Address by the Rt Revd Peter Selby
As part of Fforestfach Colloquium VII
When Rabbi Julia Neuberger answers the question, ‘How does antisemitism feel?’ with the one word ‘Uncomfortable’, it dates her careful and concerned explanation of the phenomenon as before October 2023 when rocket boosters were put under all the features of antisemitic attitudes and behaviour. Her observation that increases in antisemitic behaviour invariably accompany heightened tensions in the Middle East has been tragically shown as prescient, and we have to hear that her ‘uncomfortable’ has now become for the Jewish community in general, ‘intolerable’.
It’s important to say at the outset that as I speak of factors in the context of the rise in antisemitism, I run the risk of being thought to engage in collusion, to be blaming the Jews for antisemitism and of requiring them, rather than the exponents of antisemitic attitudes, to take the actions necessary to reduce it. That the making of connections will be heard by those experiencing the daily reality of antisemitism as pleas for the mitigation of attitudes and behaviours and reluctance to confront antisemitism, is one ambiguity that weighs on me in responding to the invitation to comment in this colloquium.
There are a few other ambiguities that affect my response. First, although I hope I listen to Jewish voices attentively there’s no doubt that I am affected by the fact that my engagement with this topic began before I was born. My father and mother came as refugees, from Germany and Austria respectively. My father was of the last cohort of Jews allowed to graduate. He left in 1933, unable to persuade his family to do the same. My mother, a Christian from birth who only knew she was Jewish when the Nazis so classified her, fled after the Anschluss. They met in London and married. I grew up in a household frequently visited by other survivors of the Shoah[1] and heard their stories, and as a child visited a great-aunt in a home for widows in Vienna. I know a bit about survivor guilt and I hope rather more about how that needs to be morphed into a sense of responsibility and empathy. I’m quite conscious here of being a person whose life trajectory has exempted me from any personal experience of antisemitism.
A second ambiguity is that I, like most other Christians, I think, need to accept that most of what I know about Judaism is derived to a far greater extent than we even know through hearing about it through Christian voices, and reading about in the Christian texts. That is particularly so for those like me whose formation is in Christian theology. A renewed emphasis on the Jewishness of Jesus may feel as though it provides knowledge of Judaism, but that isn’t really so. I still smart under the rebuke of Rabbi Jacob Neusner who later became a friend, but who on reading my account of the Jubilee texts in my book on debt said simply, ‘You’re very ignorant, aren’t you?’, before introducing me to the vigorous rabbinic debates on those texts and their significance. I take seriously to heart his observation in his book Jews and Christians that much of what has been billed as dialogue between Judaism and Christianity has in fact been people talking past each other to their own constituencies.
Fast-forward a few more years and I’m married to a person whose secondary education at a Hampstead school, at a Christian foundation some third of whose students were Jewish, gave her the experience of the better times described in Rabbi Julia’s book, of imaginative provision for both communities, some warm relationships and friendships across differences. I’ve a specially warm memory of when the priest of the first parish in which I worked invited a local rabbi to lead the parish’s Good Friday devotions. Such are among many moments of hope in the toxic history of an initial family quarrel within Judaism at the start of the Christian movement which morphed into all the persecutions Jews have suffered.
And to end this recital of ambiguities, decades later I found myself the 112th Bishop of Worcester with a 13th century predecessor who was complicit in the expulsion of the Jewish community from the City of Worcester. A blue plaque in a town centre car park now reminds passers-by if they will look and learn.
Much of what I have said is personal to me. Maybe my experiences find echoes in the stories that others in this room, particular the Jews in this room, could also tell. But perhaps it is in truth the other way round. Perhaps it is the stories of non-Jewish bystanders which are the echoes, echoes that are growing louder all the time, of the daily experiences of Jews, for whom Neuberger’s ‘uncomfortable’ has become their ‘intolerable’ and a chronic ache has become an acute and piercing scream.
What’s to do?
We have urgently to get people together to try for more agreement about what are acceptable protest behaviours and what are not. We need a firm statement, impartial and evidence-based, of what are the patterns, locations and styles by which support movements for whomsoever can be expressed and on what basis actions, supportive or protesting, will be assessed. There are at the moment on all sides allegations of bias one way or the other and a competition in victimhood that in different contexts and places disproportionately affect different communities. It’s clear, for instance, that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism is seen by many, including some very outspoken Jews, as one-sided and too limiting of the right to protest.
Behind this, and bearing out the connection Neuberger and others make between the increase in antisemitism and tensions in the Middle East, is the contention that she and others share that there is a distinction between opposition to and protest against the policies of the Israeli government, which is not antisemitism, and pointing the finger of blame against Jews as Jews which certainly is. My uncomfortableness, one that grows more and more acute, is that this distinction, a familiar outworking of liberal democratic thinking, is less and less sustainable the more extreme the conflict in Israel/Palestine becomes. There is in that much that Palestinians, not represented in this room, have to sort out, which is not the agenda of this colloquium but needs to be addressed. The late Bishop Richard Harries, a tireless Christian opponent of antisemitism, used to comment that the Middle East is in a struggle over two opposing narratives, both righteous and both flawed. But I respectfully suggest that underneath the policies of the Israeli government lies a theological issue that only Jews can resolve: are the non-Jewish residents of the ‘promised land’ Amalek to be destroyed or the stranger in the land to be respected and cared for? From politicians, theologians and media alike we are hearing both answers, and it is not claiming too much, I think, to say that the resolution of that question would cut off one major fuel on the fire of antisemitism.
But the question boomerangs, and those of us outside Jewry have to hear it too. As I walked through Yad Vashem[2] I was, as those who walk through it are meant to be, presented with the voices that remind us of a horror that resulted from antisemitism gone rampant. I absolutely embrace the charge never to forget. But I heard another voice too at various points, one that felt more ‘official’, that said that the Shoah was a crisis of the diaspora and its vulnerability, a crisis that can only be kept at bay by a strong Jewish homeland. I have more of a problem with that voice. First, because of course as a Christian I am part of a movement that only exists because of diaspora. But secondly, because of the role of diaspora in Christian history, we goyim[3] have an overwhelming duty to make diaspora safe for Jewish people; it is entirely understandable from their experience that Jews are convinced that only a strong and safe homeland will secure their peace; I believe that only if all of us make the Jewish diaspora safe for Jewish people everywhere will the tortured story of those who live where both our religious movements began stand any chance of being healed.
[1] The Hebrew term for what is commonly known in the UK and USA as the Holocaust
[2] Yad Vashem – literally, ‘a memorial and a name’, is Israel’s official memorial institution to the victims of the Holocaust.
[3] Hebrew name for Gentiles, non-Jews.
The Rt Revd Peter Selby is a retired British Anglican bishop who served as the Bishop of Worcester from 1997 until he retired at the end of September 2007. He was also the Bishop to HM Prisons from 2001 to 2007. Earlier in his career, he taught at Durham University as the William Leech Professorial Fellow in Applied Christian Theology, before returning to full-time ministry in the Church of England in 1997.