A tour that revealed so much by showing us so little

It was a curious guided tour we went on through the old city centre of Valencia. In two ways.

The first curious thing was the reception we twice received from locals, as we stood listening to our guide, Marisa, talking to us through her loudspeaker. In English.

“Welcome back, tourists!” the first cried.

The second even went so far as to applaud us for returning to the city.

Valencia is as beautiful as ever, of course. But it is strangely quiet. Despite the hot weather, and the profusion of tables outside cafés and restaurants, they had few clients.

We heard one frustrated restaurant manager swearing, “this is complete shit”. A glance inside showed food ready for ordering, and no one ordering it. The main problem isn’t that locals are afraid to eat out, though there may be some of that. It’s that the influx of tourists we would expect at this time of year has simply not turned up.

The Coronavirus restrictions are gradually being lifted, but there’s still only a trickle of visitors from abroad. That’s throttling a lot of the business the city depends on.

Hence the applause on seeing us.

We hadn’t the heart to tell them that we all lived here. We might be on a tour, but we weren’t tourists. We didn’t want to spoil their celebration, brief as it was likely to be.

The other thing that made the tour strange was what we were visiting. It was the ‘Judería’, the Jewish quarter of the old city. What made it strange was that it is, physically, all but non-existent.

There was once a thriving Jewish community in Valencia. Many of its administrators and financiers were Jews. When James I took the Kingdom of Valencia from the previous Moorish rulers, he used Jews to help him run the place. In return, he gave them a large chunk of the city to be their own. They prospered so much that before long the Jewish quarter had to be extended still further.

It wasn’t just in administration and finance that the Jews distinguished themselves. In the course of our tour yesterday, we stopped to admire the (modern) bust of Luis Vives, one of Valencia’s most significant scholars, a contemporary and friend of Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Luis Vives, descendant of Jews, 
not honoured in his own land

His major contribution was to the foundation of what we now know as psychology. However, he did that work not in Valencia, but in the Netherlands. An inscription behind the bust explains that the honour he couldn’t receive in his own land was afforded to him in another. Why? He was from a family of converted Jews, most of whom fell to persecution by the Inquisition. He was wise to get out.

A fine building in its own right
But it rather disguises the Jewish cemetery underneath it

Most of the tour was like that. We saw the rather fine palace built on part of the site of the main Jewish graveyard, but we saw no graves. We looked at where the principal Synagogue once stood, but not a trace of it remains. The closest we came to any physical sign of the previous Jewish presence was at the site of a major restoration project on the Valeriola Palace in the centre of the city. An old street runs through the site to the remains of a wall that marks the limits of the Jewish neighbourhood. A recently discovered oven too probably belonged to it.

Shoemaker Street in Valencia
A restoration project revealing a rare trace of the Jewish quarter

It’s extraordinary to see how utterly the community, and even any trace of its previous existence, has been wiped out.

It’s not just the Jews. Valencia was Arab for five centuries. There are more remains of that time than there are of the Jews, but still they’re rare and in ruins – odd stretches of wall, for instance, mostly underground.

And yet Jews offered some of the most important intellectual skills that Spain enjoyed, in administration, finance and even, as we’ve seen, philosophy, science and medicine. Meanwhile, the Muslims provided equally powerful intellectual contributions (one of the key figures leading to the European Renaissance was Averroes, a Moor from the Spanish city of Cordoba) and also some of the most sophisticated agricultural techniques the country possessed. Getting rid of these communities might indeed have made Spain more religiously homogeneous, but what was the price?

Judge for yourselves. In 1492, with the Columbus expedition to the Americas, Spain was launched on an adventure that would make it Europe’s, possibly the world’s, most powerful and wealthiest Empire. In that same year, it expelled its Jews. Twenty years later it was the turn of the Moors.

Within little more than a century, it was being challenged by France and the upstart Protestant powers of northern Europe, the English and the Dutch, the latter of whom won their independence from Spain in a long and bitter series of revolutionary wars.

By the early eighteenth century, Spain’s fate was being dictated to it by fighting between other countries to decide who would be its King, in the so-called War of Spanish Succession. By the start of the next century, it lost its dominance at sea at the Battle of Trafalgar. And by end of that same century, another upstart nation, the United States, had relieved it of its last major colonial possessions.

Perhaps it would have been the same even if it had kept its Jews and its Arabs. But I think they could have held their position a lot longer by drawing on those talents and applying them wisely, rather than driving them out. Accepting a little religious diversity might have done them a lot of good.

And that was the object lesson we drew, from the very fact that our tour showed us how little remained that we could actually look at...

By the rivers of Babylon

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we

remembered Zion.

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?

It was way back in 1978 that Boney M covered a song, By the Rivers of Babylon, originally from the Jamaican group The Melodians.

Boney M covered the The Rivers of Babylon

The lyrics were based on words rather older. They come from the 137^th Psalm, from what Christians think of as the Old Testament.

I recently finished a biography of Frederick Douglass, which was fascinating if, perhaps, a tad too long. There are times when I ask myself “why doesn’t someone who writes such good stuff get better at editing?” Still, it was worth ploughing through.

Douglass was extraordinary. Born a slave in Maryland, he saw and suffered horrible abuse as a child and young man. Eventually he escaped to the North. There he became a leading figure in the fight to abolish slavery in the US. That took courage, because he could have been caught and sent back at any time, until some admirers, ironically in England and not the States, raised the money to buy him from his ‘owner’ and free him.

