Anglo-Jewish life has been buzzing with discussion of late about whether Jews “count” or not when it comes to prejudice. It’s an intriguing debate that was started by David Baddiel’s excellent book, Jews Don’t Count, in which he argues that Jews are not afforded the same protections and consideration as other ethnic minorities.
Baddiel’s argument is irrefutably made and, as if to prove his point, days after the book came out Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner declared that Anas Sarwar, Labour leader in Scotland, was the first ever ethnic minority leader of the opposition, ignoring established tribesmen Ed Miliband and Michael Howard.
But amid all this discussion about whether gentiles discount prejudice against Jews, it’s worth noting that secular Jews rarely acknowledge how heavily the weight of this prejudice falls on the shoulders of the Orthodox, and why.
For while secular Jews debate the real meaning of “globalism” and fret over the singling out of Israel, while they hem and haw about whether Jews are a race or an ethnic minority or a religion, visibly orthodox Jews are also far more likely to experience an older and nastier form of prejudice.
Shouts out of car windows, hissed insults or jostles on the pavement, graffiti on school or synagogue walls, no-go areas where you wouldn’t feel safe in a kipah, funny looks and “othering”, street menace and occasionally bottles, stones and worse: the way the orthodox experience antisemitism tells us a lot about the visceral animosity that still exists towards Jews in some parts of Britain.
To be clear, this isn’t an epidemic: I’m not suggesting anyone is cowering in their homes nor having their lives blighted. All things considered, modern Britain actually has a pretty good record on these issues and always has.
But if we’re having this debate, it’s worth acknowledging that if most British Jews hadn’t visibly converted to Christianity a century or longer ago, they would face plenty more everyday antisemitism.
Because most of us are, on some level, partial conversos. Like so many British Jews, I have a synthetic surname, the “Galanski” carried by my Russian ancestors anglicised for the purposes of assimilation. It wasn’t just the name changes of course: we stopped wearing yarmulkes, forgot the Yiddish, adopted English mores and customs, leaving the most visible aspects of our Judaism behind so that we could “pass”.
But what if we hadn’t? What if we had all kept the faith?
If every single male Jew in Britain grew a long beard and put a yarmulke on tomorrow, what do you think would happen to levels of antisemitic incident? The answer is there in the numbers we already have. According to a Community Security Trust report, in 2017 there were 356 recorded incidents of Jews being verbally abused while going about their daily business. In 80% of these incidents, the victims were visibly Jewish.
It’s the same story in New York, where there was a spate of violent antisemitic attacks at the beginning of last year. The targets were the primarily Chasidim of Crown Heights. As is often the case in Stamford Hill, groups of community guards -— Shomrim — ended up working alongside police to tackle the problem. You don’t see that on the Upper West Side.
How Jewish you look, how Jewish your name is: these are things that matter when it comes to prejudice. Thanks to my synthetic surname, I don’t attract the attention of many trolls on social media (unless I write about Jeremy Corbyn). But journalist friends with obviously Jewish surnames — Cohen, Jacobs, Goldberg — receive far more casual antisemitic abuse.
In the film Chariots of Fire, patrician sprinter Harold Abrahams observes beautifully that you catch British antisemitism “on the edge of a remark”. That was likely true for a public schoolboy in a Cambridge common room, and possibly still is, but the residents of Gateshead or Broughton Park or Stamford Hill are also far more likely to catch it right in the face, even today.
Indeed Baddiel’s own well-publicised discomfort with Tottenham Hotspur fans using the nickname “Yid Army” emanates from the same source — the response triggered by visible expressions of Judaism. Because the instant a group of football fans publicly identifies as Jewish, they receive a torrent of antisemitic abuse in response, from lame foreskin jokes to vile gas chamber impersonations.
But imagine just for a moment if there was an actual Yid Army in football. Imagine if the Satmar Chasidim started a team and travelled in their thousands to support their boys at Stoke or Sunderland. Can you picture the response?
The (as yet tragically) unwritten story of Satmar Athletic tells us all we need to know. When it comes to discussing modern antisemitism, all too often, frum Jews don’t count.
