Jeremy Rosen
The Rise and Fall of Anglo Jewry

Jeremy Rosen | The Rise and Fall of Anglo Jewry | 08.03.21

- We’ll give them a couple of, we’ll give them a minute or two to come in. You know what, every time I turn my, every time I look at participants and I turn it on, I just, I think of when I was a student to going into the grade hall to write exams, you know? And file in and here, it’s just amazing how you just at the click of a button, you just see hundreds of people coming in at a time, just jumping up, it’s absolutely incredible.

• This sounds amazing.

• Isn’t it incredible? So it’s beautiful day in Manhattan.

• Well, at least it’s not, it was a bit overcast though.

• It’s nice. I went for a walk and then I took my dad for a walk. I went for a walk earlier, I went for a walk half past six and it was just beautiful outside and then I took my dad a bit later and it was so, just so nice because it’s just not hot.

• Right, yeah, how’s your dad doing?

• Very well, thanks.

• [Jeremy] Oh, that’s good.

• Good walking weather.

• Yeah.

• So, okay Jeremy, I think it’s two minutes past the hour, so I’m going to hand over to you, I’m very keen to hear about the rise and fall of Anglo Jewry. Have we fallen?

• I think so, I think so. From its heights, but it depends how you define its heights.

• I want to know where at what level we’ve landed. Well, I sort of am South African and British, so I.

• You keep your options open.

• I’m keeping my options open, I do love London and Britain. All right, thank you, over to you, thanks.

• So ladies and gentlemen, I want to talk about the rise and fall of Anglo Jewry, but I want to start with a little story that illustrates the overall theme of my message. In 1953, my father moved the school that he’d founded from Newbury to a place called Mongewell Park south of Oxford at a town called Wallingford. Oxford was where the oxen crossed the River Thames, Wallingford is where you walked across the River Thames. And the estate was a lovely estate, it had once been the home of the son of the American millionaire, Jay Gould, taken over by the RAF and my father found it rather abandoned and moved the school there. And on the estate there was a small Norman church. And when the builders were coming in to discover to lay down foundations for a new building, they found an old Roman well in next door to this little church. And the theory was that Mongewell Park was originally called Monkswell Park.

The well of the monks because it belonged to a famous Abbott of Saint Aubins at a certain stage and the assumption was there’d been a little monastery there. There was a very big settlement of Jews in Wallingford during the Norman period. It was one of the biggest Jewish communities in England. And as I’m going to explain, in 1292, Edward I expelled the Jews from England, but before he expelled them from England, he expelled them from different centres and towns at the request of the local church, the Pope had asked. And there was a Jewish community in Wallingford that was kicked out at the request of the church.

And the myth went was that it was the monks of Monkswell Park who had asked Edward to expel the Jews from Wallingford. And here we were a thousand years almost later, a Jewish school in the very place where the monks had asked the Jews to get out from. A thousand years later, the school survived and in 1997, unfortunately it closed and it moved, and the Jews from Wallingford had disappeared. So in this little story of which I played a small part, you have the history of the Jews, they come, they go, they come, they go, they move on, they establish themselves somewhere else.

So in England, there were Jews at the time of Julius Caesar, 2000 years ago. We actually have discovered a mikvah dating back to that period. But then they kind of disappear off the map for a while. But they were there coming in at various stages as visitors, as merchants. There were tin mines in Cornwall where they used to come for bringing imports and exports even from the Middle East. So much so that there was once in Victorian England, a society called the British Israel Society that believed that originally the 10 lost tribes came to England. And their basis for saying this was, first of all, the Hebrew Britannia is made up of two words, Britt, a covenant Anya of boats, so Britannia is a covenant of boats when the Jews came there, or Brit ish is a covenant of men. And in Cornwall there was a town called Marazion, still is. And Marazion means I miss Zion.

Now, most of this is random speculation. The British Israel Society disappeared, nobody takes it seriously at all, but it just shows the myths that can develop around Jewish settlement. The main settlement of Jews came in to Britain with Norman the Conqueror in 1066. And he brought the Jews in as his financiers and businessmen to develop businesses in Britain, which was almost entirely agricultural. The position of the Jews was that they were the property, so to speak, of William the Conqueror, it’s not as though they had citizenship or any rights or any rules. And one of the problems was that William the conqueror always needed money, and all his successor kings needed money. And one of the places they got the money from was the Jews and that’s why they were so important to the kings.

The trouble was that the barons were always fighting the king over money, just think of the Magna Carta and the Barons, also to some extent, borrowed from the Jews. The problem was that if you died, your debts automatically went to the king. And if they were in debt to the Jews, then those debts would go to the king. So the barons and the kings were always caught in this conflict with the poor Jews in the middle. But for a while they did very well. The trouble was that in addition to the Barons, kings also had to deal with the church. Think of Thomas of Becket.

And there was always competition between the church and the king. So the more the king liked the Jews, the more the barons and the church hated them. And agitation against the Jews was something that began to develop in the 12th century quite seriously and significantly. So there were a list of very wealthy Jews in England at this time. Some of the richest Jews lived either in York in the north or in Lincoln or in London or in Oxford, all of them playing an important role in commerce. And they were protected theoretically by the king.

So for example, when Richard the Lionheart comes back from the Crusades and he is crowned in Westminster Cathedral, and the Jews come to present their gifts to him as their protector. Before they could get there, the crowd outside whipped up by the barons, attacked them and killed them. That was a sort of position the Jews kept on finding themselves in. Not only that, but there was also the question of the church, and I’m sorry to say it is in England that the first blood libel is, was ever recorded. This blood libel in England was in 1130, the claim that Jews killed Christian children to take their blood, drink it as part of the four cups of wine and bake it, the blood, their bones into their mutzes, pretty ironic, given that sounds a bit like the communion, but nevertheless, that’s what happened.

And it wasn’t just the famous murder that took place in Lincoln, there was Norwich. In six towns in England in the 12th century, there were blood libels where Jews were killed on the grounds that they were killing Christian children. The trouble increased as time went on and as the kings screwed more and more money out of the Jews and the Jews, their wealth was confiscated, they lost almost of it, there was little they could do. And that was the moment at which Edward I decided, okay, for years the Pope has been agitating to get me to expel the Jews, let’s get rid of them once and for all, and 1292 was when thanks to Pope’s pressure on Edward I, the Jews were expelled, no more Jews in England from that moment on. The next mention we have of Jews actually in England comes with Henry VIII.

They’re still not allowed in, although there is some story that they were coming in as Catholics from Spain and hiding their Judaism. But as you know, Henry VIII had a little bit of a problem with Catherine of Aragon. Catherine of Aragon had been married to his elder brother Arthur. When he died, she was married to him because Henry VIII was very concerned to keep the alliance going with Spain. But when he wanted to get rid of her, he had a problem. Technically he was married and he was married with papal authority and he wanted to get out of this. And somebody whispered his ear that you know, there is a law in the Bible, which the Christians have been relied on, which says that when a brother dies childless, then the next brother has to marry the surviving female, the law of levirate, the Yibbum. Goodie thought, Henry VII, this allows me to marry Henry VIII, Henry who would be Henry VIII through Arthur.

