Dave Rich is head of policy at the Community Security Trust, established in 1994 to protect British Jews from material threats. That year car bombs exploded at the Israeli embassy and a Jewish charity in Balfour House. He opens his new book Everyday Hate with a selection of reports on his desk in London on a random October afternoon.
“A Jewish boy, travelling to school on the morning bus, is punched in the face by an adult woman. Spectators at a schools’ football match between a Jewish school and a non-faith school repeatedly shout ‘Hitler’ at the Jewish players. A man walks up to a large menorah (a Jewish candelabra) outside a Jewish school, stands to attention and raises his right arm in a Nazi salute. A Jewish university student is chased down the road by men shouting, ‘We’ve got a knife, we’re going to get you Jew.’” Despite all this, Rich writes, “it was a relatively quiet week.”
British Jews have long kept their heads down, and we have flourished here, and felt secure: there has been no pogrom in Britain since 1947, when the murder of British soldiers in Palestine sparked anti-Jewish riots in Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. But the post-Holocaust pause in Jew hatred – a 70-year-long minute’s silence, if you will – is over. The conspiracy theories that spread during the years of Corbyn’s leadership of Labour – Jews are demonic agents, this time of a foreign power seeking to subvert socialism – are echoed by the far-Right, who have their oanti-wn issues with Jews.
There are a lot of books about antisemitism: Jews are a bookish people, and they have a lot to write about. Few, though, are as practical and, in a strange way, inspiring, as Rich’s. This is no anguished cry in the dark, or attack on Corbynism as a singular thing, because it isn’t: a Corbyn figure has existed in every age, and every country, Jews have lived in. Rather, it is a poised and detailed explanation of how, and why, Jews found themselves in this position, and how Jews and non-Jews alike can work together to keep antisemitism at bay.
He does not spare the British, who think they have much to be proud of in their treatment of Jews. The first blood libel was here, in Norwich in 1144. England was the first country to expel its Jews, in 1290 (and that edict has never been formally rescinded). Along with almost every other country that attended the Evian Conference in 1938 Britain refused to help large numbers of continental European Jews. Although we accepted the 10,000 children of the Kindertransport, their parents were left to die. Even so, Rich says, there is no country he would rather live in.
This book is a history of a conspiracy theory. The Jew, to an antisemite, is everything you fear: it is a dark mirror. Rich follows this conspiracy from the gospels – “You are from your father, the devil, and you prefer to do what your father wants” (the gospel of John) – via medieval persecution to now, when the Jewish state is considered a unique evil in the world. Antisemitism moves along its path, ever-renewing, as if for the balance of the world: relations between Judaism and Christianity have improved, for instance, but Islam has absorbed some of the tropes instead.
Conspiracism is thriving, driven by political alienation and social media. It knits itself into Covid conspiracism – the “plandemic” – and fears of “globalists”. Searches for “Rothschild” and conspiracy theories increased by 39 per cent between 2016 and 2019 though, as Rich points out, four of the five largest banks in the world are Chinese.
Rich is particularly acute on the character of the antisemite: above all, it is a culture of despair, of believing the world has failed you, and who is the cause of it? He quotes Sartre, who said antisemites find “the existence of the Jew absolutely necessary” to explain their failures to themselves. Antisemitism is not a political position: rather, it is a “passion” that inhabits the subconscious.
Even so, Rich is an optimist – or, rather, he is not a pessimist – and he has practical ideas. Social media companies must take responsibility for their output, which is radicalising young people against Jews. (An October 2020 opinion poll by the anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate, based on a representative sample of 2,000 UK adults, found that 30 per cent of 25- to 34-year-olds agree with the words: “Jews have disproportionate control of powerful institutions and use that power for their own benefit and against the good of the general population.”)
There is no point teaching the Holocaust without teaching the long history of Jews, Rich adds; the Holocaust should not be universalised, because that obscures the cause of it; and most essentially, antisemitism should be taught in the homes and schools of non-Jews. It should not just be our story, but yours.
Rich quotes George Orwell: “one of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true.” Yet they are believed, and this is a fair, and timely, rebuttal.
