LONDON — An article from 1937 under the name of Winston Churchill that blamed Jews for their own persecution has ruffled a long-held view among Britons of their wartime leader's pro-Jewish sentiments.
Some experts on the history of British Jews dismissed the article, saying its existence has been well-known and it had never been published because Churchill rejected the views of the ghost-writer who composed it.
Cambridge University said over the weekend that the article had been unearthed by Richard Toye, a lecturer at Homerton College who had been conducting research at the university's Churchill archive.
Accounts of the article were reported Sunday in several British newspapers, triggering a modest debate over the extent to which it broke new ground in explaining Churchill's feelings about Jews.
The article was written four years after Hitler's rise to power in Germany, two years before the outbreak of World War II and three years before Churchill became prime minister to lead Britain in the fight against Nazism.
In an interview with The Sunday Times, Toye said: "I don't want to say he was anti-Semitic, but this sheds fascinating new light on his views about Jews, which were very inconsistent." At the same time he said most people would accept that Churchill was not anti- Semitic.
The article, entitled "How the Jews can combat persecution," was not published when it was written in 1937 and when a newspaper sought permission to print it in 1940, Churchill's office refused, saying publication was "inadvizable."
The article spoke of the wave of anti- Semitism in Europe and the United States in the 1930s.
"It would be easy to ascribe it to the wickedness of the persecutors, but that does not fit all the facts," the article said. "It exists even in lands, like Great Britain and the United States, where Jew and Gentile are equal in the eyes of the law, and where large numbers of Jews have found not only asylum, but opportunity. These facts must be faced in any analysis of anti-Semitism. They should be pondered especially by the Jews themselves.
"For it may be that, unwittingly, they are inviting persecution — that they have been partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer."
The article continued: "The central fact which dominates the relations of Jew and non-Jew is that the Jew is 'different.' He looks different. He thinks differently. He has a different tradition and background. He refuses to be absorbed."
But it also urged support for Jews "suffering from persecutions as cruel, as relentless and as vindictive as any in their long history."
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