In my new book, Jews in the Welsh Imagination: Medieval Times to the Present, I explore fifteen centuries of Welsh attitudes towards Jews, even when there were few of them in Wales. One area I focused on is the relationship between the ‘Party of Wales’, Plaid Cymru, and the Jews since its founding in 1925. In light of its recent victory in this year’s Senedd elections, amid rising global antisemitism, particularly given recent events in the UK, this piece focuses on the party’s first hundred years to push for a better relationship.
Plaid has long fashioned itself as an inclusive, civic‑nationalist movement. Yet, its history is not untouched by the prejudices that have shaped nationalist movements and the British Left more broadly. As the record shows, attitudes toward Jews and, later, Israel-Palestine feature tensions that have echoes today.
Founded in 1925 to promote the Welsh language, culture, and independence, Plaid emerged with a vision of Wales that was anti-urban, anti-capitalist, anti-English, and anti-modern — categories that, in the political imagination of the time, were often associated with Jews. Unsurprisingly, Jews felt excluded. The party’s newspaper, Y Ddraig Goch (The Red Dragon), launched in 1926, identified among the supposed threats to Wales rootless cosmopolitan capitalists and international Marxists (i.e., Jews). By the 1930s, it portrayed the looming war as a struggle between imperial powers and international capital, facilitated by a press controlled by Jews.
Plaid’s first leader, Saunders Lewis, played an outsized role in shaping the party’s early intellectual culture. He subscribed to the widespread interwar belief that rootless international Jewish financiers were controlling the economic affairs of nations for financial gain. His writings repeatedly associated Jews with capitalism, modernity, and moral decay. In one poem, he referred to “Kosher vinegar” and “Whitechapel’s lard‑bellied women, Golders Green Ethiopians.”
His 1942 poem Y Dilyw 1939 (The Deluge 1939) marked the nadir of this hostility. There, Lewis blamed the Great Depression on New York Jewish financiers and capitalists, describing them with “Hebrew snouts,” a term that racializes and animalizes Jews. He even suggested that Jews bore responsibility for the rise of Hitler. Beyond Lewis himself, they refused to oppose Hitler and expressed sympathy for Franco, Salazar, Petain, Vichy France, and Mussolini.
During the Second World War, such rhetoric persisted. In 1941, former Deputy Vice President W. J. Gruffydd attacked Jewish evacuees in north Wales as cowardly and exploitative, repeating familiar tropes of Jews as rootless, selfish, and controlling the press. His claim that Abergele was “oppressed” by Jews is particularly striking given that Gwrych Castle housed Jewish Kindertransport children who had escaped certain death. Although Plaid’s formal political program contained “no hint of antisemitism,” according to Richard Wyn Jones, this absence may reflect the assumption at the time that Jews had no place in an independent Wales.
A shift began in 1945 when Gwynfor Evans succeeded Lewis as party president. Seeking to distance Plaid from Lewis’s legacy, Evans adopted a more sympathetic stance toward Jews and Israel. Plaid greeted the creation of Israel in 1948 with admiration, even envy, particularly impressed by the revival of Hebrew as a living language. Throughout the 1950s, Evans promoted Israel as a model for Welsh linguistic revival, and nationalist publications praised the Ulpan method of intensive Hebrew learning.
Yet such support for Israel coexisted with ambivalence. Welsh nationalists admired Israel’s linguistic achievements while distancing themselves from the people who made them possible. By the late 1960s, Evans continued to praise the Hebrew revival but expressed concerns about Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. By the 1970s, Plaid’s relationship with Israel had become strained. The Jewish Chronicle reported “a new and critical attitude” among Plaid leaders, noting the party’s attempts to cultivate ties with Gaddafi’s Libya. In a 1976 interview, Evans defended his long‑standing Zionism but criticized Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and claimed that Plaid had “never found any sympathy and support for the national aspirations of the Welsh people among the Jewish community.”
From 1982 onwards, Plaid’s disillusionment with Israel accelerated, sometimes conflating all Jews with Israel, which only intensified following October 7, 2023. Back in 2020, Plaid acknowledged that its anti‑Zionist stance sometimes blurred into antisemitism, noting concerns about “how to engage in this discourse without racist conduct or rhetoric.”
Today, with antisemitic incidents in the UK at record levels and Jewish communities in Wales reporting heightened anxiety, Plaid Cymru’s new government faces a profound responsibility: to demonstrate that Welsh nationalism can be unequivocally anti‑racist, and to ensure that debates about the Middle East do not become a license for hostility toward Jews. How Plaid responds now will shape not only its credibility but the broader civic culture of Wales.
Sources/Further Reading
Brooks, Simon, Hanes Cymry: Lleiafrifoedd Ethnig a’r Gwareiddiad Cymraeg (University of Wales Press, 2021).
Davies, Grahame (ed.), The Chosen People: Wales and the Jews (Seren, 2002).
Donahaye, Jasmine, Whose People? Wales, Israel, Palestine (University of Wales Press, 2012).
Jones, Richard Wyn, Putting Wales First: The Political Thought of Plaid Cymru, Vol. 1 (University of Wales Press, 2024).
--, The Fascist Party in Wales? Plaid Cymru, Welsh Nationalism and the Accusation of Fascism (University of Wales Press, 2014).
Parry-Jones, Cai, The Jews of Wales (University of Wales Press, 2017).
Sandry, Alan. Plaid Cymru - An Ideological Analysis (Welsh Academic Press, 2011).