Remarkably, the roles of the Communist Party and the Jewish community has been wilfully unremarked upon by sections of the left in their clamour to claim Cable Street as an anti-racist victory spearheaded by undefined socialists. History teaches us otherwise.

Alone in the labour movement, the Communist Party was at the forefront of the fight against fascism in Britain. 

Anti-semitism was the essential feature of 20th-century fascism: a fact readily understood by communists and Jews. Mainly centred in London’s East End, the Party’s membership among Jews was out of all proportion to the size of the Britain’s Jewish community, accounting for around a tenth of total CP membership.

Stepney alone had over 1,000 members in the 1930s. In 1947 the Stepney CP Borough Committee reported that it had “the highest proportion of party members per capita in Great Britain — one member per 175 of population,” most of whom were Jewish.

From 1935, the British Union of Fascists (BUF) directed its anti-semitic propaganda at workers, encouraging them to blame Jews for economic hardship.

The BUF therefore concentrated its activity on working class areas, especially the East End, home to a high concentration of Britain’s 330,000 Jews — that figure a tiny 0.8 per cent of Britain’s total population.

With police protection the BUF attempted to stage a number of marches and rallies, the most provocative and infamous being the attempt to march through the East End in October 1936 culminating in the battle of Cable Street. 

The official Labour Party and trade union leadership took no part in such activities, indeed they discouraged them. This line was enthusiastically endorsed by the Stepney Labour Party, which ran the council but was itself influenced by the Catholic church, then profoundly anti-communist and anti-semitic. 

Thus it was that the Jewish community in the East End saw the Communist Party as the only form of defence against the BUF.

The Party in Stepney saw its main focus as working within Jewish organisations like the influential Workers Circle, the Jewish Cultural Club and the East End branches of the furniture and tailoring unions most of whose members were Yiddish speakers. Communists like Mick Mindel were central to the work in trade unions. 

The fight against anti-semitism and fascism concentrated on two fronts: directly through the establishment in 1936 of the Jewish Peoples Council against Fascism and Anti-Semitism (JPC) and indirectly in 1937 via the Stepney Tenants Defence League.

Communists were initiators and activists in both these organisations. Jack Pearce was secretary of the JPC and Issie Pushkin edited its paper Vigilance, both were communists. 

The Jewish Peoples Council serves as a model for a broad front anti-fascist organisation. It was formed of 86 Jewish organisations, including most East End synagogues, zionist organisations, Workers Circles, trade unions and dockers. This body, led by the Communist Party, organised the victory at Cable Street in 1936. 

The CP decided to make housing a major focus of its work locally, linking it to the fight against fascism. The Stepney Tenants Defence League employed three full-time paid organisers. It is impossible to assess the extent to which this kind of activity fulfilled the aim of winning away potential fascist sympathisers from the BUF. It is certain though that the prestige of the Communist Party was greatly enhanced. Phil Piratin, a Jewish Communist, was elected to Stepney Council in 1937 and by 1945 there were 12 Communist councillors, seven of whom were Jews. Piratin was elected as MP for Mile End in 1945. 

For the Communist Party’s National Jewish Committee (NJC) the fight against anti-semitism in Britain did not cease with the battle of Cable Street.

The BUF remained active after Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939, despite Britain’s formal declaration of war against Germany by the Chamberlain government.

In 1940, after the fall of Chamberlain, Mosley and 700 BUF members were arrested and imprisoned. They all received “velvet glove” treatment. 

Mosley and most BUF members were released from prison by the end of 1941 on the orders of home secretary Herbert Morrison, who was regarded by Jews as an anti-semite. 

Amazingly the BUF was allowed to continue to hold anti-semitic rallies during World War II. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the Communist Party called for anti-semitism and fascist propaganda to be made a criminal offence, as it was in the Soviet Union. The Jewish Chronicle supported this demand. 

Aware of this home-grown fascist anti-semitism, the CP published Willie Gallacher MP’s pamphlet Anti-Semitism: What it Means to You written in 1943. 

Its opening sentence spoke of “the most insidious nazi propaganda… finding its expression in the form of anti-semitism” the spread of which was growing. Its purpose was to denigrate the war effort branding it as “the Jews’ war.”

During the war, the NJC waged an unrelenting campaign to open a second front and linked this with support for the Soviet Union which was bearing the brunt of the nazi onslaught. 

For Jews support for the war went hand in hand with the fight against anti-semitism and because of this, the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Chronicle supported the Soviet Union after 1941. 

Chief Rabbi Dr Joseph Hertz was a patron of the Jewish Fund for Soviet Russia, an organisation founded in 1942 by the communist Simon Blumenfeld. 

In 1943, the Party’s Jewish Committee organised a three-week visit of two prominent Russian Jewish Yiddish-speaking communists. Shloime Mikhoels (director of the Moscow Yiddish State Theatre) and poet Itzik Feffer came to England to raise money for the Soviet war effort. They spoke at mass meetings — Hertz attended the last one and was moved to tears when Feffer recited his famous poem, Ich bin a Yid (I am a Jew).

The Party’s National Jewish Committee, sadly disbanded in 1964, was very active and influential for most of its existence. It was a sub-committee of the International Affairs Committee headed by Palme Dutt. 

In the 1945 general election, the NJC urged that special attention should be paid to the cultural and communal needs of Jewish people and again demanded that anti-semitism be outlawed as a criminal offence.

As the numerical strength of Jewish communists waned within the Party, so did their influence. The Party’s robust and singular understanding of anti-semitism and the fight against it gradually declined. 

Nonetheless, the record of the CP over almost 20 years remains as a proud achievement worthy of both serious study and emulation today. Anti-semitism persists, this period in our Party’s history serves as an object lesson in how to fight it.

Professor Mary Davis is a labour historian and TUC gold badge holder.