Three days after the death of Queen Elizabeth, the novelist Rana Dasgupta, who met her on several occasions, shared on Facebook a series of notes from his diaries, a record of a human encounter with the person of the sovereign.
He writes of this rare woman with a novelist’s eye for observation. His memories of her are affectionate and sympathetic: as an “exceptional storyteller” who enchanted him with stories of listening in as a girl to her father’s fireside chat with Nehru.
Yet what worries him is a comment that seems to drop straight from that world of the 1930s aristocracy. In 2010, while receiving the Commonwealth Writers Prize at Buckingham Palace, The Queen tells him of her hosting a reception earlier that day for a Jewish community group.
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Queen Elizabeth II presenting Rana Dasgupta with the Commonwealth Writers Prize in November 2010 (Photo by Steve Parsons - WPA Pool/Getty Images)
“It was really very nice,” she tells Dasgupta. “Because, you know, the Jews can be so very difficult.”
In these days of mourning, so soon after the Queen’s death, such memories have the power to be incendiary. We do know that the Queen worked closely with many senior Jewish figures to whom she showed deep respect, several of whom have told far warmer stories to the JC of their campaigning work together.
And Dasgupta — a thoughtful, intricate observer of the world — balances his anecdote by quoting the Queen’s joy at the welcome Britain has been able to give to both Jews and other minorities, including his father.
As Dasgupta implies, the Queen was a production of an age and a class in which prejudice against Jews was endemic. We discover, with every passing year, more evidence of her uncle’s intimate investment in Nazism. The archives of the Windsors for this period remain tightly closed, with hints only occasionally leaking out that even her mother and father briefly sympathised with Edward VIII’s views. (The campaigning work of the author Andrew Lownie on this period has been essential.)
But what matters, of course, is that the House of Windsor chose another path. Whatever George VI may have tolerated at his brother’s cocktail parties, he became the monarch who confronted Hitler, his daughter beloved as the princess who fixed lorries in the fight against fascism.
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Picture taken October 1940 in Windsor shows the Britain's Princess Elizabeth (future Queen Elizabeth II) and her sister Princess Margaret sending a message during the BBC's children programme, particularly to the children who were being evacuated because of the World War II. (Photo by -/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
As Karen Pollock writes in the JC this week, the Queen showed a particular commitment to keeping alive the memory of the Shoah, attending the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen despite the limitations of old age, and famously staying long over schedule to ensure that she heard the story of every Auschwitz survivor at a ceremony in 2005. This was our Queen.
If we want the final evidence that the House of Windsor has learned from the mistakes of the 1930s, we need only to look to the new monarch. In 2019, and at the height of our fear about the antisemitism enabled by Jeremy Corbyn, the then-Prince of Wales hosted a pre-Chanukah celebration of the contribution of the Jewish people to British life.
He may not have mentioned politics, but he made his point loud and clear. And whatever doubts some of us feel about his personal flaws, or about the institution of monarchy that has elevated him, his concern for the Jewish community is beyond doubt.
Only this year, he travelled to Winchester to unveil the new statue of Licoricia, the Jewish businesswoman murdered in 1277. While there, he spoke of his pride as a patron of World Jewish Relief. He is also a patron of Jewish Care.
Our new King finds the secularism of contemporary life as alien as did his mother. Yet Charles, with his focus on “faith communities” and being “defender of faith” in the general, clearly sees a full tapestry of minority faiths as best refuge for Britain’s sense of the divine. His relationship with the Jewish community will be central.
Charles’s past, however, is not entirely without taint. In 1986, in a leaked letter, he blamed “foreign Jews” for the tragedies of the Middle East.
But as with his mother, his youth was shaped by the preserved attitudes of an English aristocracy; as with his mother, we may yet learn things that give us reason for concern. But what should matter most is the public signals that our monarchs have chosen to send in more recent years.
In Charles, as with Elizabeth, we have received clear commitments that our monarch has learned the lessons of the grim treatment of Britain’s Jews by ruling classes past. Let us look to the future.
