I think I was deep into my twenties before I realised that not every British celebration – a wedding, for example – sees the guests stand up and sing the national anthem. It was only in adulthood that I twigged that it was not normal for people at a private, unofficial party to rise to their feet and belt out “God Save the Queen.” It was only Jews who did that.
That custom has faded in recent years, but until not that long ago an Anglo-Jewish bar mitzvah or marriage would be marked by two consecutive toasts: one to the President of the State of Israel, which would be the cue for the singing of Hatikva, and the other – “the Loyal Toast” - to Her Majesty the Queen, which would prompt a chorus of the UK national anthem.
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Britain's Queen Elizabeth II meets Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks at a reception to mark the 21st anniversary of the Commonwealth Jewish Council at St James's Palace. (Photo by KIRSTY WIGGLESWORTH/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
That word “loyal” is telling. Other Britons saw no great need to demonstrate their loyalty to the monarch and, through her, the country: their allegiance could be taken as read. But Jews wanted to leave no room for doubt. Which helps explain why the siddur to be found on a shelf or kitchen drawer in most British Jewish households contains the Prayer for the Royal Family, for “our Sovereign Lady, Queen Elizabeth, Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, Charles, Prince of Wales…” – as it is written in my now triply outdated volume.
Lest any question mark hover over about the fidelity of Britain’s Jews, plenty of synagogues have that prayer, asking the Almighty to “preserve the Queen in life” so that she may “deal kindly and justly with all the House of Israel,” inscribed on a plaque on the wall, where it might be seen by any non-Jewish visitors who happen to drop by.
The thread of monarchy is woven into Jewish life in Britain just as it is into Britain itself, where the Queen’s head is on our money or stamps, where the Queen’s initials are on every post box. And perhaps that would be true whoever sat on the throne. But there was something else at work here too, a specific Jewish affection for Elizabeth II. Its source is no great mystery, it is the event that explains the enduring strength of the bond between her and the rest of the country too.
I’m speaking about the Second World War, which serves as nothing less than the foundational event of modern Britain. The country’s defiant and lonely stand against tyranny in 1940 - our “finest hour” – has become a kind of creation myth, the epic story out of which today’s Britain was forged. And the Queen was present at its creation. She was at her father’s side after he delivered the address which girded the nation for war – an episode rendered yet more mythic still by the movie The King’s Speech – and she was there on the Palace balcony with Winston Churchill to celebrate the victory over Adolf Hitler in May 1945. In our national life, she was the last human connection to those epochal events.
That mattered deeply for all Britons but, inevitably, it resonated in a particular way for Jews. It was noticeable that one of the early TV tributes to the late monarch included a short interview with Ivor Perl, who arrived in Britain as a 12-year-old survivor of Auschwitz. Having lost his mother and father to the Nazis, he said that he came to look to the royals as a kind of substitute family.
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King Charles (then Prince of Wales) with the family of Zigi Shipper and the artist Jenny Saville (right) at an exhibition of Seven Portraits: Surviving the Holocaust, which were commissioned by Prince Charles, Prince of Wales to pay tribute to Holocaust survivors, at The Queens Gallery, Buckingham Palace on January 24, 2022 in London. (Photo by Arthur Edwards - WPA Pool/Getty Images)
For many British Jews, especially older ones, the Queen became a symbol of Britain as a safe harbour, a place of stability that had not succumbed to the totalitarian fevers that consumed continental Europe. That impression was reinforced a bit by the knowledge that the Queen’s husband was the son of a woman deemed to be one of the Righteous Among the Nations: in wartime Athens, Philip’s mother, Princess Alice, hid members of the Cohen family from the Nazi occupiers. She is buried on the Mount of Olives.
To be sure, there is some myth-making in this mix. I wrote not long ago of the way Britain’s acceptance of 9,000 Jewish children in the Kindertransport rather overlooks Britain’s refusal to grant a place of safety to their parents, many of whom went on to be murdered. But myths are powerful things, whether their basis in fact is solid or not. And somehow Elizabeth came to incarnate that wartime story. The short video skit she made for her Platinum Jubilee earlier this summer, taking tea with Paddington Bear, reinforced it further. Paddington was a refugee, modelled by his creator on the children of the Kindertransport.
This association with Jews’ darkest hour - so strong that Jews were ready to overlook what might otherwise have been taken as a great slight, namely the Queen’s failure ever to visit Israel - will not entirely pass with her. The new king has credentials of his own on that score: he commissioned a series of portraits of Holocaust survivors, the story of those paintings told in a profoundly moving BBC documentary aired earlier this year. When British Jews felt beleaguered by the battle over antisemitism in the Labour Party, the prince invited hundreds of them to Buckingham Palace in what looked like a bid to lift their spirits a week before the 2019 general election. He has his own kippa, embroidered with the emblem of the Prince of Wales (that, like my siddur, will need updating).
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Then Prince Charles at the installation of Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, wearing his own embossed royal kippah (Pool/Getty Images)
But through no fault of his own, King Charles III does not have that direct, human connection to the fight against Hitler. How could he? The Queen’s passing is another reminder that the defining event of modern Britain - the war - like the defining event of European Jewry - the Shoah - is passing from memory into history. As it does so, much is changing - even those things that seemed as if they would last forever.
Jonathan Freedland is a columnist for the Guardian. His new play, Jews. In Their Own Words, opens at the Royal Court theatre in London on 20 September.
