Being a Jewish Briton

On Sunday, I woke up and was prepared to write a letter to a dear friend. I write to him every Sunday morning. But yesterday I felt compelled to jot down some thoughts that had been whizzing around in my head on what it means to be Jewish in these straitened times. What I wrote was not meant for publication. I posted it to my chum and have on reflection decided to also share it with a wider readership. It is an intensely personal piece which stakes no claim to universal validity. Please indulge me.

I had not wanted to write this piece. I had hoped it would never be necessary but after three weeks of strife in the sadly so unholy Holy Land, I can no longer sit on the fence. Let’s start at the beginning.

There are Israelis, there are Zionists, and there are Jews. The intersection on a Venn diagram is large but it is far from complete. There are also Palestinians, there are Arabs and there are Muslims. For the purpose of formulating a comparison, the Arabs should best be described as pan-Arabs, if they are to be placed on the opposite side of the net from the Zionists.

One of the most difficult issues to have come to the surface since the pogrom – there is no other halfway appropriate description of what befell Israel on 7 October – is the manner in which pro-Palestinian sentiment has manifested itself as raw antisemitism. Why else would an Anglo-Pakistani wish to protest outside a London synagogue, neither of which has any particular formal link to either Israel or to Palestine.

The feeling that Israel has since 1967 not in all cases behaved impeccably is hard for many of us to suppress but if you sit in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or in Haifa and you know that every hour of every day there are people around you who want nothing more than to kill you and destroy your country and who have no compunction about expressing that wish morning, noon and night, what are you supposed to do?

But what does it mean to be Jewish? Are we defined by religion? Or are we bound by ethics? Is it genetics that holds us together? Are we a race apart? Does Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice not ask “If you prick us, do we not bleed?”

If one undergoes one of those DNA tests, is there a section that pronounces what percentage of one’s heritage is Jewish? No? Well, that I suppose answers the race thing.

It is said that if one puts 2,000 Jews into a room and asks them to define Judaism, one will end up with 2,000 different definitions. Judaism is a free-thinking religion, one which is devoid of dogma. So, how do we end up with such oddments as the pasty-looking Hassidic Jews, the ones with the white shirts, long coats, brimmed hats, and long curls growing aside their ears? What has that got to do with free thinking?

It is simple. Let’s begin with the rabbi. The rabbi is not a holy man. He is not a priest. He, or she, is not an ordained intermediary between the Lord and ordinary members of the community. Each and every Jew has a direct one-on-one relationship with the Lord. Every individual must live with their own conscience, with the consequences of their own actions. There are laws which have been written and as each individual grapples with how best to abide by them, the rabbi is there as a teacher, as a person who has a greater understanding of the meaning of the laws, as suggested by the rabbinate, and who is there to offer guidance. But ultimately, every Jew is accountable only to the Lord and to himself.

The highest of the high holidays which occur in September or October – they are defined by moon phases – are Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and a week later Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. On Yom Kippur we fast for 24 hours and during that time reflect on our past year’s misdeeds. We don’t talk about them. We reflect on them, ask the Lord for forgiveness, and promise to try to do better in the coming year. Again, it is between us as individuals and Him. So, being Jewish means in a way always working hard on oneself and as noted above, as each one of us has his or her own relationship with the Lord, each of us can and does interpret Judaism in their own way. The Hassidim share certain interpretations of the scriptures. Other Jews don’t. That does not make the visibly religious Jew any more or less Jewish than the one who is not.

Kosher food laws, all based on common sense rules of hygiene which were pertinent to Bedouins in the desert hundreds of years ago persist but not keeping them is not a sin. It is, as observed, for each one of us to settle with our own conscience. Our core rules are embedded in the Ten Commandments, abiding to which is more than enough to keep any human busy for the rest of their life.

There are thought to be globally no more than 16 million Jews, or people who identify as such, of which 270,000 odd are in the UK. That rises to 18 million if one adds the many who include part-Jewishness but again, that is a matter of identity and not of anything in the DNA. The number would be significantly higher, had at least 6 million not been murdered in Europe in the 1940s. They were the victims of the latest of many pogroms over the centuries and one which all Jews had hoped would be the last one. On 7 October, 2023, all that changed. It is only in that context that non-Jews will ever be able to understand why in response the state of Israel on behalf of the victims of centuries of persecution cannot sit back and talk.

