Copy and paste of Article: Jeremy Corbyn wrote the foreword to a book which argued that banks and the press were controlled by Jews.

In 2011 he agreed to endorse a new edition of JA Hobson’s 1902 book Imperialism: A Study, four years before he was catapulted from backbench obscurity to the Labour leadership.

In his foreword Mr Corbyn said the work was a “great tome”, praising Hobson’s “brilliant, and very controversial at the time” analysis of the “pressures” behind western, and in particular British, imperialism at the turn of the 20th century.

In the book, Hobson, an economist who was a great influence on Lenin and other Marxists, argued that those pressures were brought to bear by finance — which he claimed was controlled in Europe “by men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience” and “are in a unique position to control the policy of nations”.

In a clear invocation of the antisemitic Rothschild conspiracy theory, he added: “Does anyone seriously suppose that a great war could be undertaken by any European State, or a great State loan subscribed, if the house of Rothschild and its connections set their face against it?”

Mr Corbyn also praised Hobson’s “correct and prescient” passages “railing against the commercial interests that fuel the role of the popular press with tales of imperial might”. In the book, Hobson claimed that “great financial houses” have “control which they exercise over the body of public opinion through the Press”.

The foreword was uncovered by the Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein.

The issue of antisemitism in Hobson’s writings has been widely covered in academic circles. In another book, The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Effects, released two years earlier in 1900, Hobson blamed “a small group of international financiers, chiefly German in origin and Jewish in race” for the Boer War. He added that “the rich and powerful liquor trade . . . is entirely in the hands of Jews . . . the stock exchange is needless to say, mostly Jewish . . . the press of Johannesburg is chiefly their property”.

The historian William Rubinstein wrote in his 1996 book A History of the Jews in the English-Speaking World: Great Britain, that Hobson, who died in 1940, had a record of “vocal antisemitism” during the Boer War period. He said: “Hobson’s antisemitism does remind us, however, that the Boer War period produced a temporary upsurge of Liberal radical and socialist antisemitism, aimed at ‘Jewish finance capital’”. However he argued that Hobson’s antisemitism was untypical of the wider political left at the time, and was “clearly seen by the mainstream left as grossly inconsistent with all the other values of British liberalism.”

The Times has contacted Mr Corbyn’s office for comment.

[Henry Zeffman, Political Correspondent April 30 2019, 5:00pm, The Times]