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

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.

Leatrice in Beirut

It’s strange how much certain things can change in seventy years. It’s even stranger, and rather sadder, to see how certain other things have grimly resisted every attempt at change. Or got worse.

In 1948, my mother Leatrice was living in Paris and working for UNESCO. In November, she travelled to Beirut for a conference and she wrote to her parents on the 16th, soon after arriving:

… I hope you have already received my cable. I didn’t want to let you know until I arrived that I was travelling by air, knowing that you would worry, but we had a most uneventful trip…

Flying was still an adventure seventy years ago. It’s true, I tend to phone Danielle after a flight to say I’ve arrived safely, but I do the same after a train journey or even a car trip. As it happens, I find the prospect of travelling any great distance by car far more daunting than catching a plane. I have more confidence in the pilot’s ability to fly his plane than in my own driving – or that of other drivers on the road.

As for a cable – a telegram – I don’t even know who still provides a service these days. Certainly, I don’t remember the last time I sent or received one. In the ages of text messages or emails, does anyone use telegrams?

Leatrice (third from left) enjoying a moment's relaxation in Beirut, 1948

The trip to Beirut marked Leatrice for life. She mentioned it frequently down the years. And looking at her letters home, it’s easy to see why.

The mountains now have snow on them, she wrote on 20 November. It is cold, clear and sunny. This country grows on one. The colour on the hills mixed with the brilliance of the Mediterranean is unbelievably lovely. I have come to like the Lebanese very much. After the coldness of the Parisian, it is heart-warming to meet people who laugh with their eyes as well as their mouths.

The people may have been great, but apparently Leatrice was concerned about the sanitary conditions:

… if we drink any water, we put chlorine in it. It tastes exactly like a swimming bath, but is at least disinfected.

Personally, I’d prefer to take my chance on the infection. On the other hand, it took me a week to recover from the Cairo belly I brought back from Egypt ten days ago, so maybe Leatrice was right.

But she hadn’t finished with the subject of the people.

… it is quite obvious that they are a pure Semitic race. Olive skinned, long heads, black hair, large black eyes, curly mouths.

The racial comments I’d probably avoid, personally, but I like the underlying message, one Leatrice would repeat throughout her life: ethnically, there’s no difference between the Arabs of the Levant and Jews. The idea that there should be racial tension between them, far less conflict, is simply indefensible.

But, and this is one of the things that has not changed in seventy years, or if anything has got worse, that conflict is proving agonising and irresolvable.

We touched down in Damascus and came by taxis over the border into Lebanon… We saw some truckloads of soldiers in Syria, but there isn’t actually much military activity there. Lebanon isn’t actually at war, although Syria is.

The Israeli-Arab war of 1948 had already broken out.

Isn’t it curious that at the time Syria had been relatively untouched by war? To the extent that it was regarded as safe enough to bring staff through to Beirut? That wouldn’t be the case today.

In any case, these days we’d fly directly to Beirut.

I am, of course, very tactful about myself, but discover there is practically no feeling at all about the war. After all Lebanon is not officially engaged in it. The people I know are all Christian, and they feel themselves in very much the same position as the Jews in the Middle East. A few hundred thousand (about 600,000 surrounded by 40 million Moslems, who hate their guts). They generally feel that there is a slight bond in having another minority just over the border as some slight protection. In 1860 there was an awful pogrom of the Christians here, and the ones left fled to the mountains, and hence most of the people living in the hills are members of the Greek Orthodox church [I think she meant the Maronite Christian church]. There are actually about twenty different sects getting on fairly amicably, including a Jewish community. I had my hair washed by a woman who spoke Russian, and then burst into Yiddish with another customer.

Some things have changed, others have stayed the same. The underlying tensions have continued and, if anything, hardened. And the communities that got along reasonably well have broken out into full-scale combat, especially in Syria. The fighting Lebanon was spared in 1948 has spilled over its borders. Indeed, the links between the Christians and Jews that my mother spotted, took a particularly ugly form in 1982. That was when Israeli forces stood back and let Maronite Christian militia carry out a massacre of the Palestinian inhabitants of the Sabra neighbourhood and Shatila refugee camp in Beirut.

A deeply moving representation of this terrible event is in the excellent semi-autobiographical Israeli film, Waltz with Bashir. The sense of horror is made somehow even more intense by the film being made as a cartoon. Until the last few scenes, at least.

Leatrice left Beirut on 15 December, after around a month. With many fond memories. As early as in her letter of 16 November, she had written:

Have now seen the cedars of Lebanon. A very lovely tree. Tall, graceful and a very bright green.

