As a historian of England’s shameful anti-Semitic past,I dread the idea of Prime Minister Corbyn By Tom Holland
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On Thursday I joined John Le Carré, Trevor Phillips, Fiyaz Mughal and many others in signing a letter explaining our refusal to vote Labour on 12 December. The concern – indeed, the dread – which we expressed was “the prospect of a prime minister steeped in association with antisemitism.” Whether Jeremy Corbyn is personally anti-semitic, or wilfully blind, or both, I do not presume to judge; but the sheer range of his contacts with indisputable anti-semites, his repeated expressions of enthusiasm for them, means that I have long found it impossible to ignore the anxieties of Jewish friends. One association in particular seems to me beyond the pale. In 2011, writing in the Morning Star, the future Labour leader condemned “the Zionist lobby” for securing the deportation from Britain of a Palestinian activist named Raed Saleh. A year later, Corbyn was still campaigning on Saleh’s behalf, and even issued him an invitation to “tea on the House of Commons terrace.” It is hard to think of anyone less deserving of such an invitation. Saleh has been convicted of deploying the most repellant of all the many calumnies directed against the Jews over the centuries: the charge that they are in the habit of mixing children’s blood with their ritual bread. This blood libel is widely repeated across the Middle East today – but it did not originate there. It originated in England. The context was a growing dread in 12th century Christendom of the Jews as willing agents of the Devil. Increasingly they were fingered as sorcerers and blasphemers: enemies of the Church who, given the chance, would pollute the sacred vessels used in the eucharist with their spit, their sperm, their excrement. Darkest of all, they were charged with murder. In 1144, the discovery of a young boy’s corpse in a wood outside Norwich prompted a host of sensational accusations: that the boy had been kidnapped by the city’s Jews, tortured as Christ had been tortured and offered up as a sacrifice. The story spread like wildfire. As similar tales were reported across Christendom, a further hellish refinement was added: that the Jews, in a grotesque parody of the eucharist, mixed blood into their bread. That this claim was condemned as a libel first by an imperial commission, and then, in 1253, by the papacy itself, did nothing to stop its spread. Two years later, the discovery in Lincoln of a small boy named Hugh at the bottom of a well saw ninety Jews arrested for the murder on the orders of the king himself. Eighteen of them were hanged. The murdered boy was hailed as a martyr. That the papacy pointedly refused to confirm this canonisation did little to check the growth of the cult of Little Saint Hugh. England, as the birthplace of this most toxic of lies, has a particular responsibility to take a stand against it. Taking a stand against it, however, is something that Jeremy Corbyn, by backing a promoter of the blood libel, has failed to do. It shames him, and soon perhaps, the country as well. |
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