He preached, rather than merely speaking, against slavery. For one of his speeches he drew on this deeply moving Psalm. It’s about the time when the Jews were taken into captivity in Babylon and there, in bondage and a long way from home, they find it hard to sing the songs of their homeland and their faith.

All the anguish of the exile is there. Something that might be remembered when those who call themselves Christians round on people, from Syria or Libya, or Central America, struggle to their countries to escape persecution or terrible suffering.

I have to admit, though, that when I came across the reference to the psalm in the biography, it was the song that came to my mind. Along with some vague memories of the time when every café, car or canteen was playing it.

I was due to spend the New Year in France and I was, as usual, broke. A friend put me in touch with a family who could drop me not too far from where I was going, for no more than a contribution to the cost of their fuel. I leaped at the chance.

I loved those people. They were a Jewish family from North London, very much my own background. They were my favourite types of Jews. They were practising, unlike me, but deeply involved in secular life, and they were fun to be with.

Sadly, I’ve failed to keep in touch with them (well, they’ve also failed to keep in touch with me), and I can’t do anything about it now as I don’t even remember their names. I just remember the clattering trip in their shaky VW camper van, to the constantly repeated strains of By the Rivers of Babylon (the kids insisted). I also remember we talked all the time, though I don’t remember what about, except for one sad story: they shared the enthusiasm of many Jews for music and their elder daughter was a budding but competent clarinettist. However, they had recently lost a court case brought by a neighbour to stop her practising in their flat. A small but ugly victory for philistinism.

I remember little about the holiday either. It was up in the Alps above Grenoble, in one of those confusing places, either Villard-de-Lans or Lanslevillard. Who does that? Just call one place by the name of the other, back to front?

The parents of one of the people at the party were retiring and selling up the school they had run there for years. It was for kids with respiratory conditions, allowing them to study in clean mountain air. The parents were about to vacate the place and, since it was full of bedrooms, they’d allowed their son to invite a bunch of friends to enjoy a last New Year’s Eve there.

All I remember of the festivities is that it was perishing cold outside.

“The temperature’s down to -10,” one of the revellers announced with glee.

“How much is that in Fahrenheit?” one of the others asked me, having identified me as the only benighted Anglo Saxon present.

I worked it out for him. “About 14,” I said.

“Oh, right. Is that cold?”

You can picture for yourself the delight with which I answered, “Pretty much as cold as -10 Centigrade.”

It was only when I got back to England that I looked up the Psalm. Which was when I made the shocking discovery that as well as the sorrow of the exiles, it also celebrates their lust for revenge. The last two lines are:

O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.

Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

Ah, well. Dashing the little ones against the stones? Not quite as pretty as the opening. I don’t think Frederick Douglass quoted those words in his speech.

The Melodians and Boney M left them out too. I’m not sure they’d have contributed much to the success of a pleasant little pop song, with a touch of gentle melancholy about it.

Not sure they contribute very much to improving the outlook of mankind generally, to be honest.

A watercourse, a poet and a lot of persecution

There’s a piece of doggerel most schoolkids learn by heart:

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue

Rather fewer people, outside Spain anyway, know that 1492 was also the year that the last Moorish – Arab and Muslim – part of Spain fell to the Christian reconquest of the country. Ferdinand and Isabella, the ‘Catholic Monarchs’, captured the Emirate of Granada that year, making the entire Iberian Peninsula Christian once more.

The Alhambra in Granada
Fell to Ferdinand and Isabella when they defeated the Moors
And gave its name to their decree against the Jews

It was barely two months later that they issued the Alhambra decree, named for the great Moorish palace in Granada, expelling all practising Jews from Spain.

One of Spain’s, and indeed the world’s, greatest poets was Federico García Lorca. He was gay, in the early part of the twentieth century, when that was hardly a safe thing to be. He was also from Granada, and replying to a reporter in 1931, he said:

I think being from Granada gives me an inclination towards sympathetic understanding of the persecuted: the Gipsy, the Black, the Jew…, the Moor, that we all have within us.

He might have added “the homosexual” but that might have been dangerous.

Lorca. Outstanding poet. Champion of the oppressed

By the summer of 1936, it had become dangerous simply to be Lorca. That was when the military uprising, against the Republic that then ruled Spain, began.

The rebel leader was Francisco Franco, who would hold Spain in a rigid dictatorship for nearly four decades. His regime had no time for a gay champion of underprivileged minorities.

The Nationalists Franco led also believed that the revolt was a crusade for Christian values. So they were particularly ill-disposed towards Lorca for the comments he made during an interview in June 1936, just weeks before the military rebellion started. Asked for his view of the Christian reconquest of Granada, he replied:

It was a very bad moment, though they say the opposite in the schools. We lost an admirable civilisation, a poetry, an astronomy, an architecture and a delicacy unique to the world, and replaced them with a poor, cowardly city, a land of piety in which the worst of the Spanish bourgeoisie operates today.

Unforgivable words for the Nationalists who, just two months later, caught up with Lorca and murdered him.

All this came to back to me while walking in the hills above Valencia the other day.

This region is remarkably fertile. Far more so than the relatively poor country around Granada. It doesn’t rain often, but when it does, the rain comes down like a waterfall, in storms that usually last three or four days.

