That had shocked the country to its core — long known as the Republic’s Hussars, teachers had been explicitly tasked to foster Republican values with the advent of universal public education. Bureaucratic spinelessness and police inefficiency ensured not much has been achieved since, a fact papered over by grandiose talk about “our values”.

Then, as now, the Ministre de l’Intérieur was Gérald Darmanin, who for the last week has been engaged in a slanging match with one of his predecessors, the Socialist Manuel Valls, each accusing the other of weakness in front of the Islamist threat. Both come from immigrant families and both are a strikingly similar type, performative hard men who vow they will protect the country. Each has been trying to outdo, or rather out-talk, the other on law and order, especially terrorism and immigration — and both are failing.

Darmanin, once a Sarkozy boy who during the 2017 presidential campaign tore into Emmanuel Macron as a “bobo-populist” and “sheer poison”, nevertheless agitated for a job in his cabinet, which he got as Minister for State Finances. In the second Macron term, he got his dream promotion to Interior, and began a well-publicised anti-terrorism drive. He closed militant mosques, announced the expulsion from France of 231 “radicalised foreigners singled out by the security services”, and in general broadcast an image of proper police work. How effective that was is unclear (by the end of 2020, only 48 of those on his list had actually left France).

Suggested reading

Gaza will change the future of war

By Harald Malmgren and Pippa Malmgren

For instance Paty’s killer, Abdoullakh Anzorov, whose sister had joined Isis in Syria, was enjoying refugee status and a 10-year residency permit in France when he slaughtered the teacher, who’d been pointed out to him by his own pupils. Anzorov and his family, who hold Russian passports, had been denied asylum twice since 2008, and were almost expelled from France in 2014. But when they refused to board a plane, a number of NGOs and the French Communist Party raised enough of a political outcry over the family’s apparent “good integration” into French society that the then-Interior Minister Valls countermanded the expulsion order. It’s an error that his successor Darmanin has been at some pains to recall in their recent exchanges.

Darmanin’s presidential ambitions are so blatant that he’s usually described as having “des dents qui rayent le parquet” (“teeth so long they scratch the floor”). This, unsurprisingly, displeases Macron, and explains why he has foregrounded his new Education Minister, Gabriel Attal. He’s an old associate of the President and the ideal son-in-law — so much so that his colleagues style him as having “des dents si longues qu’elles rayent le parquet de l’appartement du dessous” (“teeth so long they scratch the floor of the flat below”). Since Bernard’s murder, most concrete announcements on law and order have been made by Attal, who has requested security in each school and announced that 1,000 supervisors would be posted at college entrances.

But, like the police, schoolmasters and supervisors have seen their numbers plummet in recent years, and for the same reasons: growing insecurity due to a fractious “sensitive” population, and bad pay. Attal hasn’t said where he would find new troops. What amounts to political manoeuvring therefore comes across as nothing more than inglorious and petty. But it is also reassuringly familiar, as is the state incompetence it reflects. For at least three decades, the French have been complaining of what they see as the dereliction of the once-super-efficient French bureaucracy: in public services, unkept promises, and a shrinking of our self-image as reflected by the diminishing French footprint in world affairs. The violence in Israel last week was, though more horrific, as much a reminder of our problems as a distraction.

Antisemitism itself has already been re-imported into France by radical Islam, but for years it was difficult even to name it: it did not belong to the Républicain national narrative. The national integrationist, secularist, and colour-blind model — long successful, now under attack simultaneously from progressive identitarians and violent religious fanaticism — could not have failed. Those who denounced the inroads of Islamists in schools were dismissed as extremists. As early as 2002, authors such as George Bensoussan, Barbara Lefebvre, Emmanuel Brenner and later Paul-François Paoli documented the inroads made into the French school system by intolerant extremists — building on a damning 2004 report commissioned by the Education Ministry — which was never followed by any kind of effective action.

Suggested reading

Do Israel's critics understand Evil?

By Jacob Howland

Last Friday, as Bernard tried to stop Mogouchkov, the killer shouted: “Are you a history teacher?” Throughout the country, it’s history classes that are most disrupted, often violently, as pupils deny the lessons of their teachers and their textbooks, usually but not exclusively on the history of the Holocaust. Increasingly, some teachers skip those lessons, feeling they’re getting no support from school or education authorities. Instead, they’re likely to get bad professional ratings from school inspectors who tell them they’re “not able to control the students”. Recent polls show that 80% of French teachers have been at one time or another “scared” by their disruptive, sometimes threatening pupils.

Yet while the French have protested their unity ever since the country started being targeted, there has also been a great deal of self-censorship from the top down. In the days of the Isis crimes, even naming Islamism was criticised as “stigmatisation” and, of course, “Islamophobia”. One million of us took to the streets of Paris after the Charlie Hebdo murders and there have been countless “white marches” to leave white roses and offerings at the sites of successive tragedies: for instance, at the Bataclan theatre where 160 young concertgoers were mown down by Islamist terrorists, just like the desert-ravers in the Negev last week.

In fact, when the worst of the Hamas attacks become known last week, French Jews were shocked but unsurprised. The killing of Jewish children, torture of young people, and beating to death of old ladies had all happened here. They recall the kidnapping, weeks-long torture and murder of a young estate agent, Ilan Halimi in 2006; the shooting of Jewish children in a Toulouse Jewish school in 2012; the murders of two elderly Jewish women, Sarah Halimi in 2017, and Mireille Knoll in 2018, by Muslim neighbours.

Yet in accordance with the well-meaning Républicain narrative, countless threats against Jewish buildings and Jews in the streets were for years discounted by police and judges as the acts of “unbalanced lone wolves”. It took the Charlie Hebdo and Hypercasher murders of 2015 for officials to acknowledge the resurgence of antisemitism in France; and many felt it was done grudgingly. Yet the perpetrators were all radicalised Muslims. The pogrom had happened gradually, then suddenly — and massively.

