116: Simon Sebag Montefiore on the History — and Future — of British Jews

(gentle music) - Hi everybody, welcome to a new episode of Ask a Viva Anything. Thank you for joining us. Simon C. Beckmonti-Fiori is with me. He's an international bestselling author, historian, his prize-winning books, both histories and novels have been published in 48 languages. Just a few examples that people, certainly people who listen and watch this podcast, know about Catherine the Great, Stalin the Court of the Reds are, and of course, Jerusalem the biography. I probably have three copies on my shelves. He's the presenter of five history series for the BBC and is someone who has the uncanny talent of bringing incredibly detailed history into vibrant color. He has a doctor of philosophy from Cambridge University and his new book The Cauldron, the Making of the Modern Middle East 1900 to 2026, will be coming out in the fall. We're gonna invite him back, we're gonna read it, we're gonna talk about it, very excited for that book. Today our topic is much closer to home. Today we wanna talk about the history of British Jews. Who are British Jews? Where do they come from? How do they become the community that they became? How did this illustrious and old community find itself in its current situation of rising anti-Semitism, the sense of a kind of catch-22 where British politics struggle so much to seriously grapple with what the community is going through. Very excited for this conversation. Before we get into it, I wanna tell you this episode of Ask a Weave Anything is sponsored by the Frozen Chosen. That's how they describe themselves. It's a wonderful nickname. They are a Havif supportive community in Minnesota. It's dedicated by the community to the memory of Khaled Fischbine who was murdered on October 7 at Kibbutz Beiri. Khaled was just 18 years old. Khaled lived in Kibbutz Williams. She worked as a babysitter in Kibbutz Beiri along the border with Gaza. When Hamas invaded Beiri, Khaled and her boyfriend, Dol Ridaire 23, both sought refuge in the home safe room in a different home about 500 meters away, where her mother and brother and 94-year-old grandmother and the grandmother's caregiver all taking shelter inside a bunker. We know about Khaled. Not only has she died, we know how she lived with an instinct to protect others. In the middle of that terrifying moment, she was warning people to stay safe. Her first impulse was care, responsibility. In the middle of the turmoil, she sent an urgent message on the Kibbutz WhatsApp group chat to her family and to everybody else, cautioning them, residents of the area surrounding the Gaza Strip, known in Hebrew as the Othef. Hamas terrorists disguised as IDF soldiers are knocking on doors. Do not open the doors, protect your lives and share. From their bunker, her relatives witnessed neighboring homes being stormed and raised. They emerged unscathed, but Khaled and Dhrul were kidnapped by Hamas and murdered Andhraev to Gaza. She was beloved by many. Khaled and her mom were an important part of a layered communal support system for other people in their communities, including lone soldiers near and dear to the Minnesota community. As the family has noted, there are many more stories than we will ever be able to tell, even if we spend a lifetime speaking names and preserving memories. There will always be voices interrupted, dreams unfinished, and lives whose full beauty we will never fully know. May Khaled's Fish Binds' memory be a blessing and may we honor her. And all those whose stories remain unfinished through the continuous work of being together and hearing one another. Thank you so much to the Minnesota Jewish community for that sponsorship, for that beautiful memory. I would also like to invite everyone to join our Patreon and subscribe to our substack. If you're interested in asking the questions that guide the topics we talk about, join us there. That's where those kinds of conversations are happening. You also get to take part in monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. That's patreon.com/aschavivanything or chavivgur.substack.com. Those links are in the show notes. Let's get into it. Simon, how are you? I'm fine. It's great to be with you. And great talk finally. It's an honor to have you. I have read you for many years. And so obviously I have a great many questions about Katherine the Great to throw your way, but that is unfortunately not our topic today. Let's do that another time. There's a Jewish aspect to that story too, of course. Absolutely. Since Prince Potemkin was the first to arm the former Jewish regiments in his Russian army, bizarrely. It was an opening joke. But now it's real. Now I actually want to keep going. But let's cover this really urgent topic. We're diving deep into history. That's what this podcast is about. We're not, this isn't going to be news, but it's history that is urgent for this moment to understand where what the significance is of everything that's happening to British Jews right now. So I just wonder if we can lay, get the lay of the land here. The Jewish presence in Britain begins really with the Norman conquest in 1066. And there's that whole medieval chapter, right? Of tremendous prosperity, horrific persecutions. It ends in the expulsion in 1290. Can you tell us about that sort of very beginning of what it is to be Jewish in England? Well, I think what I want to say, that first of all, there were two Jewish kind of experiences in Britain, the medieval one and the modern one, which we're going to talk about both, of course. And I should just say it is interesting that overall, again, I know we'll come to this, Havif, but the British Jewish experiences are called so different from the American Jewish experience. Obviously. And the biggest difference is just the scale of it. I mean, the Jewish presence in Britain has always been tiny. In the middle ages, it was 5,000 people. In modern times, now it's 200,000 people, out of 70 million. So we're talking about, by American standards, and I know many of you all listeners are American. This is a tiny community with all that entails. So to go back to the beginning, yes, the first Jews to settle in Britain were probably arrived with the Norman Conquest, probably with William the Conqueror. There were already substantial Jewish communities in France and in Spain, of course, at that time. And they arrived with him. They were actually, I mean, what's fascinating about them is of course the Norman spoke French, or a former French, the Jews spoke Judeo-French, or Zafatic sort of a language, which is an intriguing concept, doesn't it? And it had very little Hebrew in it, but it was a specific language that one of those fascinating languages that developed, like Ladino, like Yiddish, that developed in the Jewish, De Tiaspora. And they arrived, they were a very small community. Obviously, as is well known, they were, the userry or money lending was supposedly banned by the Catholic Church, but Jews could conduct that business. And therefore that was a natural business for them to go into. By the way, they could also serve as doctors. And of course in the Muslim world, many of the sort of sultans, doctors like Moses, my mobodies, et cetera, et cetera, had been, had been, or would be Jewish. And that is also true in France and Britain and Spain at this time. And so they arrived a very small community and tiny numbers at first, and then gradually over the next 200 years, some members of that very small community became very wealthy lending to the kings. And enjoying a sort of weird hybrid status where they were both despised as alien, suspected of being descendants of the killers of Christ. And yet at the same time, protected by the king as, for serving a special purpose, mainly lending money. And also, of course paying huge taxes when they were short of money, which like all governments was often. So that's the beginning of the story. So that story ends in 1290. Why does Edward I expel everybody? Well, the story is fascinating. I mean, the Jewish community really first suffers real anti-Semitism or anti-Judism, as I think I prefer to call it. This stage with the coming of the Crusades. And the Crusades, which are in the 10th night, start in 1095, immediately rebound on the Jews. Because the whole point of the Crusade is to go and retake the church, the Holy Sepulchre from evil infidels. And since there were no evil infidel Muslims nearby to kill, on the Jews were the next best thing. And so this led to all sorts of attacks, particularly. as the crusader arm is headed out towards the Middle East, which is an extraordinary story of it in itself. But this led to huge pressures on the British, the English kings as well, because they had to rate, they were constantly raising armies, not just the normal armies to fight France, but also armies to go all the way, travel all the way to the Middle East to fight. And this led to higher taxes, higher loans, and all of these things put greater pressure on the Jew, the tiny Jewish community. And so you have the beginning of the particular phenomenon that starts in England, I'm ashamed to say, which is the blood libel. And that's in 1144, the blood libel starts when an apprentice in Norwich, which was then a major city, William of Norwich, he was called, a sort of teenage boy, was supposedly murdered by Jews for the purposes of putting drinking Christian blood, crucifying him like Christ, or putting blood into Mutsubisks, for Passover. And that is really the beginning of a blood libel, which has rebounded through the ages. And it resurfaced in 1255, 100 years later. And as usual, antisemitism appears when there's great instability, civil war, when societies under pressure, when, and of course when there's huge shortages of money. And so in 1255 is another blood libel, and this one is called the Little Sait Hube Blood Libel, in which the King Henry III actually backed the blood libel and executed a whole lot of Jews. So it's an important moment because then you have state backing for the first time of the blood libel, and which sadly is something that we may talk about at the end of this conversation. But at the same time, there were