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‘A veritable Janus at the gates ofJewry’: British Jews and Mr ArnoldWhiteSam Johnson

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‘A veritable Janus at the gates of Jewry’: BritishJews and Mr Arnold White

SAM JOHNSON

ABSTRACT Historians of British antisemitism consider Arnold White (publicist,

author, journalist, campaigner) a key exponent of racially orientated anti-Jewish

sentiment in the United Kingdom in the period before the First World War. These

attitudes were repeatedly demonstrated by his vehement opposition to East

European Jewish immigration and underscored by a large literary output on the

topic. In the late 1880s, White frequently clashed with leading Anglo-Jewish figures

on immigration yet, in general terms, there was often difficulty in assigning him

definitively to the antisemitic camp. This was the result of his work for Baron

Maurice de Hirsch and the Jewish Colonization Association, which led to a more

flattering interpretation of White’s contribution to solving the so-called ‘Jewish

question’. Indeed, at times, he was actually regarded as a ‘friend of the Jews’.

Johnson’s study examines the problems Anglo-Jewish society had in analysing and

negotiating the White world-view. For instance, an appreciation in the Jewish

Chronicle described him as a ‘veritable Janus at the gates of Jewry’, essentially a

two-faced troublemaker whose true attitude was not easy to determine. For almost

three decades, the question of whether White was friend or foe was asked by various

individuals and publications. Ultimately, Johnson considers what White and his

Anglo-Jewish encounters reveal about the nature of the Jewish-Gentile relationship

and how antisemitic ideology was confronted in Britain in the period before the

outbreak of the First World War.

KEYWORDS Antisemitism, Arnold White, Great Britain, immigration, JewishColonization Association, Jewish-Gentile relations

In Anglo-Jewish historiography, Arnold White (1848�1925) is a nameimmediately and continually associated with the anti-immigration move-

ment that sought to halt the flow of East European Jews to British shores in

There once was a great writer named White.

Who wished all the Jews out of sight;

So he called them nice names,

And played little games,

But didn’t succeed one wee mite.

* ‘By the way’, Jewish World (London), 4 April 1902

Patterns of Prejudice 2012, iFirst article, 1�28

ISSN 0031-322X print/ISSN 1461-7331 online # 2012 Taylor & Francis

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the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 Indeed, one historian has

described White as a ‘self-confessed and unrepentant antisemite’ whose

attitudes towards the East European Jewish immigrant exemplified those

that resulted in parliament’s passing of the 1905 Aliens Act.2 Without doubt,

there is plenty of evidence to support such a thesis, amply spread through

three decades of White’s activity in the public sphere.

Categorizing White as an antisemite seems, therefore, a relatively

straightforward affair and, indeed, there is no intention in this study to

challenge that notion. However, in the period in which White was active

(late 1880s until the First World War), his Anglo-Jewish contemporaries

found it difficult to assign him definitively to the antisemitic camp. With the

benefit of historiographical hindsight, of course, this appears a curious

matter. After all, among the many antisemitic allusions scattered across

White’s oeuvre were references to Jewish ‘dirt’, ‘semitic manipulations’ and

‘cosmopolitan and materialist influences fatal to the existence of the English

nation’.3 In 1903 his interpretation of the Kishinev pogrom, which witnessed

the murder of almost fifty Jews, laid the blame squarely on the city’s

‘Hebrew moneylenders’.4 Naturally, such perspectives were challenged by

contemporary Anglo-Jewish observers and elsewhere, such as in the United

States and imperial Russia.5 Yet, at other times, White was regarded in quite

different terms and was actually embraced as a ‘friend of the Jews’.The positive dimension of White’s relationship with his Anglo-Jewish

contemporaries was demonstrated in the wake of his first visit to the Tsarist

empire in 1891, undertaken at the behest of the Jewish philanthropist and

founder of the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA), Baron Maurice de

Hirsch.6 White’s brief was to examine the conditions of Jewish life in the Pale

1 For discussion of Arnold White’s role in the anti-immigration movement and the pathto the 1905 Aliens Act, see Cecil Bloom, ‘Arnold White and Sir William Evans-Gordon:their involvement in immigration in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, JewishHistorical Studies, vol. 39, 2004, 153� 66; Bernard Gainer, The Alien Invasion: The Origins ofthe Aliens Act of 1905 (London: Heinemann 1972); John A. Garrard, The English andImmigration, 1880�1910 (London: Oxford University Press 1971); Colin Holmes,Antisemitism in British Society, 1876�1939 (London: Edward Arnold 1979); Jill Pellew,‘The Home Office and the Aliens Act 1905’, Historical Journal, vol. 32, no. 2, June 1989,369� 85.

2 Gainer, The Alien Invasion, 121.3 Report from the Select Committee on Emigration and Immigration (Foreigners) (hereafter

SCEI) (London: Hansard 1888), 89; Arnold White, Efficiency and Empire (London:Methuen 1901), 79; Arnold White, The Modern Jew (London: Heinemann 1899), xii.

4 Arnold White, ‘Kishinev and after’, National Review, August 1903, 956.5 See ‘Arnold White on Kishinev’, Reform Advocate (Chicago), 29 August 1903, 21� 4;

[S. V. Pozner], ‘Zigzagi’, Knizhki Voskhod, May 1901, discussed below.6 Moshe Perlmann, ‘Arnold White, Baron Hirsch’s emissary’, Proceedings of the American

Academy of Jewish Research, vol. 46, 1979� 80, 473� 89; for discussion of Hirsch, seeDominique Frischer, Le Moıse des Ameriques: vies et oeuvres du munificent baron de Hirsch(Paris: Grasset 2002), which erroneously states that White was an MP (359); Serge-Allain

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of Settlement, assess the possibilities for wholesale emigration to the newJewish colonies that Hirsch planned to build in Argentina, and intercedeon the JCA’s behalf with the Tsarist government. When he returned to theUnited Kingdom, White was confident as to the prospects for Jewishcolonization on the Argentinean plains. In southern Russia he discoveredsun-tanned, hard-working, ‘sober Hebrews’, who were, in his opinion, morethan capable of becoming agricultural pioneers.7 These Jews, he believed,would act as standard-bearers for a new Jewish breed, one that wasproductive, tied to the soil and free from persecution. Such ambitionschimed, of course, with the outlook of the JCA and were welcomed, not tosay celebrated, in Anglo-Jewish circles.

Thus the Jewish Chronicle’s assertion that White was a two-faced Januswhen it came to his attitudes towards Jews was apparently close to the mark.On the one hand, he appeared more than happy to act as a generous friendto Jewry and, notwithstanding the difficulties associated with several longexcursions to the Russian empire, covering thousands of miles of territory,White was prepared to commit his all to the JCA. Unlike most other Britishcommentators on Russian-Jewish affairs, he was possessed of first-handknowledge of Jewish life in Tsarist Russia, which he attempted to utilize toan apparently positive end. Yet, at the other end of the scale, he was contentto churn out, at a pretty regular rate, uncompromising propaganda of anentirely antisemitic bent. In the years following his first Russian visit, as theJewish World poetically implied, White not only said nasty things to andabout Jews, but nice things as well; he used his influence, such as it was,simultaneously to flatter and insult. At a personal level, this was bestrepresented by White’s clashes in newspaper columns with prominentJewish figures, the most significant of whom were the American philan-thropist Jacob Schiff and the Zionist Max Nordau.8

The object of this study, therefore, is to examine how the White world-view was negotiated by Jewish society in Britain. Was Arnold Whiteregarded by his Jewish contemporaries as a friend or a foe? Or both? Whichpart of the ‘game’ that White played was to be believed: the nice or thenasty? Did this alter over time and were there differing approaches withinAnglo-Jewish society? In this regard, can the apparently philosemiticcomponent of his world-view simply be dismissed as a form of politicalwindow-dressing, designed to curry favour among Anglo-Jewish society?In answering these questions, the volume and form of intellectual traffic that

Rozenblum, Le Baron de Hirsch: un financier au service de l’humanite (Paris: Punctum 2006).For a history of the Jewish Colonization Association, see Theodore Norman, AnOutstretched Arm: A History of the Jewish Colonisation Association (London: Kegan Paul1985); Norman also claims White was an MP (20).

7 Arnold White, ‘Jewish colonisation and the Russian persecution’, New Review, August1891, 98.

8 White debated with Schiff in mid-1901 in the pages of the Philadelphia Ledger. Theconfrontation with Nordau took place in the Jewish Chronicle in late 1897.

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passed between White and his Jewish contemporaries certainly requiresdiscussion. This study seeks, therefore, to examine what the case of ArnoldWhite and his Jewish encounter reveals about the nature of the Jewish-Gentile relationship and how antisemitism was negotiated in Britain in theperiod before the outbreak of the First World War. First, however, aspects ofWhite’s biography require discussion, as do his earliest forays in the Britishpublic sphere.