But now they wanted to get rid of her, he had a problem. And he had heard that amongst the Jews, they had forbidden this levirate marriage. They had now made it a matter of principle that you don’t marry the brother, the wife of the dead brother to the next brother. So he asked for information and he wrote to some very important rabbis in Northern Italy who came back and said, yes, that’s true, we don’t allow it anymore. Fantastic, he said, I’m going with this to the Pope. Unfortunately, the Pope who didn’t want to agree said, ah yes, hold on, do you know what the Jews are like?

There’s a different opinion. You go and ask the rabbis in Venice, the rabbis in Venice were the Sephardi rabbis and they hadn’t put a ban on this second marriage, they hadn’t put a ban on any extra marriages, they were still in favour. And so they were used by Henry VIII as his authority. But unfortunately, the Pope was not impressed. And even though Henry VIII actually bought a copy of the Talmud in order to do research, unfortunately as we know, it didn’t work, he took the law to his own hands, and poor old Catherine of Aragon was put into exile more or less but she still remained in England. Kings Henry VIII, Elizabeth, Mary, Edward, James I, Charles I, and then we have Cromwell.

Cromwell was very much a man of his own mind. And he was very interested in expanding commerce in England to meet the wealth, both of Spain on the one hand, and the rising wealth of Holland on the other. And he had heard that there was some desire for Jews to come and settle in England. Now previously there’d been Jews, as I mentioned, disguising themselves officially as Catholics. But since the expulsion from Spain, many of the Jews had come first from Spain to Portugal and Portugal to England as Catholics and England across to Antwerp, which was the new industrial centre, part of the Roman Empire under Emperor Charles and very Catholic. And so they were officially still Catholics except Holland then began to split into a Protestant north and a Catholic south.

And Jews suddenly found that in Amsterdam, they could come out and be Jewish. And the head of the Amsterdam Jewish community was a very important rabbi called Manasseh ben Israel and he had written an interesting book, which he had dedicated to Cromwell. And it was called Spez Israel, the Hope of Israel. And this book was an argument that according to the Christians, the Messiah would not come a second time until the Jews were properly scattered around the world as a punishment for the having rejected Jesus. And therefore, if Cromwell would invite Jews to come back to England, then this would hasten the advent of the Messiah, which he was very clear about.

And Cromwell like Manasseh ben Israel, and he said, okay, I’m going to put this to parliament. And he put the argument to parliament, there was a special gathering in parliament to argue the case at 1655 in which he was opposed by the church and by the merchants. The merchants said, we don’t want the Jews, there’s going to be competition. The church said, we don’t want them. If you let the Jews back, they’re going to convert us all to Christianity, they’ll forbid us eating pork, they’ll force us all to circumcise, we can’t have it. And in effect, they blocked it. And there was no official agreement.

But Cromwell turned a blind eye and it was under him that slowly Jews began to come back. And indeed, in 1656, barely a year or so afterwards, the diaries, William Peeps went to visit a little synagogue in the East end. At this moment, the only Jews in England are Sephardi, Spanish and Portuguese who’ve come either directly or indirectly from Amsterdam. This was a problem for the Jews in the Senate, they weren’t officially recognised. And as a result, their merchants had problems because the tax in England and the customs kept on taxing them as foreigners, and they kept on appealing to the authorities to give them rights and to protect them.

And it was Charles II, the one whose father had been locked off, who finally in 1664, granted not citizenship but something called denizenship, you are allowed officially to live and you come under our laws. It took another 50 years before slowly some of the Ashkenazi started coming into England from Eastern, Central, mainly from Germany, but from Europe. So at this moment, the Sephardi community, the Spanish and Portuguese community in London is small but very powerful, big dealers financiers in with a king supporting the king. One of the most significant of these financiers was able to get permission to increase the number of synagogues, so you get Sephardi and an Ashkenazi.

But the Sephardi had banned Ashkenazi from living into their, going into their synagogues, that’s why the Ashkenazi had to set up their own. So we Jews were at each other’s throats even then, I’m better than you, I’m a real Jew, you, not so much. But the Jews had started coming in from originally the Marranos of Spain and Portugal really were ambivalent about their Jewish identity. And slowly more of them began to assimilate as indeed they did in Germany in the 18th century as they got more freedom, they began to marry out in order to achieve status and positions in the Christian communities. We have cases, for example, where the daughter of a Spanish merchant, one very nice lady called Mary Breta converted to Christianity, her father said, well, I’m sorry, I’m not going to support you.

She went to court and the court insisted that Jews had an obligation to support their children, even if they converted to Christianity, and not only that, but Jews had to support Christian missionaries as well. And then there was a famous case of Kitty DaCosta Villareal who sued her father for his fortune and claimed that as I am now a Christian, I have a right to this fortune. And this was, if you like, the handicap that the Jews lived under during the 18th century. They didn’t have official status, although they were allowed to stay, but the law was heavily tilted against them by the Christian authorities. To make matters worse, Jews were also now being regarded as troublesome new immigrants.

There was a case of a man called Yule who had killed some widow, a Jewish man from Germany and he was hung. There were a bunch of thieves, I suppose maybe that’s where Dickens got his, his Oliver twist information from, and they were also hanged for crimes. So there were poor Jews who were criminals. But at the same time, there were other Jews who were aristocratic, beginning to move into aristocratic circles.

The result of this is slowly that many people within the establishment of England decided that it was time to give Jews some rights, some citizenship, positions, appointments, lawyers, doctors, whatever it was. And so it was that in 1753, parliament suggested the Jew bill and the Jew bill was a bill that would give rights to Jews in England the same as anybody else. And this bill was actually passed by parliament under Lord Newcastle. It passed the Lords, except that all the bishops voted against it. It was signed by King George.

But when it got out, the uproar was so great, the church objected, the merchants objected, the politicians were frightened they would lose their position in parliament and this bill of 1753 was repealed. It was actually taken back and cancelled despite having passed. To make matters slightly more complicated, the richest Jew at the time was one of the wealthiest Jews in England, it was a man called Gideon Samson. And Gideon Samson was very close to the king and the aristocrats, and he was looking forward to being appointed a baron as in due course he was, and he opposed the Jewish bill.

He says, no, we don’t want to be treated differently, we don’t want this special treatment, it’s only going to whip up anti-Semitism. And my attitude is, keep things down, don’t make a fuss. And that attitude of Gideon Samson basically became the primary motivation of Jewish attitudes to anti-Semitism in England. Don’t make a fuss, keep quiet, we’ll deal with it in our way. Slowly, more and more synagogues were coming up in London in the end of the 18th century. One of them was a synagogue called the Western synagogue.

The western synagogue was started off in the east end, it moved to the west end thus became known as the Western, and then it moved to towards the Edgeware Road. The Western synagogue was an independent synagogue, it didn’t join any other groups. There had already been a merger of some of the Ashkenazi synagogues under the Great Synagogue of the East end, the Sephardin, the Spanish and Portuguese, were in a world of their own, they didn’t want to have anything to do with the Ashkenazi, that wasn’t their business.

Slowly, their numbers were declining and the numbers of the Ashkenazi were rising. And that was going to become the characteristic of the Jewish community in England. The western synagogue was independent ‘cause it had its own independent burial grounds. I became the rabbi of the Western synagogue, Orthodox synagogue, but independent, not under any chief rabbi or Beth din or anything like that. I became the rabbi there in 1985. And they had a burial ground and they’d been offered this burial ground that had been out of use for about 60 years.

