European Judaism

This article provides an overview of Eleanor Rathbone’s commitment to the rescue and welfare of refugees, especially Jews, in and from Nazi-occupied Europe before and during the Second World War. The focus is on how she sought to champion their cause, while balancing her humanitarianism with the political imperatives of the day. Reference is made to her two groups, the Parliamentary Committee on Refugees and the National Committee for Rescue from Nazi Terror, both of which were used to bring pressure to bear on the government regarding their response to the refugees. Mention will also be made of some of her refugee publications, which variously proposed rescue schemes and sought to dispel the prevailing negative myths about Jews.

Between 1880 and 1905, approximately 100,000 Jews, fleeing from Russia, entered Britain. The majority settled in the East End of London, Leeds, Manchester and Glasgow. They were viewed as totally alien and a threat to society. It was claimed that they deprived the indigenous population of employment and housing. A group of right-wing Tories manipulated these allegations to instigate the 1905 Aliens Act, which laid the basis of immigration law in Britain. This article will consider how the long-term influence of the Russian Jews’ arrival impacted on the reception of the Jews fleeing from Hitler. While the government wished to maintain its façade of tolerance and the Jewish community wanted to offer traditional charity, the shadow of 1905 remained; entry into Britain was strictly controlled.

The Kindertransport has long been interpreted as a heroic response to the refugee crisis of the 1930s and has recently re-entered the British national conversation as a model to be applied to the current Middle East refugee crisis. Kinder case files are utilized to argue that an unambiguously celebratory narrative is a misreading of the Kindertransport, especially when considering the plight of parents who had to make agonizing choices to send their children away. The majority of Kinder were never reunited with their families after the war, and even those who were suffered various traumas related to their long estrangement. An examination of the fate of parents and siblings who were not welcomed to Britain suggests that it is a mistake to call for the reimplementation of the Kindertransport on any scale to respond to the wave of religious and political refugees currently crossing into Europe in large numbers.

The persecution of ethnic and social minorities during the Second World War led to the creation of customary international human rights law. These laws serve to protect the fundamental rights and civil liberties of all individuals; even when a person is brought before a criminal court their right to justice will be protected. Through its immigration policies, the UK government aims to create a ‘hostile environment’. The detention of migrants has become the norm, and immigrants have been criminalized through the introduction of criminal offences including entering the UK on false or no documents. The increase in foreign nationals convicted of such criminal offences is portrayed as evidence that criminal migrants are a danger to public safety. Laws have been changed and the role of the courts to protect the rights of children to a family life eroded to further the hostile environment.

How welcoming Great Britain was to refugees in the 1930s and 1940s depended on many factors, including the age, gender, class and profession of an individual. Members of some of the British professions did all they could to rescue their persecuted brethren from the continent, while others did all they could to bar those who might potentially cause competition in the job market. This article considers how welcoming the professions and general public were to the internees in the years preceding the Second World War, how popular opinion changed after the fall of France and the Low Countries, and how Eleanor Rathbone and some of her peers campaigned to debunk the popular myths surrounding the refugees. Much of the rhetoric from this time period will seem familiar to those reading the newspapers and listening to news reports nowadays, showing how much still needs to be learned from this turbulent time in history.

The British government’s wartime immigration policy was to refuse admission to anyone from Nazi-controlled territory unless they could prove that they were useful to the war effort. The Independent MP Eleanor Rathbone led the campaign to persuade the government to amend this policy so as to allow refugees into Britain on humanitarian rather than merely utilitarian grounds. Campaigners also pleaded with the government to do its utmost to rescue Jews and facilitate their entry into Palestine, the colonies and the dominions. This article presents the government’s reasons for refusing to recognize humanitarian factors as a basis for admitting Jews to Britain, and cites campaigners in their efforts to influence government policy. It seeks to question the myth that Britain’s response to the Jewish plight was as wonderful as is presented to the public.

In the summer of 2015, UK public attitudes towards refugees shifted significantly in the face of a substantial and sustained increase in the number of people entering Europe from the Middle East and North Africa in search of refugee protection. Contrary to what might have been expected, given that the prevailing public mood on refugees had up to this point been, at best, guarded and wary, this change in attitudes was not only overwhelmingly positive, but it also forced the UK government into a dramatic and significant policy change. This article considers whether this shift in opinion represented a real sea change in public attitudes, or was a fleeting and unsustainable compassion spasm.

