Jews were expelled from England in 1290 and only allowed back in Cromwell’s time, so we can be sure that Chaucer and Shakespeare, when they wrote The Prioress’s Tale and The Merchant of Venice, had never seen one.

Dickens (who later regretted it) created a wicked Jew in Oliver Twist; George Eliot defended them in Daniel Deronda. Anti-Semitism in this country has been fairly mild; we have had no pogroms and no Dreyfus case. But Julius demonstrates that up to the Second World War it was quite acceptable for writers and others to say offensive things about Jews.

Belloc, perhaps, was the most vicious, but Kipling, T.S. Eliot and Daphne du Maurier were not innocent.

That all changed after we knew about the Holocaust. My teachers warned us against anti-Semitism, and schoolchildren today routinely study the life of Anne Frank. However, Julius believes that today anti-Semitism is coming back and that many critics of the state of Israel are in fact racist. He is a liberal Zionist; he concedes that some of what they say is true.

“Both Israelis and Palestinians have cause to grieve,” he writes, but his book hardly touches on the Palestinians’ suffering, which is surely the heart of the problem.

In a world where racial barriers are breaking down, I can’t believe that the poison of anti-Semitism will drip on for many more generations, if this problem is — as it must be — solved.