That means there’s all the water agriculture around here needs. The trick is to manage it well, so that it doesn’t all seep away to the sea in between the storms. And, to this day, the locals are happy to acknowledge that the irrigation systems they use are based on techniques their ancestors learned from the Arabs.

Irrigation water flowing in the Sierra above Valencia

That made it poignant to walk along watercourses guiding irrigation water from the mountains to the fields and orchards. Every few metres there’s a side channel, with a small sluice to let water into the adjoining fields or keep it out. These structures are modern, not Moorish, but they use the same principles.

My mother had a refrain when talking about Spain. The two great errors of that nation’s history, she maintained, errors which ensured its long-term decline, were defeating the Moors and kicking out the Jews. With them, they lost their best agriculturalists (to say nothing of the cultural wealth Lorca listed) and their most skilled financiers and traders.

So walking along a watercourse in the hills above Valencia isn’t a simple, innocent exercise. It’s redolent with historical meaning. In the Moors, Spain had an outstanding civilisation, which it defeated and overthrew, to its own lasting harm.

In the Jews, it had another great minority with much to contribute, persecuted for merely being other.

And centuries later, Spain produced a magnificent poet, who understood and empathised. Who knew what it was to be oppressed. Who, finally, fell to that very oppression at the hands of a dictator certain he was acting for his white, Christian and Spanish nation.

And who, by doing so, inflicted further damage on that nation, just as the earlier persecutors had.

The saddest aspect of all these memories? The descendants of those self-harming oppressors are ready to do it all again. The Trumps, the Johnsons, the Leaders of the Italian League or of Spanish Vox. They learn nothing and keep making the mistake of thinking that homogeneity is the way to greatness.

Whereas, as Lorca knew, it’s stultifying and ultimately fatal.

Water, water everywhere. All for the land to drink

Christmas day without my mother: something of a relief

Christmas. So many memories.

Not all of them bad.

The tradition in English-speaking households is to have presents, at least for the kids, on Christmas morning. I’ve no idea who came up with that terrible idea: it means the children are up at 5:00 or 6:00, waking their parents to demand gifts.

My family was no different. We’d wake up at the crack of dawn and find a Christmas stocking stuffed with goodies at the bottom of our beds. That would hold our attention for the best part of two minutes, by which time we would have reached the obligatory mandarin at the bottom, and then we’d take off to wake up the parents and find our “real” presents.

An early foray into empirical experimentation tested his existence

There came a time when I began to suspect that the gifts weren’t really being brought by Father Christmas. But I was a child interested in evidence and prepared to carry out carefully designed experiments to test any hypothesis.

So, one Christmas Eve, I propped a bongo drum between a chair and my bedroom door. The outcome was spectacular. When the door was pushed gently open some time after I’d fallen asleep, the drum fell to the floor, with a highly satisfactory, indeed nearly explosive, noise followed by a volley of cursing. That was not the kind of language I’d expect any saint to use, and the voice was in any case unmistakably my mother’s. That left me freed of an old deception but also, as I discovered in the morning, denied a Christmas stocking.

Danielle is from Alsace, in Eastern France, where they have a different approach. Like so many on the Continent, they celebrate Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day. The tradition in her village was for a father to take his kids out in the afternoon, so that in his absence the mother would set up and decorate a tree – never done earlier – and assemble presents around it. The kids would be greeted by an apparently magical transformation when they returned.

The family would have their Christmas meal, after which presents would be opened. In the evening, not at the crack of dawn the next day. Indeed, if families go to Midnight Mass – usually held at 10:30 or 11:00 these days, as a more convenient approximation to midnight – the kids get home tired and unlikely to wake up early on Christmas Day. The parents enjoy a lie-in.

That strikes me as far more civilised than the Anglo-Saxon way. I have no idea why English speakers don’t adopt it.

My mother was one who never could. To her, Christmas was a sacred fixture in the Calendar, inextricably linked to the 25th of December. This was a little odd, since she was Jewish and, therefore, technically not expected to celebrate Christmas at all.

That may only further underline the tenuousness of the link between Christmas and Christianity. Today, for all but a diminishing band of true believers, it’s a feast of the family and of commerce, not a celebration of the birth of Christ. There’s no reason why members of other faiths, or none, shouldn’t celebrate it.

This, however, created difficulties. Christmas Day in England is the day when nothing happens. Public transport virtually stops and more or less everywhere is shut. My mother absolutely wanted to go for a meal with us, but there are few restaurants open and the ones that are either offer a special Christmas meal at an eye-wateringly special price, or they’re indifferent places hoping to cash in on the general absence of anywhere to eat out.

Once we ate in a Turkish restaurant opposite the Synagogue. Run by Muslims, it was ironic to see it fill up quickly with Jews, all known to my mother. The spectacle of Jews being served by Muslims on the day of a great Christian festival certainly tickled my sense of irony, which went some way towards making up for the mediocrity of the food.

On another couple of occasions, we went to a Thai restaurant near her home, where the food was frankly even worse than in the Turkish place. It really only had geographic convenience going for it. Our first attempt to eat there was a fiasco, because my mother told us that lunch was being served after 3:00. It was only when we showed up that we discovered that the correct information was that they were serving until 3:00. So we missed out on food altogether.

