To be Jewish in the Diaspora is less a search for God than for self, at least for me. In this, Corbyn and the Jew-baiters he attracted (I name them because they cannot name themselves) helped me, though they never meant to.
I entered the crisis of 2015 — the awakening of the ancient hatred, the end of the pause — uncertain, a Jew clinging to a rock at the edge of Europe. I wonder if I moved to west Cornwall because, if you forget the ocean, it is quite close to New York City, where I imagine Jews feel certain. Parts of my youthful disguise fell away, and I felt close to my ancestors. I understood them.
I wonder if I grew up in a fool’s paradise, and if it was necessary that I did: you can’t tell children they might be hated for being Jews.
I went to a girls’ school in a fake bright castle in London. It had battlements to protect us from... what? Careers? I didn’t belong at this school, which was for young ladies, and I did not want what it offered me. Ladies do not strive for anything. They do not have to. I wore a boater in summer and learned flower arranging. What for? To bend flowers to my will?
At seven I despised it, and my mother, who is a scholar, saw my misery and sent me to a better school, where we swapped shrubs for Latin. I was the only Jewish child at this school, and though, on my mother’s instructions, I said the Shema to myself while the others spoke the Lord’s Prayer, I felt alien. That queasy mixture of pride and shame.
I felt close to children from other ethnic minorities, though, being children, we never talked about it, because we did not consciously know it. But we shared the academic honours between us like boiled sweets. Tiny model immigrants. Then I went to an Oxford college, one of two Jews this time, and I developed full-blown alcoholism.
It is a truism that you understand yourself in retrospect. For instance, my favourite book at school was 1984, a book about the certainty of tyranny. I found it restful. In history, my hero was Benjamin Disraeli. I adored his ambition, his pride and his chutzpah. “I am the blank page between the Old and New Testaments,” he wrote. He was an adolescent depressive, then he invented himself.
I read about him obsessively. His father converted him to Christianity after fighting with the elders at his synagogue. What, I thought fondly, could be more Jewish? I was looking for myself in these stories, how to navigate the England I lived in when I am not English. My other Anglo-Jewish hero was Isaiah Berlin, mostly because he wrote the best essay on Disraeli.
Each part of the Diaspora is singular. England is too. We had the first blood libel in 1144 in Norwich; we were the first country to institute the wearing of the “Jew badge” in 1222 (there must be a PhD on Jew haters and fashion); in 1290 Edward I expelled us.
We came back under Cromwell, and then in waves, the Sephardi traders first, then the Jews of central Europe, then the great migration from Poland and Russia, then the brilliant Austrian and German Jews in the 1930s, carrying what remained of pre-war continental European culture in their baggage. Last month, the Church apologised for 1222 and the Chief Rabbi accepted the apology, because that’s what chief rabbis do.
We have been comparatively safe in England. Anti-Catholicism meant we were not useful scapegoats, because they were. That’s Jewish irony for you.
There is a tradition of trade and adventurism here which fits us. We were less involved in the Industrial Revolution than Jews were in continental Europe, and so we were less hated for the destruction of the old ways.
Anglo-Jewish communists never matched the Jewish Bolsheviks for blood; and always, the sea. I often wonder if, had the Nazis crossed the water in 1940 and installed a puppet government, the British would have fought for us. It’s an unanswerable question.
Anglo-Jews tend to mirror. That’s why I wore a boater and failed floristry. I used to feel shame in this, not pride. I used to think the real Jewish world was in continental Europe, except it wasn’t, and so where do we belong? What was I? Fake Englishwoman or fake Jew?
Then Corbyn came, the pause — the soporific uncertainty, the sense of living in stasis — ended, and the two parts of my identity fused: an Anglo-Jew.
Chaos brought me certainty, but that is Jewish too. I should have thought of my school days. I should have remembered Disraeli.
