The People of the Book

“Himmelfarb’s elegant essay on philosemitism is a welcome antidote to the contemporary tendency toward the lachrymose view that defines Jewish history through antisemitism. Himmelfarb is at her most erudite and illuminating in tracing its antithesis: that strain of English thought that accorded Jews everything from tolerance to admiration to near-envious reverence. A beautifully rendered meditation on a long neglected subject by one of our finest historians.”

Charles Krauthammer

“Gertrude Himmelfarb is one of the most gracious of social historians, unafraid to commit the twin heresies of seeing the best in people and events and hearing the ethical undertone in the symphony of time. In this new, necessary and faith-restoring book she reminds us that the history of Jews in England has not been an unbroken succession of hostilities and persecutions and that some very eminent English women and men, among them George Eliot, Matthew Arnold and Winston Churchill, admired both Judaism and the Jewish people. A much-needed corrective to the “lachrymose theory” that sees Jews as destined to be hated, Professor Himmelfarb’s work is testimony to hope at a time when we need it once again.”

Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks

“Philo-Semitism has always been a minority enthusiasm in Britain, despite its being a foolproof indication of intelligence and good taste. Gertrude Himmelfarb has brought her unrivalled knowledge, penetrating intellect and elegant wit to the examination of the phenomenon, and in so doing identifies those brave but all too few Britons who have supported the Jews. Not coincidentally, they have tended to include, from Oliver Cromwell to Winston Churchill, many of the very greatest of the British Gentiles over the past three and a half centuries.”

Andrew Roberts, author of Storm of War

“With her usual meticulous scholarship and elegant analysis, our finest intellectual historian presents the long—but little known—four-century evolution of growing respect for Jews, Judaism, and (eventually) Zionism among notable English statesmen, philosophers, and writers—from the readmission of the Jews under Cromwell, to the arguments for toleration by Locke and Burke, to the support of political equality by Gladstone and Shaftsbury, to the admiring fictional portrayals by Walter Scott and George Eliot, to the philo-Zionism of Balfour and Churchill. With anti-Semitism again on the rise, Ms. Himmelfarb offers an encouraging reminder of a noble tradition and a much needed corrective to our post-Holocaust view of Jews merely as victims.”

Leon R. Kass, American Enterprise Institute