I could never persuade my mother to have our Christmas meal on the 24th, French style, when there would have been a huge range of restaurants to choose from. It had to be the 25th. To be fair, I suppose she knew that all around her people would be celebrating with family on that day, and she’d have felt miserably lonely if she hadn’t. I sympathise and I’m happy we helped her avoid that fate. But it was exasperating to go out on the hunt, each year, for a restaurant that could accommodate us, serve us a reasonable meal and not require us to take out a new mortgage on our house. A hunt that failed every time.

My mother wasn’t always an easy person to get on with. Even so, I often miss the things we did together. When I watch something good on TV, I want to tell her about it. When the Labour Party does something avoidable and self-destructive, I want to bemoan our fate with her. When the kids do something particularly admirable, I want to share the pleasure with her. But the Christmas day meal?

Not so much.

Ah, the tradition. The joy. The terrible food.
Have a great Christmas, everyone. Christian or not

Leatrice: a life well-lived, if perhaps not fully

The benefit of dying on your birthday is that the people you leave behind can celebrate your life, on the day you were born, rather than lament your departure, on the day you died. Even though they’re the same day.

My mother Leatrice pulled off that trick. As I pointed out at the time, although she may have been unconscious, she managed to survive until 11 July last year, her 94th birthday. That makes today, which would have been her 95th, a good time to remember her life rather than mark her death.

Leatrice in Italy in about 1964

Last year, I wrote several pieces about her – her childhood in Britain and her adulthood during the war years, her departure from England and her travels eventually leading to meeting my father in Paris, their move to Rome, their time together in Africa and New York, including her degree studies there, and lack, perhaps, of entire fulfilment she had from her life.

I’m not going to pretend that my mother was always easy to be with. She was a difficult mother, as both her sons can testify, and often a prickly friend, as her friends could no doubt confirm.

Should I have tried to do something about her faults while she was alive? Perhaps, but I think it would have precipitated some unpleasant rows and done little good. Is it worth dwelling on them today when it can make no difference at all? No, it isn’t, and I’m not going to.

Instead, I’m going to focus on the varied life she lived, because as most who came into contact with her will gladly point out, it made her excellent company.

Both sides of her family were Jewish. Her mother’s side was reasonably well off, as her father had been a skilled artisan (he made shoe uppers for people with damaged feet). Her father, on the other hand, had been born into terrible, grinding poverty. The evening meal was a loaf of bread for the boys, half a loaf for the girls, and they had soup once a week, on Friday night, at the Sabbath. The tragedy was the day that his father returned home, tipped out the contents of the cauldron because it was where the family washed as well, and only realised afterwards that he’d just thrown away the soup.

My mother’s father set out to make sure that he would never suffer such poverty again nor inflict it on his family. He became a typographer, and a good one. Later in life, he was able to look at a picture and say how many ink colours would be needed to print from it, and therefore estimate any job. 

Inevitably, he gravitated towards Sales.

Long before that, however, he had been drawn to the left. He spent two years in Dartmoor Prison as a conscientious objector, in excellent company including Bertrand Russel’s. Meanwhile, the woman who was to become his wife had moved further left still, into the new Communist Party of Great Britain. He never joined but he attended some meetings, and it was seeing her chair one that attracted him to her.

At that time, she was recovering from the terrible blow of losing her fiancé, who had survived the War but had died in the flu epidemic that followed. She agreed to marry my grandfather but it was a stormy engagement, which she broke off at least once.

My mother was born in the poor Jewish East End of London, on 11 July 1924. From there, the family moved to Stamford Hill, where a slightly more prosperous Jewish community lived. From there, they went to Hampstead Garden Suburb, not the wealthiest Jewish area but not far from one of them, at Golders Green. Here my grandfather bought his first, and only, house, clearing the mortgage in just two years. That was where my mother grew up.

She went to a school whose praises she sang throughout her life, Henrietta Barnet, even though she was unhappy with the passive anti-Semitism: Jewish students were excused Christian activities, but nothing else was laid on for them, so they spent the time kicking their heels in a separate room and getting royally bored.

It was worse when she took a job with Barnet Council where, she said, the anti-Semitism was active and vicious. What made the job still worse was that she had hoped to go to Art College, but the family decided that wasn’t possible, and she went to work instead.

She flirted briefly with Communism but eventually joined the Labour Party, for which she went to work eventually, in a post shared between the Party and one of its think tanks, the Fabian Society. That’s where she was for the Second World War, and she stayed around long enough to witness Clement Attlee’s triumphant election at the head of Labour’s first majority government.

But the girl from middle class Jewish London had had enough of that world. She wanted out. In 1948, she went to Paris on what would eventually be nearly four decades of residence abroad. 

In Paris she eventually found a job in UNESCO. It was there that she met a colleague, a young financial expert who’d served the war in the Royal Air Force; in 1951, they married. Oddly, the married in Genoa as they were travelling to Rome, my father having moved from one UN agency, UNESCO, to another, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) headquartered in the Italian capital.

My brother and I were both born and had our early schooling there. But then our parents moved to what was then called the Zaïre, today the Democratic Republic of Congo, when my father, frustrated after fifteen years without promotion, suffered for our sakes, moved to another agency, the UN Development Programme. My brother and I went to boarding school in England, and stayed there when my parents moved again to New York.

That was where my mother at last realised her ambition and had a university education. She graduated with the equivalent of a first-class degree – Summa Cum Laude – and was admitted, in what she always felt was one of her most significant achievements, to the top academic fraternity, Phi Beta Kappa.