Judaism is not a dogmatic religion. It is not one that proselytises. It is made up of a highly diverse and amorphous bunch of people who at best share an ethical road map but beyond that very little. What holds the group together is the history of persecution and the knowledge that no matter how assimilated and normal they appear to be within the broader society in which they live, when push comes to shove, they will be pointed at as different. The British comedian and writer David Baddiel, loved and hated in equal measure by the left to which he pronounces himself to belong, wrote a short book, Jews Don’t Count, in which he raises many of the issues that persist in our modern and supposedly inclusive society. He sadly concludes that inclusiveness ends as soon as the word Jew pops up.

There is a vignette doing the rounds which points out that between them, making up no more than 0.02% of the world’s population, Jews have accumulated 129 Nobel Prizes across all disciplines but especially in Physics and Medicine, the third of which was won in 1908 by Paul Ehrlich, a close relative of mine. Rather cheekily, the list points out the astronomical disproportion of Jewish and Muslim Nobel laureates. 16 million people against 1.2 billion. 129 awards versus 7. But that should not be the point.

Why do Jews appear to be disproportionately successful in so many of their endeavours? It is, in my humble opinion, thanks to the lack of dogma. There is in Judaism nobody there to think for the individual or the collective. There is no single rule book to be followed blindly. Judaism demands that everyone think for themselves and to live with the consequences of their actions. There is nobody who can pat them on the head and offer absolution.

But there is a second element. The periodic persecution of Western European Jews since the Middle Ages has demanded of them to be prepared at a moment’s notice to up-sticks and flee. Wealth in property was always at risk of the next pogrom so it was evident that portable wealth and portable skills were of the essence. Whether as lawyers, musicians or diamond cutters and polishers, anything that could easily be moved was good. And as bankers? The Catholic church forbade usury which included all forms of money lending, and the Rabbinate did not. It was as simple as that and that in turn generated many a pogrom as a quick and easy way for local nobility to eradicate debts. The Jews killed Christ, let’s take retribution! Erm? Jesus was a Jew, was he not? King Charles I and Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were all beheaded, but nobody blames the Christians.

Heinrich Heine, who converted to Christianity in order to secure an academic post, acknowledged that he was and always would be a Jew, ruefully observing that Judaism is like an incurable affliction, and that conversion was meaningless. I myself had a step-grandmother who was more Catholic than the Pope until one scratched the surface and found her to be as Jewish as chopped liver. Her own children from first marriage in the late 1930s emigrated to Argentina, declared themselves to be good Catholics and steadfastly refused to have anything to do with their Jewish ancestry or relatives. That was to be between them, their Lord and on their own conscience. Sound familiar?

Britain, despite having given refuge to many, many thousands of Jews in the 1930s, both of my parents included, has tacitly remained remarkably anti-Semitic. How so? The British people have very scant knowledge of the Holocaust which in the collective memory rarely goes beyond British troops having liberated the concentration camp in Bergen Belsen. Show them the names of the dedicated extermination camps at Sobibor, Treblinka or Majdanek where most of Eastern Europe’s Jewry was systematically destroyed and they will shrug. Britain knows it did the right thing, but it also never thought itself to be requisite of part of the collective guilt which sat on Germans’ shoulders for the subsequent half a century or more, but which is gradually beginning to fade. It’s not a question of right or wrong, it is simply how it is.

These are personal thoughts. I do not wear my Jewishness on my sleeve, but it is deeply ingrained in my heart and my mind. I have happily made light of being “The only Jew in the village” – not quite true but nearly – and have felt at the same time part of and apart from the community in which I live. I have been happy that way and I quietly pray that it should remain so. This morning and for three weeks I have not been quite so sure.

I am a Jew, a modest Zionist and not an Israeli. I am not a British Jew. I am a Jewish Briton. Of that I am proud. I have relatives in all corners of the earth but apart from my sister to our knowledge none in Great Britain. We are true members of the diaspora.

As Shylock said in Shakespeare’s 1598 masterpiece:

“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same
food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases,
heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter
and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the
rest, we will resemble you in that.”

Shalom. Peace.

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