On Anti-Semitism in Britain

This article first appeared in The Daily Telegraph of Saturday May 16th 1998.

The son of German Jewish refugees, Tom Rosenthal has flourished in Britain, despite the ‘little hurts’ of anti-semitism. Here he recalls his experiences including a disturbing comment from the head of the Race Relations Board.

It was my first day, at my first job, in 1959, as assistant sales manager at a Jewish-owned publishing house in London. My non-Jewish boss, an immensely affable man, welcomed me to the book trade and told me that while I would never get rich I would, if I succeeded, have a moderately comfortable and highly civilised existence. As he put it, I would never have a Rolls-Royce but I might aspire to a Rover or a Jaguar, ‘the Jewboy’s Bentley’.

I was, to use an idiom then not in use, gobsmacked. This was clearly not the time to remonstrate so I let it ride. My boss was in fact married to a German Jew and we became sufficiently close friends that he asked me to become his executor should he die before his children became adults. But if he could use a phrase like that, to me, without either quotation marks or blushing, then perhaps English anti-Semitism was more pervasive and entrenched than I thought.

Although born in England, I was the child of German Jewish refugees who had fled Hitler in 1933. Via scholarships, I went to a good school and to Cambridge, had a commission in the Army during National Service, and went to work. I was 24 and I thought that I had come to terms with being different -having a foreign name, not eating bacon, being assimilated yet still being a stranger. I had had the satisfaction of being that peculiarly English middle-class creature, an Army officer.

At Cambridge, I had had a tiny triumph. In those days, the ultimate for arty types was the BBC general traineeship, of which there were then only five a year for the entire graduating population of all Britain’s universities. I got the first one awarded that year and turned it down because a publishing opportunity had occurred and books won over broadcasting. But the offer of such a much-prized Establishment job made me feel confident, for the first time, that being a German Jew seemed not to matter and that England was a wonderfully tolerant country. It had, after all, enabled me to be born in the first place and it looked as if my origins and my religion really did not count.

But that casual, almost innocent, remark about cars just a few weeks after I had thought myself cured of my Jewish paranoia made me not only replay episodes from my Jewish past but made me alert - perhaps too alert - to those niggling little events in my life and the frequent biting of my tongue. It is relatively easy to deal with the man who calls you a ‘****ing Yid”’to your face. You have a simple choice then. You can fight him physically, you can fight him with words, or you can walk away. But at least that man is an overt enemy; he is beyond the pale in all senses.

What’s difficult is coping, when you are 10, with your non-Jewish best friend’s mother. This jolly Northern woman once fed me a high tea of thinly sliced cold pork, letting me believe it was chicken. When I reached my intellectual peak a few months later and got a scholarship to Manchester Grammar School, she congratulated me sincerely with the words: ‘Oh, you lucky Jew.’ Even at 10, that is harder than dealing with the boys who, when I was one of only two Jews in a Manchester primary school, used to chase me home shouting, in the middle of the war: ‘Dirty Jew, dirty Jew.’

On learning of this, my father, a mild scholar, sought the advice of the rabbi and we were both summoned to visit the synagogue militant. The rabbi, a splendid, bearded patriarch, introduced me to a young giant in a blue uniform. ’This is my son’, he said. ‘He’s a physical-training instructor in the Royal Air Force. He’ll take you next door and show you what to do.’ Which he did.

When the ringleader of the juvenile pogrom in the playground of Beaver Road Primary School started on me again, I so surprised him by retaliating at all that a lucky blow drew blood from his nose and, after the only fistfight of my life, I was left alone.

My next school, the wonderfully eccentric day preparatory school for which my parents made great financial sacrifices and which propelled me to that Manchester Grammar School scholarship, obeyed my father’s injunction that I was not to attend religious instruction. I would therefore, if the weather was fine, sit in the playground and read a book for 40 minutes.

One day the playground door burst open and I was surrounded by 15 of my peers shouting at me in a quite terrifying unison: ‘Christ killer! Christ killer!’ I was not only frightened but puzzled. What had I done and to whom? Only Kafka could do justice to such a scene. No wonder Jews tend to paranoia.

I think it was then, when my ever-patient father, after expostulating about ignorant goyim, explained the basics of Christian theology to me, that I got my next and infinitely more important lesson from him.

Why, after I had learned all about the Crucifixion, I asked him, didn’t he change our name as so many other Jews had done? Already in those days I knew about the Cohens who had become Cowan and even, a minor celebrity in the region, a Rosenfeld who had become Ross-Enfield.In words that, at an appropriate time, I passed on to both our sons, he explained that the family could trace its lineage back for at least 300 years, that it was the name under which he had published, in both Germany and England, his early scholarly books and articles, and that it was also a beautiful name - ‘valley of roses’. I never raised the subject again.

In the Army, it was not considered a beautiful name, except by sadistic drill sergeants to whom it was beautiful only as a springboard for the creative, screaming invective hurled at those pathetic creatures who could not march properly. (At Officer Cadet School I had to be carefully hidden in the middle of any marching group.) Apart from the usual insults such as ‘Pregnant fairy’, I was named, in a full sexual gamut, either ‘Frozenballs’ or ‘Risingtool’. But in the ritualistic breaking and making of all soldiers everywhere, it was the name that gave the game away.

In my barrack room, where I first heard the phrases ‘Jewed him out of it’ and ‘Jewed him down’, I was one of two Jews and one of eight potential officers who passed the Unit Selection Board, which enabled us to go on to the three-day test called a War Office Selection Board. Six went a few days later. The two Jews were held back a fortnight.

In all fairness, not even the most paranoid Jew could construe this as anti-Semitism. We both had foreign names and parents born in Germany. Thus, the same sort of people who had cheerfully dispatched art historians and violin virtuosi to internment camps on the Isle of Man during the early days of the Second World War were simply using the extra two weeks to check on a couple of 18-year-olds as security risks.

