Government Debt (Introduction)

Government Debt (Conclusion)

Mass Flourishing: Morality, Ethics and Markets

Fforestfach Colloquium VII: Antisemitism

Antisemitism: From ‘Uncomfortable’ to ‘Intolerable’

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 112^th Bishop of Worcester with a 13^th 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.

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[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.

Antisemitism and the Double Standard

Address by Graham Edwards

As part of Fforestfach Colloquium VII

As I have the opportunity, I would like to express my gratitude to you, Brian, both for arranging these colloquia, which I find both fascinating and spiritually nourishing, and for your mentorship over the last twenty years, for which I am deeply grateful.

Turning to the subject at hand, let me begin with two observations about human nature, drawn not from scripture but from a hero of mine, Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner, who made a fortune from observing the ways that sensible people come to believe foolish things.

The first he called the social-proof tendency: thinking is hard work, so to spare ourselves the effort we take our cue from the crowd – an efficient instinct, but one that transmits error as readily as truth. The second he called the authority-mis-influence tendency: we defer to authority – the figure in the robe, the institution with the seal – even when our own eyes and conscience tell us it is mistaken. Both let other people do our thinking for us.

I start there because antisemitism, in its endurance and its strange respectability, feeds on exactly these two weaknesses – the pull of the crowd, and misplaced trust in authority. And the antidote, in every age, is the same: the willingness to judge a thing by the truth rather than by the number of voices asserting it.

Consider the arithmetic. There are some two and a quarter billion Christians in the world, around two billion Muslims, and roughly fifteen million Jews. Set that beside the social-proof tendency, and you see the structural difficulty of the Jewish position: when a conviction takes hold among very large numbers of people, the dissenting voice of a tiny minority is simply overwhelmed – not refuted, just outnumbered. The crowd does not need to be right to prevail. It only needs to be large.

So what protects a small people, or any unpopular truth, from the weight of the many? Here I turn to Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses. In the eighteenth chapter of Exodus, he finds Moses exhausted, single-handedly judging the people, and counsels him to appoint judges – and notice what he says to look for: ‘able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness.’ There, at the founding of the very idea of a judiciary, is the standard: a society must rest on truthful judgement, on judges who cannot be bought and will not be swayed.

I want to hold that standard up against the body our own age treats as a supreme moral authority – the United Nations. Here the authority-mis-influence tendency does its work: we assume that if the UN has passed a resolution, it must reflect some impartial weighing of the facts. Yet look at the record. Over the decade to 2024, the General Assembly passed more than twice as many resolutions condemning Israel as it did condemning every other nation on earth combined; in 2025 alone, fifteen against Israel and eleven against all the rest of the world together. And consider the structure, not merely the numbers: the UN Human Rights Council keeps a permanent, standing item on its agenda dedicated to one country, and one only – Israel. Every other nation is dealt with as the need arises; Israel alone has a fixed place reserved at every session, in perpetuity. There is no reason a fair-minded judge could give for permanently seating a single defendant in the dock while all others come and go. The arrangement does not describe the accused. It describes the court.

Set that against what was happening in the world in that same year, 2025. The war in Gaza was, on any honest account, grievous: by that autumn the Palestinian health authorities reported on the order of 69,000 killed, and some 1.9 million people – nine in ten of the population – driven from their homes. Terrible figures, and I do not diminish them. Yet in Sudan, over the very same period, the toll was larger still: more than 150,000 killed and around 12 million displaced – more than twice the number of dead, six times the number of homeless. And in November of that year, the General Assembly approved six separate resolutions singling out Israel, and not one on Sudan. A judge who scrutinises one defendant with such ferocity while barely glancing at far graver matters elsewhere is not, by Jethro’s standard, a judge at all. He is a man with a grievance wearing a judge’s robe – and the danger is that the crowd mistakes the robe for justice.

Now, why should a small people be singled out so? Part of the answer lies in the long history of conspiracy – of falsehoods believed because they were repeated, not because they were true. Think of the blood libel: the claim that Jews murdered Christian children for their blood. Were it true, it would directly contravene Jewish law, since it is forbidden for Jews to consume any blood at all – and it was condemned as baseless by popes as early as the thirteenth century, yet it drove massacres for eight hundred years, up to 1946. Think of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that notorious forgery purporting to be the minutes of a Jewish plot for world domination – exposed in The Times in 1921 as plagiarised from an 1864 French satire in which no Jew so much as appears, and ruled a forgery by a Swiss court in 1935. And still it circulates today. In each case the truth was available. In each case the crowd preferred the lie.