And they were offered money for it, but they would have to disinter the bones and move them either to Israel or to another place, and that was a big fight that was going on. But in order to get permission to move the bones, they had to trace the relatives in order to get their permission of some 350 bodies. And that’s what they did, and you know what they discovered? They discovered that by this time, there wasn’t one single Jewish descendant of any one of the western synagogue Jews of the 18th century.

They had all assimilated and disappeared. And that also is a sign of the transient nature of Anglo Jewry. But of course what changed this was massive immigration in the 19th century where all of a sudden, more and more Jews are coming in from the outside. And it’s getting so serious that in the 19th century, the Jews decide to organise themselves. Up until that moment, there was something called the Board of Deputies, which was a kind of a mini Jewish parliament, but it really had no power, not much authority.

But in 1804, they decided, we need to have a religious authority and so they established a Beth din a Jewish court of law, and they established it at this moment, independently of any, shall we say, chief Rabbi. There were various rabbis who held this title, but none of them had the full control over and power. That didn’t begin to happen until the establishment of what we’ll call the United Synagogue. The United Synagogue was founded in the middle of the 19th century to bring all the orthodox Ashkenazi synagogues together under a chief rabbi who would be the authority of Anglo Jewry, and during the time of the Victorian era, there were two rabbis called Adler, there was the Father Adler, the son Adler, who became the chief rabbis of England and ruled with an iron fist.

For example nobody in the United Synagogue, apart from them, was allowed to call themselves rabbi, they could only call themselves reverend. And every appointment had to come with their authority. And they wore what we call canonical English canon dress looking like priests and gators and they tried to imitate the Church of England with its lay leadership and with its different hierarchies. And all the main synagogues of the London area belonged Orthodox to the United Synagogue, and the United Synagogue was the biggest and most powerful of all the organisations in Anglo Jewry.

There were small others outside, but none of them carried that power and that authority that the chief Rabbi Adler had managed to impose. And this was a time remember, of the rising British empire where the empire extended to South Africa, to Australia, to Canada, to all kinds of different places, Hong Kong, the far East. And so all Jewish communities within the empire, the British Empire then came under the authority of the English Chief Rabbis Adler. And then in due course, under their successor chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz. There were attempts and there were small alternative synagogues developing during this time, the reform community set up as an alternative synagogue.

In addition to that, there was also much later on something called the Liberal, which was even more reform than Reform in England. So in a sense, Reform in England tried to be a bit more like the conservatives and liberal tried to be more like Reform so the names get a bit blurred between them, but they were very small. At this stage, the end of the Victorian era, there’s this massive influx into England from Eastern Europe. And the Eastern European Jews of course don’t have much patience for this United Synagogue. And so they set up their own little organisations, more orthodox than the United Synagogues.

The first one was the Federation of Synagogues, which was established by Lord Montague for the Moral Orthodox. And then came others, the Machzikei Hadas, the Hadas, and these other small little synagogues merely really were mainly focused around Stanford Hill and the east end of London. And they had very little impact outside of that area. Outside of that area, the United Synagogue was the dominant influence. And the Jewish community rose to its heights, roughly speaking, 600,000 at one stage, 600,000 Jews in England.

If you ask me how many there are in England today, some people will tell you 300,000, some people will tell you it’s even less than that. I’m sorry, but my phone has just gone off and I dunno, we’d get rid of it. So this was it in its great power. Slowly, I forgot to mention it took a long time before the Jews were able to get equality. It didn’t happen until the middle of the 19th century. It wasn’t until 1858 that Lionel Rothschild was able to take his seat in Parliament because until that time, you couldn’t get into Parliament if you wouldn’t take an oath on the New Testament.

So it took a long time for the Jews to get recognised officially, even though the Rothschild married into the English aristocracy, became part of the aristocracy, and the English Jewish aristocracy also took responsibility for the United Synagogue, even though most of them were not Orthodox, and the United Synagogue officially was Orthodox. This group of families known as the cousinhood, they followed what you know will take the, the concept of nobles oblige. It’s our job to look after the peasants and to take care of their institutions and provide for their religious welfare the way we do in the Church of England. So they were themselves, not particularly religious, they were themselves definitely initially, opposed to Zionism.

They didn’t want their status as Jews to be challenged by the implication that somehow or other they were not genuine Jews and they wanted to go live in the land of Israel even though there were many Victorians, whether it’s Israeli or whether it’s George Elliot, who wrote favourably about the Jews and the Jewish right for a homeland of themselves, most Jews were not in favour of that, it was more a Christian idea than it was a Jewish idea. But what emerged slowly from this era was the fact that Anglo Jewry was primarily centralised like no other Jewish community anywhere in the world. And it was at that moment, the most influential, America was catching up rapidly because there was even greater immigration into America.

And America was also dividing into these different sections. But whereas in America, very quickly, most Jews were either secular or they wanted to move to those synagogues, conservative and reform, which were more progressive, in England because you had the centralised church of England, which was the Queen’s church, and therefore anybody who wanted to be in with the queen had to be a member of the Church of England, even if you weren’t particularly religious, the United Synagogue in England imitated that. And so any Jew, by and large who wanted status and wanted to get somewhere, belonged to the United Synagogue, even though they might not have been particularly Orthodox.

And so although the United Synagogue was officially orthodox, most of its members were not particularly, they were more traditional, they wanted to belong to the upper class synagogue, not the lower class or the minority synagogue. So Anglo Jewry was always more traditional, shall we say, than American Jewry. And for some other reason, which still is debated, Anglo Jewry was not an intellectual community. Some people say it goes back to George III, King George III hated intellectuals.

When Edward Gibbon came to him with his history of the kind of the Roman Empire, George III said to Gibbon, “Oh no, Gibbon scribble, scribble, scribble, not another book.” And so there was this idea, and indeed when I was at Cambridge University, there were the Hearties and the Arties. The Hearties were the sportsmen and the Arties, the intellectuals. So there was always a tradition in England of anti-intellectualism. And most Jews, unfortunately, for all kinds of reasons, were not that intellectuals, partially because one generation had to go to war, World War I, another generation had to go to war, World War II, and their education was disrupted.

So England was not an intellectually vibrant Anglo Jewry community. And that’s why in England, most of the Jewish intellectuals tended to be outside the Jewish community. There were exceptions but few, unlike in America where Jewish intellectuals were welcome, the great novelists, the great intellectuals, they were all given status and position and importance. In England, very few were. So all this is a bit of a background to the nature of Anglo Jewry. It’s good points and it’s bad points like many America as well, when the new immigrants came in, the established Jews tried to assimilate them as quickly as possible, get rid of the traits of Judaism because it’d have a bad effect on us.

And so it happened both in Anglo Jewry and in American Jewry, whether it was schools, whether it was systems, they tried to get them to assimilate as quickly as they possibly could. In England during this time, the Ultra Orthodox represent a very small minority. Roughly speaking, roughly speaking, the division of Anglo Jewry, if we go back, let’s say 50, 60 years, was that something like 60% were United Synagogue, about 20% were reform, and the last 10%, so to speak, of the synagogue goers were very Orthodox, a small sliver of Anglo Jewry. And as I say, orthodox Jewry essentially was the east end of London, there was a yeshiva, which became impressive and bigger in Gateshead in the north, in Newcastle, away from everything.