very, very wealthy Jews. There was one of the most fascinating is Likarisha of Winchester, who was a woman who became the richest woman in England, certainly the richest non-nobal woman in England. And she lent money to Henry III. And she also, one of the big taxes she was forced to pay, helped renovate Westminster Abbey and build the tomb of William of Edward the Confessor, which we can still see today. So she's an interesting character, but she was murdered. And I think at 1277, and that was a murder that was kind of may have been an anti-Jewish attack. It may have been, she may have been murdered by retainers of nobleman who owed her money. We just don't know what it was, but it's just an interesting story. And then by, by the 1280s, by the 1260s, you have a phenomenon where Jewish loans are owed by many of the nobility. The nobility are fighting a civil war with the king, which entail vast expenses of, you know, or to pay for armies. And this means that their loans are bigger, and then they don't want to pay the loans. At the same time, the crusades have gone disastrously wrong. Jerusalem's been lost to Saladin, and Edward the First, the King, has gone on a sort of minor crusade. And again, the crusade is in peril. The kingdom is in peril. The nobles and king are in debt to the Jews. This is never a good place for the Jews to be. And this concatenation of issues leads to first of all squeezing the Jewish community for as much money as you can. And once they've been squeezed, the Edward the first orders their expulsion to purify the kingdom and save Christians from supposed danger of conversion to Judaism, of which it was very little child, by the way. And so for 1290, the Jews are expelled. It's really the first of a series of major expulsions that culminate in the expulsion 1492 from Spain, which we all know about. And Jews don't really live in England again for over four, almost 400 years. It's an extraordinary story of the fragility of things, of the instability of being a Jewish community. You could be there for hundreds of years. And the politics goes wrong. The finances of the kingdom goes wrong. And your whole life is dependent, is subject to is conditional on those conditions. The the bloodlabel specifically, just can we have a tiny bit deeper into that? A child is found dead 12 years old, 13 years old, something like that in a forest. And at first nobody assumes anything about it. And then suddenly a Benedictine monk writes a book. The whole thing becomes, you know, and reading about specifically about that bloodlabel story, first of all, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, who becomes the source of the claim that the Jews are killing them for ritual purposes. And then priests all through Europe don't believe the story because it's, you know, nuts. And then they keep hearing the story because it comes back around and is heard of again. Once you're hearing it from three different sources, it doesn't matter that the original source is the same. You've heard it three times and three sources, you begin to believe it. It's such an extraordinary path that libels take to becoming and trans truth without ever having anyone check them, no matter how fantastic they they sound in the beginning. But it's a million, doesn't it? It's amazing. Just how well that that whole system works. So let's, let's, let's get to Oliver Cromwell. As you said, almost 400 years, 360, 70 years, the Jews cannot come in. And then suddenly Oliver Cromwell re-admits them. What happened there? Why? And how many actually come back or are they not the same Jews? How many Jews to move to England? Yeah, well, they're very, it's a very different community, of course, 400 years later. It's a different world. And the interesting thing is that there was a certain sort of new, a sacred new attitude to the scriptures, to Jews, that was to work extremely well for Jews. And right up to the Balfall Declaration, in fact, where it starts with Puritanism, it starts with Protestantism. Of course, Martin Lufa was a was a insane Jew hater. And, and, and, and, you know, and he was no, no kind of champion of the Jews. But Protestantism, which he started, was really a return to the actual words and prophecies of the Bible, the Old Testament particularly. And it meant that they were cutting out the church in effect, and the priests, the intermediaries between, between man and God, and returning to the actual word of the Bible. And that involved the prophecies that the Jews would return to, to, to, Amzai and to Jerusalem. And, and, and that's really why the, the Protestants and the, and the Puritans now are suddenly regards, started to regard Jews as a positive thing because they were harbingers of the second coming of Christ. And the second coming of Christ might not have been a great thing for Jews, actually. But, but they, they were thinking about that yet. They were really thinking in the, in the short term. And, and, and also the Puritans in the English started to think of themselves as, rather like the Israelites as well. And so they started to identify with the Israelites. As did the early settlers in America, who also started to identify the, the idea of a city on the hill and so on. So, all of this is to do with the new Protestantism. And so all of a cron will Protestant unlead almost king of England, Lord Protector, fascinating character, military genius, never lost a battle. Extremely tough and complex person. In 1656, Manasseb in Israel, Rabbi in, in Holland, and Holland was much more liberal than, than, than, than the rest of Europe. And the most liberal places for Jews in Europe were Holland, parts of Italy, the, the Ottoman Empire and Poland, traditionally, though of course that would change radically. So he started to correspond with cron will and the top British officials. And cron will started to, to raise the idea of allowing the Jews to resettle in, in Britain. There was quite a lot of resistance to this. And cron will, who was the sort of master politician said, fine, we won't, we won't actually come to a conclusion. We'll simply raise, we'll simply ignore the ban and pretend it doesn't exist. and we will not challenge Jews settling here. And so in the 1650s, some Jews, mainly Sephardic Jews, 'cause after all the Dutch community, Holland had been ruled by the Spanish have Spurgs. And so it was a very Sephardic community and overwhelmingly, and they, certain members of those families started to settle in England in the 1650s. Charles II at the Restoration after 1660 didn't challenge this. And so Jewish families started to resettle. They were overwhelmingly Sephardic names like Lopez and Medina and so on. And they were very small numbers, but as the 17th century went on, more and more came. And a big step for them was in the late, in the 1690s with the beginning of the walls against Louis Catois, Louis XIV, under John Churchill, Duke of Moorborough, who was the descendant of Winston Churchill and Britain's greatest ever general incidentally. His armies were funded by Solomon de Medina, a Sephardic Jewish business man, who organized the logistics of the feeding these massive armies that won the greatest victories in British history, blending and so on. So he began to win access for the first time. And he was one of the funders of the synagogue, Beavis Marx, which I didn't know if you know, Havie, but it's the most beautiful synagogue is the oldest synagogue in Britain. And it was my family's synagogue. It's where my parents were married. And it's a very interesting synagogue because it's actually built like a Puritan church. And it's got a, the look of it is unusual for a synagogue. It doesn't have a dome. It's built in a rather puritanical style. And it was partly funded by Solomon de Medina. And as the eighteenth century goes on, more and more Jews arrive. Another, another important champion of the Jews was Sampson Gideon, who was another thunder of British armies. And he, he managed to get in 1753, the prime minister, Pellum, to put forward a Jewish relief bill that would remove the restrictions on Jews. And by the way, it's worth saying here, there were massive restrictions on Jews still. Jews could not go to Oxford and Cambridge. They couldn't be in the civil service. They couldn't sit in Parliament. They couldn't own land. So all of these things were, were go right through much later into the 19th century than you'd expect. - How extensive is that? I mean, I always, we are taught that emancipation, the ending of the ghetto laws and all these restrictive laws come with the French Revolution, spread through Europe by Napoleon. When the British, the British start taking those laws apart, start removing them before the French Revolution. - They try to. - And they don't, and like a lot of things in Britain, and much that is done by, don't ask, don't tell sort of style of government, which is very British, because there's no constitution in Britain. So the weren't Jewish, weren't Jewish ghettos, 'cause that's one thing. There were Jewish areas, and there's an area of the city of London called Dury, for example, where Jews lived. They mainly lived in the city of London. And so the weren't ghettos to abolish as they were in Europe. And there were these single moments of Jewish liberation, the French Revolution that you mentioned in Napoleon and all that, which continued of course with the 1848 Revolution in France and spread through Europe. But that didn't happen in quite the same way in Britain, 'cause the numbers were also still very small. And so what's surprising is that these restrictions went on much longer. They were only finally abolished in 1858, which are come to an Asacad, 'cause it's an interesting story as well. And so early in the late 18th century, sort of 1790s, families start arriving. And they start to do business, and they're allowed to do business. And there's still not specific laws that allow them to own property, even though the wealthier of them start to buy property. And so you have families like the most famous, obviously the Rothschilds. And in 1798, the Rothschilds arrived, and they come to Manchester, where the Industrial Revolution is happening. And they arrived from the Frankfurt