Jewish academic and Hebrew scholar Irene Lancaster on why she and other Jews within the UK are wondering in the event that they have any future within the country.
Abraham was the primary person in recorded history to link idolatry with hostility to hospitality. The previous Shabbat reading Lech Lecha (Genesis 12-17), ‘Go for yourself’, is a response to idolatry.
The upcoming reading is Vayera (Genesis 18-22) through which Abram’s extraordinary hospitality to a few strangers is contrasted with the aversion to hospitality experienced in Sodom and Gomorrah.
The nation has just commemorated the dead of WW1. We wouldn’t have won this war without the scientific inventions of Dr Chaim Weizmann, who in 1904 was invited to develop the organic chemistry department at Manchester University.
And yet, Manchester University has this week stood idly by while Weizmann’s bust was decapitated with impunity. The whole thing was recorded for posterity.
Having been the primary person to be invited to show the brand new subject of Jewish history at that university some 25 years ago, it’s my view that the Balfour Declaration of 1917 was largely as a result of Weizmann’s war efforts on behalf of his adopted home, the UK. Later Weizmann was to turn into Israel’s first president.
That great pundit, Isaiah Berlin, knew everyone from President Kennedy to the Queen to Shostakovitch, to Ben Gurion to all the good professors, businessmen, prime ministers, presidents and poets on the earth. In his view Weizmann was the best person he had ever met, even greater than Churchill, who he also knew quite well.
When you permit beheadings of statues, worse will certainly follow. We have seen this in Israel and Gaza with Hamas and we now have now witnessed pogroms in Amsterdam.
As in Russia from 1880-1910, these pogroms are all the time orchestrated from above. This is what happened within the Netherlands a few days ago.
As usual the BBC blamed ‘the Jews’. The Dutch King nonetheless blamed the Dutch people. After all, three quarters of all Dutch Jews were murdered in his country during WW2, statistically greater than in Germany itself.
To us the Netherlands conjures up tulips, clogs, canals, drugs, avid assistance in dying and Van der Valk.
In addition the Netherlands is the house of Spinoza, Rembrandt, William of Orange (the Protestant leader who became our king) and Menasseh ben Israel, the Jewish immigrant who persuaded Oliver Cromwell to permit Jews back to England, which he did in 1656.
Oh, and Anne Frank in fact. Mustn’t forget her!
But make no mistake. What we now have witnessed in the previous few days and weeks is a concerted effort to rid Europe, including the UK, of the very last living Jews remaining here, in addition to to wipe out the very last vestiges of Jewish life and culture on this continent. We already witnessed this in Malmo in the course of the European Song Contest. And then the decision to boycott Israeli publications.
Idolatry shouldn’t be nearly literally worshipping idols as such. It’s also a failure to read the signs of the times. Abram saw this very clearly. Which is why he left his home, land and culture and set off for pastures recent, pastures through which hospitality and openness can be paramount.
Abram and his wife Sarai attracted many adherents to their vision of the one G-d. Unlike other later religions, they didn’t do that through coercion, but through personal example.
In those days many pagans rallied to their cause. Tragically, today, nearly all of persons are too blinkered to read the signs of the times.
So they proceed to disregard expert Jewish counsel and persist in advocating increasing teaching about dead Jews, in addition to the wantonly insane destruction of beloved parks and green spaces to construct museums and memorials, again to dead Jews, thus repeating the follies of the Tower of Babel, chillingly depicted within the story of Noah, which we read at at first of November.
But the killing of living and vibrant Jewish ideals, as embodied by geniuses equivalent to Dr Chaim Weizmann of Manchester, first President of Israel, in addition to slaughtering the cultural genius of the Jewish State of Israel, embodied in Torah learning, science, arts, crafts, sports and positive outreach to the contemporary world, is akin to murdering the world itself.
Not for nothing is November 11, the day after Remembrance Day, also the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the day in 1938 when Hitler knew beyond all doubt that he could get away with it, so he did.
There is little doubt that we in Europe, including the UK, are actually back within the late Thirties, when the state police and law officers colluded with the Hitlerian state to show a blind eye to physical attacks on Jews and their supporters. After all, Hitler had been elected and might is all the time right, is not it?
But, for the record, Jews now not feel secure on this country. The universities, parts of the Church, political parties, civil society and far of the media are stacked up against us.
So perhaps it’s time, as within the era of Abram, faced as we’re by the idolatry of antisemitic wokeness, to easily pack up once more and leave.
To many who looks like the one option that is still to the Jews of Europe, including those of us still residing within the UK.