We tell ourselves that in a modern democracy we have outgrown all this – that a person must answer for what he himself has done, not for his relatives, his tribe, or the conduct of some government in a country he may never even have seen. Picture a black nurse on a British ward made to answer for the massacres of some African dictator before her patients would let her treat them. Imagine a Russian child shunned in the playground until they had denounced Vladimir Putin’s war. We would recognise these at once for what they are – racism, plain and simple. Yet for some reason, the ability to recognise the same characterisation as racist, when it refers to Jews, seems more difficult.

And yet I must put before you the oldest wound of all: the charge that the Jews killed Christ. Jesus was executed by Rome, by crucifixion, under a Roman governor shown in the Gospels washing his hands. But the charge that hardened over the centuries was not against a few men in one place and time. It was against a whole people, for all time – the crowd in Matthew’s Gospel crying, ‘His blood be on us and on our children,’ read as hereditary, collective, everlasting guilt. That single move – from some individuals to an entire people across all generations – is the template for every collective blame that followed.

And here is why I find hope. The Catholic Church did something most institutions never manage: it looked at an injustice it had carried for nineteen centuries, and corrected itself. In 1965, at the Second Vatican Council, in Nostra Aetate, it declared that the death of Christ ‘cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.’ That is the search for truth triumphing over the inertia of the crowd and the weight of inherited authority – the very discipline Jethro asked of his judges.

The tragedy is that as that ancient libel was laid to rest, newer ones took its place. Today’s antisemitism arrives by three significant roads that meet at the same destination. There is the residue of the racial hatred of the Nazis. There is the Soviet inheritance, which recast the Jew as the imperialist and the Zionist as the colonial oppressor. And there is the strain carried by modern Islamist ideology. Very different movements, but they converge on a single obsession – the conspiracy theory about Israel and the Jews – and on a striking eagerness to believe the worst, on the thinnest evidence.

Let me clarify. I am not speaking of Muslims in general, a huge number of whom hold no such views, any more than I am indicting the left as such, or every Christian for the deicide charge. My concern is narrower: an ideology – the Islamist, Muslim Brotherhood strand – with a known method. It begins in charity and social welfare, moves into community life, education, and sport, and then into political organisation and the vote; we are seeing, in Britain, the early signs of the sectarian voting that follows. And though those who hold its hardest version are a small minority, history teaches – and Gramsci understood – that a small, determined, organised minority can set the terms for a much larger, more passive majority. That, again, is the social-proof tendency from the other side. And it is an ideology that, I believe, represents a growing threat – not to Jews alone, but to many other faiths of the West besides.

Now to the present conflict, beginning with the concessions a reasonable man must make. Criticism of the Israeli government is not antisemitism; Israel is a state like any other, with its own virtues and sins, and must answer for them. The suffering of Palestinians is real and ought to grieve us. I hold all of that. What I ask is only consistency – the same unbiased judgement, applied to truthfully established facts, whoever the defendant.

And consistency is precisely what goes missing. Consider the timing of what followed the seventh of October. Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza did not begin until the twenty-seventh – three weeks later. Yet here in Britain, the first request to police to hold a national march against Israel was logged at ten to one on the afternoon of the seventh itself, while Hamas was still murdering people in their homes. And the Community Security Trust, which records anti-Jewish hate in this country, saw incidents leap from an average of five a day before the attack to thirty-one a day after it – a surge that peaked in the days immediately following the seventh, before Israel had mounted any meaningful response, and then subsided. The timing is the whole point: had the anger truly been provoked by Israel’s conduct in Gaza, it could not have crested before that conduct had even begun. It was set off not by anything Israel did, but by the bare fact that Jews had been attacked. Any other nation, attacked on that scale, would have responded with overwhelming force, and we would have thought it, if not natural, at least understandable – yet Israel’s critics condemn its response while offering no alternative. They will tell you what Israel must not do; they will not tell you what they would find acceptable, or what they would do in its place.

And consider how readily we believe a powerful image. Last summer in Edinburgh, outside my hotel, a crowd was protesting, holding up photographs of starving children. One of those images I later came to recognise – a photograph The New York Times itself was forced to correct, because the emaciated-looking child suffered from a serious pre-existing illness, and his much healthier-looking brother had been cropped out of the frame. Let me be scrupulous: there was real hunger in Gaza, and I will not pretend otherwise. But that is the point – even a real crisis was amplified with a misrepresented picture, accepted instantly by a sympathetic crowd, none of whom thought to question it.