While one portion of the population grieved, there was never a shortage of useful idiots to excuse each successive rampage. The latest have been drawn from the Left-wing Mélenchonista MPs who, regarding the Hamas attacks, will not let the “T” word sully their lips: Danièle Obono (“Hamas is a Résistance movement, not a terrorist one”); Mathilde Panot (“Hamas is the armed branch of the Gaza Palestinian movement”); and of course Mélenchon himself. So far, so Owen Jones. They are wilfully blind to the fact that France has been especially targeted by Islamists for her secular tradition, which their supporters (and Muslim brotherhood community organisers in the banlieues) relentlessly attack.

Suggested reading

Can the pro-Palestine Left redeem itself?

By Kat Rosenfield

For years, the foundational French principle of Laïcité has been intentionally misrepresented. All it means is that the Republic guarantees the neutrality of the public space. Any believers are free to practice their religion as a private affair as long as they respect the law (polygamy, for instance, is forbidden); none are entitled to request a change in state services or in public behaviour. Activist policy, however, is to seize on Laïcité whenever they make their regular accusations of Islamophobia — from attacking anti-headscarf laws in schools to taking up, as a cause célèbre, the death of an asthmatic drug dealer known for having raped a cellmate in prison. (His case is used as proof that the French police routinely kill people, despite the fact that there were 39 “deaths related to any police intervention” in France last year, compared to 1,097 shooting deaths by the police in the US). The bitter irony of such double standards may one day help us French feel a bit more for Israel, a nation regularly held to higher standards than its attackers.

Instead, all that remains is that the broken promise that radical Islam would be stopped — repeated by Emmanuel Macron in Arras last Friday ­— and the knowledge across France that nothing has been done. From car torching to drug dealing in the streets, to open support for terrorists in the banlieues, the police are a study in flailing helplessness. No wonder its successive ministers are finding it harder to build popularity.

In the face of this inaction, 70,000 French Jews have left France for good in the past 20 years. Among the more privileged of French citizens, those who live in the centre of big cities, there is no common resolve, or capacity to fight back together: the political analyst Jérôme Fourquet, in his essay “L’Archipel français”, describes the mixture of officious self-flagellation, Leftist pieties and atomised, pick-your-own social pact that constitutes this archipelago of French society. Of course, Michel Houellebecq had seen it long before him. Almost nothing binds us any longer. And the young, nearly unknown mandarin first elected president in 2017 to bridge the nation’s division seems to have exacerbated them instead, through his combination of political inexperience and narcissistic hubris.

Suggested reading

Harvard is a national disgrace

By Jacob Howland

Last Friday afternoon, hours after Dominique Bernard’s assassination, with the bloodstains still visible on the steps of the school, Emmanuel Macron showed up at Lycée Gambetta in Arras. Alongside Darmanin and a small group of elected officials, he came to speak with the school’s principal, other teachers and local parents. The local MP, Sebastien Chenu, also the Rassemblement National Vice-President of the House, thanked him for visiting his constituents so promptly, then gave voice to the feelings of many of those around him. “I have to say, Monsieur le Président, that the French people expect strong action. Words cannot stop terrorism.”

Witnesses were flabbergasted to see Macron utterly lose his rag. “Show some decency! Mind your own business! This is neither the time nor the place!” Members of the delegation said afterwards they’d never see the president so angry. “I felt I had to say this,” Chenu later said. “I simply encouraged him to act. I wasn’t lecturing him. He didn’t take it well. His reaction was disturbing: he seemed offended because he felt he didn’t have the upper hand, because I was pressing him… He’s always had trouble coming out clearly on Islamism and immigration.”

The scene was described in Le Point: Macron’s people no doubt felt it was damaging enough to leak a counter-narrative that appeared this week in Le Canard Enchaîné, France’s answer to Private Eye. A short item claims Macron had been angered by Chenu allegedly saying “We wouldn’t be in such a situation with Marine [Le Pen as President]”. Except that no witness to the scene heard the phrase, unlike the one quoted by Mathilde Siraud, the Le Point reporter. (Chenu has written to Le Canard to deny it and request a rectification.)

Hastily cooking up an easily disproven lie is not the best of ideas for a president already accused of talking tough but not achieving much. There is a feeling of febrile amateurism in the second Macron presidency. Just as he deluded himself that regular telephone calls to Vladimir Putin would bring a halt to the war in Ukraine, le Président last Sunday called his Iranian counterpart, Ebrahim Raisi, to call for “restraint in the region”. He seems to have drawn no lesson from their previous such conversation last June, when he asked, fruitlessly, for Iran to stop drone deliveries to Russia. The French, looking uncomprehendingly at Macron’s performance at home and abroad are unlikely to feel reassured — or indeed, governed.

I knew his voice, I’d heard his sermons over many years, but I didn’t know him. A bit like Jonathan Sacks. And I thought that death had brought comfort to him, that the proximity of death had elevated him, and when it came, he was blessed.

There were five Jewish singer-songwriters who clouded my consciousness when I was growing up. Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Neil Diamond and Barry Manilow. (Marc Bolan didn’t really count.) Dylan was like an itinerant Protestant preacher from Minnesota, searching for a home he could never find. Tangled up in blue. Leonard, from Montreal, was the Catholic Priest burdened by original sin, and then adding a few more of his own. Ain’t no cure for love. Paul Simon ran the gospel choir, like a bridge over troubled water. Neil Diamond ran the summer camp. Sweet Caroline raised spirits round the fire. Barry Manilow was the only one who actually showed up at weddings and Bar-Mitzvahs and I can tell you, Copa Cabana and Could it be Magic were the only songs by this crew that my Mum really liked.

