I CAME UP TO OXFORD in the Michaelmas Term of 1928, and I fear I took no steps to seek out a synagogue or any other Jewish institution (which I imagined did not exist – I was almost right). However, I received a visit from Mr Chaim Rabinovitch, later known as Chaim Raphael, the well-known writer on Jewish themes, whilst I was at lunch with my (gentile) friends sometime in November of that term. He invited me to come to a meeting of the Adler, or perhaps the Zionist, Society (although I am not sure that it was in existence in 1928), and asked me if I wished to join the Jewish congregation. I did so immediately, and went to a service two or three Sabbaths later, and found that the Wardens were both members of eminent Sephardic families, one the future Judge Mocatta – who the other was I am afraid I cannot remember. After that I became a fairly regular attender.
I became interested at that time in the social structure of the Jews at Oxford, of whom there were not too many. I have no idea of their number, but I doubt if there were more than seventy or eighty, if that. Sociologically, the Jewish hierarchy went more or less as follows. At the top were various Maranos – crypto-Jews – members of indisputably Jewish families who did not wish to be identified as such in any way. I met two or three undergraduates like that. The Sephardim, on the other hand, were perfectly identified Jews. One of my contemporaries at Corpus was a future solicitor called Henriques (his uncle was a friend of the President of my college, and known to his friends as Qs or Queus); he and his cousins took little interest in general Jewish affairs, but were perfectly open and unselfconscious about their membership of the Jewish community. These were, as it were, the ‘grandees’. Below them came the children of the, mostly German-Jewish, middle class – with names like Heinemann, Bensinger, Schwab etc., whose families tended to be members of the B’nai B’rith and prominent figures in the London Jewish community.
Members of the Oxford Jewish Congregation, 22 June 1931, including Herman Joseph Cohen (front left) and Herbert Loewe (back row, second from right); on the occasion of the signing of a document recording the reception of two Torah scrolls from the Canterbury Jewish Congregation
A lifetime friend of mine, now no longer alive, belonged to the ‘grandees’ and was typical of them, not in the least embarrassed about his Jewish origins – I mean the late Sir Henry d’Avigdor-Goldsmid, a prominent figure in the literary world at Balliol (I met him quite early in my Oxford life); although he was pretty scathing about the Anglo-Jewish community, whom he looked on as vulgar and ignorant for the most part, and with which he did not much in those days associate, he spoke with pride about his own family, its grandeur in the early nineteenth century, greater than that of the Rothschilds – and so on.
The middle-class Jews, to whom I suppose I belonged myself, went to the synagogue from time to time, not regularly – rather like Anglicans in Oxford used to go to church. But we were faithful members of the Jewish community, and in my case habitués of the Zionist Society, not the Adler Society, which had a somewhat anti-Zionist tinge.
There were two Jewish contemporaries in this university to whom I was close. One was Walter Ettinghausen, now known as Walter Eytan – a prominent Israeli diplomat, ex-ambassador in Paris and ex-head of the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation; he was pious and anti-Zionist when he came up, but as a result of Hitler and the fate of his relations in Frankfurt (whence his family had come) he made a revolution of a hundred and eighty degrees and turned into a passionate Zionist, and indeed became the unofficial, unpaid head and quasi-rabbi of the Jewish community in Oxford in the 1930s. During the war he was a cryptographer at Bletchley, and after the war he went to Israel and stayed there. My other friend was Wolf Aviram [or Abiram] Halpern, whose father was an eminent Zionist leader, head of the Jewish Colonial Trust, which became the Central Israel Bank. Besides these, there were various other schoolfellows of mine from St Paul’s, and other friends whom I met at Jewish gatherings.
