Schools should teach a broader Jewish history to avoid “Holocaust fatigue”, historian Sir Simon Schama has warned.

Sir Simon, who was knighted in the 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honours List, told the Daily Telegraph at the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival that teaching in UK schools show little appreciation for Jews’ “epic, extraordinary” history, instead focusing disproportionately on the Shoah.

The academic added that education was “absolutely essential” to countering antisemitism.

He said: “The challenge is to do it in a way which the kids on the receiving end don’t get Holocaust fatigue, somehow to make a real creative effort without dumbing it down at all, to actually do it in the kind of zone of their understanding and the liveliness of their wiring and age, and even for better or worse, with Instagram or Twitter.

“You think the horror of the Holocaust is so self-evident but it isn’t really self-evident - and it is when one knows everything there is to know about Auschwitz that it’s easy to forget a million Jews were shot before anyone had dreamed up the gas chambers - the so called ‘Holocaust of the bullets’.

“But one also wants education about what happened to the Armenians and what happened in Rwanda.”

Speaking at the festival, the historian and TV personality ruled out supporting a “Jewish history month”, in the mould of Black History Month, claiming it risked “ghettoising” history.

He said: “I’m very torn about it.

“I want people to be engaged in women’s history and black history but if you just stick it in a month it does ghettoise it, it says you can then forget it for the rest of the year.

"I want it to happen all of the time.”