In a book that Harold Bloom, in
The New York Times Book Review
, called a "strong, somber book on an appalling subject," Anthony Julius offers a wide-ranging and insightful history of anti-Semitism in England, the first such study of its kind. Julius focuses on four distinct versions of English anti-Semitism. He first describes the anti-Semitism of medieval England, a radical prejudice of defamation, expropriation, and murder, which culminated in 1290, the year Edward I expelled the Jews from England. The second strand is literary anti-Semitism, from the anonymous medieval ballad "Sir Hugh, or the Jew's Daughter," through Chaucer's "The Prioress's Tale" and Shakespeare's
Merchant of Venice
, to T. S. Eliot and beyond. The third is modern anti-Semitism, the commonplace anti-Semitism of insult and exclusion, running from the mid-17th century through to the late 20th century. The final chapters then deal with contemporary anti-Semitism, emerging in the late 1960s and the 1970s, which treats Zionism and the State of Israel as illegitimate Jewish enterprises.