What a pity that Lebanon isn’t primarily known for its cedars any more.

And as for the effect of war on a peaceful nation, what more pitiful example could be provided than Syria...

In praise of a great woman: people aren't dispensable

Time for a tribute to an exceptional mind. She left us extraordinary insights into the behaviour of man, particularly in extreme circumstances. Not just what we do but why we do it.

Two of her insights strike me as particularly important.

The first is the notion of the ‘banality of evil’. Hannah Arendt covered the trial in Jerusalem of former SS Officer and logistics coordinator for the final solution to the ‘Jewish Question’, Adolf Eichmann – he organised the transport of Jews to the extermination centres.

Hannah Arendt: a voice to listen to all the more today

What struck her most about Eichmann was his deep ordinariness. Many described him as a monster. What she saw was someone who could only speak in the clichés of officialise because he had no other vocabulary; in her world view, the inability to speak with clarity revealed an inability to think clearly; that made Eichmann literally thoughtless and unable to see the moral consequences of what he was doing.

She saw in Eichmann a man with little or nothing to distinguish him, a middle-class figure who had struggled to build a career or even make a living, and whose only talent turned out to be for the administration of transport for colossal numbers of people – no small task in war time with huge pressure on the railways.

Eichmann knew what would happen to the Jews once he got them to Auschwitz. But that wasn’t his problem. His task was just to get them there and he set about it with all the dogmatic persistence of a dedicated minor functionary. An accomplice in mass murder on a historically unprecedented scale was just the kind of man any of us might meet behind a counter or in a nondescript office somewhere. Indeed, we might him anywhere because he could be any of us.

That’s what makes evil banal: it can appear in the most everyday of people.

That’s the chilling conclusion of the notion of the banality of evil: any one of us could be capable of it. It is not the exclusive preserve of a particular type of person, a monster born.

The second of Arendt’s idea that particularly strikes me here is that western societies have, over the centuries, moved towards considering humans as dispensable. Arendt was Jewish and brought up in Königsberg. It’s a neat reflection of the terrible impact of the first half of the twentieth century that her city, the home of the great German philosopher Kant, is no longer in the far east of Germany but now belongs to a small exclave of Russia, beyond the Baltic states. Even its name has been expunged from the record. It is now called Kaliningrad, named for one of Stalin’s henchmen.

Germany eventually became a dangerous place for her to live. She was fortunate enough to get out (in 1933, when Hitler came to power), and eventually reached the US, with plenty of pain on the way, including internment in a camp in France. Over the next few years, it became increasingly clear that what the Nazis were working to achieve was the entire extermination of a group of people – several groups – simply for who or what they were, with no consideration of their guilt or innocence of any offence, indeed of anything they might have done. 

That led Arendt to the principles on which she based her colossal work, The Origins of Totalitarianism. In the totalitarian view, the human being counts for nothing. People can be wiped out, even tortured to death, because they have no importance in themselves compared to such notions as historical inevitability or the emergence of a race of supermen.

Why do I mention all this now?

Two reasons.

The first is that 4 December 2017 is the 42nd anniversary of the death of Arendt. She deserves to be far better known. Whatever I can do to help that, I do.

The second is that the concepts I’ve been describing seem horribly relevant again today. Around us we see people of complete banality playing with great evil backed by great power – not least the occupant of the White House who could, still, plunge the world into a most terrible war in Korea.

What’s more, Trump recently retweeted violently Islamophobic videos by an extreme right-wing group from Britain. Some Muslims have behaved outrageously badly – maybe one in three million Muslims, but in the Eichmann approach to humans, we don’t take the time to think things through, to distinguish between the tiny numbers of the guilty and the huge numbers of the innocent, to reject the simple approach to write off all Muslims en masse.

I’ve argued before that the Muslims are the Jews of today. By writing off an entire faith group in this way, the far right takes us further down that road. And Trump has endorsed it.

For the moment, Trump threatens merely a travel ban. But where will he take things? Especially if the target becomes North Koreans rather than Muslim? 

We’ve seen where that kind of thinking has gone before. Which is why, on the 42nd anniversary of her death, we need Hannah Arendt as much as ever. And need to listen carefully to what she taught us about human behaviour.

Muslims: the Jews of today?

A lesson I never learn is not to go into Holocaust museums.

The most recent was in Budapest. I had an hour to kill before heading to the airport and, by pure chance, found myself right by the museum. So I wandered in.

