The racism that undermines Edinburgh’s Race Review – Professor Hannah Holtschneider
Tommy Curry’s endorsement of the University of Edinburgh’s Review of Race and History as a model for the ‘decolonisation of UK higher education’ hides the review’s own, unexamined, racism and thereby undermines its purpose. The Review centres the denigration and exploitation of people classified by racist taxonomies that render ‘non-Europeans’ as less human than those classed as ‘European’ or ‘white’. As Curry rightly highlights, there is much to consider, particularly the University’s financial entanglement in slavery.
While others have taken issue with the research design of the Review, [1] my concern is the review’s own unexamined racism. Indeed, that racism is incongruous given the anti-racist goals of the review exercise and its unexamined nature makes it a dangerous precedent should the Review be elevated as a model along the lines Curry suggests. That racism can be found particularly in the parts of the Review addressing Palestine, which is marked by such a grotesque racist bias that the paper’s credibility is greatly undermined.
In their overview of the history of racism, none of the documents refers to antisemitism. This is shocking; first because it entails an ahistorical approach to European racism. Jews are among the earliest targets of racist thought across the centuries in Europe, despite Europe being identified and held out as the origin of modern racism. [2] How was it deemed possible to write a history of racist taxonomies and eugenics that excludes the othering, exclusion and oppression of Jews, the desire to engineer societies away from the supposedly ‘degenerate’ character traits carried by Jews, and the impact of historic antisemitism on other forms of modern racism? The Review team had no experts on antisemitism in its ranks. Nor did it reach out to such experts within the University to support the review process.
The absence of expertise about racism against Jews undermines the account given in the Review for a second reason: the singularity with which Jews, and no other collective, are represented as racist for acting collectively. [3] Jews are presented as an exemplary contemporary racist collectivity, monstrously stripped of the dignity and rights afforded to other living, human populations, particularly racialised peoples. [4] This is supported by a repurposing of age-old antisemitic tropes, so that Jews are collectively framed in the review as placing themselves outside the bounds of common humanity, using their alleged financial and political power (recognise the tropes!) to direct and shape British colonial ambitions in the Levant. [5] The history is tendentious, and omits any reference to the exclusion of Jews by others, before, during and after the genocide of Jews during World War II. [6] With no care for historical scholarship or for current human realities, the review casts the State of Israel an exemplar of racism, of colonialism and of capitalism, and the presence and action of nefarious Jews is presented as resulting in the inevitable: the genocide of an indigenous population, the Palestinians. Jews, in this narrative, are not considered as a group with a continuous real collective existence throughout history that places them among the minoritised and racialised populations that continue to need protection. [7] Rather, Jews appear to constitute an ethereal presence, perhaps inhabitants of a mythical, religious and nostalgic past which makes them into awkward misfits who can only cause harm when they insist they have a real collective past and a future as an equal among the ‘real’ nations. Thus distanced and objectified, Jews cannot be collectively authentic or indigenous anywhere, least of all in the land which anchors Jewish religious and cultural practices and histories. In scholarship on antisemitism, the reversal of victim-perpetrator relationships is recognised as a key vector of contemporary antisemitism, yet in this document antisemitic tropes and framing are present without reflection.
