civil: Jews, Antisemitism, and British Civility, 1881–1939

Abstract

This book is about “civil antisemitism” in British literature and culture from the early twentieth century through the start of World War II, a period during which the British nation was renegotiating both its imperial legacy and its long-standing traditions of courtesy and manners. What makes antisemitism “civil” in these years are the social and political pressures of a public sphere in which overt bigotry is seen as objectionable, and in which expressions of prejudice therefore require extraordinary degrees of complexity and obliquity. Antisemitism becomes a “style” of speech or writing, best understood and criticized in rhetorical and narrative terms, an elaborate or even tortuous compromise between rival traditions of hatred and politesse.

[H]atred as an overpowering passion, a great dramatic motive, introduced into the midst of studies of the civilized manners and morals of to-day, would make us uneasy, and shock us as bad art, because out of focus….

In a word, to be a “good hater” has ceased, in the most advanced view of the present to be a “picturesque” accomplishment. And that surely is significant.

—Anon. (“The Decline of Hatred” [1901])