Leatrice, at the front, with Leonard to her left
In retirement in France in 1982, the year before he died

When my father retired, they came back to Europe, buying a house in the French countryside and renting a flat in Bromley, outer London, so they could split their time between the two countries. But my father only managed six years of retirement before dying in 1983. That’s when my mother decided that she’d travelled enough and would return to England.

However, she chose a city with which she had previously had no contact, much against the advice of many of her friends. “Who do you know in Oxford? You’ve no roots in the place. You’ll be lonely.”

She wasn’t. She took a course in Oxford history and qualified as a city guide. It gave her a circle of friends, many of whom attended her funeral, and a job she loved and continued with, well, rather longer than her health really allowed.

That was just one of her circles of friends. She had a French conversation class. She would go to the theatre or the Ashmolean museum with other groups. She remained an active member of the Labour Party right to the end, the activity only limited by her health. Indeed, the Labour Party was a home to her as it turned out to be for me which is why neither she, who had suffered anti-Semitism, nor I could understand how the modern Labour Party could fail to rid itself of that toxin.

She loved Oxford and was happy there. Or as happy as she could be. I believe, as I’ve said before, that she was cheated of something for which she was eminently suited: a career of her own, perhaps in the academic world. I think the loss of that opportunity meant she could never be entirely fulfilled.

Her health too let her down, though perhaps not quite as badly as she often thought – and said. Her constitution was clearly much better than she allowed as she was still able to live a reasonably independent life up to just a few weeks before her death.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of her life, though, was the loss of my father. She was a widow longer than she was a wife. And he had been a remarkable support to her.

Leatrice on her last garden stroll,
less than a month before she died
She enjoyed having Toffee on her lap

Still. Despite increasing ill health, her missed opportunity, and a long widowhood, she had a remarkably varied and rich life. Not entirely fulfilled but certainly well-filled with wonderful experiences.

That’s something to celebrate. If you knew her, please join me in raising a glass to her memory. Or you could raise that glass even if you didn’t know her: what’s wrong in celebrating a life well-lived, even you never met the person who lived it?

Cockup not conspiracy. Comedians not clowns

One of the problems with conspiracy theories is that they require a belief in human ingenuity that is way beyond me. Not just ingenuity but also discretion. The latter is an even rarer quality.

The belief that the moon landings were faked, still firmly held by certain people, would have required the active participation of some 400,000 people (as calculated by James Longuski). It seems inconceivable to me that anyone could have maintained that huge a conspiracy, all working to a single end for a twelve-year period. But still more unbelievable is the notion that not one of those people would ever have told the story to anyone else.

Surely some journalist out there would have been able to offer a handful of them sufficient inducement to spill the beans?

What I have far less difficulty crediting is the opposing cockup theory of history. Call me a cynic if you want, but I find it inherently plausible that most of the things that go wrong around us are down to sheer incompetence rather than to ingenious scheming. Human stupidity, it seems to me, is fully capable of explaining most human-made catastrophes.

Take the difficulties the Labour Party is currently facing over anti-Semitism. Now I’m absolutely convinced that there are some vicious anti-Semites in Labour who ought to be kicked out. But the failure of the leadership to act isn’t, I suspect, down to their sinister complicity with the small numbers of real anti-Semites, but simply down to their ineptitude.

Why am I so convinced of that notion?

Well, take a look at the tweet the British Labour leadership sent out – and then had to delete minutes later – to wish Jews a happy Passover. It’s clearly intended to be cheerful, friendly and encouraging. An olive branch, if I can use a Christian image, towards the Jewish community.

Labour leader trying to mend fences with the Jewish Community
and cocking it up...

Alas, one of the festive little icons is a loaf of bread. As rather a lot of Jews immediately tweeted back, the whole point of Passover is that Jews don’t eat bread over the feast. Instead they eat an unleavened equivalent, matzos.

To be fair, I wouldn’t have spotted the error myself, despite my own Jewish heritage. I don’t keep Passover any more than I celebrate Easter, the Christian equivalent. But I don’t run the Labour Party. And I’d like to think that the Labour leadership has the Jewish contacts to ask about this kind of tweet before it sends it out, and the gumption to check with them.

Well, clearly not. Which suggests that their weakness on Jewish issues probably isn’t down to racism, but merely to incompetence. Which is a relief, since it would be appalling to have a racist leadership. Though, frankly, an incompetent one is only marginally preferable.

Similarly, I have no difficulty believing that no evidence exists that Trump actively colluded with Russia during the 2016 election. I think such collusion would require a greater level of skill – Machiavellian skill, certainly, but skill anyway – than I’ve seen him demonstrate at any time before or since. The man who could repeatedly proclaim his enthusiasm for Wikileaks during the campaign, and even call on the organisation to release more of Hillary Clinton’s emails, and now claims he knows nothing about it, is simply too flaky to see a conspiracy through.

That he might have been the beneficiary of one I find far less difficult to believe. That people conducted one and kept him deliberately out of the loop is certainly plausible. But that he conducted one? No chance.

Trump: cockup par excellence. But in the White House anyway

No. Trump’s an exemplary cockup artist, not a fiendishly clever conspirator. Again, however, as with Labour leadership incompetence, that’s not a hugely preferable alternative. After all, he’s in the White House anyway, however he got there.

All this puts me in mind of what’s happening in the Ukraine. It looks as though a comedian, known for playing the role of President on TV, may be about to be elected President for real. A genuine comedian in charge.

Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Ukrainian comedian playing President
and now on the brink of being elected

A change, I suppose, from the clowns at the top of the US government or the British Labour Party. Though, once more, it’s not clear that it’s much to be preferred.

Personality cults: toxin of our times

One of the benefits of having dogs is that you have to go for walks. It may be cold and wet, or oppressively hot, but the dogs always know that what you really need is another walk.

And they’re right.

Now, and I hesitate to write these words, in case they read them, but even with the company of two charming dogs, I find those walks not entirely exciting. So I take earphones, and an audible book downloaded to my phone. That passes the time satisfactorily, while Luci and Toffee hunt around smelling any patch of ground that seems potentially interesting, or playing with small dogs and running away from large ones.

Luci with Toffee behind her.
Great fun but walks need a little more...

Currently, I’m listening to a book I previously read, Ian Kershaw’s biography Hitler. I seem to be getting more from it this way than from reading it. Perhaps it’s the intimacy of a voice speaking directly into my ear. But what perhaps 
makes the book more vivid to me now is that it feels so much more topical. 

Whether on the first or second time through, the picture that emerges is of a Hitler who was not unintelligent, but hopelessly limited. Perhaps one could describe him as selectively stupid.

For instance, he warned the Jews before the war that if they dragged Germany into another world war, they would pay the price, through the annihilation of Jewry. 

He then invaded Poland, and found himself at war with France and Britain.

Two years later, with Britain still undefeated, he invaded the Soviet Union, convinced the German army could strike a knockout blow in a matter of months, leading to a complete collapse of the Soviets. So now he was in a major European war.

A few months later, Hitler’s ally Imperial Japan attacked the United States and he declared war too.

So now he was in a world war.

The Jews had absolutely nothing to do with any of those steps. Indeed, they had been increasingly victimised as each military adventure got under way. Even so, this was the point at which Hitler, claiming that the Jews had indeed dragged the nation into this terrible conflict, decided that his warning was about to be verified, and Nazi Germany launched its programme of Jewish extermination.

As Kershaw points out, there’s little doubt that Hitler believed what he was saying, however contrary it was to any real evidence. That’s what I mean by blinkered. It’s also what I mean by selective stupidity. It allowed him to delude himself into adopting a series of views with no basis in reality.

It wasn’t, however, the only form of stupidity at play. Or the only form of delusion. Much more widespread was the poisonous beliefs that formed the bedrock of Hitler’s power: the personality cult that developed around him and which meant that any statement he made had to be true, simply because he’d made it.

Hitler was a self-deluded limited man, and profoundly dishonest, but he came to be thought of in Germany as incapable of error.

No attitude is more dangerous. Because if a man is infallible, to question him isn’t merely an error, it’s a lie. To disseminate such a lie is nothing short of treason.

If such questioning is by someone powerful, say the newspapers, then the treason is particularly deadly. The damage is done not to the revered personality – he is above such damage – but to the people who may read or listen to the lies. To protect them, not the leader, it’s necessary to shut down the purveyors of these distortions. Indeed, it may even be necessary to punish the people who produce them.

This is a crucial step to take. Because democracy itself is based on suspicion of its leaders. We elect people to power, but then we surround them with institutions designed to monitor them and question their actions. We never give way to unqualified faith in leaders but expect them to be, like any human, fallible and therefore likely to have to be replaced at some stage.

Personality cults represent an opposed point of view and, consequently, tend to lead to authoritarianism.

Now in long-established and deeply-rooted democracies, such as the United States or Britain, there are mechanisms in place which may be able to prevent that decline into autocratic rule. It may be possible to remove the personalities at the centre of a cult from power before they can consolidate their hold. The great question of our time is whether they are strong enough. Because, and this is why Kershaw is so topical, personality cults are back with a vengeance.

Donald Trump in the US is the head of a personality cult, that sees him as infallibly right, a view he shares. So anyone who questions him is not merely incorrect, but an enemy. Again, the media, or the mainstream media to use today’s dismissive term, are the among the most dangerous. 

Trump would not, I think, launch a Holocaust as Hitler did. However, I’m convinced that he would have no hesitation in locking up opponents if he could. He’d be sure he would be serving the people by doing so.

It’s no accident that the cry of ‘lock her up’ rings out at his rallies.

Not so different as one might think
as both lead personality cults

We have a similar problem in Britain. The Labour Party has been invested by a personality cult. Jeremy Corbyn is seen by his supporters as incapable of error. I’ve been told that I need to show ‘faith’ in the leader, the most dangerous attitude towards leaders. I’ve been told that he is being ‘savvy’ when he refuses to back either side of the Brexit debate, though that merely strikes me as dishonest. And I see in him the same self-deluding tendency to believe that he cannot err: he’s a man of the left so that all his positions are left wing, even when he is pandering to hard right Brexiters whose support he feels he needs, to win office.

As with Trump’s followers, Corbyn’s also loathe the ‘mainstream media’.

Corbyn is no Hitler, of course. However, he necessarily embodies the same tendencies towards authoritarianism that mark all personality cults. Equally, by their unqualified faith, his supporters encourage and reinforce that trend.

Forget the man. Forget his policies. It’s the qualities of a cult themselves that are toxic and need to be resisted.

I’m indebted to Kershaw for reminding me of that vital lesson. And to my dogs, of course, for obliging me to listen to him again.

People are people

It’s an odd paradox, but not at all unusual, that people with completely opposite views can end up taking strangely similar positions on certain questions.

