BBC Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour is serialising George du Maurier’s 19th century novel Trilby. To which one has to ask — why? For Trilby is an overtly anti-Jewish novel. Its central character, Svengali, is a diabolically sinister Jewish musician who hypnotises and manipulates a tone-deaf orphan into becoming a famous singer. The character thus encapsulates a key motif of Judeophobia — that the Jews covertly bend people to their will. In As I Please, George Orwell wrote in 1946:

‘The thing that now hits one in the eye in reading Trilby is its antisemitism… There is no question that the book is antisemitic. Apart from the fact that Svengali’s vanity, treacherousness, selfishness, personal uncleanliness and so forth are constantly connected with the fact that he is a Jew, there are the illustrations.’

Indeed. To see one of these illustrations, click here .

Before people start responding in Pavlovian fashion with cries of ‘censorship’ and ‘double standards’, let me make it clear: I am not suggesting that this book be suppressed, any more than I would suggest this for the myriad works of English literature which incorporate anti-Jewish prejudice. But one has to question why the BBC, which so regularly broadcasts lies, libels and prejudices against the Jews of Israel (Dr Bell’s recent 'Thought for the Day' and TV news coverage of the Tel Aviv bomb, for which it has now been forced to apologise, are but two of the latest examples of its persistently distorted coverage) has chosen this moment to serialise this fourth-rate example of Victorian fiction, whose one attribute is that it will undoubtedly confirm and deepen the prejudice that is now so dismayingly on open display in Britain, that the Jews are a sinister conspiracy that controls the world.