ghetto, which has now been abolished. And they start to do, they start to do, first of all, they invest in the textiles, which is the huge industry of the industrial, the revolution is funneling the industrial revolution, fueling the industrial revolution rather. And then they start to lend to the British government and to fund the armies that are fighting the Napoleonic Wars, which are vastly expensive. And the Rothschilds really fund these armies. And there's all sorts of amazing, sort of covert espionage, where the Rothschilds are sort of, are smuggling huge amounts of money to pay the Duke of Wellington's army in Spain, for example. And they're responsible not only for making the loan, but for getting it to the army. And so at the same time, families like my family arrive in the 1790s, the Montafurri family. And they don't come from Frankfurt, they come from Livorno in Tuscany, in Italy. And they are Italian-speaking Jews, who probably also speak Ladino. A lot of their life is a metaturranean life, very different life from the Rothschilds who come from, or the Dutch Jews, who also arrive. So the Montafurri's arrive. And as a young man, Moses Montafurri, my great, great, great uncle or something, starts to work in the stock market. And there's now a position for a certain number, a quota of Jews to work in the stock market. And they're called the Jew brokers. And a certain, you're very lucky, you can get into the stock market. And Moses Montafurri, the young man, he's quite a striking figure. A Queen Victoria later said about him. You know, he's, he's, when you think of the perfect Hebrew, this is what you think of, 'cause he's like barrel-chested, six foot three, blue-eyed, blonde-haired. So he looks like a sort of, he looks like what Queen Victoria thinks, but the Hebrew should look like she writes in her diary. Oh, you mean like a biblical Hebrew in the armies of King David, can you say that? Exactly, yeah. 'Cause they're all reading the Bible, of course. And they all know the Bible. And the Bible at this time is very important, as you sort of, as you're suggesting, the Bible is really the national book of, you know, of Britain and many other Christian countries, too. It is, you know, with the American colonies, too. Everybody knows every word of it, you know, and everyone knows every story of it. Everyone knows the name of all the places. So it's worth bearing that in mind as we go through this. And anyway, Moses Montefuri marries the sister of, and of Nathaniel Rothschild. The sister of Nathaniel Rothschild's wife, so they become brothers-in-law. And they move into the same house in the city of London, which is now instance within Slaim, which is where the bank of Rothschild still is. And they live above the bullion shop. And the Montefurers and the Rothschilds live there. And they become very wealthy and very successful. And they have access to all sorts of people. They have friends in the royal family, for example. And they have enemies, too, who hate them and will never accept them. And as time goes on in the 19th century, they become more and more important that they rescue the government at one point when it has a huge banking crisis. They fund the armies and they buy country states, which they are now allowed to own. And they become part of the English scene in many ways. They meet the royal family. Moses Montefuri is knighted in 1837. But it's very important to understand that there are still in Britain in this time, huge restrictions on Catholics and Jews. And in 1829, the restrictions on Catholics are lifted after a huge debate. But they are not lifted on the Jews yet. And repeatedly people put forward the lifting of these restrictions. And they are constantly fail. In 1829 and also in 1830 and also in 1834, there are debates on this subject. and the Duke of Wellington by the way is a. huge enemy of the liberation of the Jews and speaks against it. And he really thinks that the liberation of Jews could be an enormous menace to British society and politics. Why? What's so scary about the Jews? That's the thing. What is so scary about the Jews? I mean, the Catholics, it's a multi-century internal schism within Christianity. There are fundamental questions of power. I mean, the monarchy is defined as after Henry the A.V., the Protestant, but who cares about the Jews? I think even though the Jewish numbers are tiny. And by the way, there are now something like between 20 and 40, about 25,000 Jews, more coming. By the end of this, towards the end of the century, there were 40,000 Jews, most of them are Sephardic, but not all. They're all either Sephardic or German and Dutch. So the sisters that Montefuri and Rothschild marry are Dutch Jews, and they're the daughters of Levi Baron Cohen, who is a merchant of Amsterdam. So you have these Jews, these are not the Ashkenazi Jews from Russia, which we're going to come to in a minute. These are Western European or Mediterranean Jews. All the families are names that you would recognize immediately as Spanish and Portuguese names. I think that Duke of Wellington's opposition to the Jews was that they shouldn't be allowed to sit in Parliament. It wasn't that he knew the Jews extremely well, he knew the Rothschilds extremely well. And in fact, he banked with the Rothschilds, and his armies had been funded by the Rothschilds. And so he was very close to the Rothschilds, but he just didn't think that Jews should be allowed into Parliament to legislate for Britain. And there's a huge debate in 1834 about the liberate the emancipation of British slaves. And at the same time, in the same debate, in the same Parliament, there was another attempt to raise restrictions on the Jews. And while the emancipation of Britain and the abolition of British slavery goes through, the restrictions on Jews, Jewish relief act fails again. It's an interesting moment. So they've actually a bullish slavery and emancipated British slaves, but they haven't yet emancipated British Jews. I remember reading about these debates in Parliament where the people opposed to Catholics sitting in Parliament, one of the major concerns they raised was you'll have a very hard time keeping out the Jews if you let in the Catholics. And so it was, you know, people opposed letting in Catholics into Parliament because the Jews would then be coming in. There was a, it was powerful. It was a powerful argument made by the top leaders of British society in Parliament. Can we take a step back and just we've been talking about the top of the top, you know, the wealthiest, the most powerful, the most influential. What is the ordinary Jew like in England at the time? What is their life? How much are there, is their existence restricted? Do they, if they can't on land, you know, if the wealth used to the wealthy can begin to buy country estates, does that mean that an ordinary shopkeeper can own some piece of London in some place? What is the life of ordinary Jews at this time? How does it change in the 19th century? Well, it's a tiny community. I mean, by the standards of the millions of Jews who are now living in Poland for example, in the Russian Empire for example, by 1890 there are 40,000 Jews in Britain. So it's really pretty small and they are now beginning to appear in society as they are in the rest of Europe. These restrictions do not restrict their daily life except that they can't go into Parliament, they can't go to Oxford and Cambridge, things like that which seem pretty basic and it's only later when I'm later in the century when one of the first universities in London University that allows Jews and Catholics to study there. So which is a very significant moment and of course the old universities don't allow Jews yet until the 1850s. So their life is a small community, they live in areas, you know, they live in areas where other Jews live, they are free to worship and to live their Jewish lives. More synagogues are built, Beavis Marx is the sort of grandest synagogue, the others are now being built, particularly funded by these big families like Rothschild Montafuri, Goldsmith and Samuel and others. It's not an oppressive life at all but it's not a full life either, they're not allowed to enter, but in the 1830s and 40s and 50s Rothschild Montafuri began this campaign to raise these restrictions and so they campaigned for it and by the way they also campaigned for the abolitionist slavery and they were very much part of that, they were abolitionists too and they helped fund that. I'm again in the 1840s when you have the Irish huge Irish family, millions of people died, all these Jewish families very proudly gave huge donations to feed the Irish in order to, because it was Jewish tradition to give charity and give arms to people. So you know they were strikingly philanthropic and not just for their own communities, finally after many many times of standing for Parliament, Lionel Rothschild who is Mose Montafuri's nephew and the head of Rothschild's bank is constantly elected to Parliament but he can't sit because he can't take the oath and finally in 1858, Jewish relief act passes and Lionel Rothschild becomes the first Jewish MP in Britain and it's a sort of triumph because now the British Jews of whom there are 35, 40,000 now can enter Jewish life and they do so with great enthusiasm and they become close to the Royal family, I mentioned Kreme Victoria, they receive peerages and they're able to sit in the house of Lord Rothschild, they become the Rothschild becomes a Lord and considering Mose Montafuri receives a barren at sea, all these families suddenly start to thrive, they buy country estates, they build huge palatial mansions, some people regard them as very vulgar, they become friends with a lot of other people and they have champions, they face anti-Semitism and there's the famous story of Mose Montafuri when he went to a dinner party in the 1830s and a very and and by the way I think it was a royal dinner party given by the Duke of Sussex who's one of the kings brothers or one of the Queen's uncles and they start to rather sort of horrible anti-Semitic Lord starts to say you know you know listen everybody, I've just been to Japan and the great thing about Japan is that there