And notice where the outrage does not go. The same voices that filled the streets for Gaza seemed wholly untroubled by the regime doing more than any other to fuel that war and others like it – Iran. It is Iran that funds and arms Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis across the region; Iran that holds Lebanon in its grip through Hezbollah, against the will of a great many Lebanese; and Iran that has answered its own people’s longing for freedom with bullets, most recently crushing a nationwide uprising, with the dead numbered by some counts in the tens of thousands. None of this shook the protesters’ certainty that every wrong in the region belonged to Israel alone. A conscience truly moved by suffering would have had a great deal to say about Tehran. That so little was said tells us how selective the outrage really is.

There is a further asymmetry I find hard to bear. It is treated as natural, almost respectable, that the Palestinian territories – and most of the Muslim world – should be without Jews altogether: the very presence of Jewish settlers is called a crime against a land that ought to be Jew-free. Yet Israel itself is home to more than two million Arab citizens, a fifth of its population, with the vote, with seats in its parliament, with a place in its governments. One side’s vision of cleansed land is treated as ordinary – though a demand that a territory be emptied of an entire people would, by any neutral standard, amount to ethnic cleansing. The other side’s multi-ethnic democracy is treated as the offence. That is the double standard, laid bare.

I grew up in Britain as a fairly secular Jew – a communal Jew, you might say. I was in numerous nativity plays at school; for two years I went to chapel every morning and sang in the choir, and I sang the hymns with joy. I have always felt British first and Jewish second, with a deep affection for this country and its Christian culture. I only truly came to understand this conflict when I went and studied it – I took a master’s degree focused on the two-state solution eight years ago, because I wanted to become more informed, rather than continuing to know as little as your average Brit. 

And what shocks me – what I never felt when I was growing up here – is to watch the old pattern return: the readiness to believe the conspiracy, the treating of contested claims as settled truth, and above all the willingness to hold UK Jews answerable for a foreign government – the very thing we would instantly call racism if it were done to anyone else. What unsettles me most is not even the hostility. It is the quiet – that when this is done to Jews, the great wave of objection that would rise for any other group somehow does not come.

And what saddens me is how the UK Jewish community is now reacting. A couple of months ago, after two visibly Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green by a terrorist, my daughter sent me a simple text: ‘We’ve got to go.’ At first I thought there was a march I didn’t know about. But she soon clarified: she meant we need to leave the country, for good. And that, I am afraid, is the most common conversation in the Jewish community in Britain today: ‘Where should we be moving to?’

We speakers were asked what we hoped to achieve today. My answer is that I hope the Christians in this room might have something to teach today’s antisemites. For in 1965, in Nostra Aetate, the Catholic Church took an injustice that had lasted nineteen hundred years and had the honesty and the courage to correct it. And the Anglican Church has taken its own steps down that same road – acknowledging, in recent years, the part Christian teaching played in preparing the ground for antisemitism, and repenting of it. That is the search for truth winning out over the crowd and over inherited authority. My aspiration is that the same spirit might spread further still: a willingness to challenge the conspiracy theory, a hunger for truth over the comfortable lie, and the plain resolve to judge Israel as we judge other nations, and judge Jews as we judge other people – by the same standard, the standard of Jethro, the standard of truth.

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Graham Edwards is a British businessman and Conservative Party official. He is the former chief executive of property company Telereal Trillium (TTG), and the current Treasurer of the Conservative Party. In 2015/7 Graham studied for a Master’s degree in International Relations at King’s College in London, writing a dissertation on The Causes of the Failure of Camp David 2000, effectively a dissertation on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

Antisemitism: A Biblical Reflection

Address by Rabbi Benjy Morgan

As part of Fforestfach Colloquium VII

I was born in New York to British parents who happened to be living there at the time. By what seemed little more than an accident of birth, I became an American citizen with an American passport. To me, it was simply a passport. To my grandmother, it meant something altogether different.

She had escaped Vienna in 1939. She belonged to a generation that discovered, through unimaginable suffering, that civilisation is far more fragile than it appears. She had watched one of the world’s most cultured societies descend into barbarism within a few short years. Whenever she saw that passport, she would point to it and say, ‘Benjy, never give up your American passport. One day you may need somewhere else to go.’

As a child, I couldn’t understand her. Leave where? Britain was my home. My friends were here. My education was here. My future was here. Like every child, I assumed history moved in only one direction; that each generation learned from the mistakes of the last, and that what had happened to my grandmother belonged to another age. For most of my life, I believed she was wrong.

