As the dog days of August entered their third or fourth heatwave – who could tell any longer? – we were surprised by the arrival of new neighbours in our Brighton street.
There is nothing surprising about new neighbours per se. For as long as I have lived here, there has been a constant churn of students, ne’er-do-wells, first-time buyers, over-optimistic young professionals, random oddballs, lost souls and dodgy old bohemians – into each of which categories, or some combination thereof, I have at one time or another managed to fall, somehow enduring like a great beached tree trunk amid an eddying tide of human flotsam and jetsam.
The surprising about the new arrivals was that they are Orthodox Jews. Brighton is a famously cosmopolitan place. You will routinely see any and every type of people here – except that one. A few months ago I spotted a young man hurrying out of the station, the first visibly Jewish person I had seen hereabouts in the wild, as it were, for years. He may simply have been hastening to an appointment, but I immediately thought that in his shoes – and headgear – I wouldn’t hang about either. Your chances of happening upon some flag-happy, shining-eyed Judeophobe, who may feel righteously moved by the crime of either your existence or that of your ethnic homeland to denounce you as a génocidaire wallowing in the blood of babies or some such, are surely higher here than anywhere this side of Bristol.
You will understand, then, why I was taken aback to see a brace of chosen-people carriers pull up on the pavement and disgorge into a nearby house a clan of what one might take to be former denizens of Stamford Hill. Soon the garden was full of traditionally clad women and numerous girl children, variously nattering, playing and bringing a wholesome, joyous breath of family life to a neighbourhood usually devoid of it. The men would periodically appear in their white shirt sleeves and fire up the barbecue, on which they exhibited an aromatic expertise that would have impressed even my late father, a master of that craft.
Their presence set me thinking about how like, and unlike, these people – my people – I am. It is an irony not lost on me that in everyday ways – their religious conservatism, their emphasis on extended family, their scrupulous adherence to gender roles and rules of dress and of conduct – they have far more in common with a devout Muslim household than with mine. The vanity of small differences is often the deadliest kind.
Jews like me are often described as “culturally Jewish”, but this is a misnomer. I am culturally much more akin to that secular, allegedly progressive segment of society which, with honourable exceptions, will never hesitate to hurl us beneath the wheels of any passing fashionable bus, and congratulate itself for doing so.
A Jewish friend at school once described me as the least Jewish Jew he’d ever met. Years later, a considerate host asked me if I am observant. “Er – I’d like think so,” I replied, puzzled, before realising what he meant. My wife, despite coming from Irish Catholic stock, is in many ways more Jewish than I am – or so it seems to me when I see her up to her schmaltz-coated elbows in a roast bird carcass stripping the flesh for leftovers, a sight that triggers a folk memory of the shtetl. I was raised without religion, but not without roots.
More importantly, she embodies the spirit of Gemilut Hasadim without even knowing the phrase. It was she who offered to help our new neighbours move in their belongings, who read up on their customs (about which she now knows much more than I do), who told them she would have brought a welcome cake but she knew they couldn’t eat it, who suggested that if they needed assistance on a Saturday they could put a sign in the garden for us to see. They started to return her waves and greetings with pleasure instead of polite reserve.
Then, they were gone. It turned out they had only been here on holiday. We miss them, although for different reasons to the Jewish woman across the road, who confided to my wife, perhaps only half-joking, that now, if the Jew-murderers came to the street, they would have a more obvious target. Imagine even having such a thought in a British city before 2015.
In doing so, she inadvertently underlined to me why I have always spoken up against the enablers of anti-Jewish sentiment who surround me, at the cost of so many friendships, social circles and professional avenues, when I might simply have kept my head down and “passed”. It’s nothing to do with courage, or principle, much as I may wish to flatter myself. It’s both a moral necessity (pace Hillel the Elder: if I am only for myself, what am I?), and a practical one. It’s not as if they’ll stop at the obvious Jews. They never do. Whatever our differences, we need to stand up for one another, because nobody else will.
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