Did George Orwell Say: VII

Did George Orwell say that the idea of equality was ‘Judæo-Christian’?

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George Orwell considered the linked Judaeo-Christian concept of morality and equality so important that a phrase he had used in a book review reappears in his World War Two examination of Nazism and Socialism, The Lion and the Unicorn.

She and Fabrice and even Mosca are incapable of acting meanly, a thing that carries no weight in the Judaeo-Christian scheme of morals.

(Review of Stendhal, by F. C. Green New English Weekly, 27 July 1939,

referring to characters in Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma)

But it is precisely the idea of human equality—the ‘Jewish’ or ‘Judæo-Christian’ idea of equality—that Hitler came into the world to destroy.

(The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,

Part III: The English Revolution: iii, 1941)

It is now a concept as widely accepted as Orwell’s other coinage, Cold War.