are no pigs there and no Jews and so there's great awkwardness at this dinner party and everyone looks at Mose Montafuri and Mose Montafuri quick as a flash says well then my Lord you and I should go there so they'll have one of each and so everyone loves and it's very nice, it's regard is a very good way of handling the you know anti-Semitism by taking it straight on and these guys these Jewish leaders at the time were very aware of that position they were very grateful to be in in the liberal sort of developing liberal democracy they loved the royal family and they regarded the royal family as a sort of guarantor of their freedoms a sort of trend that we'll see you develop through the through the 19 and the 19 20th centuries and to did and to today and we're what was seen today with the King Charles the third championing the Jewish community and helping protect the Jewish community is a tradition here and by the 1890s and the early 20th century big Jewish families like the Rothschild now the sassoons have arrived from Iraq and from India and from China the Montafuris and others become great friends with Ed with the Prince of Wales and Ed with the seventh and there are cartoons of him and his Jews arriving the Jews arriving at court as friends of the royal family but at the same time in 1881 now we're very familiar we're very familiar history have eve everyone in this podcast knows the death of Alexander the second the rise of the third the pogroms and the beginning of the mass flow west right so that changes everything right yeah and some come to London. Some come to London. to England, a lot go to America, a lot go to Palestine, and suddenly there's this arrival of these impoverished Russian and Polish, Russian Polish Jews in London. And this creates a new wave of a different sort of anti-Jewish feeling that these immigrants impoverished, they're going to depend on us for money, they're going to bring crime, when's this stopping? Where are these people going to stop? And so there's a huge kind of backlash, and the old Jewish families, Rothschild, Montefyrus, etc., welcome this Jewish community, and of course give huge amounts of money and found schools for them and try to protect them. And there's another thing happening here, which is also important, which is that in the 1820s, British and Jewish and British Jews start to travel around the Ottoman Empire, and they start to travel to the Holy Land. And in the Holy Land, Benjamin Disraeli, for example, goes, and he's played a big role in Jewish life. He's actually the child of a convert, who converts, when he's six, after an argument with the Unsinnagog establishment, which is very familiar to all Jews. And so Benjamin Disraeli is actually can become a member of Parliament, because though he regards himself as ethnically and culturally Jewish, he's actually technically a Protestant, so he can take the oath. And he, of course, is great friends with all these Jewish families, like the Rothschilds and Montefyrus, a virtually kind of Benjamin Disraeli, is virtually a family member. He regularly goes there for dinner, he goes there for shabbat, he's great friends with the families. And this becomes very important when in 1875, Disraeli becomes prime minister for the second time in 1874. And in 1875, he delivers the Suez Canal, he buys the Suez Canal for Britain. And this is really Britain's entry into the Middle East as a Middle East and Pat, it's a very important moment. And he does this in a kind of very, very flamboyant way, by going to his friend, Lionel the Rothschild, Lionel Rothschilds, and said, we need whatever it is, five million pounds to buy the French shares and the Egyptian shares in the Suez Canal. And famously, Rothschilds, it's there, spits out a pip that he's eating and says, you shall have it. And then Rothschild is able to go straight to Cremio Torio and say, we've got it, we've bought the Suez Canal. And of course, this leads to the in 1881 to the effective, not annexation, but the sort of British control over Egypt. And that is really the beginning of the story, which the British, real British presence in the Middle East, which leads to the mandate and so on. At the same time. Yeah, go on. Yeah, sorry. Well, this, well, so we're now having this sort of flood of porgy's from the East. And it creates, you mentioned the anxiety and the 1905 Aliens Act. In other words, there's a real profound blowback, which is very large numbers are coming in who are also very different kinds of Jews. Yes. Yeah. And there was great snobbery, by the way, among the Jewish community that will, we've heard surprised. Among Jews. Among Jews, what snobbery, that's almost impossible. Unimaginable. So, so though, though, like families like the Montefurri's, you know, the Rothschilds, they would marry German Jews and they would marry in a Spanish and Portuguese Jews. But there was initially a resistance to into marrying with these ports of Ashkenazis would arrive, which is, which doesn't surprise one. But of course, in the end, in the end, you know, that sort of, that was, that lasted about 20 years. But the point is, no, absolutely right. There's this huge backlash. And the person who's really kind of, who who has to deal with this backlash is, is, is off a battlefield. Prime Minister 1902 to, to, to five or six. And he brings in the Aliens Act, ban Jewish immigration. And so, which is an interesting moment. So at the same time, as that, I just want to step back a little bit because at the same time as this rarely becomes Prime Minister, etc., etc., Britain is becoming more and more present in the Middle East. And part of this is to do with British evangelicals, evangelical Christian belief, which, who are the evangelicals in Britain, are the successes of Kromwell and the Puritans and the, the Ali Protestants in Britain. And they, they embrace the idea of a Jewish return to Zai and or Jewish relationship with, with the Hony land. Because they are Victorian evangelicals who believe that, that the, the, the Jewish return is essential before the second coming. So you have these kind of very worldly leaders like Lord Palmerston and Benjamin, to Israeli at the same time, you have their friends like the Earl of Shalspray, who is a passionate evangelical, who are, who have some of the same beliefs as American evangelicals do today. And our pro, pro Jewish and pro return to the Middle East for the same reasons. And so, that is also going on at the same time. So in the 18, when we're now reaching the 1890s, the early, not, early 20th century. And of course, everybody knows, you know, 1881, the assassination of the second, the, the arrival of all these Jewish immigrants, the arrival of Jewish immigrants in the Holi land, which is still an Ottoman vile yet. And, and in, in in 1896, we have, theodore, Theodore Hurtzel, of course, and the idea of a state of the Jews or a Jewish state, the Juden stat. And this immediately causes some disquiet in in British amongst British Jews, because British Jews have got feel they have everything arranged. They're these slightly unpawed Jews who've arrived, but you know, the, the, the aliens act has kind of stopped that flow. But you know, Jews like, Jews like these big banking families, which were known by the way as the cousinhood, because they were all interrelated. They are now very well established. And in fact, you know, by the early 20th century, you have a British cabinet, whether, you know, where you have several British cabinet ministers who are Jewish, all of them from these banking families, the, the Edwin Montague, late becomes Secretary of State for India, a Herbert Samuel, who we'll hear of later becomes Home Secretary. So you have, you have an extraordinary, you have an extraordinary thing now where Jews are so established that they can become cabinet ministers. But at the same time, the idea of Zionism is like throwing a grenade into this group. And there's initially an a split amongst these very establishment families. So, but one has to look back and see that really Zionism had one of the initial starters, precursors of Zionism, before it was called Zionism, was Moses Montafuri. He had gone to, he went to the Holy Lands seven times. And he'd first gone in the 1820s. And all people don't often don't realize that Jerusalem was a completely impoverished half empty city when he went to the age in 20s. There were only about two or three thousand people living in the old city of Jerusalem at that time. Half the old city was actually empty. And there was, there was only the old city. There was only the old city, there was only the old city, and it was partly empty. It was a kind of more new mental village with these amazing buildings, the day with the rock and the wall and so on and the church. But, and he went there and he saw that the Jewish community there was tiny, but totally impoverished. They were, they were almost beggars. And so Montafuri two things happened. He decided to help this community and to fund it. He also decided that he would become an observant Jew, which he hadn't been before. And he had, so he had a sort of religious, um, a religious moment. And lastly over his many visits, he decided to promote and sponsor the return of the Jews to, um, to the Holy Land, which he sort of saw as, as either a big Jewish community under the Ottoman Sultan. He went to see the Sultan or under it or perhaps in the future under the British Empire. And So he played a big part in that, in 1860, he founded the first Jewish village outside the walls of Jerusalem, which became the new city of Jerusalem, West Jerusalem, and is still where he built his, his, the Monteferry windmill. So that was an interesting moment, and at the same time the Rothschilds, particularly the French Rothschilds, Baron Edmund Rothschild, started to, started to back the founding of small Jewish farming communities, Moshavim, as well. And by the way, they were quite friendly all these big, these big Jewish backers of early thunders, but they weren't best friends. They were all slightly jealous of each other. Again, which weren't surprised you, they all wanted to do things that, that their own way. And again, that's how big funders of Jewish organizations