In the twenty-first century, the debates about constituting the antisemitic category of the Jews sharpened after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the debates about colonialism, indigeneity and ethnic identity. If one thinks of Jews as a diasporic category, the very notion of “rooted” and “rootless” or moored and unmoored also comes into play. We can recall how George Bernard Shaw already in 1907 ironically lampooned Broadbent, the ultimate Englishman, who decried everything and everyone who was not English enough:
You are thinking of the modern hybrids that now monopolize England. Hypocrites, humbugs, Germans, Jews, Yankees, foreigners, Park Laners, cosmopolitan riffraff. Don’t call them English. They don’t belong to the dear old island, but to their confounded new empire; and by George! They’re worthy of it; and I wish them joy of it.
Indeed, antisemitisms prove that a society can hold contradictory images simultaneously, such as the fact that the Jews are both anarchists out to destroy capitalism as well as capitalists out to exploit the working class. Actual self-identified Jews in London in the early twentieth century—think of the Jewish labour reformer Samuel Gompers—must deal with the social reality of both change and continuity in their world of early twentieth-century capitalism.
