Opinion
For Jews, the Queen represented everything that we love about this country
The JC leader on the passing of the Queen
September 9, 2022 11:55
2 min read
The JC leader on the passing of the Queen
September 9, 2022 11:55Every so often reports emerge from Silicon Valley of new research into the ability to download human memories. Futuristic – and slightly frightening – as the idea seems, one can nonetheless bemoan the absence of such technology today, because the death of the Queen also means the death of an astonishing 70-year history that only she knew.
The Queen was, of course, a public figure, with a public role that defined her purpose. But much of what she did was also intensely private. In her seven decades on the throne, Elizabeth II met almost every significant figure on the planet – meetings whose content have always remained private. That part of her life, and her reign, is now gone forever.
Since her death tributes have already been paid from almost every conceivable source. That is as true for the Jewish community as it is for the rest of the country. Everything that has been said about her – that she was the fulcrum through which our nation came together, that she was an ever-present in our lives, that she exemplified all that is good about the United Kingdom – applies all round.
For Jews, however, her reign also has a special significance. Under the first Queen Elizabeth Jews were still banned from the country by the 1290 Edict of Expulsion, as we were until Cromwell. In the then Princess Elizabeth’s teenage years, Jews were being murdered across the Channel by the Nazis. Her reign, however, has been that rarest of periods for Jews, a period of intense calm, in which our loyalty to Britain and to the Royal Family has been reciprocated at every level from the mundanity of day-to-day life among the Jewish community to the highest echelons of power and society.
Our people’s history has been one of integration and apparent safety almost always followed by the upending – often suddenly – of everything. Across millennia all that has really changed has been the timescale of that upending. And with the Holocaust still so recent, it would be reckless and complacent to assert that, uniquely, history has now ended.
But there is something indeed unique about the constitutional monarchy in which we live. The combination of a monarchic historical line of stability with the rule of law by the monarch in Parliament has given us that most prized of all conditions: safety. And we have built on that safety to expand it into calm, to health and to prosperity.
This is perhaps best summed by Daniel Finkelstein – scion of a family of refugees, survivors of the Nazis and Soviets, which has made an enormous contribution to British public life. Lord Finkelstein’s grandmother, herself a refugee from Lwow (now Lviv) and political imprisonment, would say that "while the Queen is safe in Buckingham Palace, we are safe in Hendon Central".
This is the central point about Britain – and why for Jews the Queen has always mattered so much. It is why every week we prayed for her and the Royal Family and why, instinctively, we have understood the tremendous, almost unprecedented boon we have been blessed with of living in such a country.
Not that this is about the Queen as such. For all the deserved tributes and praise, she was the first to grasp that the service and purpose of her life was as the embodiment of a historical thread. She was merely the person who by birth was chosen to represent it. (That is not to diminish it: a life of service and duty, of sublimating her own path to that of the monarchy as an institution is almost impossible for the rest of us to imagine, and yet she managed it for more than 70 years.)
So yes, everything that has been said about the Queen can be said doubly for our community. But for Jews, she represented what we love about this country, why we understand how privileged we are over our forebears to be here, and why we now say, in all sincerity and as forcefully as ever, God Save The King.