work today as well. Exactly. Exactly the same. So you know, Moshavim wants his own thing, then there's, then there's, you know, Baron DeHarsh, who has his own thing, and then, and then the Rothschilds have their own thing, and none of them want to do it with each other. So it takes a long time before they merge. But, Moses Monteferry was dead by then, but one of the, the head of the Monteferry fams, Abraham Monteferry, decides to be, to back Zionism, becomes a Zionist. Other members of the family are very skeptical, and they believe that it will create anti-Semitism, and that it's, it's actually not a good thing for the Jewish community. And it's the same in the Rothschild family. And in all these families, the Monteferry is a Rothschilds, the Sammels, the Montague, the Sassos, all of them. There are Zionist members of the family, and there are anti-Semitism members of the family. And that goes right up into World War One. When Zionism has become hugely popular, and I know you'll all discuss this, in endless, endless unpodcasts, have these. We won't go into it again, but in the, for the British, this is terribly important, because when, when Hurtz and the early Zionists were promoting the idea of a Jewish state or a Jewish return, what their lawyer in one of these cases was David Lloyd George, a well, a radical well-shed lawyer and liberal politician, who later, as some radicals do, became one of the great imperialist statesmen of the British Empire. And another friend of this concept was Alphabetful, and the leader of Zionism in Britain was Crayon-Viteman, and who started, you know, became an academic, a chemistry professor, and, and was also a brilliant lobbyist, I guess we'd call it today, and became the Zionist leader in England. But at the same time, there was Zionist, there was Zionist movement based in Berlin, in the German Empire, there was Zionist movement in Istanbul, and for a while David Bengurim was part of that. So in all of these big imperial capitals, there are these Zionist leaders trying to persuade these great powers to promote the idea of Jewish return and Jewish development of the Holy Land. But of course, an early idea promoted partly by Balfour, discussed with Balfour, that the British had was to have a Jewish settlement in El Ariesh in British Egypt, and obviously that was, you know, that was not a particularly attractive idea. Another idea was to have a Jewish, a small Jewish homeland in Kenya, Uganda, which was the Ugandan offer, again sort of discussed with British leaders like Balfour and Chamberlain, the father of Neva Chamberlain, which also didn't really catch the excitement of Jews around the world. And then of course World War I begins, and in World War I a completely different game opens because Britain invades the Holy Land and invades the Ottoman Empire from Egypt under Lord Al-Alihanbi and starts to fight its way up. There are three battles of Gaza in 1917, and then they break through and they head towards Jerusalem. And at the same time the British are discussing various promises to various powers. And all of these promises, which of course are terribly famous, they make promises to the Arabs, they make promises to the Jews, they also make promises to many powers in Europe, including the Greeks and the Italians, the Armenians and the Kurds as well. And all of these promises can only really be understood by looking at the British position in the war in 1960 and 1917. Britain was bleeding, hemorrhaging men on the Western Front, and they would lose millions of men were killed in that war. And then the British was stuck, stagnated in a stalemate with the Germans on these trenches. And at the same time millions of people were dying on the Eastern Front too. And so Britain was just desperate, British statesmen were desperate to find a way, anything that would move the dial in any direction. And first of all they start to think about an Arab revolt in the Arab world, which of course was ruled by the Ottoman Turks. And the Arabs had their own ideas of nationalism and hoped for autonomy if not independence. And the rulers of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, the three passions were almost neo-fascist, racist, Turkish ultra-nationalists who were not particularly friendly to Arab nationalism. And therefore there was an opportunity for Britain. So the first thing Britain did was negotiate a very amorphous and blurred agreement with the emir of Mecca, Hussain, Hussain, Hashemite, Sharif, descended from the prophet who actually only ruled the city of Mecca, as emir, as his family had since salad in for a thousand years. But he had the great lineage of descent. And so anyway the British believed that this man could mobilize the whole Arab world, even though he had about 6000 men at arms. And while the Ottomans had millions of people at our in their armies, including a vast amount of Arab troops who remained loyal to the Ottomans all the way through the war incidentally, interestingly. And so they decided to back in. But he asked for an Arab empire that would encompass the whole Arab world. He asked for what would become the states of Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Iraq. He asked for that as his empire. And this is a man who had this tiny military presence and had never ruled anything more than the towns of Mecca and Medina. So the British of course negotiated with this and they deliberately, they deliberately blurred the agreement so that they kind of promised some sort of Arab state. But they said that they couldn't they couldn't promise everything because they also had promised a lot to France who was their chief ally. And this is the Sykes Pico agreement. But the Sykes Pico agreement should be called the Sykes Pico's sasana for agreement because it was also with Russia. And what they agreed, the French, the British and the Russians, was a sort of carve-up of the Ottoman Empire. All the way from Constantinople, which they promised to be an international but with under the Russians, a huge part of modern Turkey and the borderlands with Iraq, which would also be Russian, possibly Armenian, possibly Kurdish. And the Holy Land, which would be ruled by the Russians, the British and the French together. So that Sykes Pico sasana for agreement and of course that contract makes perfect sense. Make perfect sense. Yeah. And so that made that well one reason it didn't work is because the Russians, the Russian revolution happened, which meant the Russians were knocked out of the agreement. So that left the French. So already the the the promise to the Arabs was was was kind of contradicted with the promise to the French and at the same time they promised the Italians and the Greeks huge swaves of what is now Turkey. And then then they turn to the Jews as as your viewers will know very well the Jews in Russia. There were several million there were six million Jews in Russia. There were now millions of Jews in America. And America was now entering the war. Russia was they were trying to keep Russia in the war. So they believed, as statesmen did at that time, that the Jews had a sort of "matnistical power" and were very powerful in those countries, which wasn't completely true, but they believed it. And so part of the reason for the Balfall Declaration was this belief in the power of the Jews in these two key allies. At the same time, people like Balfall Church were the successors of 19th century statesmen like Palmerston and also the six, they weren't religious themselves, they weren't evangelicals, but they were successors of the evangelical tradition. And as Lloyd George said, "I know the names of the places in Judea, better than I know the names of the places on the western front," which was a interesting comment. And so they believed, for all these different reasons, a third reason was empire. Empires never do anything out of philanthropy. And they believed that they were going to give independence to a lot of Arab countries. They were going to have to deal with the French and the Russians in the Middle East. And they believed that the Jewish, a small Jewish entity that would be supportive of the British Empire and back the British Empire in the Holy Land, because they wanted the Holy Made, and really want to share it with the French and the Russians. So for all these reasons, they promised, along with promises to the Kurds, the Armenians, and all these other promises, they promised to the Jews in the Balfour Declaration, which we all know about, which really should be called the Lloyd George Declaration since he was really the driving force, but they agreed that they would create a homeland by some definition in the Holy Land, as we know well. So all of this, the Jews are central to the story. So we have this mass wave of Jewish immigration, it lands in London, it is impoverished, it's forming, Americans will know the Lowery side, right? It's forming these little informal ghetto type communities. There's a big debate in Britain over whether they're even assimilable. At the same time, the Jewish question is now front and center on the world stage, fundamental to how the imperial ordering of the Middle East. What is happening to British Jews in the 1900s, 10s, 20s, 30s as they go through this period where the question of the Jews overtakes European politics, but also is a fundamental imperial question, you know, for Britain? As we discuss, first of all, design is a division, and in the cabinet, in the cabinet, within the general community, in other parts, but in the cabinet that gives the balfoldec, agrees the balfoldecoration, there are Jewish cabinet ministers who are supportive of it, Herbert Samuel, who is home secretary, liberal home secretary, and there are, and there are Jewish cabinet ministers like Edward Montague, who is also a powerful cabinet minister who entirely opposed to it. So it's an interesting split. That split goes through in the community, but the community is now unbeginning to thrive in Britain, but the very fact of that increasing success and assimilation and acceptance leads to the backlash that we see, we saw in France and in France and Austria in the 1890s, for example, and the beginning of a fascist movement