Is Alan Sugar Jewish, a friend asked me recently? It was a timely reminder that, although we may seem obsessed with who’s in the tribe, most people remain blissfully unaware of Jews and Judaism. 

In recent years, as antisemitism has become ever more of a news item, the situation is worse, as lazy journalists reach for some easy stereotypes of black- hatted and bearded Jews in Stamford Hill to illustrate any news piece about the Jewish community. 

If that’s the view in the present, the Jewish past is even more poorly understood. It is right and proper that the Holocaust is now widely taught in schools but it often means that the only learning about Jewish history, even in Jewish schools, is bound up with persecution and death. Indeed, the only time Jewish history enters the mainstream consciousness is through the prism of national Holocaust Memorial Day or arguments about where to site a Holocaust memorial. 

If we knew our Anglo-Jewish history, by the way, we would recall that a hundred years ago a similar argument was raging about how to construct a memorial to Jews who had fought and died in the “war to end all wars”.  In 1919 the grandees of the Jewish community came up with a scheme for a “living memorial” to train a new generation of religious leadership, who would be “patriots of their country… Hebrew scholars and educated Englishmen”.

For just as the influenza epidemic of the time killed more people than the war, so the Jewish leadership feared that assimilation stood to inflict more long-lasting damage than even the trenches. Too many a rabbi, it seemed, was underqualified, underpaid and subject to “the tyrannical behaviour of the officers of his synagogue”. 

The idea was opposed by those who felt Anglo-Jewry even then was a lost cause and that any monies raised would better spent on ‘”the building up of a Jewish Palestine”. Meanwhile, the whole idea of Zionism was anathema to another group of Jewish grandees, who in 1917 had sent a letter to The Times bitterly opposing the Balfour Declaration, believing that “the establishment of a Jewish nationality in Palestine, must have the effect throughout the world of stamping the Jews as strangers in their native lands”.

Some of this will undoubtedly strike a chord today. It raises big questions about assimilation and tradition, acceptance and involvement. It reminds us too that we are heirs to a vast variety of differing views and differing ways of Jewish expression and, unlike most of Europe, a thankfully unbroken history. Yet despite this diversity and richness of Jewish life, it remains at odds with the lachrymose images of Jews and Jewish history that most people hold. 

Interestingly, the same kind of problem affects other minority communities. The origins of Black History Month, now a firmly established feature in the general secondary school calendar, were partly about offering a narrative that was not focused only on persecution and slavery, but instead educated young people about the rich variety of cultural contributions and the rich diversity of black life in the history of the UK. 

Maybe now therefore it is time to build a “Jewish History Month”, working with the great Jewish museums we have, the world-class historians we have produced and focusing on the vibrant tapestry of Jewish histories in these shores.  

Resourcing our schools and pairing them with others across the country could quickly build a series of centres of expertise to work with teachers and young people. More interesting even than the fact that Alan Sugar is Jewish, may yet be the stories of his grandparents, and our families likewise. 

Alastair Falk is an education consultant and an ex-teacher of Jewish history