Initial encounters: East London and immigration

Arnold White was born in London in 1848, the son of a Congregationalminister.9 As a young man, he emigrated to Ceylon to work as a coffeeplanter, but returned to Britain in the late 1870s when, apart from a brief stintin the nascent electricity industry, he seems to have cast aside any residualaspiration for a conventional career. His first appearances on the publicscene were in 1885 as a self-appointed social reformer and, from thismoment onwards, it was clear that the city of London itself* in his lifetime arapidly expanding metropolis at the centre of an enormous, global empire*played a marked role in shaping his outlook. From the mid-1880s he maderegular exploratory ventures into its East End, where he was drawn to theimpoverished condition of the capital’s unemployed.10 On one, muchreported occasion, White actually dressed as a labourer in order to havedirect experience of life at the lowest end of the social scale, joining severalhundred men in search of a day’s work in the dockyards.11

As will be seen below, this was a type of gesture politics that White was toreplicate in later years, as though to demonstrate that he was truthfullyconnected to those he claimed to represent. Even at this early stage, it wasevident that White’s true metier was publicity, a talent that did not impressall his contemporaries, as one newspaper editorial dismissively observed in1891: ‘he has the useful trick of self-advertisement; and, whatever he is up to,he always manages, like Mr. Pears [soap manufacturer] and Mr. Beecham[he of the cold remedy] to keep his name before the public.’12 Nevertheless,White frequently managed to solicit notable support for whatever causehe was pursuing. In 1885, for instance, he garnered backing for his East Endwork from the wealthy and well known, including a prominent Jewish

9 For a brief biography of White, see G. R. Searle, ‘White, Arnold Henry (1848� 1925)’, inH. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,60 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004), Index No. 101039919.

10 Arnold White, ‘The nomad poor of London’, Contemporary Review, May 1885, 714� 26.11 ‘Topics of the week’, The Graphic, 7 February 1885; ‘London correspondence’, Freeman’s

Journal, 18 February 1885. White’s charitable endeavours in the East End weredepicted in a sketch in ‘Practical charity: Mr Mearns and Mr Arnold White feeding theworkless poor’, Penny Illustrated Paper, 14 March 1885.

12 ‘Special notices’, Reynold’s Newspaper, 28 June 1891.

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philanthropist, Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, who personally fundedcharitable breakfasts that fed out-of-work dock labourers.13

The social problems that White identified in the East End, such asalcoholism, overcrowding and excessive fecundity*all exacerbated bypoverty, unemployment and disease*chimed with contemporary anxieties.In 1886, for instance, Charles Booth began his massive social inquiry,completed almost two decades later, the renowned Life and Labour of thePeople in London.14 So White was by no means unique as a social investigator;he was simply caught up in the political currents of the times. Nonetheless,his concerns were not merely focused on the undoubted problems enduredby the lower social orders in the capital. He also proffered solutions, mostof which would, in the twenty-first century, be considered drastic andunpalatable. In particular, White favoured the wholesale emigration ofsuitable candidates, each carefully selected, to apparently untrammelled(at least by the white man) parts of the British empire.15 In 1886 he made hisfirst colonizing trip to South Africa, where he aimed to establish a number ofagricultural colonies.16 Moreover, White was a eugenicist and spent mostof his life advocating the sterilization of the ‘unfit’, though, in the 1880s, hedid not publically pursue this social solution as relentlessly as the case forcolonization. Still, it was clear in this decade that the London unemployedwere at the forefront of his eugenicist ambitions, especially those sufferingfrom ‘diseases of the mind’, who threatened, via excessive breeding, to ‘taint’the ‘English people [with] brain mischief’.17

Not long after White began to make a name for himself as a socialreformer, the political world came calling and he was invited to stand on aGladstonian Liberal ticket for the Mile End constituency (East London) in the1886 general election. He was not elected and, having utterly failed as aprofessional politician (he stood unsuccessfully in a further three parlia-mentary elections, in 1892, 1895 and 1906), he therefore turned to journalisticagitation. From the late 1880s onwards, he began contributing to severalnewspapers and journals, each a platform from which he could proclaim hisviews on a wide range of subjects. His writings sometimes betrayed the

13 ‘Breakfast to dock labourers*visit of the Princess Louise’, Pall Mall Gazette, 24 March1885; ‘The London unemployed’, Evening Standard, 25 March 1885.

14 The first volume of Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London (London: Williamsand Norgate) appeared in 1889, with subsequent editions published by Macmillanappearing in 1892� 7 (9 vols) and 1902� 3 (17 vols).

15 White’s first book, The Problems of a Great City (London: Remington 1886), dealt withall these issues in some detail. An untitled book review in the Illustrated London News,13 November 1886, described it as ‘ill-considered’, ‘exaggerated’, ‘crude’ and ‘coarse’.

16 ‘How to use our newest colony’, Pall Mall Gazette, 4 July 1885; ‘A few words onemigration’, 24 November 1885.

17 Sterilization is discussed in White, The Problems of a Great City, 27ff., and Arnold White,Tries at Truth (London: Isbister & Co. 1891), 12. A connection between unemployment,poverty and mental ill-health was identified in Arnold White, ‘The unemployed’,Fortnightly Review, October 1893, 454� 63.

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emotive, sensationalist tone of the continental feuilletonist (though they were

always devoid of any humorous intent: White was no wit), and there was a

clear, if not deliberate, emphasis on quantity over quality. To be sure, White

knew how to whip up a media storm and, in many ways, he might be

regarded as a product of the newspaper age.Given his choice of social and national interests, which in later decades

were to extend to the security of the Royal Navy and the fear of German

encroachment on British power, White’s devotion to the ‘Jewish question’

surely comes as no surprise.18 In the 1880s most of his anxieties could be

connected to the nature of the modern city, to that which he regarded as

the degeneracy of urban existence. These preoccupations soon extended to

the ‘pauper alien’, an undoubted synonym for the immigrant Jew. White

believed East European Jewish immigrants were able to adapt to the most

desperately unhygienic living and working conditions. In so doing, these

‘destitute aliens’ dragged down the standards of existence for their ‘English’

neighbours. Although there was no overt suggestion in White’s writings in

the 1880s that immigrant Jews were to blame for the creation of the modern

city, it was nevertheless made clear that he believed the two had a symbiotic

relationship. In this regard, ‘the Jew’ came to stand as representative of all

the evils, of whatever brand, the city had to offer.In one of his regular letters to The Times in 1887, for example, White

observed that immigrant Jewish cleanliness was of ‘a lower standard than

our own’. He also noted that ‘until lately no one ever heard of an unchaste

Hebrew maiden in this country’, suggesting a different kind of low standard.

The inference here was that immigrant Jewish women, arriving penniless in

London, were forced into immoral avenues of employment. Again, this

practice was imagined as an urban phenomenon, yet intrinsically Jewish in

its manifestation. At this stage, however, there was no sense in which White

envisaged the presence of immigrant Jewish life in London, or the rest of the

United Kingdom, as a sign of a vast Jewish conspiracy. Still, several

components of a paradigmatic antisemitic world-view, in which Jews were

certainly configured as a race, clearly existed in an embryonic state by the

late 1880s.19

18 In the final years of the First World War, White published a book that focusedextensively on his fear of imperial Germany: The Hidden Hand (London: GrantRichards 1917). In another piece, he described Germans as the ‘intestinal worms ofEurope’, eating away at the body and soul of the continent: Arnold White, ‘Efficiencyand vice’, English Review, May 1916, 452. He also made public pronouncements on thesame theme, including an accusation that the British government was under Germaninfluence, which in turn led to a question in the House of Commons as to whetherWhite would be prosecuted under the provisions of the 1914 Defence of the RealmAct: he was not (see Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 13 March 1917, vol. 91,cols 903� 4).

19 Letter from Arnold White to The Times, 30 May 1887.

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At this juncture, White tried, not unsuccessfully, to attract the attentionof influential political circles for his immigration concerns. In April 1887 hechaired a ‘tumultuous’ public meeting in Mile End on the subject of ‘pauperforeigners’. It was attended by a number of parliamentarians, including theEarl of Meath, Lord Beresford and John Colomb, MP for the East Londonconstituency of Bow and Bromley.20 The following December, White escorteda deputation of East End workers, ‘belonging to the dumb, inarticulate class’,to the Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, including ‘foreigners recentlyimported’. During this meeting, White elaborated on his belief thatimmigrant Jews had an adverse effect on particular trades, especiallytailoring, and advised that steamship masters should be financially ‘liablefor the importation of useless foreigners’. There was, however, no attempt tosquare Jewish uselessness with their apparent skills in certain trades.21 Thatsame month, White attended a conference on the ‘condition of the workingclasses’, at which were also present the archbishop of Westminster, CardinalHenry Manning, and the prominent historian and lawyer, Frederic Harrison.Once again, White expounded on the connection between the impoverish-ment of the working classes and the ‘indiscriminate immigration of pauperforeigners’.22

Within a matter of months, no doubt as a result of his increasinglyheightened profile, White presented evidence at the two parliamentary selectcommittees devoted to immigration and the practice of ‘sweating’.23 It wasas a consequence of these very public appearances, reported in newspapersacross the United Kingdom, that White began to engage in open discussionwith representatives of Anglo-Jewry, although Jewish opinion had hithertonot been entirely absent from his analysis. For example, his notion that‘unchaste Hebrew maidens’ were becoming ever more commonplace was adirect quotation from a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette from Dr HermannAdler, the Chief Rabbi. Adler’s letter was a response to an article about one‘Lily Cohen’ (a personification of the ‘fallen’ Jewish woman), and he was notshy about acknowledging that there were Jewish female prostitutes walkingthe London streets.24 Adler took great pains to emphasize that several

20 ‘Condition of the working classes’, The Times, 20 April 1887.21 ‘The immigration of pauper foreigners’, Birmingham Daily Post, 16 December 1887.

Matthews tried to converse in German with the immigrant Jews, since they apparentlyspoke a ‘low German dialect’. Obviously this met with failure, given that most wereundoubtedly Yiddish-speakers. See also ‘Deputations to the Home Secretary’, TheTimes, 16 December 1887; the ‘foreigners’ were described as ‘Poles’ in this piece, notJews.

22 ‘Condition of the working classes’, The Times, 6 December 1887. The conference held asecond session a few weeks later; see ‘Condition of the working classes’, The Times,20 December 1887.

23 One newspaper averred that White was solely responsible for the convening of the‘sweating’ committee, though there is little supportive evidence for this: see ‘Thesweating committee’, The Graphic, 20 July 1889.

