Arnold White: 'The Modern Jew', London, William Heinemann, 1...

Hammer

£240

Arnold White: 'The Modern Jew', London, William Heinemann, 1899, 1st edition, signed and inscribed in pencil to half title "Charles Beresford Sept. 1899 From Arnold White", xvii,301pp + publisher's 32pp catalogue of adverts at end dated July 1899, rebound (not recent) cream polished buckram, calf gilt title label to spine. Chapters include: What is a Jew?; The Problem in Russia; The Jew in Austria/America/France/England/The Argentine Colonies; The Aloofness of Israel; Money Lenders; The Destitute Alien in Great Britain; Zionism; "Darkest Russia"; The Conversion of the Jews; Jewish Humour. One of several books by Arnold Henry White (1848-1925), English journalist and antisemitic campaigner against immigration. 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, as a 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’. 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. Very scarce