One such question is what it is to be a Jew. On that, anti-Semites will give the same answer as many Jews: they are a race. Being a Jew is something that is inherited by children from their parents, summed up in the expression Jewish blood. That’s why Jews feel it’s enough to have a Jewish mother to be a Jew. While it only needed a single Jewish grandparent to make someone a Jew in the eyes of the Nazis.

For others, however, being a Jew merely meant professing a particular religion. After all, you can convert to Judaism, and that makes you a Jew. But since you can’t convert your DNA, that rather suggests that being a Jew is nothing to do with physical inheritance, and instead, ultimately, a matter of choice.

Did I say DNA? Because that’s the central theme of an article from Time that Danielle pointed out to me.

It seems that a Jewish couple in Pennsylvania decided, more or less on a whim, to send off for DNA tests. She, Dani Shapiro, felt there was little need for a test, since she knew exactly who she was and where she came from. She was Ashkenazi Jew whose parents had emigrated from Central Europe.

And then the results came back.

It turned out that she was at least half wrong. It seems her parents had been having trouble conceiving. So they’d called on the services of a fertility clinic, which used a curious technique of mixing semen from different donors with that of their client. That meant, of course, that it was a bit of a lottery who the biological father of any successful embryo might be.

Dani Shapiro: perhaps not everyone’s idea of Jewish looks

In her case, it turned out it hadn’t been the man who she’d always regarded as her father. Who was, in fact, her father. Just not biologically.

Now her mother was certainly Jewish, so to the Jews she would certainly have been one of theirs. But the blood of a gentile also ran in her veins – as she established when she tracked down her biological father and discovered how much they strangely had in common.

“When I met him,” she writes, “I understood, for the first time, where aspects of my very personhood had come from.”

Well, since she had been certain that Ashkenazy Judaism was a fundamental part of her personhood, that was quite some discovery.

The reality, of course, is that being an Ashkenazy Jew really is part of her personhood. As it’s part of mine, even though like her, my father was no Jew. As it isn’t part of my sons’, though to Hitler they would have been Jews too.

The reality is that it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference who your parents are. Being a Jew or not being a Jew is neither a religious choice nor a genetic destiny. It is a cultural state that one enters or doesn’t, as one chooses.

But then the same is true for other ethnicities too. There may be a number of personal characteristics that are genetically determined, skin colour being the most obvious. But just as with Jews, most of what makes an ethnic group is a matter of culture: a series of shared notions and traditions which go far beyond genetics or faith (though faith can strengthen them).

Which makes the differences between groups interesting but superficial. A lesson both Jews and anti-Semites ought to learn. Jews aren’t better than anyone else simply by virtue of being Jews. Just as they aren’t any worse.

A race? A faith? Jews are just people. Which is the most important thing they, or anyone else, ever inherits from their parents.

As a DNA test easily proved. Though none ought to be necessary.

Jews: what goes around comes around.

Do you remember the jingle ‘In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue’?

I learned that at school. It was much later that I realised that 1492 was also the year in which King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain took other major steps, at least as significant as the decision to send an Italian sailor on his expedition westward – an expedition on which he left with no idea where he was going and came back with no idea of where he’d been.

It was in 1492 that Spain decided to rid itself of its Jews. 

Jews leaving Spain after August 1492

And 1492 saw Christians complete their reconquest of Spain from the Muslims.

My mother, who always enjoyed history, used to say that the decline of Spain as a great power dated from those times.

By moving against the Jews, Spain deprived itself of its most skilful financiers and traders. That’s no anti-Semitic slur: there is nothing inherent in Jews that makes them good with money, and few Jews were involved in high finance anyway. The law prohibited Jews owning land, forcing them into other professions such as finance, and some became very good at it.

Meanwhile, the most advanced and effective agriculture in Spain was carried out by the Muslim landowners of the south. Moving against them would carry a terrible price for the country. Like the financiers, they were outstanding wealth creators – literally feeding the nation – and it made no economic sense to drive them away.

Paradoxically, at the very moment that Spain was launching the exploration of the Americas which would turn it into a world power, it was ridding itself of the skills it needed to support itself in that position.

This kind of self-harm is what happens when nations deprive themselves of the skills that communities seen as ‘other’ bring with them. The converse is also true: when a nation drives those communities out, their neighbours benefit and move ahead of them. In 1685, France repealed the Edict of Nantes that tolerated Protestantism. Over the next thirty years, other countries such as Britain, Holland and Prussia took advantage of the flood of refugees, many of them skilled artisans – weavers, cabinet makers, clock makers – who fled with skills that enriched their hosts while their loss weakened France.

By 1720, some 11% of the population of Berlin was French-speaking. And the nation whose capital it was, Prussia, was on the way to becoming a European Great Power, one that would, indeed, overtake France in the next century.

Building bridges to take people in enriches a nation where expelling them, or building walls to keep them out, only impoverishes it. A lesson American fans of Trump need to learn. Or British fans of Brexit.

Curiously, over five centuries on Spain has made an effort to learn that lesson. A Spanish law of 2014 offered citizenship to anyone who could prove descent from the Sephardi Jews the nation threw out after 1492. They don’t have to give up their existing citizenship if they have one. They have to pass a language test and a test of culture, but they don’t even have to live in Spain.

Why, they don’t even have to be practising Jews.