And there was the Manchester Jewish community, which was also a strongly contained, a strong Orthodox element. The chief Rabbi, rabbi Hertz, had to toe a very fine line. He represented the whole of the Jewish community, he was Orthodox, and at the same time he was a Zionist. Whereas most of his leadership in the leadership of the United Synagogue, the cousinhood, the intellect, the aristocrats were not neither of those. And poor old Hertz was involved in a battle throughout his life against these forces that wanted to pull the central United Synagogue towards reform and away from tradition.

When he died, he died just after the Second World War, the person who succeeded him was a lovely man, a man called Israel Brodie, but not a strong man. The one thing the leaders of Anglo Jewry decided, we’ve had enough of strong rabbis, the last thing we want is anybody who’s going to stand up to us and so they appointed this nice man. Of course I’m biassed, I’m biassed because the only other candidate in the end was my father, who at the time was in his early thirties and highly charismatic, highly controversial, and a man who knew his own mind using the excuse of his youth, which was a pretty good excuse, you might say, they blocked his advance precisely because they knew they weren’t able to control him.

Like in some of you, those of you who remember Louis Rabinowitz in South Africa, both of them were in very similar moulds, knew each other, were very friendly. And Louis Rabinowitz became a kind of a father substitute to me when my father died at a young age. So when Brodie became chief Rabbi, you suddenly have a big influx into England of more Orthodox Jews who don’t feel at home in the United Synagogue. And slowly, slowly the complexion changes. First of all, the cousinhood, they withdraw. And instead of the cousinhood, you are now getting successful traditional businessmen running the United Synagogue.

And secondly, any sign of any rabbi who might possibly pull the United Synagogue away from the right was going to be blocked, as was the case with the famous Louis Jacobs. But slowly, the right, the Ultra Orthodox, as they have everywhere, have become stronger and stronger. And the reason why they’ve become stronger and stronger is because they have focused on their own survival. They’re focused on huge, big families, on maintaining a very strict social control and they are committed.

They are so much more committed than almost all the other Jews. And as we see, whether it’s in Marxism or Nazism, it’s those who are passionately committed who tend to win the battles. And those people in the middle, the wishy-washy ones, they tend to be outvoted or overrun. And so two things have happened to Anglo Jewry since the second World War. One of them has been the significant growth of the Ultra-Orthodox.

Now, there’d be nothing wrong with that, in my opinion at all. On the contrary, I’m delighted with it, the more the merrier. What worries me is when one group tries to impinge on another group, the whole beauty of the United Synagogue was that it was a broad church, it welcomed everybody in, had traditional Orthodox way of doing things, but everybody came in, you didn’t have to be that kosher, you could come to synagogue in the morning and go to watch your football match in the afternoon if that’s what you wanted to do. The right wing have no place for that, and in their terms, they’re absolutely right.

But instead of leaving the United Synagogue alone, they decided slowly to try, in a sense, to infiltrate in different ways. So for example, they resented the idea of a chief rabbi because the chief rabbi was not going to be Haredi like them, he’s going to be somebody more modern. And therefore they set about systematically trying to undermine his authority and his position, which they did so successfully.

The other important feature was that world Jewry has changed dramatically since then. And so now it is Israel which is the dynamic centre of Jewish life in almost every respect. So when my father set up a school in England in the 1948 and early fifties, he was still convinced that Anglo Jewry was significant enough in order to sustain, a Eton or Harrow Jewish style, an expensive boarding residential school. At that stage, there was no state education for Jews or any alternative to that kind of education, a small number of schools elsewhere.

By the time we get to the 1960s and the last year of my father’s life, he had already made plans to set up a school in Israel because he already saw the writing on the wall. And he realised that more and more people would go to Israel to study, whether it was in Yeshiva or university and high schools there would be a better bet than a school in England with a declining community that was getting smaller and smaller. So it was a combination of Israel, a combination of the Haredi world that had this significant impact on the change of the complexion of Anglo Jewry today.

So Anglo Jewry today, in many respects, is much more committed religiously than it ever has been. Its numbers may have dropped down to probably under 300,000, some people think even as low as 200,000 because it depends how you count the secular Jews in that number. The United Synagogue, which was once 60%, has now shrunk to about 30% of the synagogues. The reform and the conservatives are about 20, but the Haredi world, the ultra orthodox are up to altogether if you combine the different wings of them to 30,000 themselves.

They have now become and are increasingly becoming the main voice of Anglo Jewry. And although there are alternatives, there’s a small conservative synagogue, there’s a reform synagogue, there’s a liberal synagogue, the influence both financially actually as well as socially and religiously is coming from the right. And over the years you see more and more how if there’s a rabbi who says something they don’t like, they muscle in and get him either to censor his book, censor his words, or back down from anything he wants to do.

So the old days when you had a chief rabbi who was able to stand up to them, are no longer there and haven’t been there for a long time, I suppose the last person you might say was Lord Jacobovits, wonderful man. But the fact is that this is the way Anglo Jewry has gone and it’s the way Israel is going and it’s the way America is going. Things are different, but it’s the same thing, the assimilation rate is strong. It is taking away every year more and more Americans, more and more Americans are no longer committed to Israel and unsupportive of Israel, their children are going to universities where they only hear an anti-Israel narrative.

The part of the Democratic party is being pulled to the left in a way it never was before, rather like Corbin, but at this moment it does look a little bit as though we’re coming back from that. But on the other hand, if you read David Baddiel’s latest book that Jews don’t count, you wonder how that is. And yet unfortunately we know there has always been, there has always, always been anti-Semitism as an undercurrent in European society, in all Christian societies, even though different Christian denominations that are, have their own approach, this has always been there. It’s a kind of a disease that lies dormant sometimes and then all of a sudden explodes again and that’s what we are experiencing.

I hope in due course, Trudy, and I’ll have a chance to talk about this in terms of whether antisemitism is what keeps Judaism alive, but also England is no longer the England it once was. It’s no, there’s no British empire anymore. Chief rabbis of South Africa and other places if you have them and they’re becoming less and less fashionable I’m glad to say because I think it’s rather dangerous to think that one person can represent a whole community or everybody, but because Britain is no longer the power that it was, there’s no chief rabbi the British Empire anymore.

There’s no empire, there’s no power, there’s no centralization, those days have gone. So Anglo Jewry is not out, it’s not dead, in many respects, it’s more powerful than it was when I was a young student, hardly any of the university students around the country were Orthodox, now there to be found everywhere. Orthodoxy has increased and expanded of different kinds, intelligent kinds and less intelligent kinds. So I’m not pessimistic about Anglo Jewry, I think it’s going to do very well in its smaller iteration.

But the institutions, the glory, the power that’s not there anymore. Jews come and go, thousand years ago, the biggest yeshiva in Europe was in the foot, the heel of Italy in Otranto and Bari. Now the biggest yeshiva in Europe is in Gateshead near Newcastle. Who knows what will happen in the future? All I do know is we keep the tradition alive. I’m out of Anglo Jewry now living in Manhattan, I see Manhattan going the same way as Anglo Jewry in different respects, except it has one big advantage, it doesn’t have centralised authority. And the beauty of that is this, if you don’t have centralised authority, it’s the survival of the fittest.

Whoever does the best job in getting people to come and join their religion or belong to their synagogue, they are the people who survive. And those who don’t, those synagogues die, those communities die. And the east, the lower east side of New York is no longer what the lower East side once was. So, but in America, everybody fights for their rights. And so you have all these ultra orthodox towns, Monsey, Square Town, all of them in New York state upstate, all of them taking the increasing population that’s coming out of Williamsburg and Brooklyn.