The Synagogue at the Budapest Holocaust Museum

Things went the same way as on my previous visits to Holocaust monuments. At first I work my way around the display cases in a serious but quiet mood, but with some apprehension about the emotional onslaught to come. I read the descriptions of the long history of Jews in the country. Because this was Hungary, there was also material about the gypsies, victims too when the time came.

Then there were photos of the time just before the seizure of power by the anti-Semites. Jewish families out for the day. Jewish pharmacies or groceries supplying Jews and gentiles alike. Gypsies travelling the country. But already there were bad signs: ghettoes reforming, arched gateways being bricked up, yellow stars.

And finally, what always happens happened again. I was reduced to tears by the shots of women being marched down the streets, their hands in the air, young Jews or gypsies breaking stones in forced labour teams, and at the end of the road, old people and children making their way along barbed wire fences towards the gas chambers. The tears come every time, forcing me to leave the exhibition and make for the open air.

Once outside, my thoughts turned to how people could justify meting out such treatment to others. The thinking hasn’t, after all, ever fully died out. Even within the British Labour Party, my own party, we have a leading member and former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, who keeps insisting that Hitler supported Zionism. Here’s what Arno Schickedanz, a leading Nazi ideologue, had to say on the subject:

In the ideology of political Zionism, Palestine fulfilled the role of an indispensable part of prophecy, just as certain rules are the guarantee for success in the magical ceremonies of primitive peoples. Political Zionism never intended Palestine to be the destination of all Jews, but rather it merely wants to make Palestine the centre of Jewish world policy. That must naturally be protected by a strong Jewish population. 

Zionism to him was merely a part of a more far-reaching plan of the Jewish “race” (it was crucial, for the Nazis, not to confuse the so-called “race” with a mere religion).

Gentile observers and writers on Zionism, who see political Zionism only as an attempt at “national renewal” rather than an effort to establish a unified Jewish leadership as well as Jewish rule over the world, are therefore incorrect. The confusion of political Zionism with Palestine can be understood only through the Jewish prophecies in which Jewry is assured of control over all the goods of this world.

For the Nazis, the real aim of Jews was to control the entire world, and Zionism with its proposed emigration to Palestine, was merely a veil for it as well as a stepping stone towards it. Certainly some Nazis, at certain times, favoured shifting Jews to Palestine or somewhere else: “From a political standpoint,” Schickedannz continues, “it would be in the interests of the whole world, of all the host peoples, if the Jews now scattered throughout the whole world were to voluntarily emigrate to some habitable territory”. That, however, was to create a dumping ground for them, not to back the Zionist goal of creating a Jewish homeland.

You can support or oppose Zionism, but to suggest that Nazis had any sympathy for its aims is a strange distortion of history. It’s extraordinary that Livingstone hasn’t grasped that fact.

But it isn’t in fading grandees like Livingstone that the old mentality, the roots of the Holocaust, continues to live and strive to express itself. To a recent tweet in favour of the EU, I received a curious reply:

Well [sic] save you [sic] bacon yet - which come to think of it will probably be banned in EU soon

I was a little surprised by this news, which I hadn’t picked up. But it seems that it was a bit of a long-range forecast:

Ah there would only be a bann [sic] when the Muslims outbreed non-Muslims - how long do you think that would take?

Not long, apparently, since it seems that Muslims breed “6 kids a family...”

My correspondent was concerned with the Islamic drive to world domination. It operates from within. They come to our countries and outbreed us, so they can take over and ban (or possibly bann) our bacon.

It felt like a sentiment worthy of Arno Schickedanz. Only the target has changed. The Muslims, it seems, are the Jews of today, the new objects of a hatred of another human based only on who they are rather than on anything they do.

It’s painful to visit Holocaust memorials. But given that such views are still being expressed, perhaps we do need to keep reminding ourselves of where they can lead. Maybe I need to go on visiting them – after all, shedding a few tears is a small price to pay if it can help avoid shedding blood, again, instead.

The potential dangerous terrorist I met this luchtime

Have you read Elaine Morgan’s The Descent of Woman? 

There is little acceptance these days of her fundamental notion about human evolution. That's the “aquatic ape” hypothesis, according to which the species at one time headed back to the sea, along with various others which, like us, have streamlined residual hair and subcutaneous fat (a much more useful way of retaining body heat in water than fur): pigs, elephants, hippos, etc. Indeed, she reckoned that other land species went back to the sea and stayed there – dolphins, for instance. Who knows whether we mightn’t have done better to follow their example.