Yet over the past two years in my position as Rabbi for the largest young Jewish community in the UK, I have found myself returning to those conversations with increasing frequency. Not because I intend to leave Britain – I don’t – but because, for the first time in my life, I hear young British Jews asking questions I never imagined I would hear:

Rabbi, should I build my future here? Will my children have a future here?

Those are extraordinary questions  – not because they are being asked by Holocaust survivors, but because they are being asked by young people standing at the very beginning of their lives.

Whenever antisemitism is discussed, the obvious question is, ‘What does this mean for the Jews?’ It is an important question. But I believe there is another, that is even more important: ‘What does it mean for Britain?’ Because the true measure of a nation is not whether the majority feels secure. It is whether its minorities still feel they belong.

It is perhaps no coincidence that this past Shabbat, millions of Jews throughout the world read the portion from the Book of Numbers. For more than three thousand years, wherever Jews have lived, they have shared the same weekly conversation with the Bible. We have always believed these readings are more than memories of the past. They are conversations between eternity and the present. The words never change. We do. Every generation must therefore ask not only, ‘What did these words mean then?’ but, ‘What are they asking of us now?’

This week’s reading tells the story of two very different men. One is Balak, King of Moab. The other is Balaam, a prophet whose blessings and curses were believed to shape the fate of nations. Balak looks across the wilderness and sees the Israelites camped on his border. They have defeated neighbouring kingdoms and are on their way to the Promised Land. Although they have not attacked Moab, Balak is overcome with fear. Convinced that he cannot defeat them by force, he sends for Balaam with an extraordinary request: ‘Come, curse this people for me.’

The story that follows is one of the Bible’s most remarkable. There is a frightened king, a reluctant prophet, an angel standing unseen in the road, and a donkey that sees what the prophet cannot. In the end, every curse Balaam attempts to pronounce becomes a blessing.

It is a dramatic story. But beneath the drama lies a profound question. The Bible is interested not simply in telling us that hatred exists. It wants us to understand how hatred begins.

The answer starts with a single Hebrew word: Balak saw.

The Bible could have told us that Balak hated. It could have told us that he plotted against the Israelites, or that he was paralysed by fear. Instead, it tells us something far more subtle. It tells us simply that ‘Balak saw.’ That is a remarkable choice of words, because it suggests that hatred begins not with violence but with vision. Fear rarely changes the facts; it changes the way we interpret them. The facts remain the same, but the story we tell ourselves about those facts slowly changes until reality gives way to perception. Long before people commit acts of hatred, they begin to see the world differently.

That process unfolds almost immediately. Balak no longer speaks about men, women and children. He no longer speaks about families, neighbours or individuals. Instead, he speaks only of ‘this people.’ The Israelites have ceased to be human beings with names and faces; they have become a category, a collective threat. The Bible understood thousands of years ago what history has confirmed ever since: before people are stripped of their rights, they are stripped of their individuality. Every hatred begins by reducing human beings to a label. This people is a destructive force destroying everything in its path – like the way an ox licks up the grass in the meadow.  Here comes the justification part. This is the reason why they must be eradicated: they are a cancerous force whose only cure is eradication.

It is only after that transformation has taken place that Balak sends for Balaam. His words contain, I believe, one of the most profound questions in the entire Bible: ‘I know that those whom you bless are blessed, and those whom you curse are cursed.’ Every year, when I hear those words read in the synagogue, I find myself asking the same question. If Balaam possessed the power to bless, why did Balak never ask for a blessing? Why not say, ‘Bless my people. Bless my kingdom. Bless our children and protect them with peace and security.’  Why ask instead for a curse?

The answer, I believe, lies at the heart of the psychology of hatred. A healthy society asks, ‘How can we become stronger? How can we build a better future?’ A society that has lost confidence in itself asks a different question altogether: ‘Who can we blame?’ Balak had become so consumed by Israel that he could no longer imagine the flourishing of Moab. His imagination had become captive to his fear. Instead of asking how his own people might prosper, he devoted his energy to preventing another people from flourishing. At that moment, hatred ceased to be a means of self-protection and became an end in itself.

The Torah then adds one final and unforgettable scene. God tells Balaam not to go, yet he goes. An angel stands in the road before him, but the prophet cannot see what his donkey sees with perfect clarity. The donkey stops, Balaam strikes it, and eventually the donkey speaks. It is one of the strangest episodes in the Bible, but its message is deeply profound. Imagine this: if a donkey suddenly spoke to us, most of us would stop and question everything we thought we knew. Balaam does not. He simply argues back. Once an idea has taken hold of us completely, evidence alone is rarely enough to change our minds. Facts no longer matter. Reason no longer matters. Even the miraculous no longer matters. The greatest blindness is not the inability to see. It is the refusal to allow reality to challenge the story we have chosen to believe.