The lynchpin in this phantasmagorical narrative is Lord Balfour, Chancellor of the University during a part of a political career in which, as Foreign Secretary, he also issued the Balfour Declaration of 1917. As the review would have it, Balfour’s association with the University of Edinburgh means the University is implicated in the establishment of the State of Israel and partly responsible for the crushing of Palestinian ambitions for national self-representation. [8] These inferences are directly at odds with current historical scholarship on the origins and the attenuated impact of the Declaration during the decades which followed. The review nevertheless posits a red thread that leads directly from the former Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh to the current misery in Gaza. [9]
Tellingly, the authors of Research Strand 3 on ‘The University of Edinburgh and the Question of Palestine’ and of Appendix 3 to the Review are not historians, nor did they consult with specialists who work on the relevant archives, who know the context, and who work with recognised methods or standards of historical analysis. Rather, we find a selective reading of archival documents that are never assessed in their immediate or their broader historical context. [10] To this is joined a list that gives an account of politically motivated protests on campus, framed by the same racist, spectral narrative about Jewish mischief-makers, acting in bad faith, and this is presented as a model for effective protest at a ‘post-racist’ Edinburgh University. [11]
It is not challenging to see that the absence of antisemitism awareness in this Review and in university anti-racism programming means that real Jews will continue to be stigmatised and excluded, featuring as hauntingly absent-present companions in the discourse of campaigners who insist on the right to define their Jewish targets without due care. The challenge is to respond to the Review with a commitment to recognise the racism directed at Jews (as part of a historically continuous collectivity), and to include Jews in the ‘racially minoritised voices’ when ‘applying interdisciplinary research methods … to reimagine what genuine equity might look like’.
Professor Hannah Holtschneider, Professor of Contemporary Jewish Cultural History, University of Edinburgh
[1] See Jonathan Hearn 3/8/2025, ‘The Strangeness of Edinburgh’s Race Review’, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-strangeness-of-edinburghs-race-review/
[2] Appendix 3 pp.2f. sports a particularly egregious example when centring anti-Arab racism by denying both the reality of anti-Jewish racism and Jewish peoplehood: the Appendix posits that Palestinians are a nation whose nationhood is obliterated by the British Empire and by Zionists because of anti-Arab racism, while at the same time claiming that Jews are (incongruously) racialised by being labelled ‘a race’ when, as the author’s would claim, they are in fact just an assembly of individual people who happen to be Jewish (religiously).
[3] Decolonised Transformations pp.45, 49f. and Appendix 3 pp.3f. where racism is portrayed as uniquely embedded in Jewish nationalism alone.
[4] Decolonised Transformations pp.45, 52f. and throughout where Zionists are posited as illegitimately claiming a Jewish collective identity, in contrast to Palestinians whose collective and national identity is assumed to be historically continuous.
[5] Decolonised Transformations pp.45, 48ff. describes a mutually beneficial relationship between British imperial aims and Zionist desires, suggesting that Zionists were instrumental to British policy, portraying the Jewish National Fund as financing British imperial interests, so that Jews appear as a collective that directs racist endeavours and, in the shape of Zionists, enact the ultimate crimes of racism: ‘imperialism, settler colonialism and the dispossession of Palestinian land and life’ that culminates in ‘Israel’s war of annihilation’ in the present (p.53).
[6] Decolonised Transformations p.50 concedes that at the end of 19th and in the early 20th century ‘anti-Jewish hatred and religious persecution had exploded in the Russian Empire’ and that Britain sought to limit Jewish immigration with the Aliens Act of 1905, but does not actually consider this hatred worthy of attention and part of the racisms under review.
[7] Decolonised Transformations p.55 where racism is portrayed as uniquely embedded in Jewish nationalism alone such that the State of Israel denounced as ‘driven by state racism’ and portrayed as ‘a regime of colonial dispossession’; and Appendix 3 p.41. where the only national group with a claim to being racialised in the context of Israel/Palestine are Palestinians.
[8] Decolonised Transformations pp44f.
[9] Decolonised Transformations pp54f. and Appendix 3 pp.41ff.
[10] Appendix 3 pp.5-15.
[11] Appendix 3 pp.41-117. On p.48 this includes a conspiratorial (and false) account of the events around Dr Abu Sitta’s ‘Address to Balfour’, alleging that ‘opposing groups’ ‘tampered with evidence’ launched ‘malicious attacks’, and ‘placed unreasonable distress on the organisers’ – thinly veiled references to Jewish staff and students who were shocked to see a speaker with a known and publicly available track record of using antisemitic tropes in his speeches being invited to a public event on campus, and who were then subjected to abuse at the event. For the record, simply reading the text of his address at Edinburgh in 2022 makes Dr Abu Sitta’s view of Jews quite plain.
