I’m presently working on a major new musical composition which will attempt to tell the story of the British Jewish community. All 1000 years of it – and I need your help.
I’ve been Composer in Residence at the New West End Synagogue and a member of singing group Mosaic Voices for seven years now. I also run the film hub at UK Jewish Film. Through my work, I’m becoming increasingly aware of the importance of telling stories about British Jewish life and consider myself incredibly lucky to be in a position to do this. I worry that our community is looking to Israel and the USA for a sense of its own Jewishness and not celebrating the uniqueness and beauty of what we already have.
Jewish people were here for more than 200 years in the Middle Ages. We were subsequently expelled from England in 1290, permitted to return in the 1650s, and have been here ever since. That’s a lot of time to establish traditions and cultural offerings which are uniquely British and Jewish. From fish and chips to the very notion of Yiddish poetry food, literature, music, comedy, philosophy and even religious worship have been developed and transformed by wave-after-wave of Jewish immigration to this country colliding with native British customs.
For many years there was a tendency for British Jews to sweep their Jewishness under the carpet. As a result it sometimes takes a bit of digging to unearth the stories which I believe we have a duty to protect for future generations. I also think it’s important – in an era of unprecedented antisemitism, in a time where the only Jewish history taught in schools is focused on the Holocaust – to remind non-Jewish people that we are this country’s oldest immigrant community. If they refuse to give us a Jewish history month, then every day needs to be an opportunity for people to learn about us.
In January, while walking (wearing a kippah) at Oxford Circus, a young man took it upon himself to kick a broken bottle at me while shouting “Free Palestine.” A month earlier, I’d walked into a carriage filled with Pro-Palestinian demonstrators and felt so scared that I took my kippah off. Ironically, I was standing next to a woman of colour who was wearing a badge which said “unapologetically black.”
These dual experiences shook me up enormously and, for a while, I realised that I was beginning to feel like an outsider in my own country. I realised I had various options when it came to remedying this particular issue. I could hide in plain sight. I could stop wearing any visible signs of my Jewishness in public. This approach was never to work however. As a gay man, I’d spent much of my early adult life trying to “pass” in public, and I’m not going back into any closet to protect myself from the behaviour of bigots.
I decided, in the end, that my only option was to stand tall as a British Jew and use my creativity to encourage as many people as possible to feel equally proud of their unique identity. I don’t know if this will work, but, frankly, if just one Jewish person sees the films we commission at UK Jewish film, or hears the music of Mosaic Voices and feels a renewed sensed of pride, then I will have succeeded.
And this is why I’m writing The Jews of Britain. The 50-minute work will be split into ten movements (representing ten different periods of British Jewish history) and will be scored for mixed voices, strings and percussion. I want it to be emotional, magical, beautiful and full of soaring melody which fuse Jewish modes with British folk song. Of course I’m putting a huge amount of pressure on myself to get it right. I want the community to be inspired by and to take ownership of the piece.
Benjamin Till
I am aware that trying to tell a thousand-year story in a single musical work could be perceived as something of a fool’s errand. Obviously it’s impossible to tell the story in a comprehensive manner. What I can do, however, is select tiny little snippets of individual stories which feed into the overall narrative.
The Jews of Britain is also a research project. I’ve been working full time on research for the past three months and already have an entire wall covered in texts which I might want to use. Yes, I will cherry-pick the most interesting of the stories to include in the musical work, but I’m also creating a lengthy document which includes all of my research which will be made available online for anyone who’s interested to read about it.
Essentially, what I’m searching for are little snippets of text which are heart-warming, life-affirming, witty, moving or surprising. These might come from newspaper clippings, letters, folk songs, memoirs, testimonies and even pieces of graffiti. The excerpts need to have immediacy. They need to be pithy. They should feel very human. In a few sentences, anyone reading should be able to understand them and feel something tangible and they should all, in some way, feed into the story of British Jewish life.
Examples of texts that I’ve already unearthed include the piece of graffiti written, in Hebrew, on the wall of Winchester Castle in 1287: ‘On Friday, eve of the Sabbath in which the pericope Emor is read, all of the Jews of the Isle were imprisoned. I, Asher inscribed this’.
Hurtling into the early 20th century are the memoirs of my former mentor, the playwright Sir Arnold Wesker, one of which describes his experiences as an evacuee, at Liverpool Street Station; “I remember those days… On the station with gas masks… and someone said to my mother, “Say Goodbye, you may never see them again!”
By the time I start writing this project I suspect I will have looked through scores of official archives and read books about Jewish history till my eyes are swimming. What I really want, however, are tales from ordinary people… And that’s where the readers of the JC come in.
I want to do a call-out to everyone reading this. I would love you to contact me if you have a story to tell. Perhaps you have a love letters from a long-lost relative which is beautifully romantic. Perhaps you have postcards recounting holidays at Jewish hotels like The Green Park in Bournemouth. Maybe there’s a letter in your loft with an account of the Tredegar Riots, or the Battle of Cable Street. Perhaps your family was torn apart by someone marrying out or maybe you have a cherished letter or familial story about a soldier in the First World War. It may even be that you yourself have memories which you’re happy to share with me. Perhaps you, or someone you know, experienced the closure of a synagogue in one of the smaller Jewish communities and had to make a painful decision about whether to stay or move on.
Maybe you’ve kept a copy of the speech someone made at a wedding or a copy of a key announcement within your community. Perhaps you’ve seen something in a museum or a collection which you think I should be including in the piece. I would love to hear from members of all Jewish communities; Sephardi, Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, whether you consider yourself to be Jewish or Jew-ish.
My email address for any communication is benjamin.till@ukjewishfilm.org
