Trials of Diaspora P

In a book that Harold Bloom in <em>The New York Times Book Review</em> called a strong somber book on an appalling subject Anthony Julius offers a wide-ranging and insightful history of anti-Semitism in England the first such study of its kind. Julius focuses on four distinct versions of English anti-Semitism. He first describes the anti-Semitism of medieval England a radical prejudice of defamation expropriation and murder which culminated in 1290 the year Edward I expelled the Jews from England. The second strand is literary anti-Semitism from the anonymous medieval ballad Sir Hugh or the Jew's Daughter through Chaucer's The Prioress's Tale and Shakespeare's <em>Merchant of Venice</em> to T. S. Eliot and beyond. The third is modern anti-Semitism the commonplace anti-Semitism of insult and exclusion running from the mid-17th century through to the late 20th century. The final chapters then deal with contemporary anti-Semitism emerging in the late 1960s and the 1970s which treats Zionism and the State of Israel as illegitimate Jewish enterprises.