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 n Saturday evening
we went to a seder at the home of some friends. It was an easygoing
affair: Our friends are not
devout Jews. In fact the husband is not Jewish at all, and neither
am I, and neither is my wife. Since we took our two kids, and our
hosts' party consisted of only husband, wife, their one child and
the wife's sister, Gentiles in fact outnumbered Jews five to three
round the table (Elijah was a no-show). Still it was a most enjoyable
evening, and an occasion for thought. As a conservative, I approve
of all customary and traditional observances, even when the religious
content is minimal. I also appreciate the opportunity offered by
Passover to take out my own thoughts and feelings about the Jews
and examine them, an exercise I recommend to all Gentiles, though
once a year is probably often enough.
I myself grew up among the traditional attitudes of the English
lower classes. These were best expressed by the late Kingsley Amis,
who was once asked by an interviewer whether he was antisemitic.
"Very, very mildly," replied Amis. Pressed to elaborate, he offered
this: "Well, when I'm watching the credits roll at the end of a
TV program, I say to myself: 'Oh, there's another one.'" That is
about the temperature of antisemitism I knew as a child: barely
detectable. (I have, of course, already outraged a number of American
readers, devotees of the proposition that anyone who makes the merest
remark about the Jews that is not absolutely, irreproachably positive,
is secretly plotting to massacre them. I acknowledge this with a
resigned sigh. One thing you learn, writing for the public, is that
anything whatsoever that you say about the Jews will be seen
as virulently antisemitic to somebody, somewhere.) For a view of
Anglo-Jewish life from the other side, I recommend the slow, quiet,
modestly funny novels and stories of Chaim Bermant.
My father was a working man of little education, and his attitude
in these matters was pretty much the same as Amis's. I never heard
him say anything malicious — nor even, I think, derogatory
— about the Jews, and I know from many conversations that he
believed Hitler to have been a very wicked man. Dad's usual term
for a Jew was "sheeny," which he deployed in utterances like: "You
remember Marjorie Sykes. She married that sheeny bookkeeper from
over Towcester way." Again, there was no malign intent that I could,
or can, detect in this. It was just a way of speaking, very widespread
in England thirty and forty years ago, and for all I know still
so today.
The English have nothing to be ashamed of in this regard, having
been exceptionally hospitable to the Jews since re-admitting them
in Oliver Cromwell's time. (A marvellous story in itself, told in
Part Four of Paul Johnson's History of the Jews.) English
philosemitism has continued in a direct line of descent since then,
enlisting such notable figures as Sir Walter Scott, Queen Victoria,
Charles Dickens, George Meredith, David Lloyd George, and Margaret
Thatcher. Most Americans would consider it a wonderful and striking
thing if a Jew were to be elected president of these United States.
Pooh: We Brits had Benjamin Disraeli as Prime Minister 133 years
ago. (Yes, I know, his father took the whole family to Christianity
when Benjamin was 13. But Dizzy was born a Jew.) I was a
bit disconcerted some years ago, when some different Jewish friends
took me along to a Kol Nidre service, and I discovered that the
only reference to England in the prayer book was to the 12th-century
pogrom at York. Come on, guys: That was eight hundred years
ago. Isn't there a statute of limitations on pogroms?
The sleepy English country town I grew up in had only a small contingent
of Jews, who of course all knew each other. My first contact with
this little world came through an elderly couple of Silesian Jews
whose anonymity I shall preserve behind the name "Kellerman". The
Kellermans had fled Germany when Hitler came to power. After some
unhappy years in Palestine, they had washed up in England, where
Martin Kellerman was export manager for a firm — Jewish-owned,
of course — that manufactured greeting cards. Gussie Kellerman
gave piano lessons, as a result of which those of the town's young
people who had any aspirations to higher culture all knew her.
Martin used to conduct a sort of salon for us, in fact. Though close
to sixty at that point, he was one of those people who genuinely
like to be among intelligent youngsters. Half a dozen of us at a
time would go over there to sit in his living room and talk about
the events of the day, books we had read or plays we had attended,
while Gussie fed us with wonderful little middle-European snacks
she made up herself, out of ingredients purchased at the county's
lone delicatessen.
I still have a vivid memory of the Kellermans' house. They had brought
with them into exile all the manners and attitudes of the old central-European
Jewish bourgeoisie, one of the most civilized populations that ever
existed. (It exists no more, of course, having been wiped out by
Hitler and Stalin. Most of the Kellermans' childhood friends and
relatives had perished in the camps.) They spoke German to each
other, were intimidatingly well-read in that and a couple of other
languages, and could identify any piece of classical music after
a couple of bars. On top of a fine, gracious old wooden bureau in
their drawing-room stood the most valuable object I had ever seen
outside a museum: a Meissen vase, worth, according to Gussie, twenty
thousand pounds — at least twice my father's entire lifetime
earnings up to that point.