That, I believe, is why this ancient narrative continues to speak with such urgency today. It is not merely telling us about a king who lived three thousand years ago. It is describing the moral and psychological progression by which every prejudice develops: fear distorts perception; distorted perception dehumanises; dehumanisation becomes obsession; and obsession eventually blinds us to reality itself. By the time hatred reaches that point, its greatest victim is no longer only the people it targets. It is the society that has surrendered its capacity to see truth.

The story ends with a remarkable irony. Balak believed that Israel posed the greatest threat to Moab’s future. The Torah quietly suggests the opposite. The greatest threat to Moab was never Israel. It was the fear that had taken hold of Moab itself. A society that becomes consumed by cursing others eventually loses the ability to bless itself. It invests so much energy identifying enemies that it neglects the far greater task of building its own future. The tragedy is not simply that hatred harms its victims, although it does. It is that hatred ultimately impoverishes the civilisation that embraces it.

That, I believe, is why the Torah preserves this story. It is not simply recounting the actions of an ancient king who lived more than three thousand years ago. It is offering every generation a mirror in which to see itself. Every civilisation experiences moments of fear. Every nation faces uncertainty. Every society reaches moments when it is tempted to explain its problems by locating them in someone else. The question the Torah asks is whether we will resist that temptation. Will we respond to fear by strengthening ourselves, or by searching for someone else to blame?

There is a reason the Torah so often places blessing and curse side by side. They are not merely opposite words; they represent two fundamentally different ways of seeing the world. Blessing begins with responsibility. It asks, ‘What can I build? What can I contribute? How can I leave the world better than I found it?’ Curse begins with blame. It asks instead, ‘Who is responsible for my frustrations? Who can I hold accountable for my disappointments?’ One way of thinking creates the future. The other slowly consumes it.

Perhaps that is why antisemitism has always been unlike any other prejudice. It is never simply about Jews. Jews are its object, but they are rarely its cause. Antisemitism is what happens when a society loses confidence in itself and begins searching for a scapegoat instead of a solution. The names change from age to age, but the mechanism remains remarkably constant. Fear gives way to grievance, grievance gives way to blame, and blame eventually hardens into hatred.

The victim may change, but the moral collapse always belongs to the society that permits it. The greatest danger is not simply that Jews are blamed. It is that Jews are made to feel different. A healthy society does not ask its Jewish citizens to explain themselves, hide who they are, or wonder whether they have a future in the country they call home. The moment a society becomes comfortable with one of its minorities living in fear, looking over its shoulder, or feeling like a guest rather than a citizen, the crisis is no longer Jewish. It is national. Hatred flourishes not only because some people embrace it, but because too many others learn to tolerate it. And a civilisation that tolerates the othering of its Jews is already beginning to lose the very values that made it worth defending.

My grandmother belonged to a generation that witnessed that collapse. She watched one of the most educated, cultured and sophisticated societies in history descend into barbarism. It did not happen because Germany lacked science, music or philosophy. It happened because it lost something far more fundamental: the moral confidence to build a shared future. It ceased asking, ‘How do we become a better nation?’ and began asking, ‘Who is preventing us from becoming one?’ History has answered that question many times, and it has never answered it differently.

Only weeks ago, two minutes from my own home and Jewish synagogue, Jews were stabbed for one reason alone: because they were Jews. That was not simply another antisemitic incident. Violence is never the beginning of the story; it is the final chapter. Long before the knife comes, the suspicion, the stereotyping, the isolation and the quiet acceptance that Jews somehow stand apart. We have learned, at terrible cost, that what starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews. It rarely remains confined to its first victims. It spreads, until the values that once held a society together begin to unravel.

Of one thing I have little doubt. The Jewish people will endure. We have endured Pharaoh, Haman, the Roman Empire, the Inquisition, the pogroms and the Holocaust. Ours has never been an easy journey, but it has been an enduring one. The real question, therefore, is not where the Jewish people will be. History has already answered that. The real question is where Britain will choose to be.

I continue to believe in this country. I believe Britain is at its best when it is confident enough in its own values that it has no need to fear those who are different. I believe its greatness has never lain in the uniformity of its people, but in the values they have chosen to share: liberty under the rule of law, the dignity of every human being, the ability to disagree without hatred, and the conviction that our differences need not become our divisions.