24 ‘The worst woman in London’, Pall Mall Gazette, 8 March 1887.

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strands of Anglo-Jewish philanthropy were ‘straining every nerve to

diminish, if not eradicate this evil’. There was no link in Adler’s analysis

to the modern city, but he suggested that the rise in prostitution (of course,

he did not use this term) could be traced to ‘the overstocked labour market

and to the Russian persecutions . . . which cause thousands of Jewish girls to

arrive at these shores without any means of sustenance’.25 Unwittingly, the

Chief Rabbi’s words, which contained their own exaggerated elements

(‘thousands of Jewish girls’ was not a particularly accurate or useful statistic,

and hinted at an underlying moral panic within Anglo-Jewish society) neatly

fitted in with White’s argument.26

Similarly, in letters to The Times, White claimed that Anglo-Jews shared his

anxieties about immigration and he cited material from the Jewish Board of

Guardians, which monitored and dispensed charitable support to the poor.27

And, to be sure, Anglo-Jewish circles were concerned about Jewish

immigration from Eastern Europe and had been for many years. From the

early 1880s onwards, especially after the 1881�2 pogroms in the Russian

empire, Anglo-Jewish institutions, including the Board of Guardians, had

actually tried to discourage emigrants at source and divert them from

choosing Britain as a future home, though there was no support for the

implementation of restrictive legislation.28 Reflecting the community’s

concerns, the Jewish Chronicle (JC) often uneasily discussed the issue and

was anxious about the risk the ‘foreign poor’ posed in terms of their ‘burden’

on the resources of the community, deeming that, in general, immigration

‘was a cause of great embarrassment to English Jews’.29 The JC was not

ignorant, naturally, of White’s involvement in immigrant issues but, at this

point, he was not disdainfully regarded. In fact, an April 1887 editorial in the

Chronicle wrote of the ‘proper spirit’ in which White opposed immigration:

‘he does not countenance offensive exaggeration [and] we freely admit that

those who advocate restrictive legislation may be just as honest, impartial

and unprejudiced as those who oppose it’.30 This attitude was to alter

considerably in 1888, in the wake of the evidence he presented at the two

select committees.

25 Letter from Hermann Adler to Pall Mall Gazette, 10 March 1887.26 Adler’s words were also used in ‘Sweating in East London’, Evening Standard,

25 November 1887, in its appraisal of the ‘sweating’ situation.27 Letters from Arnold White to The Times, 26 March 1887 and 30 May 1887.28 Eugene C. Black, The Social Politics of Anglo-Jewry, 1880�1920 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell

1988), 244.29 ‘Our foreign poor’, JC, 7 July 1883; ‘Notes of the week’, JC, 11 November 1887. For

discussion of the Chronicle’s attitude to immigrant East European Jews, see SamJohnson, ‘V poeskakh ‘‘goroda ubezhishcha’’: Londonskaia ‘‘Evreiskaia khronika’’i rossiiskaia emigratsia, 1881� 1905gg’ (In search of a city of refuge: the London JewishChronicle and Russian emigration, 1881� 1905), in O. V. Budnitskii (ed.), Evreiskaiaemigratsia iz Rossii, 1881�2005 (Moscow: Rosspen 2008), 47� 70.

30 ‘Notes of the week’, JC, 8 April 1887.

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During the course of his examination by the House of Commons’Emigration and Immigration Select Committee, White attempted to influ-ence political opinion with living human ‘specimens’.31 At both hisappearances in May and June 1888, White brought with him a number ofmale ‘greeners’ (recent immigrants) from the East End, all specially selectedby his paid agents. The Jewish Chronicle deemed this ‘evidence’ a ‘stageeffect’, and suggested that there was something ‘suspect’ about the mannerof its acquisition, a question members of the committee were also to ask.32

Most of these men were from various cities and towns in the Tsarist andHabsburg empires, with a few from Romania. White’s purpose in presentingthem, each of whom he described in terms of their national origin,occupation, length of time in Britain and the amount of money theypresently carried, was to show that the vast majority arrived in Londonwith barely means of subsistence. They were supposed to stand as typicalrepresentatives of all immigrants from Eastern Europe. Yet, under inter-rogation, several of White’s witnesses revealed that their appearance at theHouse of Commons had been secured with the promise of paid passage tothe United States.33 It was even discovered that White had placed anadvertisement in a Hebrew East End newspaper, Hashulamit, requestingcontact from men who ‘found life in London hard’.34 White disputed thisevidence but it stayed with him throughout the life of the committee.

The majority (over 95 per cent) of White’s ‘greeners’ were, of course, Jews,though he argued, under questioning, that he ‘absolutely refused to regard[the issue of immigration] as a Jewish question’ and had avoided enquiringabout the religious affiliation of his witnesses. There was, however, nogetting away from the fact that White saw the issue precisely in those terms(why else would he advertise in a Hebrew newspaper?), as the remainder ofhis evidence revealed, especially that elicited by Jewish members of theselect committee. For instance, no sooner had he presented his first set of‘greeners’ than Lord Rothschild asked why, during his lengthy descriptionsof the men, White had occasionally used the designation ‘Christian’, whichtacitly served to emphasize that the remaining men were Jews. In a testyreply, White claimed this was inadvertent labelling and blamed his agent,one Isaac Levy, who had been charged with finding the immigrants andcompiling the list of biographical information.35

White’s principal Jewish cross-examiner was Samuel Montagu, MP forWhitechapel, a key East End constituency. His challenges not only

31 As described by the committee’s chair Sir William Lowther, in SCEI, 63.32 ‘Notes of the week’, JC, 11 May 1888.33 SCEI, 72.34 Two Jewish witnesses called White’s methods into question, Herman Landau of the

Poor Jews’ Temporary Shelter and Lionel Alexander of the Board of Guardians, inSCEI, 90, 109, 170. Thus far, my efforts to locate copies of the Hebrew newspaperHashulamit have been unsuccessful.

35 SCEI, 66.

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considered White’s representations to the committee, which Montagu

deemed contradictory, but also his recent journalistic endeavours, particu-

larly an article published in the Nineteenth Century entitled ‘The Invasion of

Pauper Foreigners’. Montagu pointed out that particular criticism in this

piece was directed towards Anglo-Jewish philanthropy, especially the Board

of Guardians. White’s article claimed that ‘the most powerful foe arrayed

against the poor native workers [was] the main body of the Jewish

community’.36 When confronted by Montagu on this matter, White argued

that ‘leading members of the Jewish community . . . assist poor foreigners to

come to this country and to remain here’. In other words, he believed Anglo-

Jewish charity functioned as a beacon for impoverished Jews in Eastern

Europe and was the reason so many embarked on an arduous journey to

London. Inevitably, Montagu vigorously refuted this notion.37

But, for Montagu, the most important bone of contention was White’s

assertion that the immigrants’ ‘chief fault [was] dirt’. In rejecting this,

Montagu indicated Judaism’s various strictures in relation to bodily

cleanliness, highlighting especially the number of Jewish public baths in

the East End. White refused to believe there was anything in this evidence.

He also discounted Montagu’s description of Passover preparations and the

removal of hametz from the home. Montagu believed that allegations about

poor personal hygiene were intrinsic to White’s racialized dismissal of

immigrant Jews as being from the ‘lowest type’. He asked for this expression

to be clarified, to which White replied:

I mean persons who . . . have no regard to any provision for sanitation, and a

scanty regard for cleanliness, and for whom the conditions of life are very low;

those who are comparatively indifferent to anything outside the mere sensual

indulgences of eating, drinking and sleeping, and those who have no ideal in life,

no pleasure in the past, no amusements, and who nearly approach the conditions

of animal life.38

Taken in isolation, as there is no explicit reference to Jews, it might be

supposed that White was referring to the working classes in general, who

undoubtedly faced a daily struggle for existence. But this group was not his

target at all. He was focused solely on immigrant Jews and no amount of

legitimate counter-argument from Montagu or anyone else would persuade

White otherwise. Here, already, was evidence of a rigid, unswayable

mindset. It also revealed White’s dogmatic adherence to a specific agenda,

to an idee fixe that dwelt exclusively on East European Jewish immigrants

and their supposed faults. It did not pass unnoticed.

36 Arnold White, ‘The invasion of pauper foreigners’, Nineteenth Century, March 1888,416.

37 SCEI, 87.38 Ibid., 89, 93.

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In the Jewish Chronicle, White was no longer regarded as having conducted

his case in the ‘proper spirit’. Instead, he and other anti-immigrant witnesses

were described as having imported a ‘serious animus into the enquiry, to the

undeserved prejudice of the Jews’. The newspaper was, however, also

critical of an apparent failure of duty on the part of various Anglo-Jewish

institutions in challenging White, especially the leading communal organi-

zation, the Board of Deputies of British Jews.39 According to the JC, the

Board and the Jewish establishment in general had insufficiently mobilized

effectively against White’s perspective, a view that was not entirely justified

given Montagu’s style of questioning. At the same time, the newspaper’s

analysis of the immigration select committee’s proceedings revealed the

deeply held anxieties harboured by Anglo-Jewry in relation to immigrant

co-religionists. Reflecting that the parliamentary process was ‘by no means

an unmixed evil’, the JC observed:

The Jewish poor, being human, are not perfect; and though the portraits which are

drawn of them by the perfervid imagination of Mr. Arnold White and his fellow

agitators are obviously exaggerated, they may serve a good purpose by directing

the attention to real defects and thus paving the way for their eradication. But if so

desirable an improvement is to be effected the initiative must come from sources

outside the poor themselves. The communal problem is how to assimilate the

foreign Jews of the East End to the rest of the population.40

This editorial did not elaborate on the precise ‘defects’ that immigrant Jews

possessed, though a raft of concerns had often been highlighted throughout

the 1880s. In 1884, for instance, the Chronicle had criticized East End cheders,

which it believed ‘kept alive superstition, ignorance and semi-barbaric

habits and modes of thought’.41 The following year, another editorial

expressed the hope that, under the guidance of English habits, ‘the foreign

poor’ would be ‘inspired with an English love of soap-and-water; to see him

take kindly to Western notions of sanitation’.42

There is no doubt that, for many decades, such anxieties dogged Anglo-

Jewish perspectives on immigrant East European Jews. Indeed, the commu-

nity, in the form of individuals and institutions, did its best, as it saw it, to

remedy the dilemmas presented by the ‘alien’ Jew. For example, Lord

Rothschild was active in erecting sanitary buildings and funding numerous

schools. Those who laboured under the most extreme poverty were assisted

by institutions such as the Board of Guardians, the Poor Jews’ Temporary

Shelter, East End soup kitchens and the like. Nevertheless, the hardly

unexceptional views of the Jewish Chronicle illustrated that there was some

39 ‘Notes of the week’, JC, 22 June 1888.40 ‘The Jewish poor’, JC, 29 June 1888.41 ‘Judaism at the East End’, JC, 12 December 1884.42 ‘Dwellings for the poor’, JC, 20 February 1885.

