INTRODUCTION

In contrast to those writers who attempted uneasily to contain a racialized ‘Jew’ within Arnoldian liberal notions of ‘culture’, the Imperialist writers in this chapter are quite explicit about privileging ‘race’ over ‘culture’ in their constructions of ‘the Jew’. Benjamin Disraeli, in particular, rewrote in Imperial terms the binary oppositions utilized by Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy. According to Disraeli, ‘the Jew’ represented ‘religion, property and natural aristocracy’, the very foundations of Empire. This influential reworking of Arnold was taken up by the later writer-colonialists, John Buchan and Rudyard Kipling. These authors adopted Disraelian racialized notions of ‘the Jew’ to counter socialist and radical liberal constructions of degenerate ‘Jewish financiers’ who were said to have caused the Boer War (1899–1902) for their own ‘alien’ capitalist interests.