Abstract
I have for long cherished a phrase from Kipling’s veiled yet suggestive memoir, Something of Myself. Writing in the 1930s, Kipling warned: ‘Israel is a race to leave alone … It abets disorder’ (1937: 224). This injunction does not of course allude to the state of Israel, but to a dispersed people living worldwide as part and yet apart from the larger societies, subjected to violence, persecution and civic discrimination, and by that time in imminent grave danger from ascendant tendencies within some communities. For me it speaks a yet more complicated Judaeophobia than was common amongst Kipling’s contemporaries, including those who are remembered as critics of Empire and the entrenched social system. Both the anti-imperialist J. A. Hobson and the socialist H. N. Brailsford in the early years of the twentieth century accused the sinister interests of Jewish capitalists, speculators and financial dealers of fostering an imperialism that had contaminated and corrupted domestic society (Hobson, 1988: 56–7; Howe, 1993: 38).
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© 2010 Benita Parry
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Parry, B. (2010). Kipling’s Unloved Race: the Retreat from Modernity. In: Rooney, C., Nagai, K. (eds) Kipling and Beyond. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230290471_2
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