The government that enacted this legislation presented it as an attempt to redress the error of 1492. I don’t know whether it does or not, but I feel it’s a remarkable aspiration. One to be admired.

Oddly, I only found out about it through the New York Times. That’s the paper that Donald Trump likes to refer to as ‘the failing New York Times’, though it seems to be flourishing. Perhaps it thrives on his criticisms.

The paper had picked up the story because a number of the Jews who had to get out of Spain decided to follow in the steps of Columbus, to the New World. That way, they remained in Spanish territory though they left Spain.

A number arrived in Mexico and some moved into the northernmost territory of that country, including New Mexico. Which was absorbed and made into a state by the US following its war on Mexico in the 1840s.

It seems that the Mexican authorities kept excellent records. So did the state of New Mexico. Consequently, a number of US citizens from that State are now well placed to prove that they are indeed descended from the persecuted Jews of Spain. With antisemitism on the rise in America, that curious Spanish law offers some Jews a potential bolthole – not one they intend to take, but one that it’s good to have available, just in case.

Through Columbus, 1492 opened up a new land of refuge. Through a law of the same year, made by the sponsors of his expedition, many Jews needed a land to which they could flee. And, in a beautifully cyclical movement – you know, what goes around, comes around – some of their descendants, now less safe in the land where their ancestors sought refugees can now claim citizenship of the land that that persecuted those same ancestors.

One thing hasn’t changed over the centuries. Nations still build walls and persecute minorities. Even it means shooting themselves in the foot.

And we don’t like learning lessons from history.

A night of shattered glass

Eighty years ago, Nazi Germany took a fateful step towards the ‘final solution’ to the so-called ‘Jewish question’. Mobs of stormtroopers and civilians launched a night of violence against Jewish property and citizens. It was the turning point when legal harassment of Jews gave way to naked violence.

The pogrom was a response to the murder in Paris of a German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath. Ironically, he was a non-Nazi who was under investigation by the authorities for disloyalty. He was shot on 7 November 1938 by a Jewish refugee of Polish roots, Herschel Grynszpan, whose family had been expelled from Germany to Poland. Vom Rath died on 9 November.

Coincidentally, 9 November 1938 was being celebrated in Nazi circles, including by Hitler himself, as the 15th anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch on 8-9 November 1923. That was Hitler’s first attempt to seize power and led to a shamefully weak response: he was briefly jailed before being released to take up again his drive for power which succeeded ten years later. A sad indictment of the failure of authorities to take appropriate action against right-wing insurgents, and an object lesson of what the consequences can be.

When the news of Vom Rath’s death reached the party, Hitler left without giving his planned speech. His propaganda chief Goebbels gave it for him, and then announced that if demonstrations broke out, they would not be hampered. That was an instruction to turn for revenge against the Jewish community.

A gutted Jewish shop int he aftermath of Kristallnacht

During the night of 9-10 November 1938, some 7500 Jewish businesses had their shopfronts destroyed. The shards of glass on the pavements gave the attack its name, ‘Kristallnacht’, crystal night. Jewish homes were looted, more than 7000 businesses were attacked and in many cases destroyed, and 1400 synagogues suffered the same fate. The number of immediate Jewish deaths may not have been exceptionally high – perhaps a few hundred including those who died in the following days – but 30,000 were arrested and dumped in concentration camps.

Police stood by and watched but didn’t intervene to stop the violence. Firemen attended but only prevented flames extending to neighbouring buildings when Jewish premises were set on fire.

A synagogue burns

A lot of property was destroyed, which infuriated another leading Nazi, Hermann Göring. In his view, that property should have been seized. He decided it was time to bring anti-Jewish action under more disciplined control. At a meeting with Nazi leaders on 12 November, he announced that he had ‘received a letter written on the Führer’s orders requesting that the Jewish question be now, once and for all, coordinated and solved one way or another...’ To make clear that he really meant one way rather than any other, he demanded that the appropriate agencies ‘take all measures for the elimination of the Jew from the German economy’.

From the elimination of Jews from the economy, the Nazi regime slipped almost inevitably towards the elimination of Jews altogether. The decision was taken in the end at the Wannsee conference in January 1942, and in consequence the final solution – in other words, extermination – went into effect.

The notion of a ‘Jewish Question’ strikes me as a strange one. The only question that ought to be asked about Jews is to antisemites: ‘what’s your problem with Jews?’ Similar questions could be asked of other groups: ‘what’s your problem with gays?’ or ‘what’s your problem with Muslims?’

In other words, the problem isn’t with the people targeted but with the people doing the targeting. And, sadly, there are far more of them around than there should be after the experience of the Second World War.

Despite my own Jewish roots, I’ve experienced no overt antisemitism. Until a year or two ago, I argued that antisemitism, certainly in Europe or the Americas, had shrunk until it was limited to a tiny number of fringe groups.. Islamophobia or homophobia struck me as far more widespread and far more acute.

Today, I’m changing that view. We’ve had scandals about antisemitism in various organisations – including, sadly, my own party – and a failure to take action against it. Not acting on time is dangerous, as the case of Hitler after the Beer Hall putsch showed. The sores are festering, the disease is spreading. Nothing has made that clearer than the murder of eleven Jews in a gun attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue.

Islamophobia and homophobia remain bigger problems. But maybe we can learn to oppose both of those and antisemitism as well. And what better time could there be for revitalising our commitment to the cause than the anniversary of Kristallnacht?