Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

The rich complexity of Britain’s Jewish population

There is no single community, Harry Freedman stresses, but a multitude of voices ranging from the liberal to the ultra-orthodox

The gifted rabbi Louis Jacobs, who was denied the leadership of Jews’ College in the 1960s for ‘his published views’. [Alamy] 
issue 26 November 2022

Of all the European countries that Jews have lived in, none has been so welcoming as Britain. There is a caveat: the first blood libel was in Norwich, of all places, in 1144, and after Edward I expelled us in 1290 we had to wait almost 400 years for Oliver Cromwell to ask us back. Jewish immigration to Britain was severely limited in the 1930s, as was immigration to British-controlled Palestine. Even so, Anglo-Jewry was – a handful of casualties from the occupied Channel Islands aside – the only community in Europe not ravaged by the Shoah, and Anglo-Jews are both peculiarly fortunate and haunted. My grandfather, a highly rational man, bought poison in 1940. He was going to kill his family if the Nazis reached them. My cousin sat Shiva (a wake for the dead) for her son when he married a non-Jew, because why do Hitler’s work for him?

If we exist here in our fullness, it doesn’t always feel that way.

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