Is there a difference between anti-semitism and racism?
The Labour Party have suspended Diane Abbot as an MP following her comments in a letter to the Observer. She wrote that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people “undoubtedly experience prejudice”, which she said is “similar to racism. She continued “It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice.” Then she said that Jews weren’t required to sit at the back of the bus in the southern states of the USA.
I suppose it’s understandable that the type of racism that you suffer yourself is in some way worse than other varieties of racism. But it’s wrong to draw a distinction between racism and anti-semitism. The OED definition of racism is “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism by an individual, community, or state against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.”
When I wrote Called to Account, the fourth book in the Sir Anthony Standen Adventures, the theme was anti-semitism, which I see as a placeholder for racism of any sort. There is a medical debate in the book about the two types of blood, bright red and dark red. At the time it was thought that they were separate, but of course it was whether they had come from the lungs or were on their way back to the lungs.
I’m currently researching book 5, which I think will be set in Paris, in or around 1614. I’m sure that I will hold a candle up the slave trade when the time comes, but it won’t be for a while. Claire and I recently visited Dyrham Park, which was built by William Blathwayt. The exhibits explained that in his role as secretary of trade and plantations he was the architect of the slave trade. The Spanish and Portuguese were transporting African slaves to their colonies before Blathwayt, but he took it to an industrial level, as Hitler did with anti-semitism. Blathwayt was born in 1649. So there will be many adventures before I get to Blathwayt’s slave trade.