Is Jeremy Corbyn an anti-Semite?

Is Jeremy Corbyn an anti-Semite? It is an easy question to ask, but the answer is desperately hard. In his devastating piece last week in the Times, the Chief Rabbi calls him “complicit in prejudice”. The phrase I have used to describe Corbyn in the columns for TheArticle is “an enabler of anti-Semitism”. Such circumlocutions are not cowardice. They reflect the difficulty of labelling a person who, hand on heart, swears again and again that he has devoted his life to fighting that vile prejudice, even while it swirls around him. That is the difference between Corbyn and, say, the Nazis, or those medieval Churchmen who delighted in hurling the most obnoxious public insults at the Jews.

The problem lies in the fact that historically there have been two intellectually distinct forms of anti-Semitism: religious and racial. For much of the last two thousand years, anti-Semitism has been religious. That religious scenario goes like this: the Jews rejected Jesus and conspired to have the Messiah crucified. They had made themselves a conspiritorial group, working against the will of the Lord and his Christian disciples.

From that source came the blood libel, and all the rest. And for that original sin, Jews could be exploited, driven out or at times massacred. However, there was an escape route. Abandoning Judaism and converting to Christianity was all — all! — it took. Hence the number of conversions — opportunistic or sincere — down the centuries. Even in this country. Disraeli had his father’s conversion and his own baptism to thank for the possibility of a political career.

But the politics of race and eugenics changed all that. For the Nazis and other racists, Jewishness was in the blood line, not the culture. In today’s terms it was a matter of DNA. You could be an atheist Jew, a Christian Jew or for that matter a Muslim Jew. You could Germanise your name. It mattered little. The cattle trucks and the camps awaited. The Nuremberg Race Laws (the clue is in the title) were about ethnicity, not belief. There was no escape: Jews were racially inferior and that was that. It was that sense of disgust which led to the Nazi banning of interracial marriage, segregated seating and exclusion of Jews from swimming pools and the like. The Holocaust discredited racial anti-Semitism, though it still resurfaces from time to time.

What the Corbynistas have done is to re-invent medieval, religious anti-Semitism in secular, Marxist, anti-capitalist, terms. Now it is Zionism, which is the big No-No. All the new generation of anti-Semites want is for the Jews of the world to denounce the idea of a return to Zion. For them, Israel is a pseudo-state, a colonial outpost. It therefore has no right to exist.

It is also, conveniently, an agent of global finance capitalism, in which the Jews, led of course by the Rothschilds, have supposedly played such a crucial role. Although hostility to Israel can be whipped up over the West Bank settlements or the supposed blockade of Gaza, the true aim is not a two-state solution, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security, which is what this country, the US and the UN advocate. It is to wipe Israel off the map.

Unless Britain’s Jews accept this obnoxious package, they are treated as legitimate targets for condemnation — not of course as Jews, but as Zionists. So it is, in theory, possible for Jews to escape from this far-Left form of anti-Semitism. Indeed a number of those around Corbyn or running Momentum are Jewish. They just happen to be Jews who are deeply unrepresentative of mainstream Jewish opinion.

No doubt they are sincere in their anti-Zionism, just as Corbyn is sincere in treating them as comrades and not “Zios”. And that is how Corbyn can reasonably claim that he is neither a racist nor a religious anti-Semite. After all, some of his best friends are Jews!

But Corbyn’s toxic mix of Marxism and anti-Zionism has led him to befriend the terrorist groups Hamas and Hizbollah. He also goes easy on those in the Labour Party who have created an atmosphere of harassment and bullying, and who vilely insult the great majority of British Jews who want nothing to do with his bizarre agenda. That, in the final analysis, is the sense in which Corbyn is indeed a — new-style — anti-Semite. As such, he is indeed unfit for high office.