You find them in Florida, you find them in Texas, you find them in in Los Angeles because each group has to survive. When you have a centralised authority, and this is true in Christianity too, and they take responsibility, they tend to stifle individuality, stifle creativity. And the result is that in the end they slowly, slowly descend from their glory to something else. So there’s my presentation, Anglo Jewry is an interesting phenomenon. I have to say I miss a lot of people who I knew and loved and still do there, but I don’t miss the centralised conservatism with a small C authority, conformity of Anglo Jewry because it’s only when there’s open creativity as there is in Israel with all its conflicts, that you really get real creativity and dynamism where you find both academically, secularly and religiously the Jewish people are thriving and surviving, long may they live.

So thank you very much, now I’m open to any questions.

Q&A and Comments

• Thanks Jeremy, that was really an outstanding presentation. I’d like to open the, the questioning session with, would you comment on Jewish education and why there wasn’t a high school, the same standard of St. Paul’s or Westminster in England? And also I’d like you to comment on a Jewish museum. And what was the problem in creating a Jewish museum and why was it so difficult to raise funds and why was it located where it was located? And also why was there no pride towards the English heritage, Jewish heritage in history?

• Yeah. Well, when my father in 1948 tried to start this Jewish Eton, the opposition was phenomenal by the established Jewish community, no, they said this will ghettoise the Jews. It will narrow them down, they won’t be able to, they won’t be able to integrate with other non-Jews. They will lose the opportunity of making the right contacts in Eton and Harrow with the aristocracy. And so my father could hardly find anybody who supported the idea of a good school. In addition to that, most Jewish parents thought if we send our kids to St Paul’s or to Westminster or to Manchester Grammar, they’ll get a very, very good education in an established proven school, why would we risk our children on setting up some new school?

And the only school that did exist, the Jewish Free School was basically a free, a school for the working class, was not considered of any high academic standard and there were a small number of Jewish schools in in Stanford Hill in Hendon, at Golders Green. So the idea of having a Jewish school was considered radical, it was considered controversial, which is why my father always struggled to raise money from Carmel College and couldn’t find support because Carmel college was in the middle. It was too religious for the non-religious and it was not religious enough for the very religious and Anglo Jewry wasn’t strong enough to sustain it.

And the result is that the community was not able to do that. Interestingly, last year, there was an equivalent of Carmel College in America funded by an Israeli multimillionaire called Ban down in North Carolina, it was a brilliant school, a magnificent campus. It was a dream come true for Jewish boys and girls from around the country, non-denominational. They would come and have the best education they could and it was fantastic and it folded because there wasn’t a demand. Also, lot Jewish parents didn’t want to send their children away from home. But also like anything that tries to be all things to all people, it never works. And so it failed.

Jewish education took off in England when the state supported Jewish schools. And so when state supported Jewish schools, it exploded. And not only that, it was cheaper than having to go to an expensive, thousands of pounds a year non-Jewish school. And so although there is a private expensive private school, Emanuel College in London, it’s not attracting people away from St. Paul’s or Haberdashers or the other schools. And for people who don’t want to pay or want a different kind of an education, that offers something for them.

Now the quality and the nature of education is a different issue because I happen to believe that it’s terribly important as Trudy does to teach Jewish history. Jewish history is the core of giving people the information, particularly being students, the information in order to go to universities and to combat the nonsense and the lies and the filth that they find there. And we are not doing that, we’re not doing that sufficiently strongly enough.

So there’s failure in that area, there’s also a problem, unfortunately of finding good teachers nowadays, it’s finding harder and harder to find teachers. And most of the teachers that you get in Jewish schools tend not to be the best and tend to be a little bit on the Jewish side at any rate, more to the right than to the left. So there are lots of factors why England did not have the equivalent of St. Paul’s and it’s difficult always to say a single factor, but it’s a combination of those factors. And that’s why I think anything that brings education like this website is terribly important.

That was the second part of your question, I’ve forgotten your first one.

• The museum.

• Oh, the museums Look, getting Jews to agree on anything, they couldn’t agree on JW3 on the Jewish Centre. It was only because one woman was prepared to put a lot of money into it. And it’s the same problem in England, Orthodox won’t mix with Reform, they don’t have anything to do them. They don’t be associate in the same institution. They are so worried about who, what people would think of them. They’re so worried about perspective, they’re so worried about belonging. And what will this rabbi say? Well, what will that rabbi say? Who will my daughter get to marry if I’m seen in the wrong place?

That they just can’t pull their resources, we’ve always been our own worst enemies. In the Haftarah that we read after the ninth of Ave of Comfort, following the one that there’s this famous line which has two meanings. Originally it meant those people who undermine you will leave you. But unfortunately the same Hebrew words mean those who try to undermine you come from within you. Unfortunately, that’s our fate, our individuality is our strength, and it’s our weakness. Our adaptability has helped us survive.

But Jews is Jews for better or for worse, wherever they are. And I’m saying the same everywhere, Ashkenazi, Sephardi, north, south, they have this capacity for making a mountain out of a mole hill and fighting over nothing.

• Yeah, you’re right, we’re own worst enemy, I absolutely do agree with that. And it’s not only what the rabbis say, it’s worrying about what the community says and what each other.

• Oh, that’s right, that’s right.

• All right, thank you very much.

• Okay, so I’ll come to Gina Sanders.

Q: You described the Jews as being very rich. Where did their money come from in the first place so they had enough to lend to the kings and the barons? A: Well, they were only very rich at that particular time. And as I hope I pointed out in the 18th century, Jews, poor Jews came to England and they were involved in crime, they were the poorest of the poor, they relied on charity as they did throughout the 18th century, the 19th century. And still to this day, numerically, there are twice as many poor Jews as there are rich Jews. So the notion of Jews being very rich is rubbish. But what Jews do tend to do is because they have to move from place to place, they are agile, they’re adaptable, they look for those positions where they initially could transfer their assets out of a country if they were being attacked, they were able to go, they weren’t able to go into professions or into more established jobs so they had to become traders. And traders have both the strength and the weakness of tradesmanship.

You can make a lot of money, you can also lose a lot of money. So it was during that time that because, and this is another feature, when a country kicks out its Jews, it tends to suffer economically because Jews help the economy. They create jobs, they create opportunities, so many of the successful Jews who were kicked out of Spain and Portugal came to Amsterdam. Some of them came to the Caribbean and they came to Hamburg and other places. And they brought their wealth and their knowledge and their dynamism there and they helped build up institutions.

But where did they get their money from? Basically from trading, they were all tradesmen. If you look through the 19th, 18th century, many Jews grew their wealth because they supported the Holy Roman empire armies with horses, with lumber, with foods and supplies they got from somewhere else. So because Jews had contacts everywhere, one of the big problems in the mediaeval times was banditry and robbery, you didn’t carry money with you. But if you had a Jewish cousin, let’s say in Afghanistan and you are in York, in England, you can send somebody with a letter of credit and bring back some goods or get sort of shipped. And so because they had their contacts around the world, they were very successful as merchants.

Not all of them were, most of them were scholars, but most of them were poor. All the evidence is the vast majority of every Jewish community was poor. But the rich took it upon themselves to support the poor at a time when there was no other form of charity.

Sharon Hassen, I love you, ah, thank you very much. So nice to hear from you, happy memories.