in Britain, under, under, under, under, under, under, well, mostly in the 1930s, so we're jumping ahead now to the 1930s. Britain has, Britain has created, has, Britain now rules a substantial sway of the Middle East incidentally, and, and Sykes-Pico, contrary to popular belief, was never activated. What happens are the treaties of Severe and San Remo, which give mandates, League of Nations mandates to Britain in France to rule, Britain gets Palestine, a large version of Palestine, which includes Jordan, and what they call Mesopotamia, which they rename Iraq, and the French get Syria and Lebanon. And within that, within that entity, as you all know, they allowed, they allowed substantial Jewish immigration to Palestine. And they named the Holy Land Palestine, it's the mandate of Palestine, and that's where, that's where Palestine becomes an official name for the region, for the first time since the Byzantines. Yeah, so they're allowing mass immigration of Jews to Palestine at the time when they're still not allowing mass Jewish immigration into Britain, when the doors to the United States are closed in the early 20s, right? So, so it's an interesting, you know, there's an anti-Semitism to the pro-Zionist of some of the members of the British elite. That's correct. And of course, in the early, in the 20s, though, you know, even though there are kind of crises, the, you know, in 1929-21, the Nabi Mouser riots, the Jaffa riots, and so on and so forth, culminating in 1929, and the massacres in Hebron and Sfat, and and in Jerusalem. But at the same time, the British mandate is is allowing in huge numbers of Jews to immigrate, you know, with, to create what may be some sort of definition of the Jewish homeland, alongside, you know, which at this time, by the way, is a by-national concept really. There's not much hope of a Jewish state. The idea is that they'll be a kind of Palestine with a sort of joint, with these joint communities united at the top in a legislative committee. That's the idea of the British idea for Palestine. But at the same time, you know, back in England, yeah, yeah, there's minimal, there's minimal immigration as there is in America. And there's beginning to be a rising feeling against Jews. And of course, in 1933, Hitler comes to power, and that changes everything suddenly. There is a copy-caft fascist movement in Britain, the Black Shirts, Undoels, well, mostly a form, a former Labour cabinet minister, incidentally, who is this kind of slick, very good-looking, sort of glamorous and very wealthy aristocrat, who leads this movement really aimed at attacking Jews. And there are sort of terrible scenes in the Jewish East End, which is where all the poor Jews live. And this is a period of kind of rising alarm for British Jews. And at the same time, Britain is beginning to struggle with ruling Palestine. And in the mid-30s, at the same time, Jewish immigration suddenly starts to surge, because of Hitler and Nazism. And this leads to a full-blown Arab revolt in Palestine. And an Arab civil war within the Palestinian, what became the Palestinian Arab nation, where half of the Palestinian Arabs want to negotiate a sort of agreement, to sort of compromise with the Jewish community in Palestine. And half of them under the Movedi of Jerusalem, I mean, Ahaseni, want to drive out that community and see Palestine as an Arab Muslim, Afno State, sacred territory, and which, and which only a tiny, demy Jewish community would be acceptable. And so they launched this, they launched this kind of, this revolt, this insurgency against the British, but also against the Jews. And at the same time, there's this struggle between the Nasir Shibi family that leads the sort of compromise, the pro-compromise Palestinian Arabs, and the Hussainian, his gangs, who want to wipe them out. And it's a brutal war. And in the middle of it, the British offered the Peal, the Peal Commission idea, which is the first idea for a partition. But interestingly, the Ptak partition offers a Jewish entity alongside a Palestinian Arab entity, which would be ruled by Abdullah, Emir of Jordan, which has been hived off from the Palestine mandate. And he's backed by the Palestinian Arab leader, Nasir Shibi, whose mayor of Jerusalem as well. And a failure of this is a tragedy because one of those ideas that could have worked and could have created an entirely different, a different world than with the one we know today. There wouldn't have been Israel in the same circumstances. And there wouldn't have been a Palestinian movement that we see today either. But anyway, it failed. A huge Arab insurgency exploded. And the British brutally put this down. Why, at the same time, training Jewish armed commandos for the first time, including people like Moshadeh Dayaan, who become the heart of the Haganah and the future Jewish militia. And at the end of this war, they've absolutely crushed the Arabs and really destroyed the Palestinian Arab community. The general in charge, by the way, is General Bird of Montgomery, who says he thoroughly enjoys the war. Typical British, tough British imperialist commander. By 1939, the British have decided that they've had enough of Zionism and the Balfour Declaration and they reverse it completely. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain says, "World War is coming. We'd prefer to fall out with the Jews than we would with the Arabs and we're going to back the Arabs and we're going to reject the Jews and they reverse the entire Balfour Declaration and that policy." And they offer the Mufdir Jerusalem and the Palestinian Arabs a Palestinian state, a full Palestinian state. It has one problem for them. It has to have a Jewish entity in it because there are more than 400,000 Jews now in Palestine. And amazingly, the Mufdir Jerusalem rejects this offer of a full Palestinian state. It's a Palestine, called the State of Palestine. And all he has to do is, all they have to do is acquiesce in the existence of a large Jewish community within this land. And they reject it regarding that as unacceptable. It's interesting because the word "F-No" state is often cited towards Israel now. But only an F-No" state would be acceptable. And a large Jewish community was not acceptable in what he called the sacred land, sacred Arab land of Palestine. So an interesting moment. And the moment doesn't last long but nor does the offer because Neville Chamberlain Falls World War II is started. And everything is put on hold. And the Jewish community, by the way, during World War II is very threatened. There's a real possibility in 1940 that Britain will be invaded by the Nazis. There are Nazi lists of well-known British families who were to be arrested and executed. And among them are the Montefuri family. And the Rothschild family, of course, and so on and so forth. And I remember my father telling me that many members of the Montefuri family had discussed what to do if the Nazis had landed. And one of the things they decided they would do, some of them decided they would do, would commit suicide with their own children, with all their families and children, rather than be captured by the Nazis. So it's just an interesting because one thinks that Britain was bound to define the Nazis and beyond the winning side. But for the Jewish community, it was a real possibility that they wouldn't. And so, the end of the war, there's a new government, the Atty government. And by now, of course, the Holocaust is known. You know, six million Jews have been killed in Europe. And there is now a real call among the Palestinian Jewish community for independence. And Havif, you've covered this many times. So we're sort of almost up to modern times. I mean, the Atty government has now decided to what they call scuttle from many of the British Empire's expensive colonies and provinces. And the biggest one they decide to scuttle from is the Indian Raj. But they also make a last ditch attempt to agree a Palestinian settlement with the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs. And they again offer in 1947 a Palestinian state, a Palestine state. Two of them of the Jewish, who despite being a major colluder and promoter of the Holocaust and Nazi Hitler-eyed ally is still effectively the leader of the Palestinian Arabs. And they offer him a state again. And again, from the same reasons, he turns it down in 1947, in which time, actually in Bevin, the British leadership says, "We throw up our hands, we're going to give this to the United Nations, the new international organization." And at the same time, Ben Gurion and Minak and Begin launch the Jewish revolt against Britain, which is preventing the arrival of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust camps into Palestine. And Minak and Begin and the good blow off the King David Hotel, as you know, they hang British officers. And that leads to Jewish anti-Jewish riots in Britain in 1946 against the British Jewish community. Which is an interesting precursor of what we are seeing today. But as you know, they are short lived episodes. And in 1948, the British scuttle from Palestine and Israel is established. Initially, Britain is very, I'd say, hostile to Israel. And Israel is extremely suspicious of Britain for all of these reasons. Since really Israel was created in an anti-imperialist, anti-British revolt. So, which has often forgotten today. And it's only in 1956 that Britain becomes a sort of ally of Israel with the Suez camp. The whole history, the whole story is extraordinary because the Arabs often talk about Israel being founded by the British, to serve British imperial interests. The Jewish memory of all of that period was that everything the British did. Of course, the Zionists tried to influence the British policy, use British imperial power to serve their agenda, their needs, their desperate need to create a refuge. This is Bengurianism and seized by desperation at the terrible fate that he thinks await the Jews of Europe, a view of what was about to happen that begins with Herzl. Even before Herzl. But the Jewish memory of it is that the British Empire, everything it did for the Jews, never might against the Jews. We're evidence of the need for Jewish self-reliance, for Jewish ability to control our situation. For example, the Kinder Transport, which was this great act of moral kindness and generosity, except that all those kids were orphaned, right? 