In 2011, four years before Mr Corbyn rapidly rose through Labour’s ranks, he endorsed a new edition of John A. Hobson’s 1902 book Imperialism: A Study, The Times reports. In his foreword, the Labour Leader said the work was a “great tome” and praised Mr Hobson’s “brilliant, and very controversial at the time,” analysis of the “pressures” behind western, and in particular British, imperialism at the turn of the 20th century. But in the book, considered deeply anti-Semitic, Hobson claimed Europe was controlled by a “peculiar race” – Jews – and blatantly acknowledged the anti-Semitic Rothschild conspiracy theory.

The Rothschild conspiracy can be traced to an 1846 pamphlet which claimed that the Rothschild family made their wealth on “impoverishment and disasters”.

From then on vast conspiracies evolved, such as that the family engineered the succession of 19th century French monarchs and even funded the Holocaust.

In his book, Mr Hobson, an infamous English economist and critic of imperialism, theorised that imperialism was the policy of great European finance houses controlled by Jews, who invested abroad due to insufficient home demand.

The finance houses then went on to control the press and manipulate public opinion.

Mr Hobson claimed “great financial houses” have “control which they exercise over the body of public opinion through the press”.

He went on: “Does anyone seriously suppose that a great war could be undertaken by any European State, or a great State loan subscribed, if the house of Rothschild and its connections set their face against it?”

Mr Corbyn also praised the economist’s “correct and prescient” passages “railing against the commercial interests that fuel the role of the popular press with tales of imperial might”.

In the book, Mr Hobson claimed that business capital is “controlled, so far as Europe is concerned, chiefly by men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience” and “are in a unique position to control the policy of nations”.

Mr Hobson’s anti-Semitism is also seen in his early work, The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Effects, where he blamed “a small group of international financiers, chiefly German in origin and Jewish in race” for the Boer War.

He added that “the rich and powerful liquor trade is entirely in the hands of Jews, the stock exchange is needless to say, mostly Jewish, the press of Johannesburg is chiefly their property”.

American historian William Rubinstein wrote in his 1996 book A History of the Jews in the English-Speaking World: Great Britain, that Hobson, who died in 1940, had a record of “vocal anti-Semitism” during the Boer War period.

A Labour Party spokesman said: “Jeremy praised the Liberal Hobson’s century-old classic study of imperialism in Africa and Asia. Similarly to other books of its era, Hobson’s work contains outdated and offensive references and observations, and Jeremy completely rejects the anti-Semitic elements of his analysis.”

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