It’s the fact that it happened in Britain that is so disturbing. We can no longer tell ourselves that this is a safe country, a country that elevates civic order and religious tolerance, a country that leaves antisemitism, along with other forms of extremism, to excitable foreigners.
Until six months ago, British Jews had been spared the horrors visited on their co-religionists in even our nearest neighbours. Last year’s synagogue attack in Manchester was the first of its kind. After the abomination in Golders Green, it looks horrifyingly like the first of a series.
In Europe, such atrocities are almost routine. France has seen stabbings at a Marseilles synagogue, children shot in a Jewish school in Toulouse, a hostage siege in a kosher supermarket in the Île-de-France, a knife attack on a Jewish community centre in Nice and hundreds of incidents of desecration, intimidation and abuse.
Belgium has seen a shooting at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, the stoning of buses carrying very young Jewish schoolchildren in Antwerp, assaults on synagogues and the spread of the hideous cry, “Hamas, Hamas, all Jews to the gas!”
Germany, which last recorded 4,782 anti-Semitic incidents, gave us an eerie premonition of the Manchester abomination, when police managed to foil a Yom Kippur attack on a synagogue in Hagen.
Britain, until now, was different. Our literature was different. From Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Jewish characters were portrayed with a pathos and positivity that found little echo on the Continent.
Our political culture was different, from the Old Testament Puritanism that led Oliver Cromwell to invite Jews to return in 1656, to Benjamin Disraeli’s put-down of the Irish Nationalist leader, Daniel O’Connell, in an 1835 Commons debate: “While the ancestors of the Rt Hon Gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.”
And, of course, our foreign policy was different. Israel would not have come into existence without British sponsorship. The 1917 Balfour Declaration did not emerge out of nowhere. It drew on a long Zionist tradition stretching back to at least (on the Liberal side) Palmerston and (on the Conservative side) Disraeli.
This story is worth rehearsing, because it is part of who we are as a nation – or, at least, part of who we were until an eye-blink ago.
Yes, we had our antisemites. But, almost uniquely in Europe, they never took over a major party – at least, not until Labour sank into the filthy sump of Corbynism, a degradation that repelled many Labour voters, disgusted at what had happened to the party of Hugh Dalton and Richard Crossman.
We may not have thought of ourselves as an especially philosemitic nation, but our enemies certainly did. The European authoritarians of Left and Right who railed against decadent Anglo-Saxon liberalism were, almost to a man, virulently anti-Jewish.
Wilhelm Marr, the 19th-century German writer who approvingly coined the word “anti-Semitism” saw us as “Jewish-influenced merchants”. Édouard Drumont, his French contemporary, attacked the British Empire as an instrument of Jewish financial interests. Charles Maurras, the leading intellectual French anti-Semite of the early 20th century, disliked us for all the same reasons that he disliked Jews: we were soulless, selfish, cosmopolitan.
Until recently, most British people would have applied the positive versions of those words to themselves. They’d have seen themselves as practical, eccentric, tolerant. They’d have been bewildered at the idea of coming to blows over religious differences. They’d have taken pride in judging each person as an individual. The idea that we are answerable for our own actions is, or was, the value that distinguished Anglosphere societies.
We are losing that value, not only because we are importing people who have little feel for it, people shaped by cultures of vendetta, tribal identity and sectarian war; but also because we fail to teach it ourselves. Obsessed with identity politics, colonial guilt and anti-racism, we no longer drive into the heads of our children, whether second-generation or seventy-second-generation Britons, that they are defined by their behaviour, not by their race.
Hence the bizarrely woke form that antisemitism now takes, infused by victimhood and anti-imperialism. On October 7, 2023, even as the Hamas maniacs were carrying out their murders, Mothin Ali, now Deputy Leader of the Green Party put out a video in which he praised Gaza’s “indigenous people” for “fighting back” against “a settler-colonial power”, which he likened to the white colonisation of the Americas.
You might think that a second-generation Brit encouraging indigenous people to fight the descendants of more recent arrivals is playing with fire. But such is the meme-like power of decolonise.
Greens are free to spout whatever idiocies they want. But the flip side of free speech is a culture of orderliness and civility. If we do not want offensive opinions to be punished by law, they need to be policed by social disapprobation. We need to convey, not only in the classroom, but in our wider political and media discourse, that certain British values are non-negotiable, and that these include personal freedom, parliamentary democracy, equality before the law, religious pluralism and respect for the country itself.
These were the values that encouraged millions of Jews to leave more authoritarian cultures and settle throughout the Anglosphere in the first place. Lose them, and we lose ourselves.
Daniel Hannan is an author and historian, president of the Institute for Free Trade and a Conservative peer
To get more from opinion, click here to sign up for our free Editor's Picks newsletter.