“While current hostility to Jews in the UK is frequently packaged as ‘progressive’ political comment, its origins are in traditional social attitudes that have been integral to Britain’s history for centuries.” So concludes Shalom Lappin in a new paper entitled “This Green and Pleasant Land: Britain and the Jews.”

Particularly worth reading is Lappin’s treatment of how much of the British left joined with the right to block the entry of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. He writes: “In fact the successful effort to restrict the entry of Jewish refugees was not the work of a specific political group, but a broadly based enterprise that spanned ideological differences. It was the result of a consensus that ran across the political and social spectrum, from upper class Conservative politicians to working class Labour activists and the unions.”

When Lappin says that “Britain is unique among Western countries in hosting a large, high profile campaign to boycott Israel,” I’m not sure he’s entirely right. The boycott movement has reared its head in the Canadian union movement as well as in Ireland. And regardless of whether we think of South Africa as a “western” state, it’s certainly another example of a democracy with a vocal movement to boycott Israel supported by prominent public figures.

I would also like to have seen some discussion of the pogroms which took place in Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool in the summer of 1947, following the hanging of two British army NCOs in Palestine by Jewish fighters. It’s an under-reported episode of modern UK Jewish history, but one that’s important for our understanding of the current relationship between events in the Middle East and hate crimes targeting Jews.

Those quibbles aside, this paper is well worth studying and another feather in the cap of its publisher, the Yale Interdisciplinary Initiative for the Study of Antisemitism (YIISA). Download it here.