Why do people care about dead Jews more than the living ones?

By 1918, indeed, it was seen as a relic of the Kaiser’s autocracy that would have no place in a democratic society. Finally, after 1945, the enormity of the Holocaust meant that it would now disappear for ever.

But antisemitism is a virus with a remarkable ability to mutate. It does so by mimicking the prevailing culture of the age. In the era of clerical dominance, Jews were accused of killing Christ. In the late 19th century, the age of Darwin, they were alleged to belong to an inferior “race”. In the Soviet Union, they were accused of being agents of international capitalism, while elsewhere they were said to be agents of communism.

Today, however, concern for the protection of human rights is a dominant part of our culture. So adherents of what Nick Cohen has called Islington “dinner party antisemitism” can conceal their prejudice by “criticising” — in effect seeking to de-legitimise — Israel, the only country in the Middle East which makes the slightest pretence of actually respecting human rights. We are not antisemitic, they say, only anti-Zionist.

A few “critics” of Israel have gone further. During the recent conflict with Hamas, Jews in Golders Green were asked by a group who had travelled there why Israel had not learnt from the Holocaust. Lessons, apparently, needed to be learnt not by the descendants of the perpetrators and the bystanders but by descendants of the victims. It is as if Afro-Americans were told that it is not the descendants of the slaveowners but they themselves who need to learn the lessons of slavery.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the policies of successive Israeli governments, Jews in Britain, though generally supportive of Israel, are not responsible for these policies. They neither live in Israel nor vote in Israeli elections. Many in Britain, after all, are — rightly — critical of the policies of the Russian and Chinese governments. But no one believes that this justifies attacks on Russian or Chinese people living in Britain.

Some argue that Jews cannot be exempt from “criticism”. They must indeed expect it, so it is said, now that memories of the Holocaust are fading, as if antisemitism were somehow a normal state of affairs, interrupted only fleetingly by short periods of tolerance.

Dana Horn writes in an American context, in response to recent outbreaks of antisemitism there. But many in Britain will of course remember the Corbyn episode, now fortunately fading into the distance. Still, if at the beginning of the 21st century someone had predicted that in 2019, Her Majesty’s Opposition would earn a rebuke from the normally apolitical Chief Rabbi, he would have been regarded as being remote from reality.

But the Chief Rabbi felt impelled to declare shortly before the 2019 election that “a new poison — sanctioned from the top — has taken root in the Labour Party”, adding that, “the overwhelming majority of Jews are gripped by anxiety”. This view was confirmed by survey evidence which indicated that 47 per cent of British Jews would seriously think of emigrating to Israel were Corbyn to enter Downing Street.

The period 2015-2019 is the only one in post war Britain in which Jews, to quote the Chief Rabbi again, “endured the deep discomfort of being at the centre of national political danger”. Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary in the 1945 Attlee government, had thought it prudent to conceal his antisemitism, though not always successfully. Even in the 1930s, in the depths of the depression, although Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists caused great distress and even fear in many Jewish communities, particularly in the East End of London, they were negligible as an electoral force. By contrast with the British National Party in more recent times, the British Union of Fascists never contested a constituency in a general election and never won a local council seat.

But perhaps the Corbyn episode should now be forgotten? For Britain, after all, remains amongst the most philo-semitic of countries, with quite negligible support for antisemitism amongst the general public. Most voters, one suspects, neither know nor care that MPs such as Margaret Hodge and Grant Shapps are Jewish.

And in addition, Keir Starmer has promised to eradicate the poison from his party. But one cannot suppress a nagging doubt. Would he have been so keen had Labour won the election and he had become a Cabinet minister in a Corbyn-led government?

There is, however, one aspect of recent events that should give us pause. It is the insouciance which the educated classes displayed towards the possibility of a Corbyn regime. For although Labour was heavily defeated in the 2019 election, surveys indicated that amongst graduates, it led the Conservatives by 14 per cent.

In the 19th century, the philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that the learned classes should have extra votes: six for those with professional qualifications, and for graduates “at least as many”. Until 1950, graduates did enjoy a second vote in university constituencies. Had Mill’s system or anything like it been in operation in 2019, Jeremy Corbyn would now be in Downing Street. Antisemitism, August Bebel declared, was the socialism of fools. But many of Corbyn’s supporters, although calling themselves socialists, were far from being fools.

In People Love Dead Jews, Dana Horn says that she mistook, “the enormous public interest in past Jewish suffering for a sign of respect for living Jews. I was wrong”. Her book, while rambling, in places almost incoherent and in parts slightly paranoiac, is perhaps best understood as an inchoate cry of rage. For, after all, the only real lesson to be drawn from commemoration of dead Jews is that live Jews, like everybody else, should be allowed to live freely and without fear in the countries of their choice.

Vernon Bogdanor is Professor of Government at King’s College, London and a member of the International Advisory Council of the Israel Democracy Institute