William Shakespeare caused the Holocaust. Charles Dickens helped. And the citizens of Norwich.
Am I exaggerating? Yes. But the creation of Shylock and Fagin cemented the pre-existing trope of Jews and money in the popular imagination. Because English language and culture so comprehensively permeated the planet for centuries (firstly with the printing press in 1440 and then with the British Empire), British writers, policymakers and opinion leaders helped to distribute and reinforce across Europe the notion of Jewish ‘otherness’ and even social unattractiveness — such that when the Nazis arrived to act on these culturally institutionalised perceptions, it was a not uncommon belief that ‘they had it coming to them’.
In 1144, the community of Norwich invented the idea that Jews sacrifice gentile children to mix their blood into matzah for Pesach. This was how they explained the disappearance of a 12-year old called William. His death was never solved and no-one was tried for his murder. But a wondrous new myth, dripping in religious dogma and visual possibilities, was born: the blood libel. William of Norwich was canonised as a Christian martyr and became the face that launched a thousand blood libels across Europe.
This is why the Ministry of Information’s famous injunction to “Keep Calm and Carry On” in World War II included turning a blind eye to the Nazi mission to eradicate European Jewry. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden made a speech in the Commons on 17 December 1942 condemning the Nazis’ “bestial policy”. The House rose for a minute’s silence to mourn the victims. So Britain’s refusal, for example, to bomb Auschwitz when the opportunity arose in 1944 — or even the supply lines to it — is famously hard to understand. Dominic Kennedy, writing in The Times in August 2018, said: “A long withheld file, called ‘Antisemitism in Great Britain’ and disclosed by the National Archives, shows that officials confronted by reports of rising prejudice decided that Jews themselves were to blame”.
Various other Whitehall memos reveal why the British government actively chose to be a bystander to the genocide it knew was taking place. Memo number FO 371/32682 by Richard Law, Under-Secretary of State, recommended turning a blind eye to the possibility of saving Jews from the death camps and Einsatzgruppen because popular antisemitism would rise if Jews were seen to be treated differently than any other refugees. In his Times piece, Kennedy published a copy of a memo dated 27th May 1943 from Cyril Radcliffe, the Ministry of Information’s Director-General, quoting the “evidently general feeling that the Jews were largely responsible for their own troubles”. (Radcliffe, it must be said, was not of this view and tried to dissuade others of it.)
The Holocaust took place in some 18 European nations and Britain was not one of them. But by default of its Empire, and its language becoming the global lingua franca, England perhaps played the single biggest role, influencing the widest number of societies, for the largest number of centuries, of any Christian nation state on Earth in the assumption of negative and untrue beliefs about Judaism and Jews.
In the Dark Ages after the fall of the Roman Empire, the early Church Fathers made it a principle of Christian faith to actively vilify Judaism. And in the Middle Ages, this was extended to vilifying, persecuting and murdering Jewish people. Two spectacular English actions formed a major part of the propaganda: the blood libel and Richard the Lionheart’s Crusades. These are seminal events that helped intensify the world’s view of Jews. The uptake of the English language then helped distribute more widely and reinforce more deeply the gamut of Church-created myths about the religion it ‘supplanted’.
So deeply entrenched in the popular imagination (not to mention national legislature, politics, the arts and even church walls, with defamatory carvings of a defeated Synagoga and triumphant Ecclesiasta carved into cathedrals across England and Europe) was this world view of Jews that by the 1940s, murderous violence towards them was understandable to many. England must take a bow for the starring role it played.
On the other hand, allow me to argue against myself. My name was originally ‘Kawa’, Yiddish and Polish for ‘coffee’. The Kawas came to England from Kalisz in Poland around 1878, renamed themselves Cave, and have had the opportunity to live in peace and relative prosperity ever since. My family story typifies the tolerance and largely only gentle ribbing that the descendants of some 150,000 Jewish immigrants from that period have experienced in this still wonderfully decent and sanguine country. It has enabled us to practise a benign dual identity without contradiction. To be proudly English and proudly Jewish comes naturally to me.
I’ve always felt that for every Moseley, Mitford or Corbyn there are ten Ian Forsyths. I had the privilege of interviewing this 96-year old former reconnaissance soldier for the first in our new webcast series, Britain: Holocaust Bystander or Upstander? Corporal Forsyth, then aged 21, was one of the first soldiers to enter Belsen at liberation. To this day, he cannot but weep at what he saw. It changed his life — which he has dedicated to teaching schoolchildren about what he witnessed.
In that same webcast, the Holocaust survivor Mala Tribich MBE explained how the kindness of her British liberators at Belsen “went beyond the call of duty”. After they nursed her back to life from typhus, she was taken on outings to the woods, given fancy sailor outfits and taught to dance. Mala (Sir Ben Helfgott’s very elegant, articulate and dignified sister) has never wavered in her admiration for and gratitude to the people of England.
Another magnificent Brit who features in the series is Reverend James Parkes, an Anglican priest who stuck his neck out so far in the 1930s in his defence of Jews that he endured an assassination attempt — not in England, but in Switzerland.
He survived WWII and went on to co-found the Council of Christians and Jews in 1947.
It is perhaps in Parkes’ footsteps that two unlikely lads and their mother founded Britain’s first place of Holocaust remembrance, in 1995. The remarkable Smith brothers grew up as Methodists and, after a Holy Land Tour which took them to Yad Vashem, decided to change the course of their life, setting up the unique place I now have the intense gratification of running, in an attempt to encourage a sense of Christian responsibility for the Holocaust.
I haven’t seen any Christians do that in Poland or Hungary. So insightful and intellectually forceful has Dr Stephen Smith MBE been that he was chosen to be the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust’s first chairman, then plucked by Steven Spielberg to run the Shoah Foundation in LA. Stephen tells us about the Christian roots of the National Holocaust Museum on the programme.
All in all, I am not sure Whitehall got it right in 1942.
Had the government told the British people about the death camps, I suspect they would have urged it to do something. I’d say it is not at the individual human level that Britons are typically pre-disposed to anti-Jewish racism. Rather, it is in pursuit of grand adventures where Britain has come institutionally unstuck in its historical treatment of Jewish people:
l In the Middle and Early Modern Ages, spreading the Christian gospel, the by-product of which was spreading Jew hate.
l In the Early Modern and Modern Ages, building an empire — and therefore Anglo-Christian dominion as part of its ‘cultural supremacy’.
l In the Twentieth Century, controlling the Middle East for oil — and therefore reneging on Balfour, creating a generation of post-Holocaust refuseniks to Mandate Palestine and helping to stoke a sorry legacy of Arab-Jewish (and now Muslim-Jewish) conflict.
In a reversal of perceived roles, might it not be Jews but British rulers who, through the centuries — and like every other empire-building nation state — have been obsessed with wealth and global influence?
‘Britain: Holocaust Bystander or Upstander?’ All episodes available to watch at holocaust.org.uk/britain