Eugene Heimler, writer, psychiatric social worker, Hungarian survivor of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and other concentration camps, created an approach whereby frustration is used as potential for creative, satisfying action. In his book Night of the Mist (and other books), he wrote about his experiences in the camps (www.newholocaustliterature.com). He answers his question ‘On what does it depend whether we are defeated by life or whether we succeed?’ by saying that human beings need meaning and purpose. The Heimler Method of Social Functioning is about integrating frustrating experiences as useful elements in the present and potentially satisfying elements for the future. An integral part of the method is the Heimler Scale, a tool that measures satisfactions and frustrations and highlights the potential of a person. Pain and suffering are motivating forces that we need in order to function successfully. During a recent visit to Szombathely, Dr Heimler’s hometown, his widow launched his first volume of Hungarian poetry.

Jan Fuchs was one of the Jews who were rescued by the Danish resistance in October 1943. He later settled in the UK, where in his last years he became a friend and mentor to the author who here recalls his life with affection and gratitude. Jews and Christians have rather different approaches to the idea of what it means to be ‘saved’. This article is a critical reflection on how this has played out in the fraught history of Jewish Christian relations, and what implications this has for their different attitudes to Holocaust commemoration.

This is an account of three weeks spent in Israel and the Occupied Territories talking to activists and volunteers engaged in initiatives to foster cooperation and understanding between Israelis and Palestinians. Interviews in the article include: with the Siraj Centre who run walking tours in the West Bank and along the renowned Abraham Peace Trail; Yesh Din who investigate infringements of personal and property rights experienced by Palestinians in the Occupied Territories; The Greenhouse at Kibbutz ein Shemer, where Israeli and Palestinian youth collaborate in conducting scientific, ecologically based experiments; Neve Shalom where Jews and Palestinian Arabs have been living together for fifty years; Derech Hachlama whose volunteers drive Palestinian families with sick children from checkpoints to Israeli hospitals; and others. Within the context of the Netanyahu government’s increasingly hard-line approach to the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, the unsung story of this intrepid band of warriors for peaceful coexistence deserves telling.

Fifty years after his Goncourt Prize-winning début, and three years after the author’s death, a first posthumous novel, L’Etoile du matin (Morning Star) was published by André Schwarz-Bart and his wife and co-author, Simone Schwarz-Bart. Their respective roles in the writing process have never been transparent, and the lack of interviews, as well as limited correspondence, keep this situation unchanged today. A new volume of their unfinished cycle, entitled L’Ancêtre en solitude (The Ancestor in solitude), came out in 2015. The new narratives continue to explore how margins can be minimized in order to make us see similarities rather than differences. Critics have marginalized an ‘extravagant stranger’ who has been misunderstood for his biracial and bicultural transracial imagery, a ‘Fremdkörper’ in the canon of both Caribbean and French-Jewish literature. His manifold displacements allow us not only to ‘read with different eyes’, but also to read one historical trauma in and through another (Mary Jacobus).

The narrative in BT Kiddushin 81b about R. Hiyya bar Ashi tells of a sage who waged a battle with his Urge after he refrained from engaging in sexual relations with his wife. He, however, did not reveal to her the battle being waged within him, but rather pretended to be an ‘angel’. When his wife incidentally found it, she disguised herself as a harlot and set out to seduce him. After they had engaged in sexual relations, the rabbi wanted to commit suicide. The traditional readings view R. Hiyya as the hero of the tale. This article claims that the aim of the narrative is to present the rabbi as being carried away by dualistic-Christian conceptions. The article further argues that the topic of the narrative is not sexual relations, but dialogue.

Psalms 113–118, known collectively as ‘Hallel’, are recited by Jews on New Moons and festivals and are thought to have formed part of Temple practice. I outline the historical development of this unit from two psalms to its full complement of six. Although its rabbinic title suggests that it expresses praise, other more complex associations of the word are explored in the context of reviewing the underlining ‘narrative’ traced by the texts. This spans episodes from patriarchal times to exile, ending with the eventual messianic advent. I propose here that the practice of occasionally abbreviating two of the psalms reflects sympathy for the Egyptian foe, based on rabbinic views concerning the sanctity of human life.

The book of Ecclesiastes is one of the least studied in the Bible. It should be more closely analysed for its critique of conventional, more ‘normative’ biblical books. Its relevance to contemporary thought has been unwittingly highlighted recently. Its argument against the normative view in the Bible mirrors arguments made in a recently published book by the British philosopher John Gray against the work of the Canadian psychologist and neuroscientist Steven Pinker. Ecclesiastes raises issues fundamental to contemporary discourse, such as whether we live in a world that progresses or whether the world is static and one where we are condemned to repeat the mistakes made by previous generations. This article demonstrates that current arguments, apparently deriving from Enlightenment thought, actually have origins going much further back. The author finally asks whether there really is nothing new under the sun. It is an article with a twist in the tail.