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The following is an excerpt from A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky by Galya Diment.
By the time Koteliansky arrived in England, there were around 250,000 Jews in the country, constituting 0.6 percent of the entire population. Many English Jews at the time – among them Leonard Woolf, whom Koteliansky would get to know well and work for – came from families that had already been in the country for several generations. Yet, even for them, the “lump-of-salt-in-water” effect was still but a dream. As Winder suggests, while anti-Semitismin England at the time might have been less “ferocious” than in the rest of Europe, it was still plenty “infuriating”: “One German characterized it as ‘exclusion from garden parties, refusing certain cherished intimacies, and occasional light-hearted sneers.’”
Leonard Woolf, his Cambridge education notwithstanding, definitely felt the “exclusion”: “I was an outsider … because although I and my father before me belonged to the professional middle class, we had only recently struggled up into it from the stratum of Jewish shopkeepers. We had no roots in it.”
Anti-Semitismoften went beyond just social exclusion, however, and affected careers. A good case in point was Dr David Eder (1866-1936), a friend of the Stepniaks and a member of A.R. Orage’s circle, whom Koteliansky, too, would later befriend. Eder was born in London to a middle-class Jewish family that was rather typical for the times, inasmuch as they considered themselves Jews and attended a synagogue but were also quite acculturated into British social life. Eder went on to become a successful physician and psychoanalyst – as well as an early English Zionist – but after obtaining his medical degree in 1895 he immediately knew that, because he was a Jew, “the number of salaried medical posts open to him in England of those days was limited.” He therefore spent the next ten years practicing in South Africa and South America before returning to London in 1905 to open a modest clinic.
Even the Bloomsbury Group, which prided itself on tolerance and open-mindedness, was far from immune to strong anti-Semitic sentiments. In 1909, in a brief narrative called “Jews,” Virginia Woolf wrote about her well-heeled Jewish neighbour: “One wonders how Mrs Loeb became a rich woman. It seems an accident (…) Woolf wrote in her diary in 1915, three years after she married Leonard. "How I hated marrying a Jew."
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To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.
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