The billionaire philanthropist Sir Michael Moritz said he has more openly identified as being Jewish since the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel three years.
The California-based Silicon Valley investor described himself as a “card-carrying October 8 Jew” in a conversation with the broadcaster Emma Barnett at an event to commemorate Kristallnacht at JW3 last week.
“I’d never really identified as as being Jewish and I didn't make a big deal about it,” he confided. But after October 7, “when people asked me about Israel, I was not as bashful perhaps as I might have been previously”.
The atrocity was an “obviously extraordinarily painful event, but for me, it was a sort of personal landmark event. It touched something very deep in me, that here we go again, the pogroms never cease. The place that the pogrom wasn’t supposed to happen was within the boundaries of the state of Israel, and here it is, and nobody's safe.”
Earlier this year, the Cardiff-born venture capitalist, who moved to the States 50 years ago when he was 22 and was knighted in 2013, published his family memoir, Aüslander. His late parents, Doris and Alfred, were refugees from Nazi Germany.
As a child, he encountered little antisemitism but knew he was different from his classmates. The one thing that struck home was the arrival of the annual telephone directory.
“This being the Cardiff and South Wales telephone directory, there were pages and pages of Edwards and Joneses and Evanses and Hughes and Morgans and Morrises and on and on and on. And every year, I would go to the Ms hoping that we'd have company. But there we were. We were the only Moritz listed. I always thought that, in retrospect, that was a real advertisement of not belonging in Cardiff.”
He recalled that the family name of a wife of a friend had been Rabinowitz, which her father, a butcher in Wales, had changed. “He didn't think that was exactly going to fit in amongst the Edwards and Evanses. So he changed his name his last name from Rabinowitz to Jones and, thereafter, everybody in Pontypridd called him ‘Jones the Jew’.”
Synagogue held little appeal for Sir Michael after his barmitzvah and religion has “never been very important. We'd sort of pay lip service at Passover and, occasionally, when our boys were growing up, but that was about the extent of it.”
He was inspired to start researching his family history after his sister was clearing out the family home after their mother’s death in 2019 and came across documents and photographs.
His mother had been on the Kindertransport but had spoken little of the past. “Whether she had suppressed the memories because they were so painful or genuinely couldn't remember, I never knew.”
In the archives of the Tate he found in an album of German refugees who were interned by Britain on the Isle of Man as enemy aliens during the War. His father was one of them, but, said Moritz, “he had never really talked about this.”
Of his two pairs of grandparents, one perished in Germany, “The other made it out of Germany three days before the outbreak of war and settled in Cambridge eventually.”
After the War, his surviving grandfather “wrote to his friends in this little rural farming village where he had been born and had grown up and had built a small business… He was clear-eyed about what had happened, but he differentiated very much between ‘the good German’ and ‘the bad German’.
“For me, growing up in Wales, every German was a ‘bad German’, and to find that degree of forgiveness and compassion a year after the war ended, two years after the war ended, taught me a lot about the essence of humanity, just reading those letters.”
Antisemitism, he ventured, “has been in the air supply for 2,200 years, and it's always going to remain there. It's easy to ignite it.”
It had “always been in America, but the size of the country means that the impact I don’t think is as great as it is in Britain because if you live in London, Manchester isn't very far away. If you live in San Francisco and there's an attack on a synagogue in Michigan, it's like a different universe.”
He has received hate-mail but experienced “nothing phyiscal – or anything like that. I have a friend, a Jewish friend who runs a night nightclub. He had all his windows smashed and [a] Star of David painted over them.”
He said he knew “several fairly prominent Jews who've decided to leave London and go live elsewhere because of the atmosphere here”.
But the effect of antisemitism was that “it made me want to survive”, he revealed. “It's given me the grit and determination to shrug it off and persevere. So, I think it's it's really stiffened my backbone.”
Earlier this year, he acquired a third passport – by dint of his parentage – from Germany. “I came across a couple of very plaintive letters from the grandfather who didn't survive, pleading to get into the United States.
“And of course his pleas went unanswered. He was too far down the list of people who would be considered as immigrants.
“And the lesson I took away from that was you can never have enough passports because when you're in desperate need of a passport, it's going to be too late.”
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