Over recent years, debates about Israel-related antisemitism in the UK have been increasingly pulled onto legal terrain, from efforts to formally codify antisemitism to claims of anti-Jewish discrimination and attempts to ban anti-Israeli boycotts. Yet the concept of ‘antisemitism’ does not actually exist in UK law. Instead, law approaches Israel-related antisemitism through the prism of Jewish identity, itself understood as a sub-category of ‘race’ or ‘ethnic origins.’ The way the law applies these categories to Jewish identity, then subsequently conceives of the relation between that identity and Israel, determines a court’s treatment of these issues more concretely than any wider debate about ‘antisemitism’ as a concept. This talk will explore how UK anti-discrimination law has constructed Jewish identity as a mode of ‘ethnicity.’ It will argue that the structure of law encourages the essentialisation or dehistoricisation of Jewish identity. This hinders the law’s ability to grasp the role played by the concept of a Jewish state in the historical development of modern Jewish identity, leading to an impoverished understanding of Israel-related antisemitism.
Matthew Bolton is a UKRI/MSCA post-doctoral research fellow at the School of Law, Queen Mary University London. His project examines how any affinity Jewish people might have towards the state of Israel is or should be treated by anti-discrimination law. Prior to joining QMUL, he worked as a researcher on the Decoding Antisemitism project at the Centre for Research on Antisemitism at Technische Universitat Berlin. He is the co-author with F. H. Pitts of Corbynism: A Critical Approach (Emerald, 2018), and his work has appeared in Philosophy and Social Criticism, Political Quarterly, British Politics and the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism.