Barry Pain was a famous late nineteenth and early twentieth century English essayist and novelist. Who owes his discovery and subsequent fame to the famous author of ‘Treasure Island’: Robert Louis Stevenson.

Interestingly for us, Pain took prisoners when discussion the subject of jews in his many fictional works. He styles the jews as an alien people who – as he describes in the character Moses Morgenstein in the 1920 novella ‘Marge Askinforit’ – become naturalised British subjects, use English sounding names to cover their jewishness (in Morgestein’s case ‘Stanley Harcourt’) but yet are obviously jewish with their ‘coal black hair’, ‘drooping eyelids’ and ‘hooked noses’.

Pain also points out that jews are inordinately keen on starting wars in which non-jews die in droves but jews don’t. The reason for this Pain explains in his 1911 short story ‘The Autobiography of an Idea’ when he portrays the jews as moneylenders and pawnbrokers who drive a struggling Englishman and aspiring writer to try to commit suicide. Only for the man – Albert Weeks – to be rescued by a wealthy British man who had sought to commit suicide at the same time in the same location after the untimely death of his wife. Only to find purpose in supporting Weeks so that he could feed his wife and children and get back on his feet.

He also expresses a similar idea about the cowardly nature of jews when he talks about a typically ‘furtive jew’ – i.e. a cowardly and dishonest jew – in his 1897 novel ‘The Octave of Claudius’. While in his 1901 short story ‘The Gray Cat’ Pain discusses how a ‘jew dealer’ sold a cursed Egyptian statue of a cat to a British explorer before he left Egypt. In the full knowledge that it was cursed and would cause a cat the size of a tiger to force itself on him and then repeatedly try to murder him.

In other words what Pain was trying to impart to his readers was that jews were a dangerous subversive element within the British Empire and sought to pit non-jews against each other in service to their material interest most notably the desire to make a profit.

It is a shame that few heeded Pain’s repeated warnings.