The comforting myth of Britain as a safe haven for Jews clouds our immigration debate

Mahmood explained that if people have high-value assets, they should contribute to the cost of asylum accommodation. Some critics on the left responded by posting photos of wedding rings taken from Holocaust victims at Buchenwald. Mahmood explicitly stated in Parliament: “We are not taking jewellery at the border; I cannot say it any more clearly than that.” These offensive Nazi Germany comparisons don't hold up to basic scrutiny — it was a place people tried to flee from, not enter. But as Dara Horn said, “people love dead Jews”.

Some British Jews have argued that Britain had acted as a safe haven for Jewish refugees, but this romanticised narrative overlooks how restrictive British immigration policy was towards Jewish refugees.

Holocaust survivor Berthold Goldsmith’s mother was “forcibly deported” to her death in 1937 because she only had a visitors visa. My grandmother’s brother, who I’m named after, also had to return from visiting London to be murdered by Nazis.

Before that, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the word “alien” was a euphemism for Jew. The British Brothers’ League popular demonstrations against “aliens” were backed by prominent politicians, clergy and artists. At one rally in 1902, the crowd jeered at Jews to “go back to Jerusalem”.

Supported by these marches, Conservative backbenchers pressured for laws to prevent Jewish immigration backed by allies such as journalist Arnold White, who described Jews as “paupers of foreign blood”.

During Parliamentary debates on the bill, Socialist MP John Burns blamed “Stockmarket Jews” for antisemitism, while Liberal MP Llewellyn Atherley-Jones repeatedly referred to “Jew aliens” leaving no doubt about the identity of these dangerous foreigners.

New immigration laws passed by the Conservative government were called the 1905 Aliens Act, invoking this euphemism for Jews. The concept of the threatening, alien Jew was enshrined into law, just as it had been enshrined into religious doctrine.

After the Act was passed, in 1906 weekly socialist newspaper The Clarion called Jewish immigrants “a poison injected into the national veins”.

This notion of Jewish impurity polluting the nation remained, even when it was being popularised in Nazi propaganda a few decades later. In 1933 the Conservative MP for Tottenham asked the Home Secretary what measures he was taking to prevent “alien Jews from Germany entering England”.

The 1938 Evian Conference saw Britain refuse to take significant numbers of Jewish refugees. Prioritising Arab sensibilities, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain refused to help 10,000 Jewish children emigrate from Nazi Germany into British mandate Palestine, which became official policy in 1939 with The White Paper. After Kristallnacht the situation became impossible to ignore and children were grudgingly allowed into Britain itself on Kindertransport.

It was largely a private rescue effort by Jewish organisations such as Central British Fund for German Jewry (CBF), while the initiative came from German Jews such as Wilfrid Israel, who saved about 15 times more lives than Oskar Schindler yet his name is largely unknown. Heroic individuals like Trevor Chadwick did agonising selection work because British guarantors often wanted “girls aged seven to 10 and, if possible, fair-haired”. Fuelled by eugenics thinking, the Home Office excluded children with disabilities or sickness.

The British government restricted Kindertransport. They created Jewish orphans by barring parents, and imposed a £50 guarantee per child, limiting the number of children who could be saved. Kindertransport symbolised British hostility to Jewish immigration.

In 1939 when the MS St Louis returned to Europe after being rejected by the US, Canada and Cuba, Britain accepted a minority essentially saving their lives, but most were returned to be murdered by the Nazis.

By 1942 with the full knowledge of Jews being systematically mass-murdered, Labour Home Secretary Herbert Morrison didn't want to grant entry to 350 children from Vichy France, citing fears of provoking “anti-foreign and antisemitic feelings”. In Parliament he was asked about German Jewish refugees who had been stripped of their nationality and facing certain death. His chilling answer was that they were not considered stateless, but were instead viewed as “aliens of enemy nationality”.

Comparisons with Jewish immigration ignore another critical distinction: when Jewish refugees arrived in Britain, the Board of Guardians and other Jewish charities ensured they wouldn't be a drain on the state. No such self-sustaining community network exists for today's asylum seekers — there are professional charities, not community organisations.

The “Britain as sanctuary” narrative obscures historical reality. With the current system — even with Mahmood's proposed policies — many more Jews would have been saved in the 19th and 20th centuries than Britain actually admitted.

There are legitimate concerns about whether asylum policies are too harsh, and the Jewish community is right to care about the treatment of refugees. But the comparison is fundamentally ahistorical, and the argument of Britain being a safe haven to a thriving Jewish community ignores present realities: record levels of antisemitic incidents and substantial Jewish emigration, with applications for Israeli citizenship spiking dramatically.

If we're going to invoke Jewish history in these debates, we owe it to those who were turned away to get that history right — and to face present realities rather than comforting myths.