Chris, you mentioned Antwerp when you meant Amsterdam and Samuel peeps, not William. I was definitely wrong about Peeps, I dunno how I managed to say that instead Samuel, I said William, but no, I did mean Amsterdam, I didn’t mean Antwerp because Antwerp was under the Holy Roman empire. And most of the Jews, the famous Gracia, Beatrice Deluna, who was the richest Jewess, although still officially Catholic got to Antwerp and Charles the V wanted to marry her off to one of his courtiers and she had to flee until she got to Italy. So Antwerp, because it was Catholic, was and more powerful at that stage than Amsterdam was the first port of call. They moved them later to Amsterdam from Antwerp. But Antwerp was more important at that stage than was Amsterdam.

In 1960, think when went to the synagogue Eva Simha Torah. Yes, that’s what they say. That thought they were wild and crazy and dancing all over the place. That’s one theory, the other theory is listen, have you ever been into a small Jewish community without talking all the time? You ever go to a church where they’re silent all the time, you couldn’t understand what they were muttering about. Similar problems still exists today.

Monica, was a good testimony, was said Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII was never consummated their marriage, therefore marriage could be annulled. I’m afraid, I think there’s no significant evidence from that. He did consummate their marriage, the marriage was an, if he didn’t consummated it, it would’ve been annulled, that wouldn’t have been a problem, but the Pope was not prepared to do that. And Catherine of Aragon publicly testified to the contrary. I mean King Arthur, not Henry there, yeah, prince Arthur, yes, anyway, Jews had to support Christian missionaries.

Well win some lose some hope, I hope you’re not suggesting all Jewish people convert to serve a personal advantage. No, I’m sure there are lots of different reasons why people convert. I mean most of the Jews converted to get a decent job in Germany and in England and to, for other reasons. Same thing happened under Islam. Many Jews converted under Islam because if you converted to Islam, you were able to take all the family money with you. So sure it’s not, there are other reasons too. Psychological ones not to mention theological ones, not just in England.

A single descent of Moses Mendelssohn, the great muscular remained Jewish, well that’s true. Not one did, but then in his case, his whole family had married out within a generation. Whereas England it took a bit longer.

Q: How did United Synagogue seize authority and all other synagogues? A: Well, they had no authority over the Spanish and Portuguese. They continued and to this day to have their own rabbi, their own head rabbi, particularly the hakham. They had no authority over the reform or over the liberal. They had no authority over the ultra Orthodox. But because they had the assets to build synagogues in London, all synagogues built in London belonged to the United Synagogue and therefore they could fire the rabbi even if the congregation didn’t want him to be fired. So it was purely for fiscal organisational reasons that they came to dominate the synagogues in London.

Now, when I wanted a job, I always wanted to be independent, I mentioned the western synagogue in London. My first job in the rabbinate was in Scotland in Giffnock and Newland’s Hebrew congregation, it was independent, it wasn’t part of the United Synagogue. So nobody could touch me and because I wanted to be an individualist and do things my way, I didn’t want to have a lot of people on the right breathing down my neck and telling me what to do. So that’s how that happened.

Q: Now we go onto Jennifer Malvin, was there an inverse relationship between Jewish propagation of the blood libel and needing Jewish resources for wealth? A: That’s an excellent question. I think there might well have been because if you spread the answer that Jews are murderers and you kill them all, you take their property and they take their money. So I have no doubt of course it was whipped up because this is the time the crusades and the Crusades were saying the Jews are in league with the devil and we’ve got to go and rescue the holy land from the heretics and the Jews are heretics so let’s kill the heretics on the way. So it was a mixture of theological of fiscal, financial and historical. The Sephardi society synagogue called Bevis Marks in 71, the only synagogue in York to have continuous services now under threat from skyscraper office blocks, I don’t think the threat, I mean you are right, the threat to it is skyscraper office blocks. On the other hand, the Spanish and Portuguese in Meydevel is doing very well. And there are other Sephardi synagogues in North London are doing very well. But that’s what happens, synagogues come and synagogues go just communities come and communities go, I don’t see a problem with it. I don’t see a problem with closing down redundant synagogues, keeping them open and keeping them open as historical records.

But then as Wendy has already alluded, for some reason Anglo Jewry is a bit backward in preserving its historical, not its documents, there are preservation of its documents, both religious and others, but it’s not very good at giving money to projects. I mean, another controversial one is the Holocaust memorial going up in in Westminster where there’s a lot of disagreement about whether it’s the right thing to do. Again, a argument about absolutely everything. Sorry Plymouth, in existence of the Southwest committee’s, pound of farmers no longer, yes, that’s right. Thank goodness Plymouth used to be very big, very powerful. I once knew one of the rabbis there was a great football player, but that was many, many years ago.

Q: What beliefs United Synagogues in general Jewish community describe? A: Basically the United Synagogue adheres to the halachic behavioural system of how Orthodox Judaism should be observed. So keeps Shabbat keeps Kashrut, follows the Halakhah, the strict Halakhah in all its official public functions. Where I think it varies is that it was always tolerant of different heterodoxal beliefs. And even though there’s a debate about how tolerant Rabbi Hertz was and don’t blame poor old Brodie 'cause he was still following in a tradition that Rabbi Hertz had established, I don’t agree with that at all, but that’s history for you. The fact of the matter is that the beauty of the United Synagogue was it didn’t look into your personal, private theological beliefs. And I think that’s the biggest problem with orthodoxy nowadays, you can’t regulate belief. So I mainly talking about the idea of beliefs. I regret that the Beth din, the United Synagogue has chosen to be one of the strictest Beit din courts of law in the country, which makes it very difficult to be flexible and they always get themselves into a mess on anything to do with marriages and conversion or one thing in another, or Jewish schools, what have you. I regret that, on the other hand, I understand the need to preserve standards when all standards in the other direction are going off the board, going so far left, you don’t know where they’re going to end. So I have some sympathy with it, although it’s not my style and I regret there wasn’t a home within the Orthodox church, so to speak, for people who have different beliefs, why not? Rabbi Rabinowitz in South Africa? Ah yeah, great guy. Louis Rabinowitz, great horse rider. Dunno however you know, he used to go horse riding every Friday, Every Friday afternoon, both in Cape Town and when he moved to Jerusalem. Apart from everything else, Rabbi Rabinowitz was very strong as a Japadinsky supporter, he did, I lacked him enormously, Mikhael Bloom, I agree with you, wonderful man.

Michael Goodman, did not the ending of state grammar schools and direct grants synagogues accompanied by establishing the more Jewish state support secondary schools contributing increasing from the younger generation. Yes, definitely did that certainly did make a difference. When the grammar schools ended, most Jews were happy to send their kids to grammar schools 'cause they were free and they were very good when that ended and they were opened up and they became what they have become now, where in a state school, if you’d say anything supporting a Jew, you’d be shouted down, that’s a big factor.

Q: Don’t you think communities are heavily influenced by the characteristic society they live in? A: Absolutely, definitely. That’s why you could take an English, always see an English Jew from an American Jew. You could even tell a Jew a haredi English Jew and a haredi American Jew. An American haredi Jew walks tall, an English haredi Jew tends to walk with a stoop. So yes, you are absolutely right.