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shared intellectual ground with Arnold White on the matter of the East

European Jewish immigrants and their disagreeable traits. This was, in part,

acknowledged, though there were obvious expressions of distaste with

regard to White’s style.At this stage, the late 1880s, the Anglo-Jewish press could hope that White

would disappear from the public arena as swiftly as he had arrived. After

all, his personal prestige remained minimal, he had already failed to get

elected as an MP, and had made himself look foolish (and deceitful) before

the immigration select committee, which did not accede to his wishes and

failed to recommend restrictive legislation. Yet, within three years, Anglo-

Jewish society was to encounter a different, more influential Arnold White,

one who had by then acquired high-profile support from one of Europe’s

most prominent Jewish philanthropists, Baron Maurice de Hirsch.

Baron Hirsch and Jewish colonization

Precisely how White entered the social orbit of Baron Hirsch is not entirely

clear.43 Some historians have suggested that the two may have met at the

National Liberal Club in Whitehall, a major venue for political intercourse in

the period before the First World War (although White’s Who’s Who entry

reveals that he was not, in fact, a member).44 One thing is certain however:

Hirsch was fully informed about White’s attitude to East European Jewish

immigration, not least as, in the early 1890s, it remained a burning issue for

the British agitator.45 In April 1891, for example, White co-founded, with the

Earl of Dunraven, the Society for the Suppression of the Immigration of

Destitute Aliens.46 Around the same time, in a letter to the Evening Standard,

he referred to the ‘replacement of our English population by the scum of

Eastern Europe’.47 In spite of the blatancy of this stance, Hirsch believed that

White was capable of taking a fair and committed perspective on the plan to

43 Aspects of the relationship between the two men were discussed in White’s positiveobituary of Hirsch, who died in 1896: Arnold White, ‘Baron Hirsch’, English IllustratedMagazine, June 1896, 189� 93.

44 This claim was made in Frischer, Le Moıse des Ameriques, 371. White’s Who’s Who entrynotes that he was a member of the 1900 Club; see ‘White, Arnold’, in Who Was Who(London: A & C Black 1920� 2008).

45 See, for example, letter from Arnold White to The Times, 15 July 1890 (this letter wasrelated to recent immigration statistics that he believed were underestimated).

46 This organization was short-lived, and does not appear to have survived even into thefollowing year. See ‘Our London correspondence’, Glasgow Herald, 27 April 1891; ‘Theimmigration of pauper aliens’, The Times, 4 May 1891, 13; and editorial, AberdeenWeekly Journal, 18 July 1891. White’s anti-immigrant activities were also given a front-page paragraph in ‘The news of Europe’, New York Times, 10 May 1891.

47 Letter from Arnold White to the Evening Standard, 30 March 1891.

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relocate thousands of Russian and Polish Jews to Argentina.48 In addition,White’s established experience as a colonist was surely an advantage and

Hirsch hoped that a Gentile, rather than a Jewish representative, would bemore readily able to gain access to the highest ranks of Tsarist society.49

By the time of White’s first visit to imperial Russia (late May to mid-July1891), the regime’s Jewish policies were under far greater international

scrutiny than they had been at any time since the pogroms of the early 1880s.

The reason for this was a precise execution of the so-called May Laws,introduced in 1882, that attempted to control Jewish residence in the empire

and confined the majority of Jews to the Pale of Settlement in the westernprovinces. From mid-1890 onwards, the regime began expelling several

hundred, possibly a few thousand, Jews from St Petersburg, Moscow and

Kiev, which, although in the Pale, was still forbidden territory. The followingyear, just a few months prior to Arnold White’s Russian visit, Tsar Alexander

III consolidated the regime’s expulsion policy by issuing an edict determin-ing that certain social categories of Jews were not permitted residence in

particular cities.50 It was an action that provoked horror in Western Europe

and the United States, and irrevocably reinforced the notion that the Tsaristregime was in vindictive pursuit of its Jews. It further underlined a second,

equally widespread perspective that persecution was the reason EastEuropean Jews sought to emigrate. Seen from the outside world, therefore,

it appeared as though Baron Hirsch had decided to intervene at the very

moment when the threat of a renewed tide of emigration was intense. ForWhite, the Russian imperial context and its potential consequences for

Britain surely justified his role as an emissary. Perhaps he even allowedhimself to imagine that his intervention had been sought not a moment too

soon.Like most foreign visitors to the Tsarist empire, White’s journey began in

St Petersburg. Supported by letters of recommendation from Hirsch, the

British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, and the Russian ambassador toLondon, Baron de Staal, White met with a number of key officials, including

Konstantin Pobedonostsev, procurator of the Holy Synod (and renownedreactionary), the minister of foreign affairs, Nikolai de Girs, and the finance

minister, Aleksandr Vishnegradskii.51 Such encounters were, of course,

48 One British newspaper was not convinced that White was suited to the task: ‘Specialnotices’, Reynold’s Newspaper, 28 June 1891, referred to ‘pseudo-philanthropy with firstclass [self] advertisement’.

49 Norman, An Outstretched Arm, 20.50 For discussion, see Heinz-Dietrich Lowe, The Tsars and the Jews: Reform, Reaction, and

Antisemitism in Imperial Russia, 1772�1917 (London: Harwood Academic Publishers1993), 70� 1.

51 Perlmann, ‘Arnold White, Baron Hirsch’s emissary’, 479; ‘The persecution of theJews’, The Times, 30 May 1891, 9; ‘The Jew-harrying in Moscow’, Pall Mall Gazette,30 May 1891. The report ‘The Tsar’s persecutions’, Sunday Call (San Francisco), 31 May1891, claimed that officials had refused to meet with White.

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absolutely vital, as they ensured that White received the official approval

(and documentation) that granted access to the provinces, and that Hirsch’s

scheme was acknowledged among the highest government circles.

St Petersburg’s Jewish community was also aware of White’s presence and

mission. Although not overly enthusiastic at this stage about the Hirsch

proposal for mass emigration, the community nevertheless realized it had to

exert some influence on Arnold White. He was therefore introduced to

David Feinberg, later to become a key figure in the Russian branch of the

JCA.52 Feinberg accompanied White on his travels into the Russian interior,

acted as a translator (from Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew; the two men

conversed with one another in French) and as a point of contact with various

provincial Jewish representatives.53

White’s first Russian visit took in a large part of the empire’s western

provinces and included stops in Kiev, Chernigov, Berdichev, Odessa,

Kherson, Ekaterinoslav, Gomel and Minsk.54 In each city, he met with

various Tsarist officials and Jewish communal figures. In Odessa, for

example, White reportedly met with the Zionist Leon Pinsker, head of the

so-called Odessa Committee, dedicated to the establishment of Jewish

agricultural settlements in Palestine. From the outset, if Feinberg’s memoirs

are anything to go by, White was shocked by the legal limitations endured by

Jews in the Russian empire and not unmoved by their general living

conditions. In Kiev, Feinberg was refused accommodation in the same hotel

as White, who was so infuriated he reported the matter to the provincial

governor. In Gomel, a visit to the ‘Jewish quarter’ revealed ‘appalling’

conditions, where, in one meagrely furnished single-roomed dwelling,

White encountered a widow and her ‘barefooted’ six-year-old daughter.

The child carried a piece of paper on which was written the Hebrew

alphabet. The British visitor was evidently struck by the fact that crushing

poverty was no bar to education in the hovels of the Pale; the child was

being taught by her mother. White took the girl’s scrap of paper with him,

52 For a short biography of Feinberg, see the entry in Evreiskiaia entsiklopediia (JewishEncyclopaedia) (St Petersburg: Obshchestva dlia Nauchniykh Evreiskikh Izdanii1906� 13), vol. 15, 201� 2.

53 For Feinberg’s own account of his work with White, see ‘David Feinberg’s historicalsurvey of the colonisation of the Russian Jews in Argentina, translated from theRussian with an introduction from Leo Shpall’, Publications of the American JewishHistorical Society, vol. 43, no. 1, September 1953, 37� 69.

54 These visits were monitored in the press; see ‘The new exodus*Mr A. White inRussia’, Pall Mall Gazette, 11 June 1891; ‘Baron Hirsch’s scheme of emigration’, GlasgowHerald, 23 June 1891 (which detailed White’s Odessa visit); ‘The Russian Jews’, DailyNews, 25 June 1891 (which claimed White had been hurried in his visit to Odessa, andrefused to meet with several Jewish representatives, but this is not borne out byFeinberg’s account).