For a working-class boy from a family with very narrow horizons
(I had never even heard the word "delicatessen" until I heard
it from Gussie), this was heady stuff. Martin was a man of much
learning and strong opinions. Some of his pronouncements were made
with such force and conviction that I have not, even to this day,
ventured to gainsay them. When, one evening, someone asked him for
an opinion on Proust, he shook his head and gave a firm "No!" Why?
we asked. Replied Martin, in his heavy German accent salted with
British slang: "Because I do not like poofs. Und I especially
do not like Chewish poofs. It is against nature, und against
my religion." I have never since felt the slightest urge to read
Proust.
The Kellermans were not in fact very religious, and Martin could
be rather scathing about this. The town's other Jews (he said) looked
down on the Kellermans because "They do not think we are religious
enough." The Kellermans didn't even think of themselves as very
Jewish. I remember once Gussie even corrected me, gently, when I
referred to them as "a Jewish couple." Said Gussie: "I would prefer
you to say, 'A German couple'." For all the vile things the Nazis
had done to them and theirs, and for all that their home town was
now a part of Poland, they still thought of themselves as German.
All the men of their parents' generation had fought — for Germany,
of course — in World War One, many with distinction.
I was very surprised, therefore, when I called on them one evening
by myself and found Martin seated in his customary armchair, but
wearing a yarmulke and reading a black-bound book printed in Hebrew.
Here was his explanation. "For some time I have been suffering from
an embarrassing and very painful cyst. At one point, the pain was
so intense that I made a vow to my Creator. I said if he would be
so good as to relieve me of this pain, I would do my duty to him
as a Jew, and attend shul for three months, and make proper
observances. The pain went; and now, you see, I am fulfilling my
side of the bargain." (A true story, though now I see it in print,
it would not be out of place in one of Chaim Bermant's books.)
I find myself now, in middle age, with complicated and sometimes
self-contradictory feelings about the Jews. Those early impressions
— culture, wit, intelligence, kindness, and hospitality —
are still dominant, and I have read enough to know what a stupendous
debt our civilization owes to the Jews. At the same time, there
are aspects of distinctly Jewish ways of thinking that I dislike
very much. The world-perfecting idealism, for example, that is rooted
in the most fundamental premisses of Judaism, has, it seems to me,
done great harm in the modern age. That dreadful speech Charlie
Chaplin gives at the end of The Great Dictator made me gag
instinctively, even before I understood why. I also find the theories
of Kevin Macdonald (The Culture of Critique) about the partly
malign influence of Jews on modern American culture very persuasive
— though this is not an endorsement of Macdonald's theory of
"group evolutionary strategies," which I do not understand. And
like (I suppose) every other Gentile, I have often been irritated
by Jewish sensibilities, and occasionally angered by them.
For an example of what I mean by that last, recall the Spectator
incident of 1994. In October of that year, the London Spectator
— a literary and political magazine of impeccable gentility
— published an article titled "Kings of the Deal," analyzing,
in a thoughtful and entirely unthreatening way, the dominance of
Jews like Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg
in Hollywood. To the amazement of the Spectator's editor
(who was Dominic Lawson — a Jew!) this innocuous article caused
a storm of outrage in the U.S.A. The young author, William Cash,
was denounced from the pulpits of political correctness — that
is, from the Op-Ed pages of the Los Angeles Times and the
New York Times. Prominent American Jews like Leon Wieseltier
went into high-hysterical mode, denouncing Cash as the new Julius
Streicher and so on. The storm went on for weeks, led by a howling
mob of buffoons — Barbra Streisand, for example — who
had certainly never read, nor probably even heard of the Spectator
up to that point. (I have been reading it for 30 years, and have
also written for it.) It was a display of arrogance, cruelty, ignorance,
stupidity, and sheer bad manners by rich and powerful people towards
a harmless, helpless young writer, and the Jews who whipped up this
preposterous storm should all be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
Taken all in all, though, I am proud to call myself a philosemite,
and even at low points like the Spectator affair still, at
the very least, an anti-antisemite. I recall the numberless kindnesses
that I have received at the hands of Jews, friendships I treasure
and lessons I have learnt. I cherish those recollections. As a keen
reader of history, I also stand in awe of the sheer staying power
of the Jews. In Paul Johnson's words:
When
the historian visits Hebron today, he asks himself: where are all
those peoples which once held the place? Where are the Canaanites?
Where are the Edomites? Where are the ancient Hellenes and the Romans,
the Byzantines, the Franks, the Mamluks and the Ottomans? They have
vanished into time, irrevocably. But the Jews are still in Hebron.
These are not very happy days in Hebron. I have no doubt, though,
that 3,000 years from now the Jews will still be there, arguing,
feasting, theorizing, charming, and vexing all who come to know
them. What an astounding story theirs is! "How odd of God, to choose
the Jews." (To which one Jewish wag offered the response: "Not news,
not odd: We Jews chose God!") A peaceful, healthy and happy Passover
to each and every one of them. L'chaim!
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