My grandmother feared that one day I might need another passport. For most of my life I believed she was wrong. Today, I still hope she was.

Because, in the end, every generation is handed the same choice that confronted Balak: not whether to choose between one people and another, but whether to build a society whose instinct is to bless or whose instinct is to curse. The future of every civilisation depends upon that choice.

Rabbi Benjy Morgan was born in New York City and raised in the UK.  He has  spent 14 years studying in the top Rabbinic training academies in the world. Today he is the Chief Executive Officer of the Jewish Learning Exchange (JLE), a London-based organisation which aims to teach Judaism’s relevance and deeper meaning to 21st-century Jewish youth and young professionals, so as to enable them to connect with one another and make informed life decisions.

Antisemitism: A Spiritual Virus

Address given by Rabbi S.F. Zimmerman [1]

As part of Fforestfach Colloquium VII

My Lords, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak with you today. I speak not only as a Rabbi, and not only as a member of the Jewish community, but as someone whose own family story is bound up with the history of antisemitism, with the history of Britain, and with the question of what sort of society we wish to be.

My parents were Holocaust survivors. They came to this country after seeing what happens when hatred is allowed to grow, when lies are allowed to become respectable, when neighbours are taught to fear one another, and when the language of contempt becomes the prelude to persecution. They came to the United Kingdom with deep gratitude. They admired the Royal Family. They admired the stability of this country. They admired the freedom of religion and the freedom of political life that Britain represented. To them, this country was not merely a place of safety. It was a place where one could live as a Jew without fear, where one could worship openly, speak freely, and contribute to society with dignity.

That personal history is always with me. It is not a history I carry as bitterness. It is a history I carry as responsibility. My parents knew what it meant to be denied the protection of law and the fellowship of ordinary citizens. They also knew what it meant to be received by a country whose institutions, at their best, defended liberty and conscience. So when I speak about antisemitism today, I do so with love for this country and with concern for its future.

Today, the 2nd of July 2026, is the 17th of Tammuz in the Jewish calendar. For Jews, this is a fast day. It marks the beginning of a period of mourning leading towards the remembrance of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Jewish tradition teaches that on this day, among other calamities, the walls of Jerusalem were breached; a Torah scroll was burned; and an idol was placed in the Temple. These are not merely ancient memories. They are symbols. A wall is breached when the protection of a society fails. A Torah is burned when truth and conscience are attacked. An idol is placed in the Temple when something false and degrading is allowed to stand where holiness, dignity and moral responsibility ought to be.

Antisemitism is not simply a prejudice like any other, although it is certainly a prejudice. It is something more persistent and more adaptable. I think of it as a spiritual virus. It mutates. It travels across borders. It afflicts countries with very different political systems. It has appeared in communist societies and capitalist societies, in religious cultures and secular cultures, on the far right and on the far left. It changes its vocabulary from age to age, but the underlying sickness remains recognisable.

In one age, Jews are accused of being too separate; in another, of being too influential. In one place, they are accused of clinging to tradition; in another, of undermining tradition. At one time, they are accused of being rootless cosmopolitans; at another, of having loyalty only to one particular country. The accusation is never stable because it is not really based on evidence. It is based on a need to blame.

History is full of absurd and wicked beliefs about Jews. One of the oldest and most poisonous is the blood libel: the claim that Jews would kill Christian children in order to use their blood. It is difficult even to repeat such a thing, because it is so grotesque. Jewish law forbids the drinking of blood from any animal. The idea that Jews would do what they were accused of doing was not merely false; it was the complete inversion of Jewish belief and practice. Yet lies, if repeated often enough and tolerated by people in authority, can become deadly.

That is one of the lessons of antisemitism. It does not require truth. It requires permission. It requires enough people to shrug, enough people to remain silent, enough people to say, ‘Well, perhaps there is something in it,’ or, ‘This is not really our concern.’ Once that happens, the lie gains a social life of its own.

So how do Jews feel today? I can only answer from what I hear, what I see, and what many in the community express quietly and sometimes with great pain. Many Jews feel targeted. They feel under threat. They feel that they need protection in a way they did not expect to need protection in modern Britain. They feel isolated.

And sometimes, even well-intentioned advice deepens that isolation. Jews are told: stay inside; do not go near people who disagree with you; do not incite them; do not be visibly Jewish; hide the symbols of who you are. I understand that such advice is often given out of concern for safety. But we must be honest about what it means. If the answer to hatred is that the hated person must disappear from public view, then the hatred has already won something. If a Jewish child is told not to wear a kippah, if a Jewish student is told not to mention Israel, if a Jewish family is told to avoid certain places because their presence may provoke hostility, then we are not solving racism. We are reorganising life around it.