I thought that the five of them should get together and form a band called the Sanhedrin, but then again the only song that Cohen and Dylan recorded together, with Allen Ginsberg, was called ‘Don’t go home with your hard on’. Phil Spector was the producer. I let the idea go.

Suggested reading

Roger Scruton still gives me strength

By Maurice Glasman

It was Dylan who towered over them all but then Cohen made a late bid for glory. The closer to death, the greater the work. The Future, released in 1992, bore the hallmark of prophesy and foreboding.

“It’s coming from the sorrow on the street
The holy places where the races meet
From the homicidal bitchin
that goes down in every kitchen
To determine who will serve and who will eat.”

His voice, his songs, and even his music became stronger in his sixties and seventies, full of wisdom and compassion. ‘Anyhow’, ‘Come Healing’ and ‘Amen’ are unique and profound songs and ‘Lullaby’ is the only song I know that directly speaks to insomnia. “If your heart is torn, I don’t wonder why, if the night is long, here’s my lullaby.” It is beautiful.

They are all from the album Old Ideas that was released when he was 78. Bob Dylan could barely talk, Neil Diamond could barely walk but Leonard Cohen, the firstborn, was still throwing lightning bolts of prayer and repentance until his death. In ‘Steer your Way’ from his final album the perfect diction of his prophetic heart was still beating:

“Steer your heart, precious heart, past the women that you bought
Year by year, month by month, day by day, thought by thought.  
They whisper still the ancient stones
The blunted mountains weep
As he died to make us holy
Let us die to make things cheap
And say the Mea Culpa, which you probably forgot
Year by Year, month by month, day by day, thought by thought.”

And yet we didn’t. The greatness of his work is his ease with the ancient stones, the dry bones and the mountain tops of the Bible. Abraham and King David live again. The Psalms frame and animate his writing; Hallelujah. Jesus is a constant presence from first to last. Whether he was a sailor, who walked upon the water, or the spirit who will re-animate love, the holy spirit hovers over his work:

“It’s coming through a crack in the wall
On a visionary flood of alcohol
From the staggering account of the Sermon on the Mount
Which I don’t pretend to understand at all
It’s coming from the silence on the dock of the bay
From the brave the bold the battered heart of Chevrolet
Democracy is coming, to the USA.”

No wonder the election of Donald Trump was the final nail in his coffin.

Suggested reading

Bob Dylan doesn't like you

By Dorian Lynskey

His decades-long devotion to Zen Buddhism was also part of the story. He spent years in a Buddhist monastery in California, learning from Joshu Sasaki Roshi, who, it turned out, molested and abused hundreds of women in his role as head of the order. He claimed that sexual contact with a Zen Master would help women attain “new levels of non-attachment”. Who’d have thought?

And for all the drawing on the Kabbalah, in which sexual union is the most sublime expression of divine love, there is no mention of faithfulness, of marriage, of the fidelity to a woman and to God that is the basis of that teaching. Throughout his work, eros is disconnected from devotion. It is an escape, a healing, a triumph; but it is not bound by covenant or love. 

“And like a blessing come from heaven
for something like a second
I was healed and my heart was at ease”.

The Sixties, when Leonard Cohen abandoned the idea of being a novelist and a poet and moved to New York to be a singer-songwriter, was a cauldron of sexual liberation and enslavement. The over-the-counter-culture intensified the commodification of sex, the dissolution of its relational essence accompanied by celebrity endorsement. The idea that sex was sacred was profaned. It was a time full of sex cults, and the emergence of Kabbalah as part of an occult sexology was part of that story. And Leonard Cohen, who initially saw himself as a prophet of a new religion, was one of the high priests of that movement.

“It’s coming from the women and the men
Ah baby we’ll be making love again
We’ll be going down so deep
that rivers gonna weep
And the mountains gonna shout Amen.
It’s coming like the tidal flood beneath the lunar sway
Imperial, mysterious, in amorous array
Democracy is coming, to the USA.”

It’s hard to load the dishwasher after that. It is the lack of relationality in regard to sex that is remarkable. He would have benefited from a conversation with Mary Harrington. Love and eros were divorced and it is notable that in his final recording, having elevated sex to the sublime life force of creation throughout his work, he writes: “I don’t want a lover, no, no, the wretched beast is tame.” The body and the soul could not find reconciliation.

Suggested reading

The Velvet Underground had to die

By Ann Manov

There was more than a dose of the biblical prophet in Leonard, and more than a dose of the new age cultist. His defrauding by his manager and ex-lover make sense within this story. The ‘wretched beast’, ‘my crazy’, and his adventures on ‘Boogie Street’ could not be constrained by his merger of Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism. They could not be bound; they could not be consecrated and so ‘love itself, love itself was gone’.

He was like Noah, a great man of his time, but unlike Abraham, Moses, Jesus or Imam Hussein, he could not make the sacrifice required for redemption. He was enslaved by sex. There was no liberation there. And unlike King David, the Kingdom was merely his own.

In 1992, Cohen promised: “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” The crack in the wall that creates a space for democracy and a cold and very broken hallelujah. In the end, however, the birth was betrayed and the marriage spent. He refused to be bound by his understanding, that the forgiveness of others is far more important that forgiving yourself. He had a messianic vocation but he could not fulfil it. He wanted it darker. And he blew out the flame.

The capital’s strictly Orthodox Jewish, or Haredi, community has an infection rate of at least 64% — UK-wide estimates range from 7% to 30%. And according to the new study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), that figure rises to a staggering 74% among adults and secondary school children.

When I visited the area in North London last week — the study’s researchers have asked the press to refrain from naming the community’s precise location for security reasons — there was little to suggest that it has endured a pandemic quite unlike any other in the world. Smartly dressed children skip down the steps of their schools into waiting minibuses; men with sidelocks and dark frock coats rush to synagogue, their wide-brimmed black hats draped with makeshift plastic coverings to protect them from the elements.

