Jewish culture, dying? You’re looking in the wrong places
In 2018, Heritage England published a list championing English history through 100 “irreplaceable” sites dotted around the country. Jewish history entered the list at different points, but there was only one Jewish site that was marked as “irreplaceable”. Was it the 18th-century Bevis Marks Synagogue in east London, which still holds services to this day? Or the Plymouth Synagogue, built in 1764 and the oldest Ashkenazi synagogue in the English-speaking world? Neither. It was the Jewish cemetery at Penryn, near Falmouth, chosen because it served as an “important reminder” of how different faiths commemorate the dead.
People love dead Jews, as the US author Dara Horn likes to say. But I would suggest an amendment to that declaration: people also love Jews that are dying. You don’t need to look far to find examples – photography exhibitions of synagogues on the verge of closure, an entire journalistic genre devoted to finding “the Last Jew” of a particular town. This year, on January 27, it’ll be the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and you’ll hear a lot of stories that drive at a similar point. Jews are forever on the brink of extinction.
Wrong. That is the bold argument of historian Gavin Schaffer, whose diligent and well-researched book, An Unorthodox History, challenges this “lachyrmose” telling of Jewish life after the Holocaust. British Jewry, he argues, has actually flourished – we’ve just been looking in the wrong places.
Here’s one example. Lionel Blue – later to become a regular broadcaster on the BBC’s Thought for the Day and one of the most respected Jewish figures in the UK – recalled that, after walking out of rabbinical college, he rediscovered his faith touring the gay clubs of Amsterdam. As he later remarked: “God has no prejudices. He speaks in a sauna as well as in a chapel”. For many Jewish twentysomethings today, that lesson, that these two identities might not conflict but produce something remarkable, has been born out in an unlikely form. “Buttmitzvah” – a biannual gay Jewish clubnight featuring live music, smoked salmon bagels and folk dancing – has become something of a festival itself. So much for tragic decline.
Schaffer extends this analysis to those who committed the cardinal sin of marrying non-Jews. Traditionally, Jews who “married out” were barred from formally participating in the community because they were perceived to threaten Jewish continuity. But in 1988, Rabbi Jonathan Romain of Maidenhead Synagogue launched a series of seminars where interfaith couples discussed what Jewish rituals would be available to them and their families, thereby bringing them, and their children, back into the fold. Even after the first set of seminars, the couples continued to meet and shared a Passover meal together.
Anglo-Jewry has even flourished beyond Britain’s borders. In a vivid study of Kfar HaNassi in northern Israel, a kibbutz set up following the Israeli-Arab war of 1948 by British-Jewish migrants, Schaffer reveals a community which thrived on a peculiar combination of British and Israeli culture: cricketers padding-up to play matches on arid Israeli turf, comedy sketches in the style of Dad’s Army known as “zigs” (and that were completely lost on native Israelis), a well-stocked library which lent out nearly three times as many books written in English as works written in Hebrew. This Kibbutz, Schaffer argues, saw a recreation of Britishness “played out through a Zionist lens”.
Schaffer makes a persuasive case that British Jewry is alive and well. Where there’s plenty of pessimism about the community’s decline – in 1994, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks published a book arrestingly titled, Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? – Schaffer is more hopeful. When synagogues and rabbis have failed to keep up with change, he points out that Jews have “done their own thing” rather than just disappear into secular society. JW3, an active community centre opened in Camden in 2013, was not built for one denomination but as a space for Jewish culture and heritage. Last month, a close friend used its cinema to screen a short film he made about Jewish summer camp.
Where Schaffer is less persuasive is in the idea that you can only see the flourishing once you focus on the community’s periphery rather than its core. I’m not so convinced. The energy that he describes seldom grew on the edges. The campaign for the release of Soviet Jews in the 1970s and 1980s is used as evidence of marginal Jews being brought back into communal life. But that campaign was hardly fringe: it was supported by the Chief Rabbi and practically every mainstream Jewish figure in public life. My own late grandfather Michael, who hosted the weekly radio show You Don’t Have to be Jewish on BBC Radio London, featured the topic constantly.
It’s all too easy to see British Jews as the fading embers of a fire that’s about to go out. Such a narrative can be comforting, easier to accept than admitting change. In a community that knows it would have been murdered next had the Nazis succeeded in conquering Europe, that story can also serve as a powerful call for self-preservation. But as Holocaust Memorial Day approaches, Schaffer rightly reminds us that there is more to Jewish life than just surviving.
An Unorthodox History is published by Manchester UP at £20. To order your copy, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books