The thesis sets out to examine the political importance of the Marconi Scandal and also to study the use of anti-semitism during the affair and the wider implications of this hostility to Jews. Using a wide variety of sources, the first three chapters analyse the Scandal and its significance in Edwardian politics, suggesting that the parliamentary tensions traditionally described had little fundamental influence on the governing elite and its institutions. The press coverage of the Scandal is considered, indicating the political divisions and also the role played by anti-semitism in the affair. From this general approach, there develops a close study of the two journals most prominent in the anti-semitic campaign. These chapters examine the principal characters involved with the journals, their views on the Jews and the translation of this journalistic hostility into practical action, a previously undocumented episode. Finally, the Scandal is placed in its wider context of British anti-semitism before 1914. A comparative study of contemporary attitudes towards other minority groups in Britain and towards Jews in other areas of the world is also made. In this section, the main stereotypes of Jews are identified and from this approach it can be shown that British anti-semitism before 1914 is an important indicator of attitudes after the First World War. The conspiracy theory of anti-semitism is apparent well before the Russian Revolution of 1917, usually claimed to be the impetus for the British anti-semitism of the 1920s and 30s. The conclusion is that the Marconi Scandal and its ramifications mark an important transitional period in the continuum of British anti-semitism.

This study examines the Jewish identity of teenagers growing up as both British and Jewish. While these young people all have an 'ethnic' identity they are unmarked by colour and are able to 'pass' if they so wish. Bhabha (2004) suggests that in members of ethnic communities have a 'hybrid' identity, one where elements from each culture continually interact to produce a new cultural form - an amalgam. However, if Individuals do not look different, are not economically or socially oppressed; if this does not occur within a situation of colonialism and resistance', does this still hold true? Various theories of 'Identity' are examined together with substantive studies of the British-Jewish community.

Distinguishing between different ways of thinking about antisemitism, this study concentrates on those theories that understand antisemitism as a uniquely modern phenomenon. Covering the period from the mid-19th century to the present day, it first examines the work of Marx and Nietzsche and then moves on to those theorists who wrote in the immediate aftermath of the holocaust and concludes with the postmodern writings of Bauman and Lyotard. It argues that these critical theories of antisemitism all relate the emergence of antisemitism to modern forms of political emancipation and questions the impact of the holocaust upon this body of thought. The study argues that the fluidity and open-endedness by which the early writers characterise modernity - most notably the ambivalence within modernity itself between the possibility of full emancipation and barbarity - comes to be replaced by an increasing pessimism that sees antisemitism as modernity's only possible outcome. It argues that this change is accompanied first by increasing the centrality of antisemitism to modernity, and also by defining more rigidly the concepts by which antisemitism is explained, most noticeably, the concept of "the Jews". This study argues that as a result of these interrelated developments, critical theories replicate many of the assumptions of the antisemitic worldview identified in the early works. By calling for a cautious and critical return to these earlier ways of explaining antisemitism, the study concludes by pointing to an approach that remains within the tradition of critical theory, but which re-establishes the critical distance between ways of accounting for antisemitism and the phenomenon itself - one in which the "Jewish question" is de-centred, the explanatory concepts reopened to question and the promise of emancipation reinvigorated.