Storm Darcy is sending snow across this enclave of the city, with strong easterly winds wending their way from Ukraine — the same place from where the biggest stream in ultra-Orthodox Judaism, and its 18^th-century codes of dress, originated. Over the past few weeks, a chill wind of publicity has also been blowing through the area, home to 25,000 Haredim — the word comes from the Hebrew “to tremble” before God — the largest community in Europe.

Suggested reading

Are Heredi Jews ahead of their time?

By Giles Fraser

It culminated last month with coverage of an illegal wedding held at a state school and attended by 150 guests, though other recent stories about the community have covered everything from forced marriage to benefit fraud. But, like so much about this complex corner of London, the picture is far more nuanced than it first appears. Yes, life here is going on largely as normal, but most of the manifold physical interactions which may seem to break lockdown rules are, in fact, perfectly legal.

Unlike Christians, who may go to church once a week, Orthodox Jewish men pray three times a day, and the government has allowed communal worship in England since July 4. All Haredi children are also still allowed to attend lessons. They come under the government’s category of “vulnerable children” as they live in overcrowded households and attend schools that ban internet access at home. Even those who go to full-time unregistered “yeshivas” — which controversially escape Ofsted scrutiny because they offer a religious curriculum so restricted that they are not deemed schools under the Education Act — are allowed to continue attending, because the category also applies to “out-of-school settings”.

But their initial exposure to Covid-19 was also a product of bad timing. With its raucous celebrations and door-to-door gift giving, the festival of Purim fell in early March, less than a fortnight before the first lockdown was imposed. As one person who works in the community told me: “It was the Haredi Cheltenham Festival.”

As ever, there are also socioeconomic reasons for its high rate of infection. Larger families increase the risk of catching the virus and also mean higher-than-average levels of deprivation. The average Haredi woman has between six and seven children; the average British woman has fewer than two.

“Many families live in very crowded conditions, not out of choice but because there is a real dearth of housing,” explains Rabbi Herschel Gluck, as we talk in his back garden. The rabbi, his long white beard flowing from beneath his disposable mask, bristles at any suggestion that Haredim — known for being insular and resistant to modern mores — are “backwoodsmen” who simply don’t understand what’s going on. “I’m totally sick of this attitude that somehow we’re dealing with people who are not aware,” he says, pointing out that many use WhatsApp or have broadband for work.

And for those who don’t: “The message has been delivered in every way that you can think. We had a car going around with a loudspeaker, leafleting, advertising. If anything, I would say they are too aware. Because they are now also aware of all the conspiracy theories, the misinformation.”

Suggested reading

Do you know how Covid really spreads?

By Stuart Ritchie

One of the most unusual things about LSHTM’s study, which involved 343 households and 1,759 individuals late last year, was that it was initiated by the Haredim themselves. Its Medical Advocacy and Referral Service charity approached the scientists and even offered funding. “It’s the only time it’s happened to me in my career,” says Dr Michael Marks, who co-led the study.

Since publication, he has written in a local community newspaper warning that the data is no reason to relax. For while his findings are, on a human level, truly remarkable — some might say disturbing — they also raise profound scientific questions. If, for example, three-quarters of the community’s adults and secondary school children have been infected, does that mean that it now has herd immunity to the virus? And if that’s true, how should its existence influence policy decisions over the lifting of lockdown restrictions?

Dr Marks, however, is cautious about making any assumptions. “There isn’t a strict biological threshold for herd immunity,” he says, and especially because of the chance of reinfection and new variants, “we certainly wouldn’t think that the community has achieved [it].” Moreover, in more densely populated areas such as this one, where there are greater opportunities for viral transmission, any threshold would be higher than average.

Marks says he has no reason to believe that rule-flouting was a significant factor in driving up the community’s infection rate, pointing to non-compliance nationwide, and the fact that Haredim are merely hyper-visible. “When you see people who break the rules and they look like you, you think, oh, they’re probably just taking their dog for a walk. We notice when people who don’t look like us break the rules.”

Yet for many Haredim, it is judgment from within the wider Jewish community that is the most painful. One recent comment piece in Jewish Chronicle said that “much of the lifestyle for many Haredi communities is completely incompatible with the fundamental principles of Judaism”.

It certainly has exposed fault lines in Britain’s Jewish population. Even before the pandemic, mainstream organisations had been working hard to connect with a Haredi fringe that is in the ascendancy. Roughly 20% of all Jews in Britain are Haredi (about 60,000) — and within a decade, most Jewish children in Britain will be. But bridge-building has its limits. Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, representing mainstream Orthodoxy, tweeted about the recent illegal wedding story, saying the event “amounts to a brazen abrogation of the responsibility to protect life”.

Suggested reading

The risk of eternal lockdown

By Adam Wagner

Eli Spitzer, a Haredi headteacher who knows 12 people in the community who have died from Covid, believes the runaway infection rate mainly “comes down to a lack of compliance”. He says Haredim were “just as scared as anyone else” in March and “paid an enormous price” to observe the first lockdown (you try entertaining seven children indoors without iPads or CBeebies). But he adds: “I think the horse had already bolted at that point in a community of this nature,” and it was then too late to tell people to continue turning their lives upside down to ward off a virus that had already run riot.

Though he says most have therefore “sat out” this lockdown, he is mystified by the idea that he and his neighbours have put religion above the preservation of life. “It sounds like they think there are people dropping dead all around us, that we just continue praying and we’re oblivious to mountains of corpses.”

True or not, it’s clear that Jews across the board have been disproportionately affected by Covid. Last year, Public Health England found Jewish men aged over 65 died at twice the rate of Christians, even after adjusting for socio-demographic factors. There is no data on the mortality rate among Haredim specifically, but while their infection rate is up to nine times the national average, it is unlikely their death rate will be anywhere near as high. This is because the median age of a Haredi Jew is just 14, compared with 40 for the rest of the country.

