June 7, 1942 British Antisemitism

At a debate in the House of Lords, Lord Moyne, who had left the colonial office at the end of February 1942, ARGUED THAT THE JEWS WERE NOT REALLY A ‘RACE’ AT ALL.

‘It is very often loosely said that the Jews are Semites,’ ‘but anthropologists tell us that, pure as they have kept their culture, the Jewish race has been much mixed with Gentiles since the beginning of the Diaspora,’ ‘During the Babylonian captivity they acquired a strong Hittite admixture, and it is obvious that the Armenoid features which are still to be found among the Sephardim have been bred out of the Ashkenazim by an admixture of Slav Blood.’

To the Arabs, however, Moyne asserted, the JEWS WERE ‘NOT ONLY ALIEN IN CULTURE BUT ALSO IN BLOOD.’ Palestine could not absorb three million dispossessed Jews of Europe: ‘immigration on this scale would be disastrous mistake and indeed an impracticable dream’. The Arabs, he said, ‘who have lived and buried their dead for fifty generations in Palestine, will not willingly surrender their land and self-government to the Jews.’

Source: Gilbert, Martin. Exile and Return. (p. 261)