Q: What’s the strength of the Chabad in England? A: Very strong, they’ve grown from nowhere in the the fifties to be very powerful. And whereas once they would never have been allowed to be rabbis in the United Synagogue, now many of them are, and many of them are successful on the pastoral side. The trouble of course, is on the ideological side because bless them, for all the wonderful and good that they do, they still count as fundamentalists.

This was very interesting lecture, Karl from Holland ah, thank you Karl, nice to hear from Holland. A lot of Dutch people I know and love.

Q: Jennifer Marvin, why is the Orthodox and the NG fighting other Jews around Jew hatred? A: A good question, Jennifer. I wish I knew the answer. It does not make sense why we spend so time fighting each other, I can’t answer it. I we only that we have always been a stiff neck people. That’s what God says in the Bible, you’re a stiff neck people, at one stage you wanted to get rid of us, but that’s who we are, for better or for worse.

Q: I always saw modern Orthodox in nice way to, it seems to be declining, why? How can it be revived? A: No, I don’t think it’s declining at all. It depends how you define it and where it is. But I think in Israel, I, for example, when I used to live in Handen, when I used to, sorry, visit Handen, I never lived in Handen. When I used to my, my family did visit Handen in the 1950s and sixties, there were very few modern Orthodox. The United Synagogue, Hendon United wasn’t really orthodox outly, but very few. Now if you go to Hendon, there are hundreds and hundreds of families of modern Orthodox Jews who are professionals in law, in finance, in medicine, who are open-minded, who are learned far more than anybody in the past. So modern orthodoxy is stronger in England now than it ever was. It might not be United Synagogue Orthodoxy and similarly in America and similarly in Israel.

Now, it’s true that all Jewish communities always suffer from some attrition, but the attrition in the Orthodox world is far less than anywhere else, precisely because by and large, they’re better educated in Judaism, they’re more committed, they spend more time in Israel, they study in Israel for some of their career. All that makes a fundamental difference. So I’m not worried about Morden Orthodoxy, people write that off because largely because there is no, shall we say, there’s no rabbi in modern orthodoxy who rivals the knowledge and the brilliance of the Haredi rabbis who spelled the whole of their lives only studying Talmud and Jewish sources. So inevitably their mastery is far greater than anybody in the modern Orthodox. That doesn’t mean to say rabbis in the modern Orthodox don’t know enough to be good teachers and good preachers and to influence people, but nevertheless, they do pale in comparison to the absolute genius of haredi Rabbinet. The trouble is haredi Rabbinet where it’s brilliant on text, is failing disastrously on inter not intellect, on understanding the needs of their communities, of understanding the world of rejecting things and refusing to bend in any way because they see themselves as fighting a battle to the death against assimilation. And their answer to the Holocaust, for example, has been the best possible answer. Don’t try to argue with it, have 10 children each in your family and we will survive better than having anybody do anything else.

Q: Should there be more appropriate the rise and fall of a United Synagogue? A: Well, yes, I did concentrate more in United Synagogue 'cause United Synagogue was and still remains the dominant element, even if it’s less dominant than it was and I had to choose in three quarters of an hour lecture on where I was going to talk, I could have talked a lot of other things. So I apologise if I upset you and maybe sometimes I’ll do another one. Well, there were now 20,000 times going to Jewish schools. Big cultural difference, he’s very positive saying and the Jewry six. Oh yes, definitely. I mean the Jewish education got its big boost primarily, primarily from Lord Jakobowits. Lord Jakobowits is the man responsible more than anybody else for the rise of state and Jewish education in England. And it came about for reasons we mentioned before and it is definitely a positive statement. Not everybody goes to a Jewish school, remains Jewish or remains Orthodox. But yes, it and limo is very good, but nevertheless, if you are to ask you how many significant intellectuals does Anglo Jewry have? I’d be interested to know with a kind of a universal reputation, I’d be very interested to know who you have. And much as I like Howard Jacobson, he is definitely no Roth and doesn’t rank with the, the Giants of American Jewish literature. Thank you Jennifer, thank you Sue.

Q: Would you agree trend is part of a general loss of faith in Christianity and Judaism? A: Yes, faith, I’m not certain so much about faith, but certainly attendance to religious institutions is definitely falling away. And it’ll be interesting to see as a result of COVID, how far that’s going to go. Because for many people who are not religiously observant, the Zoom services have been a great success and they are probably going to continue in different ways. So I don’t know, but I’m not certain it’s a loss of faith so much as loss of growing up, of loss of education, of lots of growing up in a committed family. And a reaction most of all to ignorance.

Q: How strong is Chabad in Britain? A: I actually don’t know the statistics, that’s excellent. I don’t know statistics, I must try and find out. But certainly they’re growing exponentially 'cause I remember originally when I became aware of Chabad through my father who helped establish them in the east end of London. There were a couple of rabbis and a handful of families. Now there are hundreds and thousands of them all around the world, but I don’t have the figures, Thanks, I like speaking about my father sometimes, I might speak about him some other time. Due the stone in 87, my grandfather came to Manchester as a rabbi, the Walker Wash community in Manchester. He was quite a firebrand who struggled with the established Jews in Manchester because of uncompromising level of observance. Well, yeah, good for him, I mean, Jews like people to be the same as them. I always say Judaism, anybody who’s a more religious Jew than I am is a fanatic and any Jew is less religious than I am is a bloody assimilationist.

There’s a wonderful Jewish museum in Manchester, there is. I hope it’s well supported. Thank you very much, whoever 8277598 says me.

Q: What’s the essential difference between modern orthodoxy and ultra orthodoxy in the USA? A: Oh, huge big difference. Modern orthodoxy tries to combine intellectual secular studies with religious studies. Think of Yeshiva University for example, in New York. Ultra orthodoxy on principle rejects secular culture. It will allow people to study for a career if you need to, but on principle believes that secular culture is somehow a moral failure. And they would argue that the secular world stood by the destruction of the Jews in Europe and the secular world supports antisemitism, why the heck should we take any notice of what they say?

Q: Do you believe UK Masorti presents a real opportunity for modern orthodoxy? A: Well, UK Masorti is not modern orthodoxy, I like it, I think their rabbi is a wonderful guy and does an amazing job and I think it’s a great community, but it is not officially orthodox.

Trevor Fenner, ah, hi Trevor. Good to hear you. I mentioned that all the number of modern orthodox, decreased number of non Haredi orthodox has increased significant in recent years Yes, phenomenally. Phenomenally, there’s a school in Stanford in the Haredi world with over a thousand pupils. So yes, they’re exponentially increasing all the time. But unfortunately, those type of Hasidic schools don’t include secular education. Or at least that’s one of the battlegrounds going on with the state at the moment.

Q: Was there equivalent to the Alliance Israelite University within the English world? A: Not of the Alliance Israelites, but there were other movements in England, the equivalent of that would’ve been the board of deputies. And so it was Moses Montefiore of the Board of Deputies and Khamir of the Alliance Israélite in the Victorian era who went to Syria to protest when the Jewish community was attacked over the blood libel and its rabbis jailed and its members murdered. So that was the equivalent there. In America you have a different series of institutions that are national of all kinds of levels, but nothing that is as centralised as the Alliance was or as indeed the, I’ve forgotten the name. What’s it, the consistoire, right? The Consistoire in France would be the equivalent of the United Synagogue in England. My father of Clifton College had, I believe, a Jewish house it, had of a Jewish house. Yes, I closed down a few years ago. It was thought to be a kind of a compromise with being in a non-Jewish school and having a Jewish house, but it was never very big.

