12 March 2007
The UK's wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, suggested the Jewish people were "partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer", according to a document made public for the first time. A historian at Cambridge University has uncovered an article written by Churchill in 1937, three years before he became prime minister. Entitled "How The Jews Can Combat Persecution", the document was never published after Churchill's advisers stepped in, saying that publication would be "inadvisable". The document lay buried in the university's Churchill archive for more than 60 years until the historian Richard Toye discovered it while researching a new biography. Its sentiments include a complaint that cheap Jewish labor was "taking employment from English people". The piece begins with reference to persecution of Jews and refers to a new wave of anti-Semitism across Europe and the United States.
"It would be easy to ascribe it to the wickedness of the persecutors, but that does not fit all the facts," the tract reads. "It exists even in lands, like Great Britain and United States, where Jew and Gentile are equal in the eyes of the law, and where large numbers of Jews have found, not only asylum, but opportunity. These facts must be faced in any analysis of anti-Semitism. They should be pondered especially by Jews themselves. For it may be that, unwittingly, they are inviting persecution - that they have been partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer." Elsewhere, the article is sympathetic towards the Jewish people and it becomes clear that Churchill disapproved of their persecution. He ends his tract by urging the British people to stand up for the Jews. "The Jews are suffering from persecutions as cruel, as relentless and as vindictive as any in their long history," he wrote.
