My history of post-War British Jewry is consciously unorthodox

In this way, fear and anxiety shaped modern Jewish life in ways not always realised by communities themselves. What does it mean ‘to need Pharoah?’, American activist and scholar Leonard Fein asked his readers, arguing that it was the ‘winds of others’ hatred’ that held Jewish communities together. This idea was also underpinned by the seemingly opposite problem of secularism and acceptance. If non-Jews stopped hating us, if we could just blend in amongst them, what then? Jews, for generations, have feared these challenges, which were hyperbolised, in Rawidowicz’s words, into obsessive narratives of an ‘every-dying people.’ Indeed, in the thinking of many community leaders around the Jewish world, fears of threat/violence and acceptance/assimilation blended together, amid the idea that the latter betrays those whose fate was the former.

In the postwar period, many Jews have been, and remain, scared of losing their Judaism or having it ripped from them, despite ostensibly being a settled and secure part of Britain. Jews, on these terms, have frequently been labelled as neurotics, and we have often constructed ourselves (with varying degrees of seriousness) in this way. When, in Bernice Rubens’s novel The Elected Member, the tragic Norman Zweck remonstrated with God for using Jews as the ‘scapegoat for all Your neurosis’ he argued a case with which many will identify. But the reduction of Jewish fears to a neurosis seems to me to be a slip into antisemitism, taking on the clothes that Jews have so often been given to wear. For Jews did not (and do not) need to seek out threats or terrors; they were (and are) real enough. Jews in the postwar have been frightened for good reasons and taking these fears seriously must be the starting point, in many cases, when opening up Jewish stories and lives. And just as threats against Jewry were real, the idea that many Jews were drifting away from traditional Jewish communities was real too. There is little doubt that the Jewish communities that we, and our parents, grew up in changed around us, and are changing more. My book attempts to capture this state of flux while trying to resist what the historian Salo Baron would have described as a lachrymose reading of what Jews have been, and what we may become.

Resisting the lachrymose feels incredibly important when trying to understand Jewish history. As Jonathan Sacks put it in 2009, the postwar Jewish tendency to feel ‘alone’ and ‘surrounded by enemies’ was ‘understandable’ but ‘dangerous’. Aside from leading us away from much of the richness of Jewish lives, it would be profoundly depressing if identifying Jewish fears and their impacts was all that a new history of postwar British Jews achieved. British Jewish communities cannot be explained or understood simply in terms of their anxieties; Jewish lives are much more interesting than that. While it will rear its ugly head in many places, I have declined in my book from offering a history of British antisemitism and have tried instead to dig for Jewish history in different places, which, I hope, will throw up new stories and focuses.

In an atmosphere of relative prosperity, safety and acceptance, Jewish lives sprawled in different directions across postwar Britain. As religious, family, sexual and social norms have changed, Jews have changed too, leading some to claim that British Jewry has unravelled into disparate threads. In 2001, a JPR report described British Jewry as ‘a community of communities’, following the thinking of ex-President of the Board of Deputies, Israel Finestein, that to speak of one community was ‘misleading’. Sociologist Barry Kosmin had made just such a suggestion over twenty years earlier, noting that ‘the plural term communities is increasingly a much more accurate description of the sociological reality than the singular noun’. While accepting the logic of this case, this book pushes in a different direction, arguing that there remains value in seeing and understanding the Jewish community as a unitary whole, and that the different paths taken do not diminish this case.

In this way, I partially follow the thinking of Jonathan Sacks, who, extensively vexed by this question during his time in office, observed, ‘Jews have often thought of themselves as irreparably divided, yet a sense of kinship remains’. Indeed, the case studies in my book point to a strong nexus of shared thinking, concerns, and values, despite the breadth of Jewish practice. Put another way, division and discord has historically been so constant in Jewish life that there is no compelling reason to worry about a coming apart now.

To test the case, my book consciously seeks to engage with the history of Jewish Britons who have lived at the edges of the Jewish community or even beyond its parameters, and who have not met stereotypical expectations of postwar Jews. It is in this way that my approach is consciously unorthodox. I want to complicate some of the dominant narratives of Jewish British history, to tell new stories that bring into Jewish history at least some of those who have frequently been left out. The book focuses on Jews that left Britain to live on kibbutz in Israel, on queer Jews and intermarried Jews, very frum Jews, progressive Jews and Israel-critical Jews. There is even a chapter on Messianic Jews.

Of course, whether Messianic Jews remain Jews is arguable, but it seems to me a productive argument which tells us both about the Jewish community and also about British society beyond it. On occasion in recent years, discussions regarding who counts as a Jew have become a matter of legal dispute, but generally they have stayed within the family; that is to say that we are largely free to bicker amongst ourselves. This may seem an obvious point to make but it bears consideration precisely because, as Cynthia Baker pointed out, ‘Those identified as Jews have not, in fact, owned the word Jew or controlled the discourse about it – or even much used the term – for most of the past two thousand years’. After the Second World War, in 1946, Jean Paul Sartre defined a Jew as someone that was so designated by others. In a text written in a Paris just liberated from the Nazis such a definition made obvious sense, but it does not hold true in the present day. I do not want to diminish the prevalence of antisemitism, or the struggles that Jewish people may face in contemporary Britain, but the stark difference between the present period and the 1930s and 1940s merits our attention. As David Cesarani wrote in the Huffington Post in 2015, comparing Jews in the present day with those of the 1930s ‘is not only inappropriate - it is inflammatory and insulting to the victims’.

This study of Jews in postwar Britain begins from Cesarani’s reminder, from a recognition that I write from a position of considerable privilege about communities whose histories now lie in their own hands, realities which contrast sharply with the great majority of the Jewish past. In this atmosphere, I do not seek refuge in an ivory tower above the history making. I want to contribute to it, to write a history of the British Jewish community that I am part of, and grew up in. In so doing, I hope to paint a historical picture that readers, Jewish and non-Jewish, will recognise, though my many forays into lecturing and teaching in this field suggest that I should not hold my breath! There are, after all, so many Jewish histories to be written, and the set I choose to write here will leave much unsaid and untold. I write in hope of a proliferation in British Jewish studies that will create a rich tapestry, so that we can begin to capture the complexity and diversity of the global Jewish past and contribute more broadly to the history of modern Britain.

An Unorthodox History: British Jews since 1945 by Gavin Schaffer is published by Manchester University Press