INTRODUCTION

Whereas John Buchan and Rudyard Kipling privileged ‘race’ within the sphere of Empire, the fiction, drama and social criticism of George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells offered a vision of the world which understood semitic racial difference in terms of an ordered ‘scientific’ socialism. As part of a radical anti-capitalist tradition, late Victorian constructions of ‘the Jew’ were a potent symbol of capitalist disorder. Instead of the Arnoldian ‘cultural’ transfiguration of individual Jews, a socialist rationalism was predicated on, among much else, the disappearance of all forms of Jewish particularity. By imagining the transcendence of Jewish racial difference, the ‘socialism of fools’ (as it became known) also associated the universalized ‘Jew’ with the emerging utopian world order. Jews, in this way, were at the heart of socialist expectations concerning the radical transformation of society which, in contradictory fashion, also encompassed definitions of Judaism as being irredeemably capitalist.