Below this socially – this was due entirely to levels of income – came the children of Yiddish-speaking Jews up and down England, some of whom were exceedingly brilliant and very attractive, with whom I made friends. For instance, there was Sol Adler, a scholar of New College, who became professor at Harvard, later a research fellow in Cambridge, and ended up by going to Communist China and staying there as adviser to various Chinese Communist governments. There was an excellent philosopher called Abe Edel, with whom I used to go to lectures, now retired from a chair in New York – and there were other agreeable people. The children of Yiddish-speaking families, usually rabbis and other synagogue officials, tended to congregate together and did not seem to me to have a great deal of contact with their gentile contemporaries. The gravitational pull of their Yiddishkeit was powerful. My best friend among them was Abe Harman, at Wadham, who later became Israel’s ambassador to the United States, and then President of the Hebrew University and an honorary fellow of Wadham College. I do not mean that they spoke Yiddish all the time, but they liked to do so, took great comfort in it, and it created a warm, cohesive feeling among them. I could speak no Yiddish, though I understood a certain amount; nevertheless I was happy in their company and they were probably not too unhappy in mine. They became rabbis in various congregations in England, and they remained deeply embedded in the affairs of Jewish religious life – and I am sure were among the people who kept it alive and successful through the years. There were Israelis too, for example my friend Akiva [or Akiba] Persitz, son of a prominent Jewish family in what was then Palestine, who was at University College. He had nothing to do with the English-speaking Jews but was on very happy terms with his gentile contemporaries and seemed a man from another country, more Israeli than Jewish, which has been increasingly the case ever since, in my opinion.
There were Jewish dons – Herbert Loewe, later Cecil Roth, Walter Ettinghausen, who became a lecturer in German at Queen’s, and one or two others, but no Jewish fellows of colleges save two. At this point I wish to go back in history. Cecil Roth has established that the first Jewish fellow of any Oxford college was a famous mathematician whose name was Sylvester; he taught in Cambridge, but could not get a fellowship in a college because of the religious tests. When Gladstone abolished these he was elected to a mathematics chair in Oxford and thereupon became a fellow of New College. He stayed for a few years and then went, I think, to some university in Louisiana. After that there was a gap, and the next Jew to obtain a fellowship was Samuel Alexander, the philosopher, who came from Melbourne to Lincoln College – it is not clear that Lincoln, when they elected him, realised that he was a Jew, but he made no secret of it. He taught philosophy here for a few years, and then went to Manchester as professor. He wrote an excellent book on Spinoza, was much respected in his day, and received the Order of Merit. Then there was another gap. The next Jew was Professor Arthur Goodhart. He came, I believe, from a fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge – I don’t know how many people in Cambridge knew that he was in fact Jewish – and became Oxford Professor of Jurisprudence in 1931, which carries with it a fellowship at University College. While he could scarcely conceal his origins, he was not identified, so far as I know, in any way with the Jewish community; neither his wife nor his children were Jews. With the advent of Israel he did develop fairly strong pro-Zionist views, but that, of course, was a post-war development.
The next Jew to be elected to a fellowship was myself. I became a lecturer in New College in Michaelmas Term in 1932, and a fellow of All Souls in the same term, and went on teaching at New College until the war. German refugees were given chairs; the great Latinist, Professor Fraenkel at Corpus, physicists like Einstein and Simon were, and certainly two or three other eminent scientists in other colleges. Among non-fellows, there were classicists and economists and at least one distinguished philosopher – men who did a great deal for both humane scholarship and natural science in Oxford during the 1930s and during and after the war. Professor Sir Rudolf Peierls is a fine example of these Jews. There were no other Jewish fellows, so far as I know (I may be mistaken), until Keith Joseph (later a member of the House of Lords) was elected to All Souls a year or two after the end of the war. Since then, of course, the situation has changed enormously. I can think of no college which does not have Jewish fellows, at least one if not more. In 1990 I counted no fewer than seven heads of colleges who were less or more identifiable Jews. With Lord Goodman, Professor Hart and myself – none of whom could be accused of failing to identify themselves as Jews – they form a minyan. The situation has altered radically, and my amateur statistics no longer apply.
As for the synagogue, it continued to have a perfectly regular attendance before the war, and indeed after. Cecil Roth, who was the guru of the community, at one time tried to make it into a University Synagogue, as St Mary’s is the University Church. He wanted the university members of it, senior and junior, to wear gowns and academic caps – mortarboards. There were so many excellent people, non-academics, by now, partly as a result of the immigration from the blitz during the war, partly from other attractions of this city, that the idea of discriminating in favour of academics seemed completely unacceptable. Since I was the only established Jewish academic in Oxford before the war, I was a trustee of the synagogue, and was therefore consulted on the matter. Jonathan Cohen at Queen’s, David Daube at All Souls, David Lewis at Christ Church were dead against this, so it didn’t go through. After that the community and the synagogue have grown apace and flourished; there is scarcely room to contain all the congregants on Yom Kippur. So it is in general a great success story (the only serious row in my time was over a member who brought his dog into the synagogue on a Sunday afternoon), and I am happy to be able to record that in the sixty-two years during which I have been a member of the Oxford community, no recession, only progress, has occurred. Long may this last.