That is why this matters to all of us. Treating Jews differently, even in the name of caution, can further isolate them. It allows hatred to set the terms of public life. It dehumanises people by making them appear as a problem to be managed rather than as fellow citizens to be protected. And it causes Jews to ask a question which no loyal British citizen should have to ask: do we have a future here?

Lord John Mann, the Government’s independent adviser on antisemitism, was commissioned by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and the Prime Minister in October 2025 to review how the NHS and its regulatory system recognise, report and tackle antisemitism and other forms of racism. That review was not only about Jews. It was about the moral health of a national institution. It showed that antisemitism is not a Jewish problem in the sense that Jews cause it. Jews suffer its consequences. The problem belongs to the society in which it is allowed to grow.

The importance of that review is that it understood something fundamental. Racism corrodes trust. Antisemitism corrodes trust. If a patient wonders whether the person treating them despises them, or if a member of staff wonders whether a colleague sees them through the lens of conspiracy and hatred, then an institution begins to fail from within. The NHS, like any great public institution, depends on tolerance, fairness, discipline and mutual respect. Without those things, it does not merely become unpleasant. It begins to self-destruct.

We have also seen recent violence in Golders Green. Jews were shocked by it, but many were not surprised. That is a terrible thing to have to say. When slogans are repeated without responsibility, when hatred is dressed up as activism, when people shout ‘globalise the intifada’ or ‘from the river to the sea’ and then insist that no ordinary person should draw any conclusion from those words, we are asked to abandon common sense.

There may be academic discussions about the precise meaning of slogans. There may be people who say they mean something different by them. But ordinary Jews hear them in the context in which they are shouted, and in the context of the violence and intimidation that so often surrounds them. Common sense understands that when people call for the elimination of Israel, many Jews hear a call for the destruction of the one Jewish state and a threat to Jewish peoplehood itself. Words matter because words create permission. They prepare the ground on which violent people decide they may act.

In our society, most people are not violent. The overwhelming majority of people are peace-loving, decent and fair. But violent people exist on the fringes of every society. The danger comes when those on the fringes sense that the atmosphere has changed, that certain hatreds have become acceptable, that certain targets no longer command the sympathy of the majority. Then they act.

This is why I appeal today to the House of Lords, to people of influence, to parliamentary representatives, and to all who care about the moral character of our country. Please do not be afraid to call out hatred. Do not be afraid to say that certain language is unacceptable. Do not be afraid to say that Jewish citizens must not be made to feel alone. And do not imagine that sympathy is weakness. To feel with us is not to take a partisan position. It is to take a human position.

There is a famous saying often attributed to Edmund Burke, although the exact attribution is disputed: ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’ Whether Burke said those precise words or not, the truth of the sentiment is beyond dispute. Evil does not always triumph because it is strong. Very often, it triumphs because decent people are tired, embarrassed, cautious, or silent.

We are not asking for special treatment. We are asking for equal citizenship. We are asking that Jewish children should walk to school without fear. We are asking that Jewish students should speak honestly without intimidation. We are asking that Jewish patients and staff should enter hospitals with confidence. We are asking that synagogues should not need the level of security that has become normal. We are asking that our fellow citizens see us, hear us, and stand with us when hatred is directed our way.

Antisemitism begins with Jews, but it never ends with Jews. A society that tolerates conspiracy, dehumanisation and selective compassion will eventually damage every minority and every institution. If one group can be abandoned, another can be abandoned tomorrow. If one lie can be excused because it is politically convenient, another lie will soon follow. The defence of Jews is therefore also the defence of truth, the defence of decency, and the defence of Britain’s best traditions.

My parents came here because they believed this country could be different. I still believe that. I believe most people in Britain want fairness. I believe most people reject hatred. I believe most people understand, instinctively, that a society is judged not by the slogans it permits the loudest voices to shout, but by the protection it gives to those who feel vulnerable.

So my message is simple. Do not leave Jews to face antisemitism alone. Do not allow hatred to become normal through repetition. Do not allow intimidation to dictate where people may go, what they may wear, or how openly they may live. Speak clearly. Act fairly. Stand alongside those who are targeted. And let us ensure that Britain remains what my parents believed it to be: a country where freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, and the dignity of every citizen are not merely admired in speeches, but defended in practice.

