JOURNAL OF THE IRISH LABOUR HISTORY SOCIETY

DOCUMENT STUDY 121James Connolly in the United States. 1902Boris Kahan. Secretary. East London (Jewish)Branch. SDF. 1902Palestine'.4 On the other hand, during the. course of tlte Boer War he had also reprinted an article fromthe Brisbane Worker which had rhetorically asked: 'What would you do in the same position as theBoers? Supposing yo:= ~ountry was invaded by a mob of Jew and foreign exploiters ... What wouldyou do?'5Connolly's associate in the pro-Boer solidarity campaign in Ireland, Arthur Griffith, had infused hisUnited Irishman propaganda with rabid anti-semitism.6 But the fact that Connolly himself hadreprinted the passing anti-semitic remark quoted above was an uncharacteristic lapse on his part.Nothing similar occurred in any other issue of the Workers' Republic. in stark contrast with the antisemitismwith which the pro-Boer propaganda in Justice. organ of Britain's Social DemocraticFederation (SDP), had been infected on the commencement of that War.The question arises as to whether or not in later years in the United States, when Connolly finallybroke with the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) of Daniel de Leon, he had indicated an anti-semiticprejudice. An American authority on de Leon, James A. Stevenson, has said of Connolly, 'As he sawit, the only SLP members to which a personaiity of de Leon's type could appeal were Jewish'? Theevidence cited was a private letter which Connolly had written to J .C. Matheson, editor of the ScottishSLP newspaper The Socialist. Connolly had remarked of de Leon:• My friend Dan made a grand effort to destroy me at general party meetings here in New York, but he wasrouted. horse. foot and artillary. As a result he made enemies of nearly all the American, German, Swedish.Irish and British members of the party in New York, and has nobody left he can trust outside of the Jewishelements. The Jews. 'you know, are still looking for a saviour. The rest of us have had our saviour already,and as he made a mess of it we intend to mistrust saviours in the future. '8But it would be a mistake to read too much into such a casually-made ethnic joke in privatecorrespondence. American socialist organisations at the time were composed of many immigrantgroupings and foreign language publications. A political difference between one party section and