Still, all that is questioned these days. On the other hand, I stick with her overall stance, that woman must have contributed more, and perhaps a great deal more, to the development of the species than man. That makes sense if only because the rearing of young is key, especially in a species such as ours, where the young are so vulnerable for such a long time.

I haven’t tracked down the quotation, but I think it was Morgan who, in combating the prevailing macho theories of anthropology – the theories of the “Tarzanists” for whom the key development in mankind is the emergence of the hunter, strong, tall, farsighted, courageous, deadly and inevitably male – came up with a great little thought exercise. When faced with such a sentence as “humans are the most lethal predators the Earth has seen”, apply it to some individual human from your daily experience. This will give you give you something along the lines of “that postman coming up my front path is the most lethal predator the Earth has seen.”

It’s a great antidote to over-generalised thinking. And, as well all know thanks to William Blake, “to generalise it to be an idiot.”

It was just this lunchtime that I was reminded of Morgan’s inspiring and lucid thinking. I bought a few bits of food at Marks and Spencer. I was called over to a till by a young woman with a shy but kind smile, who dealt with me politely, efficiently and with friendliness. As it happens, she was wearing a Muslim headscarf.

Two thoughts occurred to me.

The first, why are we who happen to be white entitled to tell a woman like her what she should or shouldn’t wear on her head? It appals me that France, my second nation, full of so many people I like and admire, nonetheless feels it’s entitled to tell the Muslim minority what aspects of its perfectly harmless behaviour are tolerable and which aren’t.

The hijab doesn't even rule out belief in basic
French republican principle

The second was just how appalling a society we will have created if we ever allow ourselves, in our necessary and legitimate pursuit of vigilance, to suspect of terrorism anyone whose dress identifies them as Muslim. What an atmosphere that would be to live in. Besides, if there’s one sure way to create a large pool of alienated and antagonised people, it’s to suspect them of hostility towards you – there’s no better example of a self-fulfilling hypothesis.

“That timid and deferential young woman may be a vicious and callous terrorist?” Yeah, right. I’m really not prepared to live a life in which that’s the first thought that crosses our minds.

Arabs and Jews: things were better under the Nazis

It’s always a pleasure when a film reminds one of when things were better than they are today. Even if that just leaves one wishing they could be as good again.

It’s odd when the setting for such a film is the Nazi occupation of Paris. But that’s what Les Hommes Libres, available in English as Free Men, successfully does.

A Nazi officer in the Paris Mosque, from Free Men

It’s set amongst the North African community in Paris during the Second World War. There had been significant immigration from Algeria and other parts of the Maghreb to France even before the war, though the really big wave came later. Many went home when the Germans invaded, but a large number stayed on, scratching a living as best they could under difficult conditions.

That led to a development that many might find extraordinary, given the state of tensions in the world today. The Muslim community of Paris, which wasn’t persecuted by the Nazis, did what it could to protect as many Jews as it could. It focused on Sephardi Jews, from North Africa themselves, because they spoke Arabic. The main mosque in Paris issued as many as possible of them with certificates attesting to their being Muslim: with similar features and the same language they could pass as part of community.

How many people were saved? Estimates vary between 500 and 1600. A drop, certainly, in the ocean of suffering that was the Holocaust. But for the 500 or 1600, it was literally the difference between life and death.

In protecting Jews, the North Africans of Paris reflected the attitudes of their compatriots and coreligionists back home. In countries under Vichy French or German occupation, Muslims refused in their vast majority to collaborate in persecuting Jews. In Algeria, when the (French) authorities offered expropriated Jewish homes up for new owners, some of the (French) white settlers leaped at the opportunity; Mosques denounced the practice and few Muslims took advantage of the offer.

That was a continuation of a centuries long tradition. When a more extreme Muslim ruling group from Morocco took control of Moorish Spain, many Jews left to live elsewhere in North Africa; when the equally extreme Christians of the “reconquest” took back control of the whole of Spain, others followed.

In the Arab, Muslim world Jews found refuge and forged new careers. Moses Mamonides, of whom Jews still say “from Moses to Moses there arose none like Moses”, lived and flourished in Cairo, where he was a court physician and wrote major works, some in Arabic (strictly Judaeo-Arabic, Arabic written in Hebrew script).

For centuries, Jews and Arabs worked and lived well together across North Africa and the Middle East. Those good relations, as Free Men shows, extended to Paris during the war.

Heartwarming, isn’t it? But a bit of shame that relations between Jews and Muslims today are so much worse than they were under Nazi occupation. With, sadly, no likelihood of their returning to those idyllic conditions any time soon.