I survived Mons Officer Cadet School and got a much-coveted overseas posting, in this case Malta. A single pip on each epaulette made me absurdly proud and went some way to reducing the weight of the various chips on the shoulder I had by then accumulated. Or so it seemed until one afternoon.

The bachelor National Service second-lieutenants were having afternoon tea in the mess. As we were all in temporary exile, talk turned to life at home and then focused on siblings. One said that he had a sister out in Kenya, something that rather worried his father, who was concerned that she ‘might do something silly, like marrying a Jew or a Nigger’.

I remained silent and, I trust, inscrutable. I waited for 10 minutes or so and then asked this genuinely charming fellow if, by the way, he would be terribly upset if his sister married me. ‘Of course not. Jolly good idea, actually. Why do you ask?’ So I told him. I think his consternation was genuine. He replied convincingly that he had no idea I was Jewish. I said that with a name and a nose like mine it must surely be obvious. He denied it. The episode passed and we continued to enjoy each other’s company.

As my responsibilities in publishing grew, I found myself working with Arnold Toynbee, and proudly told my father of my modest and entirely peripheral association with the sage. My father was much less impressed than I was. ‘That anti-Semite!’ I was stunned and accused him of being intolerant. He then explained that Toynbee’s anti-Semitism was not of the jackboot variety but was an erroneous but carefully reasoned argument to the effect that the Jews were actually an inferior civilisation and culture compared with the Christians and the Arabs. So I felt thoroughly chastened; a case of guilt by association.

A few days after this paternal rebuke, I received Toynbee’s introductory essay to a symposium called The Crucible of Christianity that he was editing. It contained the phrase, ‘the Jews, for so long having practised a policy of apartheid’. I was barely 30 and the sage was nearly 80, but I gritted my teeth and spent several hours drafting a letter, which I would hate to have to reread today, composed more or less equally of flattery and egregious circumlocution.

The nub of it was that, given the universal abhorrence among right-thinking people for the current South African regime - this was in the late Sixties - he himself would surely be attacked for such an association. Could he not perhaps use an expression such as ‘separateness’ or ‘otherness’, without in any way compromising his opinion? To do him credit, he immediately and graciously thanked me for saving him from error and amended the phrase.

Oddly enough, one of my other experiences of the subtleties of middle- and upper-class English anti-Semitism arose out of my no doubt absurd love of cricket. I was lunching with Mark Bonham-Carter, a remarkable man who was a life peer, the first chairman of the Race Relations Board, a vice-chairman of the BBC and a grandson of a prime minister, Asquith. I was expanding on some arcane cricketing issue of the day and he mused: ‘It’s a funny thing about you people.’

I froze. I hadn’t encountered that phrase before, except in the pages of Philip Roth. Very quietly, I asked: ‘You people?’

‘Well, you know, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, you, lots of you. You all seem to be so keen on cricket’, he said in a faintly surprised tone, not entirely unlike someone noticing that we were all wife-beaters or worse.

For once, the mot d’escalier came when it was needed. ‘Of course’, I said. ‘And there’s old Siegfried Sassoon as well. He was a Jew once upon a time, before he became a country gentleman with his own cricket team. I suppose it’s because we’re all so desperate to win the approval of you people.’ The silence was long. The colour of his complexion changed visibly, but he did not insult either of us by apologising or explaining.

Contact remained unbroken and our last encounter was when, as chairman of an appeal for the London Library to set up a T. S. Eliot fund, he sent to me, in my capacity as head of a publishing house, a formal letter asking for money. I replied that I had the greatest respect for him, the library and Eliot’s poetry, but that as he was a former chairman of the Race Relations Board I knew he would understand that Eliot’s appalling anti-Semitism made it impossible for me to contribute.

I dare say he had by then classified me as one of those chippy, over-sensitive Jews, always on the lookout for slights. Perhaps that is what I always was; still am. Perhaps that is why I am writing this as a way of ridding myself of all those little hurts. Clearly, I would not remember them with such clarity and doubtless tedious total recall over a period of more than 50 years if they had all merely bounced off a thick skin. In mitigation, I can only say that it is a fairly heavy load to bear as a child, whether you are the ‘Dirty Jew’ of Beaver Road Primary School or the ‘Christ killer’ of Moor Allerton Preparatory School. And the child is the father...

When I started to write this, Isaiah Berlin was alive, so that five Jews, i.e. nearly a quarter of the statutory limit of no more than 24 members, were holders of the Order of Merit. We have recently lost a Jewish Lord Chief Justice and, as the importance of state religion in general and the Church of England in particular wanes, it is probably only a matter of time before we have a Jewish Prime Minister who can get his Home Secretary or Lord Chancellor to appoint the bishops.

In other words, we should draw a distinction between anti-Semitism and discrimination against Jews. If asked whether there is discrimination, I would confidently say no. If asked about deeply held racial prejudice, which still pops up in the most surprising circumstances, I would have to say yes.

So, am I surprised by those, in the broad scheme of things, rather petty little anti-Semitic episodes as experienced by me? Given the hindsight of 60 odd years, no. Was I upset by them? Manifestly, yes, although, with the passing of the years, one can begin to laugh as well as cry. Will this sort of thing ever disappear? Certainly not in my or my sons’ lifetimes.

Was I personally ever discriminated against? I can only answer no. In that archetypal Jewish phrase, I mustn’t grumble. But if I have grumbled at length about my experiences of anti-Semitism, it is because I believe it is still out there, inbred and lurking in the thickets of the essential English character, not necessarily intended to wound, not necessarily entirely innocent either.