10,000 kids, I think it was, allowed into Britain because war is coming. There could be so kind of straffick that we have to take in these 10,000 kids so they don't die. But the condition we nevertheless place on taking in the kids is that we don't take in their parents because we're not letting Jews in. So the British decision was to rescue kids on the condition that those kids would be orphaned and the vast majority of the parents who stayed behind were killed. And every year now, Britain celebrates the great moment of its great generosity and kindness in the Kinder Transport. The Jews remember that as a great symbol of never relying on someone else, a vulnerability of desperate need. And it's true in 1930, when does the British Empire turn on Zionism? At the gates of Auschwitz. Yes, 1939. In 1939. So it's like, you know, yes, okay, every small people will use every imperial power they can get their hands on. It's not like the Arabs weren't turning to the Ottomans, turning to the Russians, turning to anyone they could over the course of this history. But the idea that we are the arm of some kind of imperial project, when in fact, at the key moments, it always backfired and in the end only self-reliance works. And of course, when the British public is angered at what the Jews are doing over in Palestine, riots against the Jews. It is an extraordinary moment of clarity, but also of how different things can look to different people. The same set of facts can just lead to very different conclusions. Let's bring it up to the present. What, what does the postwar period look like for British Jews? There's obviously the deconstruction of empire. [BLANK_AUDIO] welfare state has built out the Jewish community continues to grow. What does all that look like? It looks, it's the golden age of, it's the golden age of Jews and Britain. Really from, maybe from 1948 we should say, but you know, maybe after 1945, it's a golden age, you know, you've got this amazing influx of Jewish refugees from Germany and from Austria. You know, people like Isaiah Berlin, Lord George Ridenfeld, who founded the publisher. You have this, you have an amazing, you have an acceptance of Jews in British society. And again, you know, they all looked to the raw families, particularly. There were Jews in boat, Jews were pretty, many Jews were socialists in fact and were members of the Labour Party at this time. And you have a great sort of, you have a great prosperity and success that really comes all the way through two years ago, three years ago. And you know, you have these, you have, again, you have, you know, many Jewish cabinet ministers they're represented in the arts, they're represented in business, they're represented in business, it's still a tiny community, 250,000 people out of 60 million. And it's a golden age and you know, it goes right. To be comfortable. It's comfortable. Totally. It's integrated. It's integrated. It's very, I listen to some British Jewish comedians. They don't sound like being Jewish or something exceptional that they have to grapple with in their day to day life. And then we come to October 7 or does it proceed October 7? There's a change. There's something earlier which I think happens. And in this case, I think it's something that's in common with the discourse in universities across the rest in the world. And so here's a point where this is, this, you have this, you have this Anglo-Jewish communities we call ourselves. And it's extremely patriotic, extremely English, we sound English, we live English. There are areas like Golders of Green and in Manchester where there are orthodox Jewish communities living what are known as Jewish areas. But there are also a lot of Jews like myself who don't live in a Jewish area but are very proudly British and Jewish. And that's how we regard ourselves. And that is completely unchallenged from really, from the end of those small riots in the mid-40s to October 7th. But as an, exactly as in America, there are in universities, particularly universities like London University for example, which ironically many of the colleges there were founded as colleges where Jews would be acceptable, Jews and non-conformists would be, it could study when they were banned from big at Oxford and Cambridge. It these very, what were then called progressive universities. And ideology of decolonisation was becoming extremely fashionable, exactly like in America. And in fact, influenced by America. And it really, I think it really started, of course you can go back to the 60s and look at the real decolonisation and the new radicalism, Mukha Wama, resistance in the Arab world, but also extreme radicalism in Western universities, most extreme, it's most extreme, Red Brigades and bottom mine half and all of that. But that's really dormant. And in the early two, in the early 2000s, you're at the beginning of this new decolonisation movement in which, in which the world is divided into goodies and baddies to oppress and oppressors. And the oppressors are white settler-colonialists who are engaged in the destruction of indigenous peoples. And it comes from, as you know, and I think you've discussed a lot, it comes from originally, from Australian academics looking at Australian colonisation. It's immediately applied through a new journal founded in 1999, in the Journal of Genocide Studies. And it's immediately applied and focused on the case of Israel. And there is an undisputed, without us really realizing it. I feel like me knew about this in Swaritan universities and just thought this was just a sort of, sort of a sort of slightly-demented radical fetish, anti-Israel fetish that really belonged in a small amount of, in a small number of radical professors in the academy. And not for a moment that I think that this would explode into becoming, you know, a movement among many young people and many professors across the Western world. And but the worst signs of this, and this was when Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader in, I think, 2016 all around, and I forget the exact date now, even though I should remember it well. That moment for the first time, the Labour Party, which is, you know, one of the two main parties in Britain, was suddenly captured by a radical entriest group of progressives, as they were called, who treated Jews as outriders for Zionism. And who believed that the Jews were a wealthy white community, who therefore could not face racism themselves, and who in fact were extremely suspect because of their economic position and their alliance to Zionism in Israel. And so this was, this was immediately recognised as real anti-Semitism. And in fact, Jeremy, the fight against Jeremy Corbyn, I mean, partly he was extremely unpatriotic. He always supported anti-Western dictatorships, you know, Putin or… And Iran. And Iran. Yeah. And he always supported those against the brist, the evil West and the evil America. And part of it was anti-Americanism. But a lot of it was identified as a strong strain of anti-Semitism, was recognised within this movement. And that was the first we'd heard of this idea that the Jews couldn't be, couldn't, there couldn't be anti-Jewish racism because Jews were rich and white. And this concept was completely new to us and was, was, was extremely alarming. Particularly since, you know, it's completely a historical and in fact this whole kind of ideology rests on a completely a factual, a historical approach, which is alarming. And I think it's great as danger is not only to the security of Jews, but actually to, as, as to British society, you know, societies that don't recognise and don't respect facts, sources, history, and accept fabrications and conspiracies, societies like that ultimately fail. And so that is one, that is one part of where we are today. But what we saw on the day after October 7th was this movement resurged. And Corbin had, had lost the general elections, been removed from the Labour Party and the Labour Party had, unpurged itself of its more notorious anti-Semites. And it seemed like that that battle was over and won. How wrong we were. And then, and then October 7th, you saw this movement burst out of the universities and into the, onto the streets and in, in an alliance of radical decolonialised ideologues. And in an alliance with, with ultra islamists from amid the four million strong Islamic community, much of which by the way is assimilated, patriotic and thrilled to be in Britain. But there is also a strong minority, I hope it's a minority, who are supportive of islamism within Britain. And, and this a lie at this, I say it's non-holy alliance. In fact, the movement is a sort of really a post-Christian religious, religious moral movement, a sort of moral hysteria. But that amnesia did, I'm exploded after October 7th in demonstrations calling for globalise the Interfada for, for calling Israel genocide. for calling British Jews who were supportive of Israel. genocide, genocide, and out of that came a series of Calamies and libels in demonstrations that Israel was a genocide, a baby killing organization embarking on an attempt to exterminate the Palestinian people while also pretending that the Hamas attacks in October 7th had not happened at all and that the war in Gaza was actually just a massacre, not a war against, not an extremely sadly brutal war against, against an extremely well-armed and ruthless arm-malicious. So that's what happened and I think British Jews then very quickly started to feel a change in their position here and suddenly for the first time since in this golden age of being Jewish and Britain which I said it really started in 45 but really it started much earlier, it really started in the 1850s and it went starting in the 1850s and it lasted right until 2023 and suddenly then you start to feel that Jews are being looked at differently, Jews are being challenged in the arts, in politics, on the streets, in their areas and the effect of these Calamonies and libels when you're really accusing Jews