Study in prejudice
THE ANTISEMITISM PROBLEM with G.K. Chesterton is regrettably all too real and it is not for nothing that he felt obliged to defend himself against the charge up until his death in 1936, including in his posthumously published Autobiography. The general consensus, though, has been pretty clear-cut. As far back as 1985, no less Chestertonian an outlet than the Chesterton Review carried an essay by the historian Owen Dudley Edwards detailing the antisemitism and describing Chesterton as “unhinged”.
A similar verdict crops up in the 2001 biography of Churchill by Roy Jenkins, who said of Anthony Julius was particularly unsparing, while Ian Ker’s now standard biography of Chesterton the following year described one particularly nasty letter as “utterly anti-Semitic” and the newspaper Chesterton’s brother edited as “violently and virulently anti-Semitic”.
