OPINION: Is our British Eden becoming a more unwelcoming terrain?
This country has never been fertile soil for antisemitism. But, in the wake of the Gaza war, is Britain slowly starting to shed its benevolence? Josh Glancy notices some troubling signs.
When, I sometimes ask friends or family, was the last time a Jew in Britain was murdered on account of their Judaism? It’s a morbid question, but a pertinent one. Generally speaking, no one has a clear answer. We have no modern martyrs, none really since Clifford’s Tower.
Why not? To answer this question, you could do a lot worse than watch One Life, the new film about the righteous gentile Sir Nicholas Winton and the evacuation of mostly Jewish children from wartime Czechoslovakia. My favourite performance in the film was Helena Bonham Carter as Winton’s delightfully indomitable German Jewish mother, Babette.
The scene that stood out for me was Babette hectoring a reluctant British bureaucrat into providing visas for refugee children in Prague, explaining that she came to this country and brought up her son to believe that Britain has a “commitment to decency, kindness, respect for others”. The foot-dragging pen pusher grudgingly obliged. The visas were issued.
“Ordinary people wouldn’t stand for this, if they knew what was actually happening,” says Winton later on in the film, as he seeks to build popular support for his visa scheme.
Of course, lots of ordinary people couldn’t have cared less about the plight of European Jewry. But some did. Those friendly strangers who turned up on the platform at Liverpool Street station to take in terrified young foreign children for who knows how long. It’s mawkish of me I know, but I wept quietly in the back of the Maida Vale Everyman at those moments of deep humanity.
I really do believe that, in relation to the rest of Europe, there’s something a bit divergent about this country.
Of course Britain might well have behaved similarly to the rest of Europe towards its Jews, had the Nazis ever conquered here. But perhaps not. Perhaps it would have been more like Denmark than France. This has never been fertile soil for fascism or violent antisemitism.
I do view Anglo-Jewry as an underrated success story. We were the first significant non-Christian wave of migration since the Vikings. And we were mostly accepted with a very British grumble.
Why is this the case? I can think of several reasons. Generally there’s a moderation to the British temperament, a stolid aversion to sweeping political passions or the kinds of revolutions in which Jews rarely fare well. For many centuries we haven’t had the Catholic Church, a longstanding bulwark of antisemitism.
When Jews returned to Britain under Oliver Cromwell, the liberty to tender conscience established a century earlier by Queen Elizabeth had laid the groundwork for a broad panorama of religious observance. In recent centuries, this island nation has been sheltered from the worst tempests of history: genocide, conquest, civil strife. Its Jews have been sheltered too.
I’m not naive about Britain. This is a class-bound, hidebound society that often likes to sneer and exclude. When Jews needed a refuge from the Nazis in the 1930s, only a lucky few were invited here. When they needed a refuge after the Nazis in the 1940s, few were welcomed then either.
Yet I really do view Anglo-Jewry as an underrated success story. We were the first real ethnic minority in Britain, the first significant non-Christian wave of migration since the Vikings. And we were mostly accepted with a very British grumble. I see this as a triumph. To me this country is not so much the ‘Troubled Eden’ that was the title of Chaim Bermant’s famous survey of Anglo-Jewry, but more like a Gan Eden. The Garden of England.
I think it’s critical to remember this history when we try to answer the most pressing question facing our community today: is all this changing? Is the garden wilting? Is our Eden becoming a more hostile terrain for Jewish life?
There are three main repositories of antisemitism in this country: the far right, the far left and parts of the Muslim community.
Clearly there are some troubling signs. Antisemitic hate crimes have soared during the current war in the Middle East, as they have during every previous Gaza engagement. There’s a nastiness in the air and, though I pray I’m wrong, it feels as if it is only a matter of time before the question that began this article has a clearer answer.
There are three main repositories of antisemitism in this country: the far right, the far left and parts of the Muslim community. Many British Jews, looking at population patterns and also at recent French history, worry particularly about the last of those three.
But there is now another strand of concern: young people fired up by social media and algorithmic wokery.
Fed a simple and undeniably heartrending story of Palestinian genocide, ignorant of history and blind or indifferent to the Judeophobic pitfalls that riddle their culture like holes in a cheese, parts of Gen Z are veering into quite alarming prejudice.
This does not bode well for the future. But it may also be the case that these digital passions are shallow and ephemeral. And that the benevolent culture of deep Britain is a stronger and more enduring force.
I was reassured of this on Tuesday night, when I went out for a drink with a new colleague. He waited until the end of the meal, after he’d had a few glasses of wine, before telling me that he is passionately, profoundly philosemitic and deeply disturbed by the hatred he’s observed online in recent months. My response was stuttering – what to say? – but inside I felt a warm glow of comfort and kinship.
Just one example of course, but I still think that’s the Wintonian spirit and soul of this country: fair-minded, with a commitment to decency, kindness and respect for others.
Not everyone of course, and not all the time by any means. This is undeniably a difficult moment and the direction of travel concerns me. But when it comes to antisemitism in Britain, I still believe that most ordinary people, when they know what is actually happening, just won’t stand for it.
• Josh Glancy is News Review editor at the Sunday Times
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