Jews' 350 Years In Britain

It was Edward I who expelled the Jews from Britain in 1290. And it was in 1656 that Oliver Cromwell permitted 300 to return. Today British academics are voting to boycott Isreali universities, as reported by Al Jazeera.

So even though British Prime Minister Tony Blair told an audience at the 300-year-old Bevis Marks Synagogue that “it was impossible to imagine the modern United Kingdom without the Jewish community,” the fact is that plenty of left-wing Labour voters can imagine such a thing vividly. They look at the world through the left-wing lens of victimization and right now that distorting lens is focused on the suffering Palestinians and not at the Jews.

Of course, Jews have made a remarkable contribution to Britain. Celebrating British Jews, Charles Moore draws up a little list.

Among the eventual consequences of this re-admission have been Benjamin Disraeli, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Yehudi Menuhin, Peter Sellers, Joan Collins, Arthur Koestler, Alan Sugar, Nigella Lawson, Lucien Freud, Tom Stoppard and Sid James.

That’s quite a list, from philosophers to prime ministers to soap opera queens. And the chap who let them in, Oliver Cromwell, let us remember, was a man who, in today’s world, would be considered a leader of the religious right.

Moore goes on to name dozens of individual British Jews to make the point that “it does seem to my gentile eyes that there is more prodigious ability and energy per Jew than per the rest of us.” It’s a point that needs to be made as a surging Muslim community seems to be upsetting the tenuous safety that Jews have enjoyed in Britain since Cromwell’s time.

Why, we must ask, have Jews been able to live in peace in Britain for 350 years while Muslims take the role of helpless victims who must be appeased?

Moore cites the ingenious differentiation between civil and divine law in the Jewish faith. As long as civil law does not conflict with religious duty Jews are enjoined to obey the civil power.

Jews are told: "Pray for the welfare of the government, for, without the fear of it, people will swallow one another alive."

That is an important lesson to remember has Britain confronts its latest immigrants.

In the past half-century, Muslims have come where the Jews came earlier, and in much larger numbers. Like such Jews, they have sometimes experienced the unhappiness that comes when one's religion is misunderstood or derided.

But the Muslims seem to think that such humiliations are insults to be avenged. Maybe they should. But then, of course, life is reduced to a question of who swallows whom alive.

Today in Radlett, the stockbroker belt village northwest of London where I was raised, the old movie theater is a synagogue, and the old Congregational church where I went to pre-school is also a synagogue. Have the Jews moved out from London’s Golders Green because they have become more prosperous, or because it is no longer safe to be Jewish in London?