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not as a kind of shtetl souvenir, but as testimony of the Jewish desire for

social and intellectual betterment.55

In the early stages of his trip, White was plainly in search of proof to

support the antisemitic theory that all Jews were materialists, dedicated to

making money, a notion he later claimed had been encouraged by his official

encounters in St Petersburg.56 Thus White was informed by his own agenda,

as well as that of Baron Hirsch. But his views were fiercely challenged by

Feinberg and, following his own first-hand experiences, White partially

moved away from such stereotypical interpretations. In particular, he was

most impressed with the Jewish agricultural colonies in the provinces of

Kherson and Ekaterinoslav, in the south of the empire. From White’s

perspective, visiting these rural communities afforded an unprecedented

opportunity to examine the prospects for the Jewish capacity to farm,

essential if Hirsch’s dream was to be realized. White was astonished at what

he found. Whereas the ‘poor Russian Jew townsman’ was physically unfit to

‘bear the strain inseparable from settlement in a new country’, those he

encountered in the agricultural colonies were ‘active, well set-up, sunburnt,

muscular [and] marked by all the characteristics of a peasantry of the highest

character’. Such men were entirely ‘fit for colonisation’.57 After his return to

London, it was these Jews, bound to the land by their work, who were at the

forefront of the optimistic diagnosis White placed before Baron Hirsch and

wider public opinion.58 He gave several interviews and published articles

that reaffirmed his positive attitude to prospects for Jewish colonization and,

as the Daily News noted, the ‘question ‘‘has a Jew ever been seen to plough?’’

is answered by Mr. Arnold White with a very emphatic affirmative’.59

Of course, in interpreting White’s overall response to his Russian Jewish

encounter we must be cautious. In the first place, the contrast between the

urban and rural Jew was all of a piece with his established detestation of the

modern city. It is no surprise, therefore, that he idealized the peasant Jew,

toiling away on the land, as ‘fit for colonisation’. Second, notwithstanding his

highly personalized encounters and evidently humanitarian, sympathetic

feelings for the plight of individual Russian Jews, White’s stance towards

55 ‘David Feinberg’s historical survey of the colonisation of the Russian Jews inArgentina’, 46, 49. The degree to which White was touched by ‘the sufferings ofHebrew children’ was mentioned in ‘Mr Arnold White in Russia’, Pall Mall Gazette, 6July 1891.

56 White, The Modern Jew, 52.57 White, ‘Jewish colonisation and the Russian persecution’, 98, 99.58 Letter from Arnold White to Baron Hirsch (in French), 27 June 1891: Central Archives

for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem, File JCALon 1(1). The letter isreproduced, in English, in White, The Modern Jew, 294� 301. My thanks to mySt Petersburg colleague Alexander Ivanov for this reference.

59 Arnold White, ‘The truth about the Russian Jew’, Contemporary Review, May 1892,695� 708; Daily News, 13 July 1891. See also ‘Mr Arnold White in Russia’, and ‘Jewswho plow’, New York Times, 2 August 1891.

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other Jewish matters was not altered. For this reason, although greatly moved

by the little girl in Gomel, it did not follow that there was a reversal, or even a

momentary questioning, of his anti-immigrant attitudes. On the contrary, on

returning to the United Kingdom, he remained overtly committed to the need

for restrictive measures on immigration. In late July 1891, just days after he

returned from the continent, White attended a public meeting of the Society

for the Suppression of the Immigration of Destitute Aliens.60

White actively challenged, therefore, the established Western European

stereotype of the Russian Jew ‘at home’ while simultaneously upholding that

of the ‘alien’ Jew, though these were, of course, broadly the same people. For

instance, in a journal article published after his Russian trip, he discussed the

‘serious danger of Europe and the United States being devoured by a locust-

swarm of vicious and mercenary Israelites’. He also noted that the entire

European press was ‘in Jewish hands’ and ‘international finance [was]

captive to Jewish energy and skill’. But, in the same article, following a series

of statistics that examined the Jewish economic role in Tsarist Russia, White

argued: ‘the popular notion of the evil effects of Jewish influence in Russia is

nearly destitute of foundation’. Inevitably, he also challenged the antisemitic

insinuations appertaining to the belief that Jews were unable to farm: ‘the

cry against the Jews that they are not agriculturalists is exactly like

preferring an accusation against a man for not being able to swim, at the

same time as he is not allowed to approach water’.61 The latter point was

intended as an indictment of Russian imperial legislation against its Jews,

though, at the same time, White’s desire for the passing of British laws

against immigrant Jews from the Tsarist empire remained a major priority.It must be said, of course, that key to White’s response was surely the fact

that his Russian task had been undertaken at the request of a wealthy

benefactor who had specific aims in mind. He was paid handsomely by the

Baron and so undoubtedly felt obliged to ensure his aims were fulfilled.

At face value, White’s political support for the scheme was understandable,

since it promised the transfer of Eastern European Jewish populations to

South America, which would potentially reduce the number of those

planning to emigrate to the United Kingdom. And, from Hirsch’s perspec-

tive, White’s conclusions were entirely satisfactory. In interviews with

various newspapers, Hirsch spoke of his plans to take his Argentinean

scheme a step further.62 In particular, he revealed his intention to send White

back to Russia, with the object of securing the regime’s permission to

establish local JCA committees in St Petersburg and elsewhere.63 This second

60 ‘Pauper immigration’, Morning Post, 25 July 1891.61 White, ‘The truth about the Russian Jew’, 696, 699, 702.62 Editorial, Aberdeen Weekly Journal, 5 August 1891; ‘The new exodus’, Pall Mall Gazette,

16 September 1891; ‘Baron de Hirsch’s mission’, Jewish World, 10 July 1891.63 ‘The Russian Jews’, Daily News, 4 August 1891; ‘The Russian Jews’, Morning Post, 4

August 1891.

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trip was undertaken in September 1891 and included a visit to Copenhagen,

where Tsar Alexander III and his Danish wife were staying. White was

refused an audience with the Tsar, though he met with the Tsarina. It was not

until his third and final visit, in March 1892, that the Tsarist regime’s

approval for the setting up of the JCA on its territory was finally secured.64

Thus, whether one agreed with Hirsch’s scheme or not (and many Jews in

both the United Kingdom and imperial Russia were opposed to it), White’s

own commitment was unquestionable.65 Nonetheless, it remains up for

debate as to whether this was down to his own political interests or to a

personal sense of duty to the Baron.How did Anglo-Jewry respond to White’s imperial Russian encounter?

Inevitably, the situation was monitored intensively, especially in the press.

On the eve of White’s first visit, he remained a suspect figure in the eyes of

the Jewish Chronicle. In May 1891, for instance, in discussing a negative article

about immigrant Jews published in The Times, the JC was robust in

concluding that the piece had ‘clearly been inspired by Mr. Arnold White,

who is full of resource in the relentless manner in which he is endeavouring

to create in England an antisemitic agitation’.66 As a result, in the early

weeks of White’s Russian excursion, there was a tangible sense of

dissatisfaction in the JC at Hirsch’s choice of emissary.67 But, once White

returned to London and delivered his report to the Baron, the JC’s tone

altered somewhat. White’s conclusions, as already noted, were presented to

the general public and the report itself was made available to Anglo-Jewish

representatives. In July 1891, Samuel Montagu*with whom White had

personally tussled in 1888*gave a verbatim account of the report to the

board meeting of the Federation of Synagogues in London. Montagu was

impressed with White’s conclusions and believed his opinions had been

‘materially changed’ through his Russian visit.68 Similarly, the JC was deeply

taken with White’s descriptions of poor Jews in Russian towns: ‘the

miserable parents, who possess industry, hope, patience, temperance, but

no food, are bringing up suffering children’.69 Evidently, White’s touching

64 ‘Russia’, The Times, 5 September 1891; ‘The Jews in Russia’, The Times, 16 September1891. For White’s third visit, see ‘North, West, East and South’, Pall Mall Gazette, 4March 1892; and ‘The Russian Jews’, The Times, 24 March 1892.

65 For instance, ‘The new exodus’, Jewish World, 8 May 1891, 5, although notunappreciative of Hirsch’s intentions, did not believe the scheme would see anymeaningful amelioration in the position of the Jews of the Russian empire.

66 ‘Antialienism’, JC, 1 May 1891; see also a letter from Arnold White that questioned thevalue of immigrants to the nation, in JC, 15 May 1891. ‘The Russian Jews’, The Times,30 April 1891, spoke of the ‘plague of the [Jewish] invasion [to Britain that] can bringonly economic embarrassment and dangers both hygienic and social’.

67 ‘Jews in Russia’, JC, 26 June 1891.68 ‘Notes of the week’, JC, 17 July 1891.69 Ibid.