But locals are clearly conscious of the scrutiny. Signs outside schools warning that masks are mandatory are in Yiddish, the everyday language of residents here. A second set in English is there to send a message intended for non-Haredi eyes: “Look, we are upholding the rules.”

Rabbi Gluck detects a double-standard. While other minority communities — also disproportionately affected by the virus and more likely to display “vaccine hesitancy” — have received compassion, he suggests there is a sense among some that Jews have brought it on themselves. “I think people do not have the same sympathy for the Jewish community,” says Gluck. “Many people, their parents, their grandparents, were guinea pigs for science under the Nazis. We can understand that they have a certain amount of healthy ambivalence to accepting medical opinion without question.” Gluck himself was filmed being vaccinated, “so my position is clear”.

Even so, it is difficult not to conclude that there has been a catastrophic failure by a leadership that is able to wield extraordinary power. Spitzer points out that most UK Haredi religious institutions belong to global organisations that are capable of telling you “how to wear your socks”. But now, he explains, “the leaders will not issue directives that they don’t think will be popular, because they’ll lose their position.”

Still, perhaps the community’s extraordinarily high infection rate can be best understood by taking a look at those leaders who do “issue directives”. Take the case of Rabbi Yossi Teitelbaum, who allegedly circulated leaflets in December that highlighted spurious “loopholes” to the lockdown restrictions. His punishment? Earlier this month, he was put in charge of “Covid coordination” by the community’s main umbrella group.

It was not a school for Jewish Feminist social democrats, or really – if knowledge is your goal – a school at all. It was, rather, a hushed house for women in search of rich husbands. But we did not know this, being children.

It was very pretty because prettiness was the most important thing: a crenellated white Strawberry Hill Gothic house on Richmond Hill. The Good Schools Guide blithely calls is a castle. It isn’t. A castle is a defensive fortress, not a house with ornamental battlements and if I had stayed there I would probably not know that. It was merely decorative and useless for defensive purposes. As we were.

More from this series

The victims of a liberal education

By Helen Thompson

Even in the late 1970s it was a relic, dedicated to upholding – and infiltrating – the British class system and to creating a particular sort of woman: decorative, pleasing, and ambitious in the most pointless sense: the geishas of Twickenham. Even now I wonder how many of them actually have jobs.

It was a tiny world, which sought to be no bigger – quite the opposite of an education. My class contained the daughter of a marquess who is now a duke and a girl who is now a world famous “socialite”. I was there by mistake. My father was the dentist to the headmistress and, on the advice of my mother – a working class Jewish girl from south London, who wanted me to go to Oxford University, and thought this was the way – he secured our admission, probably when she was at his mercy in the chair.

There were only two Jewish families in the school. We learnt that on the first day. The other Jewish family was the only other one to arrive with grandparents. So my sister and I were oddities from the start, although she coped better than I did, being kind and calm. When my uncle delivered us one day in a motorcycle and sidecar – he was a biker – it caused a sensation.

More from this author

The inescapable misogyny of the modern world

By Tanya Gold

I remember the costume best, for obvious reasons. This school existed to create surfaces and, as far as I know, it never looked below them. We wore red and white gingham frocks in summer, and grey pinafore dresses with matching coat in winter. We had straw boaters with ribbons in summer, which was ludicrous, and felt bonnets in winter, which was worse.

We were supposed to be immaculate; and they were. I was always the dirtiest girl in the school photograph, an alien among placid English girls certain of their destiny, which was marriage and money. My clothes were grubby and torn because I was curious and accident-prone; once my hat flew out of a car window. Among the others, who seemed to me a rainbow of blonde, there was competitive plaiting of hair.

We were just out of infancy, but I could already sense hierarchies of beauty and status forming. There were no nerds, for what use are they? Some girls shifted to be invited to the tiny socialite’s mansion. (The marquess’s daughters had better manners, because the landed aristocracy, which is secretive, depends on not publicly acknowledging its power.) She spent winters in Barbados and we knew it, and we also knew that it was something to admire.

I would not call that an education. I would call it a trap; almost a hobbling. If you are not properly educated, and you do not find the rich husband your lack of education has prepared you for, what then?

More from this series

What Eton taught me about power

By Sam Leith

This world was filled with manners – not warmth, but manners. Each day at the end of school, we had to queue up to shake the hand of the headmistress, a fearsome woman with hair like a wax cauliflower. Once I attempted to queue twice to shake her hand twice – I have the disease of more – but was rebuffed. At lunch we sat at tables of six, presided over by a teacher whose job was to watch for, and root out, bad manners. We had linen napkins and a personalised napkin ring. It was on the school list! We passed bowls of vegetables from hand to hand. Once, my sister licked the communal mashed potato spoon. The shame followed her to the 11+.

We had to learn something, so we learnt French conversation, ballet, and flower arranging. The socialite won the flower arranging, but she had acreage to play with. Our French teacher was actually French. We called her “Mademoiselle” and she was talkative and dramatic, like a French woman from a Sunday night television drama. It was, I think, the ideal school for Mr Bingley’s sisters. It was intellectually empty but if we surrendered to the torpor they spoilt us.

More from this author

How Jane Austen makes fools of her fans

By Tanya Gold

My mother was distraught when she realised the truth of a school that she hoped would make us secure in a Britain filled with class: learning too much was forbidden and she could not tolerate that. One night my she and I were bored and, in a fit of mania, we finished all the questions in the maths textbook. It was a term’s work. I walked into school expecting praise. Instead, I was rebuked. Was I vulgar? Had I tried too hard, and that was not faux-aristocratic enough?

