Anti-Semitism and the Bloomsbury Set's Sexual Fluidity

Leonard Woolf lived at 9 Colinette Road from the age of 11 until he went to Cambridge.

Leonard and his wife author Virginia Woolf became influential in the Bloomsbury Group and established the Hogarth Press publishing house.

Despite her reputation as an Edwardian modern thinker, Virginia also referred to Leonard as “my penniless Jew”. Looking at this house one struggles to understand how he was penniless. Given the militant atheistic beliefs of the Bloomsbury group it’s also hard to understand why she needed to refer to him as a Jew.

In 1930 she wrote, “How I hated marrying a Jew – how I hated their nasal voices and their oriental jewelry, and their noses and their wattles – what a snob I was: for they have immense vitality, and I think that I like that quality best of all.” Virginia somewhat recovers herself in the second half of her sentence, but it sounds patronising today.

These views were echoed by other members of the Bloomsbury Group, and Leonard was frequently the target.

This discrimination was common at the start of the last century. It was driven by the influx of 150,000 Jews to the UK who had been persecuted in eastern Europe. The arrival of skilled European workers was whipped up by the British press into a threat. The press accused the Jews of being a threat to the employment of British labour, they accused them of not integrating, and even of being a potential terrorist threat. Sadly, all of these narratives continue in relation to migrant groups today in the UK.

Leonard and Virginia’s sexual relationships were unconventional for the Edwardian era. Leonard and the closeted author of the gay novel Maurice, EM Forster, were childhood friends. Leonard taught Forster to ride on Putney Common, and at university they both joined the secretive Cambridge Apostles along with other famous gay intellectuals including economist John Maynard Keynes and biographer Lytton Strachey. Lytton first proposed to Virginia and offered her to Leonard when he was snubbed. Lytton later lived in a menage a trois comprising a platonic relationship with a woman and a man. Leonard and Virginia also had a platonic marriage. After their honeymoon in Venice Virginia wrote to Lytton that their sex had been frequently interrupted by mosquitos, so they had discussed literature instead. In the 1920s Virginia famously had an affair with lesbian garden designer Vita Sackville West, of which Leonard was fully aware.