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The Brexit vote has heightened passions right across the nation. Many have been left deeply upset and anxious. Families and friendships have been ripped asunder.
The temperature has been raised yet further by a reported rise in the number of attacks on immigrants and Jews. Some Remainers have blamed this on the Brexit campaign.
Such a charge is odious. The Brexiteers, of whom I was one, wanted to restore to Parliament control over UK immigration policy. They also wanted to reduce future immigration from currently unsustainable levels to manageable numbers.
Aspirations for both national self-government and a sustainable, coherent and cohesive society are legitimate. Neither rests on prejudice against immigrants or minorities.
Apart from the inflammatory poster depicting a long line of Syrian refugees, nothing in the Leave campaign could reasonably be deemed racist or xenophobic. For some Remainers, however, the very suggestion there should be any restriction at all on immigration is considered beyond the pale.
Among British Jews, this attitude tends to be widespread. One such writer claimed that British Jews who voted for Brexit were turning their backs on "fellow refugees" who not long ago, "could have been us or our parents", and that such a vote was "the most un-Jewish act imaginable".
This argument was as inappropriate as it was disgraceful. The total number of Jews who arrived in Britain around the turn of the last century is currently being exceeded every single year by the numbers now migrating to the UK.
In addition, Britain faces even more unmanageable pressure from the mass migration of peoples into Europe from the impoverished and tyrannised global south.
There seem to me to be two reasons for the post-Brexit rise in bigoted attacks. First, the Remain side repeatedly claimed that Leave was fuelled by racial hatred and even that it had spawned murderous neo-Nazi violence. Neo-Nazis could therefore tell themselves that, since half the country was said to be legitimising racist attacks, they could now perpetrate them with impunity.
Second, the lamentable failure by both Remain and Leave to state unequivocally that migrants already in Britain were welcome and here to stay allowed long-suppressed, festering feelings of frustration and rage to burst into the open.
As I have written for many years, riding roughshod over people's legitimate aspiration to govern themselves in a place they recognise as their own homeland is bound to fuel racism and fascism.
We can see the rise of such movements across Europe. The EU was formed to prevent fascism from ever returning; in fact, it has itself provoked it.
In Britain, the systematic denigration of national identity and the stigmatising of protest against this as racist or Islamophobic has also swelled support for bigoted violence.
Back in 1996, Greenwich council produced a remarkable report in response to the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence and two other black boys. One of the principal reasons for the rage of white youths, it said, was that they had no national identity to give their lives meaning. White children were "like cultural ghosts, haunting as mere absences the richly decorated corridors of multicultural society".
Two decades on, many more have been robbed of their historic cultural heritage. This was progressively dismantled on the basis that the nation was itself a racist construct. Legitimacy resided only in transnational institutions like the UN, the European Court of Human Rights and the EU.
Brexit signals the beginning of an end to this thinking. The nation is back, and with it the chance to reassert Britain's own historic cultural identity.
This makes a lot of Jews uneasy. They fear this identity will exclude them.
People may in fact have several identities, like Russian dolls stacked inside each other. But ultimately, a functioning society depends upon shared bonds of attachment; and those depend upon the existence of a common culture. Strong national identity doesn't produce bigotry. The absence of it does.
The astounding increase in open anti-Jewish feeling in Britain has occurred while it belonged to the EU. This hatred has mainly come not from neo-Nazis but from the progressive internationalist left. This despises the nation; no surprise, then, that it despises the Jewish nation, too.
The Jewish people are formed and sustained by their own culture and identity as a nation. Why then should any Jew want to deny the same to the British people? That, for all its looming difficulties, is what Brexit is really all about.
Melanie Phillips is a Times columnist