Who Do You Think You Are?
BBC1, Wednesday September 3
God on Trial
BBC2, Wednesday September 3
Another week, another How Jewish Do You Think You Are? This was the third subject in a row with Jewish ancestry, if you include mad old Boris Johnson, who has a little Litvak in him. And we still have David Suchet to look forward to. Why do they like us so much? (It's not often you ask that question.) Perhaps Jewish celebrities make better subjects; or it could be that Jewish ancestors make for better stories.
If last week's show on how Jerry Springer's grandmothers were murdered by the Nazis made for harrowing viewing, Esther Rantzen's investigation was more like a Victorian detective novel.
She set out with two questions. The first concerned a half-whispered story about one of her forebears - tales of bigamy and even murder. Her other query surrounded her father: why was his middle name Barnato? Could there be a connection with the fabulously rich 19th-century diamond-dealer of the same name? This being WDYTYA?, we kind of knew already.
Rantzen discovered that her great-grandfather, a solicitor called Montague Richard Levison, had got into a spot of bother when a client's money went missing. Within a very short space of time, so had Levison. Rantzen was shown a copy of The Times which stated that Mr Levison, a solicitor "of the Jewish persuasion", has absconded following charges of fraud. Our Esther was visibly shocked. At one point, I wondered whether she was going to do the proper Victorian thing and swoon.
In fact, every discovery about the life of Levison was accompanied by an entertainingly over-the-top reaction from Rantzen. He disappeared to France, then California, where he may or may not have married bigamously, before returning to Britain and re-applying for his citizenship (the police report declared him a man of sound character - clearly the database was on the blink that day). Later he married a woman 40 years younger than himself. Oh, and did I mention that, as an 18-year-old, Montague had accidentally shot dead a domestic servant with his father's gun? Esther's face was a picture.
Meanwhile, on the Rantzen side of the family, she was attempting to discover how her great-grandfather Abraham had gone from bankrupt cap-maker in Spitalfields to prosperous diamond-broker in Maida Vale in a very short period of time. It turned out that his wife, Sarah, had a rather entrepreneurial brother who at some point in the 19th century had changed his name from Barnett Isaacs to Barney Barnato and become the richest diamond-dealer on the planet. He eventually sold his concerns in South Africa to Cecil Rhodes for £5.3 million, which at the time was the biggest cheque ever. Did Abraham and Rebecca keep in with multi-millionaire Barnato? You bet they did, and when he died they were left a tidy sum in the will. It beats any story Esther ever had on That's Life.
Meanwhile, at the same time on BBC2, the inmates of an Auschwitz blockhouse were deciding whether God should be held responsible for their fate. Frank Cottrell Boyce had based his 90-minute drama on the (probably apocryphal) story that God had been tried and found guilty by those about to be gassed in the death camp.
Given the regime, it was unlikely that inmates would have had the time or energy to conduct such a hearing but, suspending disbelief, this was an absorbing drama asking one of the most pertinent questions of our time. If there was a God, how could He have allowed the Holocaust to happen?
The matter was debated by a cast led by Sir Antony Sher (who has already acted in striped pyjamas as Primo Levi), Rupert Graves and Jack Shepherd. The characters, from rabbi to physicist to law professor to criminal, debated whether God had broken His covenant to the Jewish people - its climax was Sher's speech claiming that God had always performed terrible deeds and that he was now doing so for the Nazis instead the Jews.
Once God' culpability had been determined, one of those condemned in the selections asked a rabbi what they should do now.
"Now," said the rabbi, "we pray."