I left a term later. I thought at the time it was my choice, but it wasn’t. That is good manners for you. My mother was told, politely, that it was not the school for me: I was too curious, too talkative, too grubby. I think I was also, in retrospect, too Jewish.

I should feel lucky to have attended the fake castle, and in an awful way I was. But it was there that I first felt the alienation. I couldn’t do the things that they required of me; but I had other things. I know that houses with ornamental battlements aren’t defensible, for instance, except, perhaps, as metaphor.

Until recently such a statement would have seemed far-fetched. Yet the applause that greeted Labour MP Chris Williamson as he informed an audience of Momentum activists that his party had been “too apologetic” in its approach to antisemitism proves otherwise.

Labour has since, reluctantly, suspended Williamson, reversing an initial decision not to after a backlash by MPs and the deputy Labour leader.

Suggested reading

Is Jeremy Corbyn anti-Semitic?

By Giles Fraser

Despite the retrospective distancing exercise by Left-wing commentators, the Labour MP for Derby North is really an outrider for the Labour leadership. He is a one-man basket of atrocious opinions, but they are opinions that chime with the hard-Left milieu from which Corbyn himself emerged. Williamson has defended the dictatorship in Cuba. He has denied that people in Venezuela – who are currently facing an economic catastrophe – are “genuinely starving”. And he has promoted a pro-Assadist blogger who called the murdered MP Jo Cox a “warmongering Blairite”.

It is difficult to decide which of these is the more monstrous opinion to hold let alone to espouse, but it seems reasonable to suggest that a political party that was not undergoing a profound moral crisis would seek to drive someone who held such views to the margins. Instead – even as the latest scandal surrounding antisemitism unfolds – it has been reported that Jeremy Corbyn “did all he could” to stop Williamson from being suspended by the Labour Party.

But it is on the issue of antisemitism that Labour’s descent into morally dubious territory has been most stark, culminating in nine Labour MPs quitting the party last month over its perceived botched handling of antisemitism claims. This comes on the back of a row last year over the Labour leadership’s initial refusal to adopt the full International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism.

Suggested reading

The Left is deceiving itself over antisemitism

By Douglas Murray

Since 2015, a large number of cases of antisemitic abuse by Labour activists have been reported, with Jacky Walker, a senior activist in the Corbyn-supporting campaign group Momentum, claiming that Jews were the “chief financiers of the slave trade” (Walker was invited last month to speak at the House of Commons by none other than Chris Williamson).

How the Labour Party – a ‘proud anti-racist party’, as Labourites are so fond of saying – came to be derided as “institutionally antisemitic” by one of its Jewish MPs is a story that predates the rise of Jeremy Corbyn.

In fact, the far-Left has had a strained relationship with the mainstream Jewish community in Britain for several decades. In the 1980s for example, Left-wing ‘anti-Zionist’ campaigners fought to ban Jewish student societies from forming unless they explicitly rejected the state of Israel.

This old Left view of Israel as a colonial enterprise continues to find a residual echo on the contemporary Left. As Dave Rich puts it in his book The Left’s Jewish Problem, for much of the far-Left “Israel is a Western colonial implant in the Middle East”.

What gives contemporary Left-antisemitism its potency is its mixing of older antisemitic narratives about Zionism with populist tropes which seek to blame society’s ills on a shadowy ‘elite’ or ‘establishment’. Capitalism is not a set of economic relations which we all live under; instead it is something that is “rigged” – Jeremy Corbyn’s term – by malevolent rich people.

Suggested reading

Can we really call Jeremy Corbyn an antisemite?

By Tom Chivers

With ready-made tropes about Jewish world domination never more than a few clicks away online, populist ‘anti-elitism’ rhetoric – of either the Left or Right – easily lends itself to antisemitism. Portray capitalism as a sinister cabal of individuals controlling the economy, and antisemites invoke long-standing tropes about Jews controlling the banks.

As a recent paper on European antisemitism put it, prejudice against Jews is “residual yet perpetual”. A 2009 survey found that 31% of Europeans blamed Jews for the global economic crisis.

What Jeremy Corbyn has done – a man whose political assumptions are largely derived from the anti-colonialist and anti-Zionist New Left – is to embolden those who were previously confined to the political fringes. And he has done this partly by his own sorry example.

Corbyn has publicly defended an antisemitic mural, has blamed a terrorist attack in Egypt on the “hand of Israel”, and has palled around with antisemitic political movements, describing them as his “friends”. He also claimed in a speech that British Jews did not understand “English irony” – comments that won the stamp of approval from far-Right ex-politician Nick Griffin.

Suggested reading

Why Holocaust memorials fail

By Tanya Gold

Another major reason the Left is finding it so hard to expunge antisemitism from its ranks is its division of the world into sharp moral categories of good and evil. Williamson touched on this in his speech to Momentum activists. “A party that has done more to stand up to racism is now being demonised as a racist, bigoted party,” Williamson told the room with incredulity in his voice. We are the good guys, Williamson seemed to be implying; and how could the good guys possibly harbour prejudice?

In his book Contemporary Left Antisemitism, the academic David Hirsh refers to those with this mindset as the “community of the good”. Hirsh cites the example of the French Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou to make his case. When accused of antisemitism, Badiou replied revealingly that there “could be no such thing as a far-Left antisemitism – an absurd oxymoron”. The former mayor of London Ken Livingston similarly claimed to have “never heard anyone say anything antisemitic” in over 47 years as a member of the Labour Party. By definition, there could be no bigotry within the community of the good.

This binary division of the world into the good and the bad is not something that is strictly confined to the Left. Our entire political discourse around racism has come to rest upon a separation of the world into those who are irredeemably racist and those who are not, which misses the rather obvious point that racism is a learned behaviour and can therefore be unlearned.

Suggested reading

Corbyn's intolerant populism

By James Bloodworth

As a society we have come to favour blanket condemnation and ex-communication in our treatment of prejudice, as if such attitudes were fixed, a product of a corrupted and irredeemable soul.