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portrayal of the plight of the little girl in Gomel inspired universal

compassion.White’s literary responses to his Russian visit were also appreciated in

Anglo-Jewish circles, and his principal writings in 1891 were lauded as

‘valuable and instrumental’ and ‘a pleasing surprise’.70 In particular, his

appreciation of Russian Jewish peasants was celebrated and even utilized to

demonstrate that ‘these Hebrew farmers have achieved a far greater success

far beyond that of their [Russian] Orthodox neighbours, and proved

themselves not merely in material prosperity, but in moral status, a superior

race’.71 The Jewish World deemed one article ‘a sweet and refreshing breeze

over a parched and droughty land’, and

so important, and of so extremely gratifying a character, that it is justly entitled to

every attention and consideration.. . . it would be difficult to exceed the terms of

praise which Mr. Arnold White applies to the Jewish agricultural colonies [in

Kherson]. This testimony is all the more valuable since it comes from an impartial

and non-Jewish source.72

The latter sentence hinted at a turnaround in Anglo-Jewish attitudes

towards White; three years earlier, the notion of him being regarded as

‘impartial’ towards Jewish matters would have been unthinkable. Now, he

was considered a useful Gentile, one who might potentially emphasize

the Jewish cause in Eastern Europe. At one level, such a response was

understandable, not least as British voices had loudly scoffed at Hirsch’s

proposal to settle Jews on the land, with the remarks in The Spectator

summarizing a widely held opinion: ‘The Baron will tell us that Jews can

plough, and we do not question their capacity; but has anybody seen them

do it, under stress of circumstance?’73 The non-Jewish championing of the

Jewish potential for agriculture was therefore a phenomenon to be seized

upon. However, such was the Anglo-Jewish preoccupation with the notion

of the Jew as a successful agriculturalist, no commentator asked what

70 ‘Notes of the week’, JC, 6 May 1892; ‘The East End problem’, JC, 7 August 1891;‘Darkest Russia’ supplement, JC, 14 August 1891; ‘Darkest Russia’ supplement, JC, 20May 1892.

71 ‘Darkest Russia’ supplement, JC, 14 August 1891.72 ‘Jews and agriculture’, Jewish World, 24 July 1891. See also ‘His old tricks’, Jewish

World, 7 August 1891, 5, which contrasted the views of White with another suspectcommentator, Professor Goldwin Smith of the University of Oxford. White’s NewReview article (‘Jewish colonisation and the Russian persecution’) was said to ‘directlytraverse the theory of the Arch-Judeophobe [i.e. Smith]’. For discussion of Smith, seeDavid Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840�1914(New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press 1994).

73 ‘Baron Hirsch and the Russian Jews’, Spectator, 30 May 1891. For discussion of theBritish image of the Jew in relation to agriculture, see Sam Johnson, Pogroms, Peasants,Jews: Britain and Eastern Europe’s ‘Jewish Question’, 1867�1925 (London: PalgraveMacmillan 2011), ch. 7.

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motivations lay behind White’s apparent volte face and whether hisperspective on Britain’s Jewish question (i.e. immigration) had shifted atall. By 1892 such was the level of White’s esteem in Anglo-Jewish circles thathis article ‘The Truth about the Russian Jew’ was published as a pamphlet bythe British branch of the Jewish nationalist organization Hovevei Zion.74

The rise in White’s stock was emphasized with an invitation to contributeto an irregular supplement published by the Jewish Chronicle, entitled‘Darkest Russia’.75 The purpose of this publication, founded by Sir IsidoreSpeilmann and the Russo-Jewish Committee (an Anglo-Jewish organizationset up in response to the 1881�2 pogroms), was to rouse British publicopinion to the then ongoing expulsions in the Tsarist empire. It firstappeared in July 1891, just as White returned from the continent, andinitially he was less than an enamoured of such an overtly anti-Tsaristpublication. He pointed out, in particular, that the views espoused in‘Darkest Russia’ would serve no other purpose than to intensify the regime’sapparently anti-Jewish outlook: ‘Anyone who really wants to help the Jewshas two courses open to him*he can hold his tongue about Russia, and hecan put his hands in his pocket and help some poor family to go to SouthAfrica or America.’ He also questioned the truth of ‘Darkest Russia’s’allegations against the Tsarist regime, particularly its revelations as to thenumber of Jews expelled in 1890 and 1891, a remark that prompted someconsternation in Anglo-Jewish quarters.76

But the short-lived fracas over these views did not damage White’sstanding and, by early 1892, he was claimed as a contributor for‘Darkest Russia’, in spite of the fact that it did not support Hirsch’semigration scheme. Clearly, it was hoped that White’s name would raise

74 See advertisement in the JC, 25 November 1891, which appeared in subsequenteditions. Sometimes known as B’nei Zion, the British incarnation of Hovevei Zion(‘Lovers of Zion’) was founded in 1887.

75 Sam Johnson, ‘Confronting the East: Darkest Russia, British opinion and TsaristRussia’s ‘‘Jewish question’’, 1890� 1914’, East European Jewish Affairs, vol. 36, no. 2,2006, 199� 211.

76 Letter from Arnold White to The Times, 1 September 1891. See replies by N. S. Joseph(secretary of the Russo-Jewish Committee) and Harold Frederic (London correspon-dent of the New York Times), in The Times, 5 September 1891 and 22 September 1891,respectively, and Harold Frederic in The Times, 22 September 1891. See also a shorteditorial in JC, 25 September 1891, which, more than anything, questioned White’stactics and wondered why he had felt the need to conduct his disagreements in thepages of a newspaper rather than have a quiet word with the Russo-JewishCommittee. These letters did not challenge White’s dedication to the Russian Jewishcause, though it was suggested that he had been hoodwinked by the Tsaristauthorities on the impact of the expulsions. Frederic was particularly scathing andwondered what White had seen ‘through the spectacles obligingly furnished him bythe accomplished liars of the Holy Synod’. Evidently, this was not wholly justifiedsince White had, after all, not been subjected to an official agenda during his firstRussian visit. And he had been accompanied throughout by Feinberg, who willinglychallenged and corrected White’s preconceptions.

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the supplement’s profile above and beyond the readership of the Jewish

Chronicle, though there is no evidence that this was achieved. The use of

White for the purpose of publicity was further underlined by the presence

of suspect elements within his contributions, suggestive of a degree of

compromise on the part of the editors. For instance, White observed that the

‘exodus of the population en masse from Russia would involve Russian

insolvency’, which evidently hinted, in turn, at a conspiratorial belief that

Jews played the most vital economic role in the Tsarist empire. Likewise,

there were unexpressed concerns at work, namely White’s fear of a large-

scale Jewish emigration to the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, he wassympathetically disposed towards Russian Jews and dramatically described

the ‘perils and dangers by which they [were then] beset’. He appealed

directly to Tsar Alexander III:

His Majesty would hear them, they would tell him, and tell him truly, of

widespread misery, of scattered homes, of husbands parted, of the old deprived

of hope, of the young old before their time, gaunt with want, ignorant of laughter,

of starved hospitals, and schools deprived of support, and, above all, the Emperor

would hear of the decay of manly and womanly dignity of the whole race, arising

from the conditions in which they are forced to exist. And the Emperor, whose

goodness and kindness of heart are examples to all Europe, might end those

things with a stroke of his pen.77

This stance appeared to match the supplement’s ambition of trying to make

imperial Russia’s ‘persecutors ashamed of themselves and of their hateful

work’. Indeed, in this same piece, ‘Darkest Russia’ reflected that, while there

were differences in emphasis with regard to its mission (the halting of

persecution in the Russian empire), it recognized that White’s work, while itmerely aimed at ‘curing some of the victims of the disease’, was nevertheless

praiseworthy and valuable.78 In other words, by May 1892, when it came to

the continuing fight against the Tsarist regime, Arnold White appeared

to stand firmly in the Jewish corner.

‘Zigzags’: the final analysis

Such a response*embracing White as a supporter for the Russian Jewish

cause*was fairly typical for Anglo-Jewry in this period. As on earlier

occasions, especially during campaigns that attempted to highlight the

iniquitous Jewish policies of various foreign governments, the Anglo-Jewish

establishment, as embodied by Lord Rothschild and institutions such as the

Board of Deputies, was always keen to ensure the mobilization of prominent

77 ‘Darkest Russia’ supplement, JC, 20 May 1892.78 ‘Darkest Russia’ supplement, JC, 25 September 1891.

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Gentiles. In 1872, for example, the most important figure attendant at the

well-publicized anti-Romanian meeting in London’s Mansion House was

the Earl of Shaftesbury, perhaps the most renowned philanthropist of the

age. At the time, however, Shaftesbury was also the president of the

evangelistic London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews. Yet

Anglo-Jewry saw no contradiction or compromise in utilizing such an

individual and, in 1872, the Jewish Chronicle stressed that, in promoting a

universalist message, British Jews should be willing to shed all religious,

political and social affiliations.79 The same perspective was adopted in

subsequent decades, during moments of crises involving the Tsarist empire.

In relation to the response to the 1881�2 pogroms, for example, the Anglo-

Jewish Association, the leading internationally orientated Anglo-Jewish

organization, advised that all anti-Tsarist meetings should be ‘convened by

Christians’ and that Jewish speakers should ‘confine themselves to propos-

ing and seconding votes of thanks to the respective chairmen’.80 Similar

attitudes were evident during the 1890�1 campaign against the Tsarist

expulsions.No doubt this willingness to compromise and underplay the Jewish

message was due, in part, to the difficulties in drawing attention

outside Anglo-Jewish spheres to issues focused exclusively on foreign co-

religionists. After all, Anglo-Jewry remained, notwithstanding the swelling

of numbers through immigration, a tiny community in Britain, representing

less than one per cent of the entire population. Civil emancipation, even in

the 1890s, remained of recent, sometimes living memory and the Anglo-

Jewish establishment was desperate to prove its loyalty to and belief in

Britain. Thus the acquisition of Gentile support in any kind of campaign was

eagerly grasped and oftentimes other, more suspect opinions on Jewish

matters were disregarded. In the case of Arnold White, who was hardly shy

of expressing his point of view on Jewish immigration, even at the height of

his association with the JCA, the compromise is perhaps less easy to

comprehend. However, since his role was approved by an influential,

internationally respected Jewish figure, and the subsequent propaganda

White produced in support of the JCA was viewed in a positive light, it was

perhaps not too problematic to assign him to the side of good. Even in the

mid-1890s, although he continued to further publicize his anti-alien crusade,

especially through his book English Democracy,81 the Jewish Chronicle

appeared to play down White’s unequivocal views: ‘in the main his

argument may well be accepted as that of an outside spectator who is not

79 ‘The Romanian committee’, JC, 17 May 1872.80 Minutes of the Anglo-Jewish Association, 24 January 1882: Southampton University,

Special Collections, Archives of the Anglo-Jewish Association, MS137/AJ95/ADD/2,AJA Minute Book, 24/I/1882, 13.

