Alien Invasion

David Glover’s important book asks how it was possible for a law restricting immigration to be passed in a country that had long prided itself on its open borders and its welcoming attitude to refugees. To answer it, he explores the cultural world of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century England in which ‘the Jew’ came to epitomize the racially denigrated alien. Literature, the press and popular entertainments are all probed for what they reveal about changing attitudes to Jewish migrants.

The book opens with a finely-honed analysis of the complex depictions of Jews and Judaism in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) and their reception by late Victorian audiences. Deronda, Glover suggests, was a key expression of liberal sentiment and the prevailing openness toward diasporic figures as well as gesturing toward a messianic vision of a Jewish homeland. It also raised questions that were to become increasingly significant about ‘national allegiance, citizenship, and birthright’ of Jews (p. 11). Daniel Deronda was published prior to shifts in the political atmosphere of the late 1870s and early 1880s that included a growth in antisemitism accompanying widespread criticism of Disraeli’s pro-Turkish policies. Furthermore, Liberal historian Goldwin Smith proclaimed that the Jews were unpatriotic and even William Gladstone at times deployed anti-Jewish discourse. Elsewhere, Australia and the United States initiated immigration-control measures that were seen in Britain as possible models to be followed. In subsequent decades, with mass immigration of Eastern European Jews, anti-Jewish and anti-immigration sentiment hardened.

The remaining chapters present readings of fictional and non-fictional works that contributed to a growing antipathy toward the Jew/Alien. The book concludes with a discussion of debates about enforcement of the 1905 Act and an analysis of novels, stories, and magazine and newspaper accounts suggesting a more decidedly antisemitic structure of feeling in the years prior to the Great War.

Glover’s compelling analysis emphasizes complexity and contradiction. This is not a story about the inevitable rise of a pro-restriction, anti-alien, antisemitic political culture but rather one about the fractures and tensions in a society that had prided itself on tolerance and had a history of granting asylum and welcoming refugees. The tale it tells is about a fractured set of emotions, a constellation of diverse and often competing strands of anti-Jewish and anti-alien sentiment – from socialist to liberal to conservative to the radical right. But it is also a story of writers and political figures who wanted to preserve Britain as a type of liberal utopia. In this sense it is, perhaps, a story about the tensions and contradictions within liberalism itself.

Early on as I read, I wondered what Glover meant by ‘liberal’. The word is famously ambiguous and, with the advent of New Liberalism in the late nineteenth century, liberalism itself was changing. ‘Liberal modernity’, Glover suggests at one point, ‘ … assumed a form of life in which the state was constantly engaged in determining the limits and the risks that free and active subjects must face’ (p. 39). Throughout the book he implies that liberalism was closely associated with cosmopolitanism. As Uday Mehta has noted, ‘liberalism has come to represent … political thought that was cosmopolitan in its imagination and potential reach’ – it was meant to be universal in its applicability. The universal claims of liberalism, according to Mehta, are based on what he calls an ‘anthropological minimum’ which defines what it means to be a human – that is, a being capable of acting rationally, who can be trusted with individual rights and freedoms.¹ This underlying appeal to a common-denominator humanity means that liberalism has always had problems with ‘difference’. Britain had prided itself on its ‘tolerance’ since the late seventeenth century, and now that characteristic was seen to be in peril – not only from exclusionary laws but from those who by virtue of their difference, their alien otherness, threatened that tolerance.

Glover suggests that there was a desire on the part of all players (except, perhaps, for the radical right) to preserve the idea of British tolerance. Intolerance generally, and antisemitism in particular, were said to be ‘over there’: in France, in Germany, in Russia. One of the arguments for curtailing alien immigration was that unrestricted immigration would stimulate antisemitism in Britain. This kind of argument has had a long life. A similar argument was made during the Second World War when the British public were told about the Nazi extermination camps and there were calls to accept Jewish refugees into the country. Then, too, there was an outpouring of antisemitic sentiment in response to those calls, and an expressed fear on the part of some government officials that letting refugees into the country would encourage antisemitism. When government officials were pressed to address the problem of antisemitism through radio broadcasts and other public media, they declined – again claiming that drawing attention to it would only stimulate it further. As Glover says, in the 1880s and 1890s when antisemitism was both pervasive and contested, ‘it was frequently regarded by the political class as a volatile problem that needed to be managed, as a danger that was symptomatic of democratic or popular excess’ (p. 86). Antisemitism, then, was either ‘over there’ or being promulgated by a minority of unrespectable loudmouths; it was certainly not truly English. In the debates on the Aliens Bill, those in favour of restricting alien immigration were in an uncomfortable position: if they denied the relevance of Jewishness to the case for immigration control, then warnings about the erosion of English culture in cities with substantial Jewish populations would not work; if they used the threat of the Jewish presence to bolster their case, they risked being called antisemites. The claim that the Aliens Bill would prevent the spread of antisemitism was the strategic route out of this dilemma.

It is interesting that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were conflicting negative representations of ‘the Jew’. As Glover points out, the long-lived view of the Jew as money-lender was refurbished and Jews became either sweaters and money-grubbers – bottom-feeders in the commercial sphere – or profiteering capitalists and plutocrats. The latter image was favoured by some socialists and trade union leaders. But along with those representations were images of Jews as slum-dwellers, wallowing in poverty and dependent on charity – the outcasts of ‘outcast London’. Jews were also thought to be rootless, without national or local loyalties: marginal people with no cultural ties. They were akin to changelings. Glover shows how these negative stereotypes were regularly refashioned to suit their times. In World War Two Jews were condemned for being selfish and cowardly while unabashedly displaying their wealth and increasing it through black marketeering – this at a time when to be truly British was to be an unselfish, patriotic, responsible citizen.²

Clearly antisemitic/anti-Jewish and anti-alien sentiments have been articulated and rearticulated throughout the history of early modern and modern Britain. With each new articulation the terms of the discourse change as they become interlaced with and modified by new cultural themes and concerns.³ Commentary by Jewish intellectuals on seeking a homeland in Palestine or elsewhere for the ‘Jewish nation’ in some ways reflected and reinforced the growing sentiment that Jews did not belong in Britain.