of these demonstrations now happening every week and accusing Jews of being party to cosmic evil, to cosmic evil, suddenly starts to rebound on Jews and suddenly you find that Jewish synagogues have to be effectively armed into fortresses, Jewish schools, fortresses with high walls and guards all the time. In the 60s a a tough British British Jewish businessman, Gerald Ronson, had created the community security trust to protect Jewish community, building schools, synagogues, etc etc. And it was always a kind of it was essential because you know there were terrible terrorism against Jews and Britain but it was very minor by the time you get to by the time you get to the Jeremy Corbyn era, suddenly there is a real danger to to Jewish buildings and to Jewish community and after 2023 after October 7th the Jewish community remember how tiny it is 250,000 people roughly give or take out of 70 million people. This community is suddenly batting down the hatches you know it's going to synagogue you have to go through metal detectors go through guards. The British government backs the CST this community which we have I don't know what your equivalence is in America but we have this amazing this amazing organization which once seemed kind of you know since I slightly necessary but not that important now it's absolutely central to Jewish life and this security trust still run by the great Sir Gerald Ronson who is now an optogenarium but you know this organization is now completely central and as the two and a half years or three years since 2023 roll on with every week these these demonstrations accusing Jews of cosmic evil of genocide of baby killing of blood drinking and these calls for globalized the interfered and from the river to the sea suddenly you see that these marches are being are being deliberately being deliberately fueled past synagogues and the police are the police in Britain are quite innocent compared with you know the police in America for example and they're also really mean innocent they're innocent in the sense that they they they they've kind of they've been politicized to the extent in an anti-racial ideology and multiculturalism that they cannot believe that a minority of any sort could ever could ever reveal malicious behavior to anybody and you know there are all sorts of cases of Britain where we see that this is now this this view has now been radically challenged by events and the British the metropolitan police and the Manchester police now have had to become suddenly change their their approaches by the way British security forces and the British anti-terrorist forces within these police forces have always been extremely good by the way and a vote and a not innocent or in fact you know coldly realistic and and and expert at stopping attacks by Islamists few of which have got through but what they weren't good at at understanding was how these demonstrations some of which were some of these demonstrators of course were humanitarian rightly criticizing Israel for things that Israel should be criticized for and there's much to criticize in Israel as we know but they were very slow to realize that a large part of these demonstrations were hate marches accusing Jews of cosmic evil and really inciting rage and hatred and violence against Jews they couldn't they couldn't attack Israel but they could attack Jews who were here and those attacks have then started inevitably if you accuse people of if you accuse an entire people of killing babies and drinking they have a lot effectively in the end fanatics and and sort of vulnerable people in those communities will attack them and that is exactly what's happened and so we have attacks by Islamists against Jewish communities and we have the killing of Heaton the Heaton Park synagogue at Yon Kippur we have the bombing of Jewish ambulances the Hatsala ambulances in North London we have the stabings of Jews in in Golders Green just the other day and everywhere we have attacks on Jewish buildings threats against Jewish people school children being threatened and the government has been very slow has been very slow at really recognizing this and doing and doing anything about it but what what we've realized and I know we've got we've been talking a long time so we must end this but what's happened is a huge chain change in the Jewish awareness the British of Anglo Jews of who they are and where they are for 150 years more than 150 years for 170 years British Jews were the luckiest Jews in the world we are still really grateful to be here we still have many friends and allies and I and I and we still have the majority of the Jewish people who are the British the British people who are extremely I'd say pro-Jewish and sympathetic to the dangers that Jews are now facing but we also have to realize that the golden age is over and when you have tens of thousands of people walking through Jewish cities threatening Jewish communities on a weekly basis and then you have to realize the golden age is over and we're a small Jewish community in a large high population and we have to adapt to where we are today. I want to finish with one very brief question given the attacks given the marches the I keep telling people just think about those marches a moment with them they are totally unprecedented in the history of marches of Britain march of British marches in Brazil in the United States and Amsterdam everywhere they have been these marches over the Gaza war are totally unprecedented and that means something because not even while the Gaza war was underway was the Gaza war the worst war underway including wars funded by the west with western allies and western weapons and so there there's something here that isn't about specifically Gaza it's about the countries where the marches are happening it is an anti-western argument it is a a civilization argument is an elite competition thing happening so much is happening here that isn't just critique of the Gaza war and the vocabulary being used is the Jews the Jews are the way to talk about so many other things that people are trying to advance and the violence is beginning one of the extraordinary themes that came out and everything you have said over this conversation is is that the Jews have always sought to contribute tremendously as much as they could they tended to be corralled by literally British law into financial professions and that was their contribution, but it was an immense contribution. And they were loyal and patriotic and as soon as they could become part of Parliament and the House of Lords and the elites, they thrilled to the chance and being British meant to British Jews, something very profound, something very profound in their identity and always, always, always until the 1850s. And maybe a little bit after the 1850s as well, but certainly you could say the 1850s begins a trend in the other direction, always they discover that it was all conditional, that it was all temporary, that it was all until the next great crisis. Britain is now going through a very great crisis. It's not quite a crisis of immigration. Maybe it's a crisis of integration. Maybe it's a crisis of of identity. It's some sort of crisis. The left and the right are debating and arguing about this. But there's no question that there's a sense of urgency to it. And in this moment of deep crisis, the Jews are the vocabulary somehow. And whether or not the immigration is happening or not, the violence ends up being about Jews. It's been a period of extraordinary patriotism. It's been a period of extraordinary integration and extraordinary loyalty and extraordinary gratitude by British Jews for being British. Is it conditional again? What's the future look like? Are we back? You just said something has changed. We're, you know, the golden age has ended. What does the golden age ending mean? Did British Jews have a future in Britain? There are by the way options today. Obviously I'm talking about Israel, but I'm also talking about the United States. There are ways and places to go easily, more easily than in the past has Britain once again swung back that pendulum to the conditionality of Jews, the fragility of Jewish life. Do you think the future for British Jews is healthy and happy? Well, I think that the, I think that we're seeing a backlash against this in part. And I think you'll see the king, for example, Charles III, has, has, has, he he offered to become, you know, the patron of the Community Security Trust. The government has, you know, he's bringing in measures against these, these terrorism and hate marches. The Metropolitan Police just put out a statement yesterday or today, and you know, really admitting that these are hate marches that threaten Jewish communities. So I do think that most of British society is sympathetic to Jews. But the question is, will they do a, will they do enough about it? I think that the most Jews, most Jews I speak to, they are talking about things like should we have a month, should we have a Mazar, should we wear our star of David? Most of the attacks are against Jews who are recognizably Jewish and where, where I'm keep our and so on. But most Jews are now beginning to wonder, you know, how Jewish can we be in Britain? But I think it's very few Jews are really discussing whether to leave Britain. And very few Jews are really discussing. I mean, they, they, they say it. And there is a regular conversation over Jewish family tables in Britain now. Where, where would we go? I mean, I, I have not met a Jew in Britain who has not asked that question, by the way, even in a slightly kind of, in a, even in a slightly humorous manner, as Jews do, where would we go? And so definitely, Jewish Jews are asking that question. And definitely, I think that Jews still have a future in Britain. And I am certainly planning to stay here. And I want to stay here. And I love Britain. And I'm, I'm a patriot. But that said, the world is darkening. Simon, see, I went to Fury. Thank you so much for joining me. This was absolutely fascinating. And unfortunately, we're giving context to darkening times. Maybe context gives strength. Thank you very much for coming on. Thanks for having me. Love it to see you.