Historian confirms This Site’s verdict on Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘anti-Semitic’ book foreword
Donald Sassoon is emeritus professor of comparative European history at Queen Mary University of London, and has probably never heard of Vox Political.
But he does share This Writer’s opinion of claims that Jeremy Corbyn must be an anti-Semite because he wrote a new foreword for a book written more than a century ago, that contains around 10 lines of verbiage that may be considered derogatory to the Jewish people.
His words:
The campaign about antisemitism in Corbyn’s Labour party is getting absurd… Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study has been taught for years in universities up and down the country (I taught it myself).
That comment is uncannily similar to my own, about other texts with questionable material that are taught in colleges and universities. Or are the screamers going to start ranting that Professor Sassoon must have been an anti-Semite all the time and didn’t know it?
No one has ever felt the need to highlight the 10 lines or so, in a book of 400 pages, which are antisemitic, but Corbyn was expected to do so.
Anyone who had not heard of this text would be forgiven for thinking this is antisemitic text. It is not. It was an extremely influential study of imperialism (it even influenced Lenin) and has always been read as such. I do not remember any article in scholarly journals making a point about that paragraph on the Rothschilds and the “race” which, Hobson claims, was so influential. The paragraph is completely marginal to the text.
So there you have it. But remember: you read it here first!
Source: Jeremy Corbyn, Hobson’s Imperialism, and antisemitism | Letters | News | The Guardian
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