If it wasn’t for the inconvenient fact that he was brought up in north London, Nathan Abrams could be the ultimate Welsh Jew, having synthesised what some people think of as two very distinct and incompatible identities into one coherent, if quirky, whole. He nimbly handles television interviews in the Cambrian language, digs out forgotten histories and marks out the overlapping cultures for both academic and popular consumption.
But this walking, talking fusion of the Star of David and red dragon insists that “having learnt Welsh doesn’t make me any more Welsh”. And also that abandoning support for his beloved Arsenal would be like “reversing my circumcision”. For now, he’s content simply to be the highest-profile Jew in Bangor.
Abrams’s latest book, Jews in the Welsh Imagination: Medieval Times to the Present, reads as something of a rebuke to the country he has called home for the past 20 years. In it he traces how deeply embedded hostile attitudes to Jews have been in the culture since long before a single member of the tribe of Israel set foot in the Land of Song. It has been something of an obsession, he says. “For most of Wales’s existence as an entity – for 15 centuries – there have been no Jews here. The fascination the Welsh have with Jews is inversely proportional to the numbers.”
As Abrams writes, by the 8th century Jews already loomed large in the popular imagination. “A common pool of images and attitudes inherited from ancient Christianity included Jews as God’s rejected people, guilty of deicide as the killers of Christ, spiritual blindness, and carnality.”
Jew-hatred was pervasive, yet Abrams resists labelling it antisemitism, preferring a term that suggests more of an ambivalence, a fusion of both love and hatred: allosemitism. According to sociologist Zygmunt Bauman the word means regarding Jews as radically different. Allosemitism is what we would now call “othering”. I am not sure this is any less of a problem than antisemitism.
Once Jews were actually present in the principality, they were useful but dispensible. In the 13th century, Edward I borrowed heavily from Jewish moneylenders to fund his Welsh campaigns. After completing his conquest by defeating Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in 1282, he expelled all the Jews from Britain, thereby annulling his debts.
That Britain’s only antisemitic pogrom took place in Tredegar in 1911 might not be altogether a coincidence when leading politicians were spreading deeply toxic ideas. Former prime minister David Lloyd George accused German Jewish financiers of pushing Britain into the Boer War to safeguard and extend their interests in the South African gold fields.
Keir Hardie, the MP for Merthyr Tydfil, claimed that “modern imperialism is really run by half a dozen financial houses, many of them Jews, to whom politics is a counter in the game of buying and selling securities”.
Now that the recent elections have made Plaid Cymru ascendant in the Senedd or Welsh parliament, it might be time for a reckoning with its own past. As Abrams puts it in his new book: “One could… argue that antisemitism was one of the underpinning tenets of Welsh nationalism.”
The writings of one of Plaid’s most legendary founding fathers, Saunders Lewis, are positively seething with it.
In 1940 he took to verse to describe refugees in an Aberystwyth café as “the sad horde that had lost the goodness of intellect”, mentioning “their gorilla faces” while throwing in a reference to “kosher vinegar” and “Golders Green Ethiopians”. Still regarded as a hero, Abrams doesn’t think today’s leaders have sufficiently addressed Lewis’s rabid antisemitism.
“I think Welsh scholars, even well-meaning ones, haven’t been harsh enough on it.
“I understand Saunders Lewis presents a problem for Welsh-speaking nationalist people, but I want them to come clean about it.”
All of this might seem to be something of a tangent from Abrams’s day job. Professor of film studies at Bangor University, he has published more than 20 books about cinema, at least six of them about his particular hero, the Jewish director Stanley Kubrick.
His next, due out in January, is about (Jewish) writer and director David Mamet.
The fascination with local Jewish history began at his previous posting in Aberdeen, where Abrams was living above the old synagogue and came across some long lost records in an airing cupboard.
That led him to write a book called Caledonian Jews about the far-flung communities of Scotland.
His interest in provincial Jewish history ignited, it seemed like a natural step after moving to the University of Bangor to do some research. He discovered a wealth of information about longstanding communities in a string of north Wales towns such as Holyhead, Beaumaris, Llandudno, Rhyl, Colwyn Bay and Abergele.
So, for 20 years alongside his film work, he’s been raising grant funding that allows him to scratch away at the history of north Wales’ Jewry, producing a series of articles as well as maps and trails available to the public, and even signage, such as a lectern on Bangor promenade celebrating visionary mayor Isidore Wartski.
He claims he learnt to speak the language by serendipity because he “was solicited in a swimming pool by a local legendary Welsh tutor”.
The offer of free lessons came with a very cheap crèche, which proved irresistible to the hands-on dad desperate for some peace, and has ended up with his being fluent enough to do lengthy interviews for local media.
By back-of-an-envelope calculations he must be one of maybe 12 Jews who speak Welsh, a skill that has given him extra cachet in the academic world and beyond. His two children, now aged 13 and 11, are also bilingual.
Abrams is founder of British Jewish Contemporary Cultures Network, treasurer of the British and Irish Association for Jewish Studies, founder of a journal, a trustee both of the Welsh Jewish Cultural Centre, which is redeveloping Merthyr Synagogue and its partner organisation, the Jewish History Association of Wales.
As if all this weren’t enough, he’s also writing what sounds like the most Welsh-and-Jewish novel in the entire history of this notably narrow literary niche.
Before him stand Booker Prize-winner Bernice Rubens, poet Dannie Abse, novelist Lily Tobias and, very modestly, Cardiff-born and bred me, as the author of the 2019 novel Reparation.
In terms of content alone, Abrams’s forthcoming book is surely ahead of the pack when it comes to defining the genre.
“My novel is about Welsh antisemitism, being Jewish in Wales, learning Welsh and living in Wales.
“And it’s also about making a film in Wales and in Bangor, in particular. It will combine the two halves of my academic identity.”
The book has been commissioned by leading independent Welsh publisher Seren Books, and will be published in 2028. In the interim, it would be good if the movers and shakers of modern-day Wales read his latest to understand the cultural legacy over which they preside.
The Anti-racist Wales Action Plan is due to be implemented by 2030 and judging by the tenor of a “pro-Palestine” demonstration I saw the last time I was in Cardiff – the usual “end Israeli apartheid” and “stop the genocide” banners – there might still be quite a long way to go.
Jews in the Welsh Imagination: Medieval Times to the Present, by Nathan Abrams, is published by Palgrave Macmillan
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