these empires, and the instability, decline and excesses of the same polities, yielded important lessons for English statesmen and churchmen who sought to manage better their dominions within and without the British Isles, to conduct foreign policy and to convert Jews, pagans and Muslims to Christianity. The late humanist, global understanding of the Republic of Letters that these men had internalised dictated that useful knowledge about the histories of Asia and Africa was to be sought from the non-European inhabitants
research on the victims’ DNA. Certainly, the artefacts, clothes, and documents found in the graves offer some legible indications, but to this day, no systematic attempt has been made to determine the identity of the human remains, as we are reminded in this volume by Viacheslav Bitiutckii, lawyer and head of the NGO ‘Memorial’, who oversaw the exhumations in the Voronezh region. Additionally, sometimes bodies resurface without being sought for. This was the case in the ravine of Babi Yar in Kiev, where the city’s Jews had been killed and hastily buried (33,771 people
’s consummate ability as a myth-maker and the memories of wartime have also contributed to the notion that all French residents in Britain were supporters of his cause. The fact that the French were not a numerous body, nor an especially conspicuous one, despite the explosive arguments between Carlton Gardens and Downing Street, have ensured that other exiled groups – notably the Germans, Jews, and Poles – have received the lion’s share of attention. When French communities-in-exile have been studied in depth, attention has naturally focused on the USA and Canada, where their
-Semites started to explain this cooperation as based upon an innate connection between the British and Jewish concepts of religion. According to Gino Sottochiesa, British Puritanism (which he seemed to associate with Anglicanism) was quintessentially British and Judaic at the same time. Its ‘pretences of self-election and world dominance’ were similar to that of the Jews, and granted the Briton a sort of divine right over the world, a ‘new Jehovah transplanted from Jerusalem to London.’87 58 chapter 2 In the same way, according to Sottochiesa, the general Puritan cruelty
that he himself was Nordic.12 Mussolini tasked the young anthropologist Guido Landra with writing the ‘Manifesto of the Racial Scientists’ in 1938.13 The Manifesto sported a scientific approach to the problem of race. While Romanità could be kept with reservations, Landra’s Nordicist racism replaced concepts like Latinità (Latin-ness) and Mediterranean identity with Nordic-Aryan myths.14 Supported by the anti-Semitic faction of the Catholic Church, the racial campaign singled out Jews, useful targets because the stereotypes surrounding them were close to what
points, particularly in the judicial sphere. As befits a movement which champions liberal values and is not affiliated with any particular political bloc, the Association has intervened on behalf of members of all protesting groups, no matter whether they are Arabs or Jews, secular or religious, left-wing or right-wing. In fact, it has even made efforts to protect the civil rights of Jewish settlers in the occupied territories and members of the Kach Movement. 40 The achievements of ACRI underscore the vital importance of civil society type II groups in terms of
Victorian spirit of self-help that pervaded the British state at war. It is also apparent that the French have been overshadowed by other more prominent groups of foreigners who arrived in wartime: Jews, Germans and American GIs. The abominations that were perpetrated in the death camps of central and eastern Europe have rightly focused attention on what Britain, and France, could have done for the victims of Nazi persecution in 1939–45. Far more is surely the answer.26 Attention has also centred on those politically suspect groups whose loyalty was called into question
official alarm was misplaced. Grumbling about the authorities, it concluded, was within certain limits ‘normal’ behaviour, a British tradition even, and the wartime regime inevitably gave people plenty of things to grumble about. As such it was something to be lived with.99 Casting around for someone to blame also took the form of an increase in anti-Semitic feeling. Mass-Observation noted this as early as 10 September 1940 in the East End and reported it spreading in a huge circle around London covering the area into which East Enders had evacuated. Jews were accused of
nightmare in which cultural prohibitions MUP_McDonald_07_Ch6 124 11/18/03, 17:02 Richard Coeur de Lion 125 are played out against fantasies of race, sex and imperialism. We don’t eat people, they do: medieval mappaemundi, like John Mandeville, conveniently locate the man-eater on the margins of the known world; responsibility for the gruesome tales of anthropophagy that, inevitably, surface nearer home is levelled at those already beyond the pale, Jews and other outcasts.4 Yet for all of its determination to purge itself of blame, and squeamishness aside, Western
reckoning in a little roome’ (3.3.12–13) as a glance at the Coroner’s Jury’s verdict on Marlowe’s homicide and an echo of his ‘Infinite riches in a little room’ ( The Jew of Malta 1.1.37). 4 Six weeks later Paul Reyher connected Touchstone’s remark ‘When a man’s verses cannot be understood ...’ (3.3.10–12) to the suppression of Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Amores. 5 Ever