KEY POINTS:
Winston Churchill suggested Jewish people were "partly responsible for the antagonism" that saw them branded "Hebrew bloodsuckers", according to an article made public for the first time yesterday.
The 1937 document, "How the Jews Can Combat Persecution", was unearthed by Dr Richard Toye, a Cambridge University historian.
Written three years before Churchill became Prime Minister, the article has apparently lain unnoticed in the Churchill archives at Cambridge since the early months of World War II.
The article argues that "the wickedness of the persecutors" was not the sole reason for the ill-treatment of Jews down the ages. Churchill criticised the "aloofness" of Jewish people and urged them to make the effort to integrate themselves.
Dr Toye said: "I nearly fell off my chair when I found the article. It appears to have been overlooked. I think a lot of people thought that the file it was in only contained copies of articles that had already been published. It was certainly quite a shock to read some of these things and it is obviously at odds with the traditional idea we have of Churchill."
The article was intended for the US publication Liberty but withdrawn when another magazine Churchill wrote for objected to him supplying a rival.
In the piece Churchill criticised Jewish employers in the clothing trade and their use of sweated labour. Because refugee Jews escaping the Nazi regime in Germany were willing to work for lower wages, this was in his view "bad citizenship" because it forced English workers out of jobs - and "bad policy" as it created anti-Semitism.
He then criticised Jewish moneylenders: "Every Jewish moneylender recalls Shylock and the idea of the Jews as usurers. And you cannot reasonably expect a struggling clerk or shopkeeper, paying 40 or 50 per cent interest on borrowed money to a 'Hebrew bloodsucker', to reflect that almost every other way of life was closed to the Jewish people."
However, Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill's biographer, says Churchill had a ghostwriter who was a member of the UK fascist party. "This article was the only serious subject the ghostwriter was asked to tackle, in which he went over the top in the use of his language."
- INDEPENDENT
