ABSTRACT
This study begins by examining, in some detail, the assumptions which lie behind an ‘interactionist’ model of racial hatred. To date, this theory — with specific regard to recent histories of anti-Semitism and Fascism in Britain — has been largely unchallenged as a self-proclaimed ‘revisionist’ orthodoxy. The second half of this paper takes the ‘Marconi Scandal’ (1911–1914), which has often been read in ‘interactionist’ terms, and offers an alternative reading of this event. In particular, the fiction of Hilaire Belloc, one of the main protagonists of the ‘Marconi Scandal’, will show how Jews were constructed in ways that anticipated the ‘scandal’ and supplied an interpretative framework for ‘understanding’ it in racial terms.
