Join Professor Nathan Abrams (Bangor University) for the launch of Jews in the Welsh Imagination: From Medieval Times to the Present.
This groundbreaking new book uncovers how Wales has imagined, represented, and engaged with Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness across more than eight centuries. From medieval poetry and early modern missionary zeal to twentieth‑century geopolitics and contemporary debates on identity and nationhood, Abrams reveals a hidden but powerful thread running through Welsh cultural history. Challenging assumptions and opening new conversations, this is a major new account of Wales’s complex relationship with Jewishness.
This book offers a comprehensive study of the ways Wales and Welsh people have historically engaged with—and imagined—Jews, Judaism, and Israel-Palestine. This volume argues that Walesis allosemitic, a term that encompasses both positive and negative attitudes towards Jews, but which views Jews as fundamentally different from the non-Jewish mainstream.
Jews and Judaism have long—albeit hidden—histories in Wales, but traditionally, little has been written about non-Christian religions in Wales. Jews often served as allegorical figures in medieval poetry and chronicles; in the early modern period, Welsh Christian evangelists expressed missionary zeal toward Jews. In the twentieth century, policy driven by Welshmen like David Lloyd George and T.E. Lawrence changed the Middle East’s political landscape forever.