81 Arnold White, The English Democracy (London: Swann Sonnenschein 1894).

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biased in our favour’. But it also commented on ‘the fairness with which he

refers to Jewish influence’.82 In 1895 another of White’s publications, this

time a piece on alien immigration in the Fortnightly Review, provoked some

consternation among correspondents to the Jewish Chronicle.83 But, once

again, an editorial refused to recognize any anti-Jewish malice in White and

merely described his ‘earnest but erratic philanthropy’.84

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Anglo-Jewry’s reasonably

amicable attitude towards Arnold White underwent another shift, and this

time it was irrevocable. It occurred in tandem with a pronounced heighten-

ing of White’s interest in the ‘Jewish question’, though the reason for this is

not entirely easy to discern. To be sure, immigration remained a pressing

issue, but it does not appear to have been of more significance than in

previous decades: his advocacy of restrictive legislation remained consistent

through three decades. It is evident, however, that racial theories were

becoming ever more central to White’s world-view, which combined with

an undoubtedly increased tendency to imagine a range of concerns in

conspiratorial terms. These included, as already noted, White’s neurotic fear

of imperial Germany in the decade before the Great War, and the suggestion,

in 1900, that ‘sinful women’ were ruining Britain. These latter sentiments

were explored in an extraordinary interview with the New York Evening

World in which White revealed that the ‘secret influence [of women from

London’s ‘‘smart society’’] on the government, wielded by the common rout

of Circes, sybarites, cynics and financiers, is subtle and profound’.85

By the last few years of the nineteenth century, White’s propensity for

obsession was played out to the fore in his analyses of the ‘Jewish question’.

A series of articles for the Pall Mall Gazette in 1897 demonstrated the scope

of his fixations. Here he adumbrated at length on the ‘materialistic sway of

cosmopolitan finance’, freely admitting it was ‘only another term for Jewish

money-lending’.86 He also complained of the ‘manipulations of the press by

a handful of philosophic Semites . . . who have not a drop of English blood in

their veins’. These were not unfamiliar White themes, nor was the belief that

82 ‘Notes of the week’, JC, 22 June 1894.83 Arnold White, ‘Alien immigration*a rejoinder’, Fortnightly Review, March 1895,

501� 7. See letters from Arnold White to JC, 22 March 1895; from Arnold White to JC,5 April 1895; and from ‘Altruistic’ to JC, 12 April 1895.

84 ‘The general election’, JC, 26 July 1895.85 ‘Sinful women ruin Britain’, New York Evening World, 12 February 1900. In part,

this attack was evidently concerned with the influence of American women whohad married into English aristocratic society, though no individual names werementioned.

86 Arnold White, ‘The Jew and Europe: a plea for a European congress’, Pall Mall Gazette,13 October 1897; see also Arnold White, ‘Europe and the Jews’, Contemporary Review,November 1897, 733� 42.

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Britain was in ‘agricultural decay . . . a democracy omnipotent for every

purpose but providing its own means of sustenance’.87 These views drew

venomous replies from Jewish correspondents, including Oswald John

Simon, a member of the Russo-Jewish Committee, who reflected on the

‘strange’ and ‘mysterious’ elements in White’s articles. ‘Since the death of

Baron Hirsch’, Simon continued, White appeared to have ‘thrown off the

mask which then concealed his personal antipathy towards the Jewish race

and religion’.88

By the end of the nineteenth century, White grew ever more antipathetic

towards Jews, with positive perspectives now usually entirely absent.

Articles published in 1898 revealed, for example, that immigrant Jews

(termed ‘dirty squalid Hebrew workers’) were ‘destitute of the qualities that

enrich civilised communities’.89 Following another visit to the Russian

empire, White observed only ‘overcrowding and constant multiplication

[and] the spiritual, moral and physical degeneration’ among the Jews of the

Pale of Settlement.90 There was no reference to the agricultural Jews of

Kherson, to the once celebrated communities ripe for the colonization of

the Argentinean plain; instead, White stressed the threat Jews posed to the

economic and domestic security of the Russian empire.91 In an interview

with The Sketch, he further elaborated his belief in the ‘moral decline’, the

‘degeneracy’ of Jews, while simultaneously attempting to reassure Jewish

readers with the immortal phrase: ‘I am not antisemitic*many of my

friends are Jews.’92 Then, in the following year, 1899, White published The

Modern Jew, a book that has been accorded a degree of notoriety by historians

of British antisemitism.There was little, however, to separate The Modern Jew from the views

White had frequently expressed elsewhere. The same kind of antisemitic

allusions were trotted out and he spoke, for example, of ‘the practice of

ignoble cosmopolitanism’, of his belief that ‘the engine of international

finance [was] under Jewish control’ and that public opinion was ‘mediated

by Jewish influence over the European press’. In the context of the Russian

empire, White confirmed his belief in the ‘moral and physical degeneration

of its’ Jews, and he cautioned that, were Russian statesmen to remove the

87 Arnold White, ‘Europe and the Jew II’, Pall Mall Gazette, 3 November 1897.88 Letter from Oswald John Simon to the Pall Mall Gazette, 6 November 1897. For other

published hostile responses, see Bella Lowy to the Pall Mall Gazette, 18 October 1897,and Lucien Wolf to the Pall Mall Gazette, 5 November 1897.

89 Arnold White, ‘A typical alien immigrant’, Contemporary Review, February 1898, 245,248.

90 Arnold White, ‘The Jew in modern life’, Chamber’s Journal, 28 May 1898, 402. ‘Notes ofthe week’, JC, 10 June 1898, was critical of this article.

91 Arnold White, ‘The Russian bogey’, National Review, August 1898, 805.92 ‘Is England against the Jews? A chat with Mr Arnold White’, The Sketch, 12 January

1898, 470.

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legal obstacles that inhibited Jewish life in the empire, the consequenceswould be devastating:

The intellect of the Jew is masterful. His assiduity, his deadly resolve to get on,

his self-denial and ambition surmount all natural obstacles. If all careers in the

Russian Empire were thrown open to the Russian Jew, not a decade would go by

before the whole Russian administration . . . must pass into Hebraic hands. This is

a sober statement of fact.

Elsewhere, though, White claimed that ‘the popular notion of the evil effectof Jewish influence is not supported by facts’. He was also complementaryabout the philanthropic activities of British Jewry and repeated his assertionthat, as regards Russian Jews, ‘sunshine and sweat’ would, in a singlegeneration, ‘restore the traditions of the time when Israel was both a pastoraland an agricultural people’. On this latter point, he again keenly laid claim tohis JCA allegiance with the inclusion of a letter to Baron Hirsch in theappendix.93

In other words, the literary zenith of White’s ponderings on the ‘Jewishquestion’ over the course of a generation was the same old mishmash ofpositive and negative perspectives. The single exception was a new assertionthat suggested revolutionary political tendencies could be found amongJews, in whom, ‘in the avoidance of patriotic and communal duties, is to befound the raw material of revolutionary outbreak’.94 Every other opinionhad been expressed many, many times before.

It cannot be argued, therefore, that The Modern Jew represented some kindof political departure for Arnold White. From a literary perspective, the bestthat can be said is that it was seemingly patched together in great haste,largely using sections filleted from various articles published in the previousdecade. As a consequence, no overall single objective is discernible from thebroad range of topics examined within its 300 pages, from British, Russian toHabsburg Jewry. By no stretch of the imagination can The Modern Jew beregarded as a carefully considered, intellectually convincing thesis. At times,

it is difficult to know when White is voicing his own views, or utilizing theperspectives of others, such as Konstantin Pobedonostsev. The worst that canbe said, of course, is that The Modern Jew, no matter its editorial vulgarities,represents a wholesale attack on Jews, in racial, intellectual, social andpolitical terms. In this context, its incoherence and intellectual weaknessescannot simply be ascribed to sloppiness, but instead indicate an emotionallydriven, febrile, almost fanatical mindset. In this regard, the book’s manifoldcontradictions (and there are many), its garbled and often incomprehensiblearguments, can be regarded as signs of White’s real intent and true feelingstowards Jews and the ‘Jewish question’.