Glover points to anxieties that were interwoven with anti-alienism, and I want to underscore these here. In the fin de siècle there were widespread fears of degeneration and national decline. Anxieties about degeneration were prevalent across Europe. One of the most influential books on the topic was Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892), written in German but translated and widely read in both France and Britain. Nordau, himself a Jew who became a Zionist, saw degeneration as both cultural and national. In Britain, concerns abounded about moral, cultural, physical and social degeneration. During and after the Boer War, the government became intensely concerned about the poor physique and medical fitness of boys and men they attempted to recruit into the army. An Inter-departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration was convened in 1903 to determine why so many army recruits were rejected. Although the findings indicated that there was no evidence of actual long-term physical deterioration in the population, concerns about deterioration and degeneration and their links to poverty and urban life continued to inform popular culture. Testimony by military officers maintained that the British army recruits in the South African War made poor fighting men.

The outpouring of publications citing city life as a main cause of degeneration furthered anxieties about moral and cultural decay exemplified by London’s East End. The journalist Arnold White loomed large here. In his The Destitute Alien in Great Britain (1892) White decried the emigration of ‘authentic’ Britons from rural areas and the entry of decadent foreigners into the cities. Other writers discussed by Glover were George Sims and Andrew Mearns, both of whom ‘saw urban destitution as a breeding ground for socialism and communism … moral degradation shaded into political chaos’ (p. 51). Glover treats the final report of the Commission on Alien Immigration as part of this moral-panic genre, arguing that it ‘can be read as an attempt to fix upon one particular narrative of the causes of cultural and economic impoverishment in which race and degeneration went hand in hand’ (p. 142). As Daniel Pick wrote in his 1989 Faces of Degeneration, the Commission and the Act itself ‘should not be seen as a mere anomaly, nor, exclusively, as part of some timeless, centuries-old phenomenon of anti-Semitism, but in relation to that wider contemporary attempt to construct a racial-imperial identity, excluding all ‘bad blood’ and ‘pathological elements’, ‘literally expelling anarchists, criminals, prostitutes, the diseased, and the hopelessly poor – all those now declared “undesirable aliens” ’.⁴

I have been underlining the importance of seeing the Aliens Act of 1905 (and the debates about its enforcement that followed it) in the context of a discourse of degeneration that was associated with ideas about urban life and poverty as well as race and anti-Jewish sentiment. But there was a related anxiety that was much discussed in the late Victorian and Edwardian period – that of national decline. Glover touches upon this fear in his ‘afterword’ where he discusses novels such as James Blyth’s Ichabod (1910) and other fictions that played on the dread of invasion and conquest, linked to the perceived growth of German industrial and military prowess and the threat this posed to British national sovereignty.

National decline was linked to another iteration of degeneration anxiety: the idea that Britain had to increase its national efficiency by undertaking a variety of measures to improve its workforce and its military. It was in this context that a host of voluntary organizations promoted patriotism and nationalism, reform of the navy, militarism and physical fitness. The manliness of the nation was said to be under threat from urban moral and physical degeneration. Popular literature depicted city boys as neurotic, dyspeptic, pale and physically fragile. The new imperialism of the fin de siècle was perceived by some as an antidote to masculine degeneration; Social Darwinism encouraged people to see imperial competition as a way to create a society of virile men. Was it such thinking about masculine degeneration that fed into representations of the Jewish male as the alien figure? Was it this culture of anxiety about masculinity – an anxiety enhanced by the growth of the women’s suffrage movement – that led contributors to the public debate about aliens to focus their attentions on the Jewish man, both the wealthy and ‘over-civilized’ Jewish man and the physically and emotionally weak East Ender? The print culture that Glover analyses certainly concentrates on masculine antisemitic caricatures. From my reading of his readings, it wasn’t until well into the Edwardian period that the ‘Jewess’ became a focus of antisemitic derision.

One might argue that this stress on a virile national identity provided a fertile milieu for the development of a political culture bent on reinforcing the boundaries around the ‘we’ of the nation. Freud’s concept of the ‘narcissism of minor differences’, and his argument that hostility to outsiders is a way of facilitating solidarity within a community – ideas mentioned by Glover – are clearly relevant here (p. 137).

As Glover shows, and I have been emphasizing, anti-alien/antisemitic sentiment emerged in Britain within a particular cultural conjuncture that led to immigration being defined as a problem, and a problem so serious that it required state intervention. Narratives of decline, degeneration and the need for national efficiency formed a complex constellation of ideas in which literature, popular entertainments, and the diatribes of antisemitic propagandists reflected and contributed to exclusionary sentiment. Glover’s book is an insightful and intellectually stimulating analysis of this background to an Act that must be seen as a turning point in British political and cultural history. After 1905 there was no turning back to an age of open borders. Rather, the Act was followed by the progressive strengthening of the borders against other ‘others’. Glover’s careful dissection of the Jew/alien equation of the fin de siècle is all too relevant to present-day languages of social threat, as we listen to cultural commentators worrying over the presence in Britain of ‘economic migrants’, ‘foreign welfare scroungers’, ‘health tourists’ and ‘home grown Islamist terrorists’: the enemies within.

NOTES AND REFERENCES