Churchill article critical of Jews

JEWS were “partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer”, Winston Churchill argued in an article publicised for the first time yesterday.

Britain’s leader through World War II made the claim in an article entitled How The Jews Can Combat Persecution, written in 1937, three years before he became prime minister.

He outlined a new wave of anti-Semitism sweeping across Europe and the United States, which was followed by the deaths of millions of Jews in the Holocaust under the German Nazi regime.

“It would be easy to ascribe it to the wickedness of the persecutors, but that does not fit all the facts,” the article read.

“It exists even in lands, like Great Britain and the US, 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 the 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, Churchill praised Jews as “sober, industrious, law-abiding” and urged Britons to stand up for the race against persecution. “To protest against cruelty and wrong, and to strive to end them, is the mark of a man,” he wrote.

The article was discovered by Cambridge University historian Richard Toye in the university’s archive of Churchill’s papers. At the time, his secretary advised him it would be “inadvisable” to publish it and it never saw the light of day.