LIVERPOOL, England — For the 22 years it has existed, Wavertree, a multiethnic, mostly working-class constituency in the northern city of Liverpool, has voted exclusively for Labour. It has been a safe seat in a strongly socialist city; at the most recent general election, the party’s candidate took four-fifths of the vote.

So its local leaders were aghast when tiny Wavertree emerged as the locus of the latest feud over anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, when its member of Parliament, Luciana Berger, resigned this week after receiving anti-Semitic abuse, and with local Labour activists having called her a “disruptive Zionist” and a supporter of a “murdering” government.

“It has always been a Labour government that addressed racism,” said one of the district’s city council members, David Cummings. “I’m proud of that. I’m a socialist. I’m an internationalist. When you’re a socialist you recognize everybody, you don’t judge anyone on anyone’s background.”

The tensions only deepened this week as an eighth Labour lawmaker quit the party, accusing its leader of infecting it “with the scourge of anti-Jewish racism.”