— 135 — VI ________________________________________ “SOME LESSER KNOWN ASPECTS” The Anti-Fascist Campaign of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, 1936-40 Daniel Tilles Assessments of British fascism have often placed the movement some- where between an irrelevance and an inconvenience, with even Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF), the best supported interwar group, deemed by its most prominent historian to be of “only marginal significance,” a “nuisance” at worst. 1 However, from the perspective of the country’s Jewish community, the emergence and growth of native fascism cannot be so easily dismissed. In particular, the extreme brand of anti-Semitism that came to be associated with it represented the most serious external threat that Anglo-Jewry had faced since Readmission in the seventeenth century, as various organisations stoked existing antipathy towards Jews and fostered new prejudice, most tangibly in east London, where incidences of “Jew-baiting” proliferated in the mid-1930s. Although elements of the community had been involved in opposing the BUF from its earliest days — even before it had adopted an anti-Jewish position — it was only in 1935-6, as Mosley’s Blackshirts initiated their viciously anti-Semitic “East End campaign,” that Anglo-Jewry as a whole was forced to consider a concerted and systematic response. The following three years saw significant developments in and disagreement over the approach to self-defence, 2 and central to this debate was the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the official representative body of the community, with Geoffrey Alderman noting that, “by the outbreak of war, communal defence had assumed its place as the greatest of the Board’s priorities.” 3 Its response to fascism, however, has been widely condemned by historians, characterised as unsympathetic, ineffective, and even counterproductive,