93 White, The Modern Jew, 9, xv, 39, 19, 20, 294� 301.94 Ibid., 8.

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It was perhaps understandable, therefore, that contemporary reviews

of The Modern Jew reflected a consensus of puzzlement, with flashes of

outrage. The Jewish Chronicle referred to The Modern Jew as a ‘bewildering

achievement’ that was full of ‘ignorance’, ‘misstatements’, ‘capital crimes

against elementary logic’ and ‘grotesque inconsistencies’. ‘With Mr. White’,

it observed sarcastically, ‘the study of the Jew has not yet reached the plane

of an exact science’. Ultimately, the JC was confused as to White’s allegiances

on the Jewish question: ‘he seems to love and hate us in a breath’.95 A similar

conclusion was reached in Reynold’s Newspaper, which reflected: ‘nobody

who reads [this] book can tell on which side Mr. White is now’.96 The

Morning Post, however, was less unequivocal in its diagnosis: ‘a book to be

read only with extreme caution’.97

At the other end of the European continent, a reader in the Russian-

language Jewish monthly Knizhki Voskhod entitled his review ‘Zigzags’, a

comment on the duality and fluidity of White’s attitude to Jews. But there

was no confusion here and White was revealed as having developed his own

‘antisemitic brand’, his disagreeable personal qualities as evident as the ‘sick

fantasies’ on which his world-view was based.98 To accredit White with

originality in the genesis of his very own ‘antisemitic brand’ was stretching

the point somewhat. Nevertheless, it is clear that, in a different national

context, there was a greater understanding of the significance of The Modern

Jew. No doubt this was a consequence of the kind of antisemitic currents that

made up a pattern of everyday discourse in the Russian empire, particularly

in the press. There was, for instance, no London equivalent to Petersburg’s

Novoe vremia, which obsessed daily on a range of fears it associated with the

‘Jewish question’.99 In this regard, perhaps the reviewer compared White’s

world-view to that of various antisemitic agitators in Russia who also

peddled incomprehensible, contradictory and emotionally informed non-

sense about Jews. While there was no explicit reference to such a comparison

in Knizhki Voskhod’s review, the context in which The Modern Jew was

scrutinized was that of the Russian empire, not the United Kingdom.Although the British reception to The Modern Jew was less categorical than

in Russia, in the years that followed it is apparent that any pronouncement

by White was eyed somewhat warily by Anglo-Jewish observers. He was

also subject to a good deal of derision, as though his views could not be

taken entirely seriously. In 1902, for example, the Jewish World remarked that

White was ‘never happy unless he can complain’. In this instance, the reason

for his grievance was the appointment of Lord Rothschild to the Royal

95 ‘Mr Arnold White on the ‘‘Modern Jew’’’, JC, 1 September 1899.96 ‘Up to date’, Reynold’s Newspaper, 3 September 1899.97 ‘Books of the day’, Morning Post, 21 September 1899.98 [S. V. Pozner], ‘Zigzagi’, Knizhki Voskhod, May 1901, 137.99 See Daniel Balmuth, ‘Novoe Vremia’s war against the Jews’, East European Jewish Affairs,

vol. 35, no. 1, 2005, 33� 54.

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Commission of Alien Immigration, which made White ‘apprehensive that

restrictive legislation will never be undertaken’. It was in relation to this jibe

that the Jewish World penned the limerick located at the beginning of this

study.100 Similarly, after observing a meeting of the anti-immigrant British

Brothers’ League, a short-lived East End movement that exclusively focused

on Jewish immigrants, the Jewish Chronicle gleefully celebrated the audi-

ence’s heckling of the ‘demagogic’ White. Even among those with whom he

apparently shared a political agenda, his allegiances were openly ques-

tioned. ‘Haven’t you taken some of their money?’, a raised voice asked,

which caused White ‘to wince under the unkind question’.101 The following

year, during a gathering of the English Zionist Federation, the mere mention

of White’s name was sufficient to prompt a chorus of hissing from the

assembled members.102 By this stage, it seems, he was regarded as some-

thing of a pantomime villain.Behind the hisses, however, there were surely serious concerns, not least in

consequence of White’s appearances at the Royal Commission. The Chronicle

declined to provide editorial comment on the proceedings, merely reprodu-

cing a verbatim report of every witness interrogation (an unhelpful

approach). But there could be no question of the unwavering support that

White proclaimed in favour of restrictive legislation, nor the reasons that lay

behind the evidence he presented to the Commission. Additionally, to make

matters far worse, White had, throughout 1903, attempted to raise his profile

in the aftermath of the Kishinev pogrom, a tragedy of immense significance

from the British and international Jewish perspective. Indeed, according to

the Jewish World, it appeared as though he functioned as a ‘peculiar medium’

through which the Tsarist government could issue various pronouncements

on the pogrom.103 There was no truth in this, but White was apparently

happy to allow the myth to disseminate. This revealed the heightened levels

of self-importance that White had accumulated by this stage, which might

easily have prompted ridicule. But, given the grave incident with which it

was associated, the proposition was taken seriously by the Anglo-Jewish

press as proof of the antisemitic proclivities of both the Tsarist regime and

Arnold White.104

Notwithstanding his increasing acquisition of a bad press, White

continued to present himself as a fair-minded ‘friend of the Jews’. This

was especially made apparent in an article entitled ‘The Jewish Question:

100 ‘By the way’, Jewish World, 4 April 1902.101 ‘Notes of the week’, JC, 17 January 1902.102 ‘Mr Arnold White and the Jewish question’, JC, 21 August 1903.103 ‘An apish apologia’, Jewish World, 19 June 1903.104 ‘Darkest Russia’, Jewish World, 21 August 1903; ‘Darkest Russia’, Jewish World,

9 October 1903, 34. White was also cited as the Tsarist regime’s intermediary in‘Massacre of Jews’, New York Times, 15 June 1903; ‘Plehve’s allegation untrue’, NewYork Times, 8 October 1903.

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How to Solve It’ for the North American Review. In large part a discussion ofhis encounter with Baron Hirsch, White also revealed his real priorities byavowing that Jewish immigrants in Britain formed ‘racial islands’ in the ‘seaof the general population’.105 Similarly, in a letter to The Times in 1904, heexpressed dismay that the Hirsch legacy had failed to cure the ‘evils of alienimmigration’, thereby revealing his motivation in supporting the JCA in the1890s. Once again, he complained of the ‘refusal of the Hebrew communityof miscegenation’ with the English.106 By this stage, there was no question-ing of White’s allegiances and, understandably, the Anglo-Jewish responseto this missive was resoundingly dismissive.

An editorial in the Jewish World gave vent to a build-up of anger andfrustration, accummulated, it seems, over the preceding years. Occupyingover two columns (three-quarters of the page) it commented on a range ofmatters connected to White. In relation to the letter to The Times, the editorialconcluded that it ‘strung together all the distortion his bitter pen is capableof to the disparagement and prejudice and hate of the Jewish people’. Thiswas nothing new, said the Jewish World, and it usually felt compelled to passover ‘most of Mr. Arnold White’s lubrications . . . with contempt’, for ‘as arule they are not worth notice, and we are not inclined to advertise thegentlemen even by criticism’. On this occasion, however, the newspaper didfeel inclined to comment:

This disappointed candidate [a reference to White’s repeated electoral failures] is

always taking something or the other under his special protection. When it is not

the nation generally, it is the Mediterranean fleet, and when that has been utilised

as far as it may, and prominent men remain immune to his abuse, then he falls

back on what he is pleased to term ‘the Jewish question’. On that he seeks to pose

as an authority. On what ground, except that of determined self-advertisement, no

one knows except himself.

. . . We suppose the author of [the letter in The Times] expects to be taken

seriously, and there is little doubt that he will point to what he has written as a

proof of his good-will to Jews. It is too fantastic to be worth space of

discussion.. . . Mr. Arnold White bobs up in many places. His recent denuncia-

tions have included the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the Attorney

General and the British Admiralty, none of whom know their business so well as

he would teach them. Most of the objects of his attacks treat him and what he says

with indifference, and as no one else takes any notice he has to relapse into

105 Arnold White, ‘The Jewish question: how to solve it’, North American Review, January1904, 18. This piece revealed that White visited the Russian empire a fifth time, in thewake of the Kishinev pogrom. He attempted to meet with Tsar Nicholas II, but wasrebuffed. Apparently not discouraged by this, White included a memorandum inthis piece addressed to the emperor and the US president Theodore Roosevelt (22� 4).I have no evidence to indicate a response was forthcoming from either of theseindividuals.

106 Letter from Arnold White to The Times, 24 December 1904.

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nothingness. Jewry, however, is less happily placed; there is usually an audience

to listen to the recital of the dose of original sin which we are supposed to bear.

Perhaps that may account for the persistent and valiant bearing of this individual

whose would-be patronage is more offensive than his misrepresentations.107

A quarter of a century on from its initial brushes with this infuriating,contradictory figure, Anglo-Jewish opinion categorically understood that,for all his flattery, all his positive pronouncements and ‘friendship’ withBaron Hirsch, it ultimately counted for naught.

Of course, by the early twentieth century, the opinion-makers and thejournalists who wrote for the Anglo-Jewish press were not the same, asindividuals or in relation to their general outlook, as their predecessors of thelate 1880s and early 1890s. They were of an entirely different generation, onethat was less prepared to compromise on a variety of Jewish issues, whetherinternational or domestic. Many, for instance, were involved in the EnglishZionist Federation, which was pretty robust in its defence of Jewish matters.But this was surely not the only reason for the vehemence with which theJewish World expressed its views on Arnold White. Through the twenty-fiveyears since his appearances at the parliamentary committees of 1888, Anglo-Jewish observers had witnessed an alarming surge in anti-Jewish attitudesthroughout the European continent: from the pogroms in the Russian empireand the Dreyfus affair in France, to the rise of antisemitic politics in theGerman and Habsburg empires and, closer to home, the perpetual threat toJews from anti-immigration agitation. As a result, it was in this context that,by 1904, Arnold White’s prognostications were regarded as, and he himselfnow embodied, a dangerous, threatening and sometimes elusive ideologythat Anglo-Jews felt compelled to oppose at every opportunity. Although heappeared to lose his appetite for the ‘Jewish question’ in the years thatfollowed, White’s reputation, as a key British exponent of that ideology, wasjustifiably beyond redemption.

Sam Johnson is Senior Lecturer in modern European history at ManchesterMetropolitan University. She is the author of Pogroms, Peasants, Jews: Britainand Eastern Europe’s Jewish Question, 1867�1925 (Palgrave 2011). Her currentproject focuses on antisemitism and visual culture in Europe, 1880 to 1918.E-mail: s.johnson@mmu.ac.uk

107 ‘A shameless sting’, Jewish World, 30 December 1904.

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