This is perhaps understandable. It is, after all, important to take a stand against racism, and the easiest way to do so is to denounce the individual racist. The problem begins when we start to see the racist as a separate and almost alien type of human being – as someone fundamentally different from ourselves.

Invert this process and a select group of individuals – in this case the section of the far-Left that has taken over the Labour Party – can readily believe themselves to be morally pure. To be on the Left is thus to be beyond reproach for racism and antisemitism. Per Badiou, it is impossible to be Left-wing and antisemitic.

George Orwell once wrote that “Saints should be judged guilty until proven innocent.” Those on the hard-Left who see themselves – and their political party – as saintly and beyond moral reproach should be more self-critical.

For until the Labour Left is able to conceive of a ‘progressive’ bigotry – a bigotry which couches itself in ‘anti-imperialist’ and ‘anti-capitalist’ rhetoric, and which emanates from those committed activists who show up unfailingly at meetings to ‘fight the Tories’ – then the Corbyn movement will not root out antisemitism.

The Left's long history of antisemitism

Subscribe:

Instead, a new Holocaust Memorial will be built next to parliament, in Victoria Palace Gardens. It was ordered by David Cameron and chosen by competition – Memorial Idol? The winning entry looks, to me, like a giant toast rack containing toast.

I went through the entries yesterday, in a facetious rage – what’s your favourite Holocaust Memorial? It is hard to forgive the architects, however well they mean, their professionalism. It’s a job, inciting meaning with sculpture in small spaces, and their metaphors screech at me. And so, alongside Toast Rack, I found Massive Alien Baby, Hill on Its Side, Metal Sandwich, Toast Rack Slightly Different, Triangle, Something About Aeroplanes, and – and this is just lazy – Circle.

I hate most Holocaust memorials. I hate the one in Berlin, which is a series of concrete blocks. It’s so unimaginative, only a German could have built it. I watched a woman place a handbag on a block, saw an emergency exit twinkling, and left. I hate the one in Vienna too, which is a prison cell, surrounded by cafes. Is it a memorial or a tiny re-enactment? I won’t go to Auschwitz either. All that chip throwing, and children being dragged around unwillingly, and bad reviews on Trip Advisor – look them up, people complain they aren’t moved, and they flew in to be moved – and, in the past, anti-Semites with tape measures lurking, trying to prove it’s all a hoax.

Suggested reading

Why are Jewish people 'wandering' again?

By Douglas Murray

My favourite memorial is Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. It’s an archive too, busy with historians. If you want proof, for instance, that Jews were not complicit in the murder of their fellows – a popular myth on the far Left, who love the anti-Semitic play Perdition as much as Ken Loach does – you email Yad Vashem, and they rebut it with evidence. They have collected all the names of the dead they can find. It is in Israel, which is the only memorial to the Holocaust that means anything, because it holds the possibility that it will not happen again, not because people type hash tags that say #NeverAgain and post them on Twitter, but because there is an army. That is why Jews mind Right-wing anti-Semitism, which is not anti-Zionist, less that Left-wing anti-Semitism, which is anti-Zionist. Sticks and stones will break my bones. Leave us the guns.

There is a canyon in the grounds of Yad Vashem, made of golden stone. On the walls of this canyon are written the names of the settlements in Europe which were emptied of Jews. The size of the letters depends on the size of the settlements. You find names in Hebrew and English of places you have never heard of written in small letters in the walls, and then you come to the great pre-war centres of Jewish culture and they are huge: Warsaw. Krakow. Vilnius. There is also a children’s memorial where, with candles and mirrors, the effect is conveyed of infinite points of light. I like this less, because it is comforting, and I won’t be comforted. They make the children seem eternal when they did not even have even a natural life-span.

But is this the whimsy – the privilege – of the Jew? I don’t need a Holocaust Memorial, for all surviving Jews are a memorial. There’s one asleep upstairs. He’s five. I haven’t told him of the attempt to annihilate his tribe in living memory. I will tell him when he is 13. They learn it too young in Israel, and I think it has sent them mad.

Suggested reading

Is Jeremy Corbyn anti-Semitic?

By Giles Fraser

There is already a Holocaust Memorial in London. It’s two stones under a tree in Hyde Park, with a quotation from Lamentations: “For these I weep. Streams of tears flow from my eyes because of the destruction of my people.”

We don’t need another one, not because they irritate me, but because Holocaust memorialisation does not work. It has not worked. Extreme populism and Nationalism are rising. Anti-Racist campaigners are in despair. The absence of anti-Semitism post war was the anomaly, and now we return, slowly, to the status quo.

People cannot be educated out of mass murder. That’s the paradigm. Germany was the most cultured country in Europe in 1933. The Waffen SS weren’t fools with pitchforks. Many of them had PhDs in medicine and law. Anti-Semitism is many complex things, but it is, at its most mundane, a pressure valve. It erupts when people are bereft, and afraid, and seek a common enemy on which to project their fear. So the £50 million for the toast rack should go on something else. Something that will create a society prosperous and self-confident enough not to need a pogrom in which the most despised wretch in the city is a king. Because he is not a Jew.

Suggested reading

When will people learn that hate speech is here to stay?

By Douglas Murray

The new Holocaust memorial will stand by Westminster, as if a debt were owed by Britain to the Jews. Bars are low here, but Britain owes less than most of Europe, if only due to the luck of the sea. We cannot know, and I do not want to know. (My grand-father had the cyanide ready in 1940 in south London. He didn’t want my grandmother to go to a concentration camp.) I dislike the self-congratulation due to the Kindertransport, in which 10,000 children were brought to Britain, for where were their parents? But the British have not been truly expert in anti-Semitism since the 13^th century, and even Jewish memories struggle to extend back that far.

