There are not many Jews in Britain — no more than 300,000, although more if we include those with Jewish backgrounds who don’t identify in that way. We comprise a very small proportion of the national population and as a minority we generally keep our heads down.

Even when the row over antisemitism in the Labour Party hit the headlines, the number of Jewish voices that spoke out or made themselves heard was quite small. Jewish life in Britain does not have the vibrancy or self-confidence that it has in America.

But despite our reluctance to be seen or heard as Jews, there has been a remarkable change in how we think of ourselves. Jewish self-esteem in Britain is at an all-time high. And the ways in which we display our Jewish identity today are astonishingly diverse.

My new book, Britain’s Jews, looks at contemporary Jewish life in this country. I interviewed dozens of people, asking them, among other things, what it meant to them to be Jewish, how their Jewishness shaped their lives, if at all, and how strongly attached they were to the idea of a British Jewish community. I knew I was likely to hear a very diverse range of answers, but I was surprised — pleasantly — by the broad variety of ways in which we define ourselves.

It’s not just that people express it in terms of religious affiliation, though many do. As in America and Israel, there is a broad spectrum of religious identities, from Charedi to secular (yes, secular is a religious identity too).

But there are other ways of expressing Jewish identity that have nothing to do with religion, revolving around politics, culture, interests and so on. There are Jews whose identity is bound up in their ethnicity and there are activist Jews whose political outlook is defined by the fact they are Jewish. Some Jews express their identity through food, others describe themselves as cultural Jews. There are Zionist Jews, anti-Zionist Jews, Christian Jews, Buddhist Jews, reluctant Jews, left-wing Jews, right-wing Jews; the list goes on and on. Jewish identity today is fluid.

Anyone can create a hybrid identity for themselves, from all the different ways there are of being Jewish.

A lot of this is to do with the contemporary interest in identity and the belief that being able to articulate it is essential to our sense of self. The zeitgeist expects us to be uninhibited in asserting who we are, our ethnicity, sexuality, and origins. One of the most striking things that I found when speaking to young Jews is that, unlike their parents and grandparents, they are not afraid to be proud of their Jewish identity. There is a new confidence about Britain’s Jews today, particularly among the younger generations.

The recent political and media focus on antisemitism has also been instrumental in creating this change. As one interviewee put it: “We are prepared take a stand, to unapologetically say, ‘I am Jewish and I’m not going to put up with this’. We don’t have to hide or apologise anymore. And we demand recognition for ourselves in those spaces, around identity politics or wherever, where it is said that racism can’t occur towards Jews.”

The idea that we can choose how to express our Jewish identity is recent. Of course, people have always opted in or out of the Jewish religion; Jews have thought about their relationship to Judaism ever since the Enlightenment in the 18th century. But the choices they made were whether or not to remain within the community and, if they decided to stay, whether to reconsider their relationship with the Jewish faith; reinterpreting it intellectually and spiritually, as happened with movements like Chasidism and Reform.

The idea that one’s Jewish identity is a label that informs a political, social or cultural outlook was largely unheard of until our times.
Identity politics and our response to antisemitism are only the most visible factors in explaining the multiple ways in which we define ourselves today. More prosaically, although Jews continue to immigrate to Britain, collectively we no longer feel as if we are an immigrant population. We no longer need to strive to establish ourselves within the host community.

It is almost 150 years since the great waves of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe changed the British perception of Jews for ever and although many Jewish families have arrived more recently, a good number of us trace our ancestry back to that time.

Of course, it is easy to generalise and every family has a different story, but broadly the early immigrant generations were too busy trying to keep their heads down and establish themselves to care about matters of identity.

Anyway, they knew only too well who they were; they’d been outsiders in the lands where they were born, and why should it be any different here?
Now, however, we are a fully-integrated part of British society. We are just like everyone else. And just as everyone else identifies with those elements of society that they find relevant, so do we.

But we tend not to shake off our Jewishness; it too is part of what we are. So we end up with hybrid Jewish identities, partly defining ourselves in terms of our Jewishness, partly in terms of who are as Britons.

One of the most frequent assertions that I heard from people who work for charities, volunteer or give their time for good works is that, even if the cause they support is wholly secular, they do it because they are Jewish.

We have Jewish charities such as World Jewish Relief that work for the benefit of people in third world countries who are not Jews. A generation ago, a Jewish charity working to alleviate poverty outside the Jewish world would have been deemed unnecessary. Why, it may have been asked, would Jews need their own charity to support this type of work when they could donate to any one of the dozens of secular organisations working in the field of international aid?

But as attitudes have changed, the idea has taken root not just that it is safe for Jews to be outward facing, but that it is actually beneficial. Doing things as Jews, even when we don’t need to, makes us appreciate the value of being Jewish. It makes us appreciate who we are.

As a community, our much more relaxed sense of what it means to be Jewish has allowed us to do things that former generations would have shied away from. We have been a minority in Britain longer than any other, but for most of our history, for understandable reasons, we elected to remain beneath the parapet. We chose to look after ourselves and built the remarkable communal infrastructure that most of us take for granted (until we need it).

These days, however, the realisation that our Jewish identity is an asset has encouraged our communal organisations to work with those from other minorities to help them to square that impossible circle of integrating while remaining distinct. It is a circle we have more or less managed to square, and our communal organisations now train, support and advise more recently arrived minorities, for the common purpose of building a successful and well-functioning multicultural British society.

Jewish life in Britain has not been easy over the past few years. But beneath the surface, there has been a change in how we think of ourselves, one which is likely to become more noticeable as today’s confident young Jews grow older. It should encourage us to face the future positively.

‘Britain’s Jews: Confidence, Maturity, Anxiety’ is published by Bloomsbury

See review, JC2

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