A few weeks ago, as I looked at footage of a pro-Palestine demonstration – I forget which one, they’re all blurring into one – and noted the prevalence of the nice, genteel, middle-class protesters, a phrase popped unbidden into my head: “The stupid, suburban prejudice of antisemitism.”
The words were Ezra Pound’s, in conversation with Allen Ginsberg in 1967. During the war Pound had broadcast, from Italy, the vilest antisemitic propaganda; this was his way of apologising for it. Leaving aside the question of whether his contrition was genuine or not, the choice of the adjective “suburban” was telling. It suggests something tamed, polite even; not the wildness of the countryside or the jostle and bustle of the city, but something tree-lined, respectable.
I also thought of this when a friend sent me a link to George Orwell’s 1945 essay Antisemitism in Britain. For an 81-year-old, this essay is looking surprisingly youthful. (One surprise: it begins by saying that “There are about 400,000 known Jews in Britain”; the current figure is some 277,000.) A quote from it has been doing the rounds on social media lately: “One of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true.”
This is usually cited in opposition to the recent opinion piece in the New York Times about dogs being trained to rape; but it has, and will continue to have, other applications.
Orwell’s essay, though, also makes much of the respectability of those who make antisemitic comments: “Naturally the antisemite thinks of himself as a reasonable being. Whenever I have touched on this subject in a newspaper article, I have always had a considerable ‘come-back’, and invariably some of the letters are from well-balanced, middling people – doctors, for example – with no apparent economic grievance.”
I can believe it. There has always been this strain in British antisemitism, something of middle-class virtue; and I think of Dulwich, the suburb itself, as leafy as can possibly be imagined; and the famous school, the college, that sits within it, like a country house; and its (currently) most famous alumnus, Nigel Farage, who, it has been often alleged, spent much of his time there making hissing noises at fellow Jewish pupils, and racially abusing anyone with darker skin than him.
“A Jewish boy at a public school almost invariably had a bad time,” writes Orwell in the same essay.
“He could, of course, live down his Jewishness if he was exceptionally charming or athletic, but it was an initial disability comparable to a stammer or a birthmark.”
And I think of my own public school, Westminster, where two of the school’s intellectual elite, the Queen’s Scholars, asked me if I was Jewish, and when I said I wasn’t, replied: “Then you won’t mind saying, ‘Jews are the scum of the earth, and up with Adolf Hitler.’ They’re only words, go on, say them.” I demurred.
Incidentally, and by pure coincidence, in the same class as us was Christopher Nineham (not one of the abusers), who went on to become the vice-chairman of the Stop the War Coalition, and was recently arrested for broaching police restrictions at a pro-Palestine rally. The Met wanted the protesters to maintain a decent distance from a central London synagogue. Some protesters wanted to narrow that distance.
Nineham said he was intending to protest outside the BBC and I am perfectly happy to take this assertion at face value. But oh, the BBC? Forgive me while I have a little chuckle.
What were this splinter group from the original march going to protest about? That the BBC isn’t antisemitic enough? That it doesn’t take Hamas press releases seriously enough? If you wanted a nice, middle-class profession – with, at board level, a higher number of privately educated individuals than could be accounted for by mere statistics – it really doesn’t get much better than the BBC. Or, dare I say it, The Guardian, which in the past has invited Osama bin Laden and Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian Foreign Minister, to write columns for them.
To go back to Orwell, and another loud echo from the past. He mentions a Jewish Solidarity event organised in 1943: “The service was attended by the mayor of the borough in his robes and chain, by representatives of all the churches, and by detachments of RAF, Home Guards, nurses, Boy Scouts and what-not.” (That “and what-not” is devastating.)
Orwell saw the event for what it was: superficially touching, but he knew for a fact that at least one of the attendees was an ex-member of Mosley’s Blackshirts. And here we are again, after the Golders Green stabbings, with public displays of piety; and with no less mighty and recognisable a figure than Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden being chosen to represent the government at a rally against antisemitism.
I think Orwell would have been rather amused at that. Anyway, do keep a lookout for more of this kind of thing: declarations of solidarity from the suburbs of government.
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