Q: Mayra, what are your thoughts black hat in the USA anyway, due to becoming too visible? A: So what if we’re visible? If people don’t like it, that’s their problem. A black guy can’t control how he looks so he has to put up with it or somebody else. Who cares about it? The truth of the matter is, I was brought up in England not to wear a kippah in public. I was told wear a hat as if people can’t find a 14 year old God boy wearing a hat and say, oh that’s Jewish. I was brought up in England where with a German manic tradition, you are a Jew at home and a citizen outside. And I began to battle against this. And indeed when I went to Cambridge University, I did not wear a Kippah in public. It was almost unheard of, this began to change after 1967, after the six day war, when two things happened. One of them is we were proud of being Jewish, we didn’t feel the need to hide it anymore. And secondly, because thanks to the Beatles, you could wear crazy clothes, you could wear a crazy haircut, thanks to West Indian immigration, people were different.

If you look at English photos of England in the fifties, they look at the, they’re almost all businessmen in, in pinstripes wearing filled up umbrellas and bowler hats, is that change only came about in the 1960s and seventies. And from that one on that time on was I said, heck, why shouldn’t I wear a Kippah in public? And I do it to this day, and now when I moved to New York, I thought, how wonderful, you can be who you want to in New York, there’s no problem. And now for the first time people are saying in New York, don’t wear your Kippah in public. Look what’s happened to the bloody United States of America. Now when people are saying that and haredi are proud? Sure they get spoken more down people attack them and spit at them and do other things, but I’d rather that than be a coward. And I’d rather that than hide who I am.

One of the main factors Austin, hi Austin, moved to the right Jewish Day Schools, demise of common Jewish boarding schools. Yes, absolutely right, I agree a hundred percent. And the rise of Israel, definitely. Thank you for a wonderful presentation.

Q: What’s the appeal Chabad organisation? A: Attracting more and more people from the reform. The great attraction of Chabad is they are non-judgmental. Whatever their own ideology is, they don’t try to force it on other people. They would try to force it if you wanted to become a member of Chabad yourself, that’s a different matter. They’d go out of the way, the most lovely, likeable, sociable people, most of them, those who aren’t, don’t get the job, right? But they do so much good work all the way around the world and they do it, and although they don’t charge, they do expect financial support. But they are open and they’re not judgemental. And they offer an expression of Judaism, which is more intense, more passionate. I won’t say more authentic 'cause we can argue about what it means more authentic. But they offer a more intense Jewish experience to more people and they’re nice guys.

Q: What about Christ College? A: Many prominent Jews are educated there, assumed high standards, yes, it’s a non-Jewish school. Sure, city of London, non-Jewish school, Haberdashers, Westminster, they’re all non-Jewish schools.

I live in Los Angeles, Wendy in an area called Beverly Wood Southern School. One thing, that’s the enterprise Orthodox community house values, museum of tolerance. That’s very good, yes, thank you. You’ve addressed it to to, to Wendy, but beautifully said on immigrating the USA, I always miss a centralised structure, having a Jewry, can I see the value of competed communities? Yes, it’s a matter of taste, it really is a matter of taste. It was originally centralised.

Q: What’s JW3? A: It is the Jewish Community Centre, which was set up a few years ago in Finchley and hoped to attract as a cultural centre like a JCC, it modelled itself on the JCC and it offers cultural, musical Jewish activities like the JCC here in New York that I lecture at and it was open to everybody, but it hoped it would attract the religious community, which is the biggest Jewish community in that part of North London. And sadly it hasn’t, but it’s still a very worthy organisation.

Q: To what extent, in your opinion, does the regularisation of individual sectarian syndrome help to unify or fragment you? A: I don’t think proliferation or, I don’t think the regularisation of individual sectarian syndrome has an impact as a matter of choosing, you choose where you want to go, you choose what Sido you want to use. It reflects the fact that there are different customs. There are some Sidorim who have a service for Israel independence, they are more Zionists, some who don’t, some who have Ashkenazi, some who have Sephardi. We are multicultural within Judaism, and I’m delighted each one has its own tradition. There’s even an Italian tradition, which is different to the others, so plenty of them.

Q: Why were they able to create schools like Ramaz in New York where people going to say Jews secular as well as religious education but not in UK? A: Well, Ramaz was is a day school, successful day school in New York. And remember New York always had within Manhattan, more Jews than the whole of the United Kingdom. So there, more Jews, more finance, and therefore it was very successful. Others have tried to become as good as it. Some people say it’s not as good as it was, but it is. In the same way, there’s another Jewish school in York called Heschel, which is a conservative school, Reform equivalent of Reform to England, which is very successful. Why hasn’t reform managed to set a reform? There is a sort of the JCOS, but not for the same stature or the same power and the same reach.

Our daughter, North Carolina School, you mentioned came from, Mexico. Yes, they did, they came from around the world. Not many came from America, the Hebrew Academy, we were brilliant building. What a shame, but there we are, no mention of Parks House. Yes, somebody just mentioned that here. Could you please? But Pollock’s house was very small. It was, not very large. So there were other Jewish houses in Cambridge, in other places.

Jews in England took last name versus Hebrew traditional construct. I not understand what you mean. They took English names as they had to do in Europe when they were forced to in the enlightenment, take secular names.

Q: Why did they change? A: I suppose 'cause then they came into England, they didn’t want to be recognised as different because they felt the pressure of antisemitism. For many years, there were signs as they were later to blacks saying, no Jews and Jews were excluded and remain excluded from many societies and communities. So, Jews wanted for their children not to suffer. And you can, as a parent, have two responses. One of them is to teach them to hide and the other is to teach them to know. And if they know, they’ll feel pride, and if they’re proud, they will fight back.

Q: What is your view of strengths and weaknesses of the Board of Deputies as representation? A: It’s never been a proper representation. It’s not a very, if so, I’d have to say this, not very effective. It has tended in the past to be responsible for a wishy-washy response to crises. Now, it may be a bit better, but it doesn’t represent most Jews. Most of the Haredi Jews don’t get involved in it. It’s a brave attempt, but I don’t rate it as being very influential.

Q: How did Shakespeare know about Jews? A: There are no Jews in England at his time, well, first of all, he could, he, he, how do you know about Italians? Did he ever go to Italy? I don’t think he ever went to Padua, any of those things. He read about them in books, he heard people talk. There were lots of stories and lots of books written about them by other people so he will have heard. Even Charles Dickens only found out later on that there was another side to the Jews.

B'nai B'rith is worldwide. Yes, B'nai B'rith is worldwide.

Are we coming to the end? Do we stop now?

• I think so Thank you, Jeremy. Thank you, that was for an outstanding presentation.

I just wanted to add that the sheriff of Norwich actually was somebody that I used to play marbles with in Swaziland. She is the sister of John Schleper Bursky, and I’m going to reach out to Mary and I haven’t seen her in years and years and years to do a presentation for us, I’m sure she’d be delighted to do that. Well, I’m just, I’m referring to his, to what her brother said. So I think it would be be a fun presentation, maybe you could interview her.

• That would be lovely. That would be lovely.

• Well, thank you very much to all our participants. I want to say thank you very much for joining us this morning, this afternoon, and this evening. And thanks Jeremy, you’ve really been on a marathon today.

• My pleasure, bye everybody.

• Thank you, take care, bye-bye everyone.