Something about the Celtic nations' attitude towards Jews has always struck me as unusually opportunistic--intensely antisemitic when it suits, relatively non-antisemitic when it suits, seeing Jews as part of the sectarian "us" when it suits, seeing Jews as part of the sectarian "them" when it suits. Would you say there's something to that?
There's something to that. If we take the Welsh case as it is more extreme in its range than the others, on the one hand you have a society that has had a not even undeserved reputation for several centuries as one of the most philosemitic* on Earth, yet one that has also seen
incidents from time to time. The Tredegar riots (which certainly had an element that felt a little pogrom-y) would be an example: they came out of a clear sky, were never repeated and were so strangely out of character that the precise details of what actually happened were a point of severe contestation within the Jewish community in Wales even half a century later. It is also the case that one cause of much of the hostility towards Welsh Nationalism from Welsh intellectuals of other political traditions was the sense that Saunders Lewis's strident antisemitism was, on some level,
un-Welsh; that it was a sign of the foreign and perhaps
Continental nature of his views and those of his followers, much like his Catholicism. And you will find, in certain circles, people who continue to think this way.
*Using this to mean the opposite of antisemitic rather than the other usage.
