The only British writers to have stuck up for Jewry “before the days of Hitler”, according to George Orwell, were Charles Dickens and Charles Reade. Orwell had forgotten George Eliot, whose Daniel Deronda was portrayed as a good Jew. Otherwise Orwell was not far wrong. Hilaire Belloc was convinced that both Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning were of Jewish birth and thus Christ-killers. (“Okay, so we killed him. But only for three days,” runs the New York Jewish joke.) For Julie Burchill, journalist, provocateur and hard-drinking good-time personality, the British establishment has always been hostile to Jewry. As a long-standing philo-Semite, she will not hear a word said against Israel, and scorns Britain’s intellectual Left for (as she conceives it) its &l