It is normal, though, on the far Left, to accuse Jews of stealing victimhood, and refusing to share it with others who are, equally, due memorials. That’s an offensive charge. Murder a talkative people who like books, and survivors will talk about it, and write books about it. But even anti-Semites can be right, if for the wrong reasons. There should be a memorial to all racisms, not to thwart their idea of the grasping Jew, but because it is just.

The British profited greatly from slavery, and colonialism for a while, and those victims have no Yad Vashem. They do not have a great centre of sorrow and learning to commemorate the enslaved, the tortured and the dead. It would be better for the Jews, and for everyone – for what is good for everyone is good for the Jews – if one were built.

That is my prayer – no, my desire – on Holocaust Memorial Day.

Mark Lewis (54) is not a household name. Although as one of Britain’s leading experts in media and libel law, plenty of the events of his life and career have intersected with moments of public interest. Lewis was the lawyer representing some of the most prominent victims in the News International phone-hacking scandal. His clients included the family of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler and also the singer Charlotte Church. More recently, he represented the food-writer Jack Munroe in her successful libel case against Katie Hopkins.

Though he was near to limelight, he never sought it for himself. A modest, self-effacing and cerebral figure, his career was not about seeking personal notoriety, but of practising the law, representing his clients and upholding what he saw to be the principles of a free and fair society.

Lewis’s decision to leave the UK, then, is the sort of act that demands some attention.

As well as being a leading lawyer, Lewis is also Jewish. As is his partner, Mandy Blumenthal. In recent years, Lewis has watched events in Britain and across Europe with increasing concern. He has watched the attacks on Jews across the continent, and has seen anti-Semitism become acceptable again in Britain – this time on the political Left. And he has seen the equanimity with which British society, and the British state, has come to view anti-Jewish extremism.

Further reading

Why we mustn't leave debate to the extremists

By Douglas Murray

For example, every year in London a march occurs called ‘The Al-Quds day march.’ It goes through the centre of London, passing the great institutions of the state, including the BBC. The day it commemorates was instituted by the late Ayatollah Khomeini and it is a day which Khomeini hoped would unite Muslims around the world. The specific purpose of the march is to call for the destruction of the state of Israel (“Al-Quds” being the Arabic for Jerusalem).

Each year, the march includes the most overt support for terrorism – including flying the flags of the terrorist group Hezbollah. The speeches follow suit. In 2017, one speaker at the Al-Quds day event (himself from a Khomeinist organisation misleadingly named the Islamic Human Rights Commission) did not merely call for the destruction of the Jewish state, but blamed “Zionists” for – among other things – the Grenfell Tower tragedy.

No charges were brought against him for this speech. It seems likely that if somebody stood up in public and made such unfounded and inciteful comments against any minority group other than Jews (even while hiding behind some thin, veneer smokescreen such as “Zionists”) that the authorities would have taken action.

In the same way that if a march took place on an annual basis which called for the eradication of a state which was the only safe-harbour for any race of people other than Jews, it is highly unlikely it would be allowed to go ahead. And if it did go ahead, then decent members of society from every walk of life and background would unite in opposition to it. But they do not. The public do not turn out to protest the Al-Quds day march as they would a march by the KKK or some neo-Nazi group.

Further reading

Fukuyama's blinkered view of history

By Douglas Murray

Earlier this year, Lewis – who suffers from Multiple Sclerosis and sometimes needs to use a wheelchair – made his own stand. As the ‘Al-Quds Day’ march set off in June, Lewis – in his wheelchair – placed himself right in front of the march. Amid furious and intimidating scenes he held his ground. He refused to budge, halting the march for almost an hour. At which point a police officer threatened to arrest him and forcibly moved him to the side of the road. It was a heroic moment, where one man showed a dignified protest in the face of ceaseless and apparently unstoppable hate.

But now he has had enough. Mark Lewis and his partner Mandy arrived in Israel last week to start a new life. “Europe in my view is finished”, he told Israel’s Channel 10 on arrival into the country. “You see people murdered in museums in Belgium, people murdered in schools in France, people attacked in England. There is only one place for Jewish people to go.”

He also said that in recent years he had been subjected to an increasing number of death threats and other abuse. The couple is in no doubt as to where at least some of the blame must lie: “Jeremy Corbyn moved the rock, and the anti-Semites crawled out from underneath the rock. They’re not going back.”

Like many other Jews, it is the discovery that anti-Semitism has crept up on them from the political Left that is one of the propelling factors for such a move. It is one of the cruellest ironies of our day that the place of last resort for Jews worldwide should have become the primary focus of hatred by people who – among other things – like to think of themselves as ‘progressive’ and on the side of minority groups.

Further reading

Has America lost its mind?

By Douglas Murray

However, the most heart-breaking comment – which should be widely heard across Britain and Europe – is what Lewis said as he arrived in Israel. “We’re a wandering people, and it’s time to wander again,” he said. “People just don’t want to see it.” He also knows other people considering the same path.

Perhaps they will see it in due course. One of the most haunting phrases in fiction in recent years is the moment in Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission in which the French law professor learns that his student, and lover (who is Jewish) is planning to leave France and go to Israel to live. As she mentions it, Houellebecq’s character reflects that “I don’t have an Israel”.

To that haunting phrase of Houellebecq’s invention can now be added Lewis’s terrible one. There are many things that people can say are emblematic of an era. But that statement, “It’s time to wander again”, is as sobering and disturbing a phrase as I have heard. With implications that go deep as well as wide.

Whether words mean anything in the current era (where they often seem to mean whatever anyone wants them to) is one matter. Whether actions count for much in an era deluged by unprecedented noise and images, is another. But it seems to me that the words and actions last week of this one Jewish man and his partner should count for something. And should be thought upon by anybody who still cares to think.