If Alan Michael Sugar – soon to be Lord Sugar – didn’t exist, he might have been invented by antiSemites. That, at least, would have been the view of my maternal grandmother, part of a Jewish family that had built up a very successful business, starting with a barrow in the East End of London and ending up as the catering and food empire J Lyons & Co.

Yet the family were at all times anxious not to draw attention to their success. None of them would have dreamt of buying a Rolls-Royce or a Bentley; none of them acquired a country estate, still less an exotic home overseas. If they gave to charity, it would be anonymously.

In my grandmother’s view, this was all very wise: she had a great fear of antiSemitism (not surprisingly, given what had happened in Europe during her lifetime) and felt that any ostentatious display of wealth, besides being inherently vulgar, could provoke dark forces lying just below the civilised surface of British society.

So the idea of Sir Alan Sugar appearing on peak-time television driving a Rolls-Royce Phantom with the number plate AMS1 before yelling at various humiliated Gentiles, “You’re fired!” would have filled her with despair. I suspect she might have had a similar reaction to Michael Winner’s unashamedly sybaritic columns in this newspaper, detailing our hero’s brutal put-downs of errant staff at some of the world’s most expensive restaurants and hotels.

If I am to be entirely honest (not always a good idea), I must admit I have inherited a bit of my grandmother’s neurosis: a small part of me wonders if it is entirely wonderful that Britain’s two best-known Jews seem so comfortably to tally with the antiSemitic stereotype of the money-obsessed loudmouth.

This reflects much worse on me than it does on them. Why should anyone moderate his naturally brash or exuberant behaviour to appease the prejudices of others? In any case, it can’t be said that either man is too stupid to be aware of the impression created. Sugar told Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, a few years ago: “The Jew [in England] is portrayed as Fagin, and you won’t shake that out of people’s heads. It’s an underlying thing – that the Jews are a little bit sharp, a little bit quick, not to be trusted, possibly. If you ask a group of nonJews in a pub what it is that they don’t like about Jews, this is what they’ll come out with . . . that they hoard money.”

Sugar’s reference to the Charles Dickens character is well judged. George Orwell observed in 1945, as Britain became fully aware of the horrors of the Holocaust: “There has been a perceptible antiSemitic strain in English literature from Chaucer onwards.”

In his fascinating essay AntiSemitic Stereotypes in the English Novel, Professor Philip Jenkins looks at Our Mutual Friend, in which Dickens – aware that the invention of Fagin had, as one contemporary critic put it, “encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew” – created a more sympathetic Jewish character: a moneylender called Riah.

Yet Dickens has Riah say of his own usury that “if . . . I had been a Christian, I could have done it, compromising no one but my individual self. But doing it as a Jew, I could not choose but compromise the Jews of all conditions and all countries. It is a little hard upon us, but it is the truth. I would that all our people remembered it”.

So even a Dickens attempting to make amends for the crude caricature of Fagin promotes the notion that Jews have an obligation to avoid professions such as moneylending in order to save their entire race from a special form of persecution. This was especially perverse, given that medieval European governments had often restricted such practices to Jews on the grounds that they were morally inappropriate for Christians – and also that the Jewish presence in moneylending was a function of the fact that constant fear of expulsion meant they would always want to be in a business with very liquid assets.

So for me to worry about whether Sugar encourages antiSemitic stereotyping is to commit the same error that Dickens attributes to the mind of the moneylender Riah: making an individual responsible for appeasing the collective prejudice of a multitude of bigots.

There are in fact, as one Jewish friend put it to me half-jokingly, “two sorts of Jew: book Jews and money Jews” – but it seems to be only the latter who are taken as the stereotype. This ignores the “book Jew”, who is interested in ideas rather than material possessions and who leads a life dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and intellectual discovery.

This is something that the Swedes of the Nobel prize committee have never failed to appreciate: Jews have gained almost a quarter of the Nobel prizes awarded worldwide since the beginning of the 20th century, with a particular concentration on physics, chemistry and medicine. When one considers that Jews make up barely a quarter of 1% of the global population (and just 2% of the American population), this record ought to encourage a more sympathetic stereotype.

On the other hand, even to make this point is to draw attention to what I think remainsa distinction between English Jews and English Gentiles, at least of my generation and background. The former have no desire to hide their intellectual light under a bushel, while the latter regard it as courteous to pretend that they are no more hard-working or determined than anyone else, regardless of how many hours of midnight oil they burn. This might be described as traditional English modesty or hypocrisy, depending on your point of view.

You can see an element of the discomfiture caused by this slight cultural difference in the reaction of many Tory MPs to John Bercow’s campaign to be Speaker of the House of Commons. The 46-year-old Bercow, who would be the first Jewish Speaker, has openly campaigned for this position in a way that even those colleagues who can stomach his shameless schmoozing of the government front bench regard as unseemly. English upper-middle-class Gentiles are no less given to plotting and planning for personal promotion than their Jewish counterparts; but they feel it is simply not done to be open about it.

Perhaps there is something of the same irritation in the attitude of many Labour MPs to Lord Mandelson (whose father was advertising manager of The Jewish Chronicle). What infuriates them is not so much that Mandelson’s brain is much faster than theirs at political calculation, but that he makes absolutely no attempt to disguise this fact.

It will be interesting to see how the Labour benches in the House of Lords greet Sugar when he takes up his place – assuming that he does find the time in his busy schedule to grace them with his presence. They will treat him rather as my grandmother would have done, I suspect.

Yet, if she were alive today, she should have been encouraged by Gordon Brown’s decision to ennoble the owner of AMS1. The prime minister has appointed him “enterprise champion” only because he desperately wants some of Sugar’s popularity to rub off onto the despised Labour government – The Apprentice is watched by up to 10m faithful and devoted viewers.

This, in turn, demonstrates that the sort of figure who once might have been seen as a caricature of the money-obsessed Jewish tycoon is now taken to the nation’s heart – and that therefore my grandmother’s fears were unwarranted; but I still can’t watch him in action without feeling a spasm of unease.

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