 

[1] Rabbi Zimmerman never writes out his addresses verbatim, preferring to speak from a set of abbreviated bullet-points.  The editors have used Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence app, Copilot, to reconstruct the Rabbi’s presentation, using his bullet-points to guide the AI.  The Rabbi has reviewed and approved the resulting verbatim reconstruction, its style and the thrust of its argument. 

 

Rabbi Shraga Feivel Halevi Zimmerman is an American and English Haredi rabbi who since 2020 has served as the rov (senior rabbi) and av beit din (Head of the Court) of the Federation of Synagogues in London. He is a posek (a legal scholar who determines the application of halakha, the Jewish religious laws derived from the written and Oral Torah) and is regarded as one of the United Kingdom’s most influential Haredi rabbis. 

And Who is My Neighbour? Moral Duties at Home and Abroad

 

By David Miller

Fforestfach Colloquium VI 

I want to begin with a thought experiment proposed by the Australian philosopher Peter Singer in a much-cited article from the 1970s.[1] Singer asks the reader to imagine walking past a shallow pond and seeing a small child who has fallen in and is in danger of drowning. He assumes, and we would surely all agree, that the passer-by should jump into the pond and carry the child to safety even though this might ruin the clothes he or she was wearing. Indeed it would be morally wrong not to do so. Singer argues that this shows that we are committed to the following principle: ‘if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it’.

But Singer goes on to argue that accepting this principle would create for us quite demanding obligations towards people living in distant places. Suppose that rescuing the child would cost us £250 – the exact figure doesn’t matter – to replace the clothes that are now ruined. And then suppose that the following day an appeal letter arrives in the post asking you to donate £250 in order to save the life of a famine victim in a faraway place. (Bengal, experiencing a severe famine at the time, was the example Singer used.) Suppose there is no question that if you donate the money a life will be saved. Then, says Singer, you have as strong a moral obligation to write the necessary cheque as you had to pull the child out of the pond. The fact that the child is right there in front of you while the famine victim is thousands of miles away cannot make a moral difference – so long as it is within your power to save the life of the latter.

Most people, I believe, when presented with Singer’s two cases, are likely to disagree. They would willingly accept that in the case of the drowning child, there is indeed a strong moral obligation to go to the rescue, so long as the cost is moderate. Anyone who later reported that they had walked past a pond in which a child was drowning, but they had decided to save their new suit at the expense of the child, would rightly be severely blamed. But in the case of the famine victim, people are likely to say that while it would be a praiseworthy act of charity to send the money – and perhaps that everyone who could afford to do so should set aside a portion of their income for general charitable purposes – there was no obligation to donate in this specific case. It should be left to the person who receives the letter to decide.

But if we want to avoid being impaled on Singer’s hook, we have to be able to explain why the two cases are different. Singer is right about one thing: it can’t just be a matter of the physical distance that separates the vulnerable party from his or her potential saviour. But the distance matters nonetheless, because in the pond case it’s the fact that I directly confront the drowning child, together with the fact that there is no-one else around to help, that makes saving the child my responsibility. I have been singled out by physical circumstances as the person who bears the obligation to rescue, whereas in the famine case, the person I might save is one among millions, and I am also just one among millions who might write the necessary cheque if they chose. There has been no assigning of individual responsibility.

The pond case is actually quite exceptional, not only because most of us will pass our lives without ever being called on to perform a rescue of that kind, but also because here a responsibility is created instantaneously between two people who are otherwise strangers to each other. In the usual run of things, moral responsibilities arise out of ongoing relationships, such as those we have with family, friends, or work colleagues. We take it for granted that we owe them things that we don’t owe to people at large. The responsibilities are simply part and parcel of what it means to be a friend or colleague, or to belong to a family. Suppose, for example, that a friend calls you to say that it’s an emergency, his car has broken down and he needs to get to the airport at once: can you give him a lift? You would, I hope, feel obliged to do that for a friend, whereas you wouldn’t do that for a random stranger who asks you – or at least, it would be seen as a great favour, not something required of you, if you did.

It would be possible to dig a little deeper here and ask why our morality has this shape, why our moral responsibilities grow out of relationships in this way. But instead I want to investigate whether and how the story so far can be extended so as to include obligations to our compatriots. Because some critics will accept that relationships matter in the case of family members, friends and colleagues, but deny that the same applies to the millions of people who belong to our nation but whom we will never know or meet in person. Nations are what the sociologist Benedict Anderson called ‘imagined communities’ – we think of them as communities, but only because of what we learn indirectly about our compatriots, through the mass media in particular.[2]

If we ask what exactly it is that binds the members of a nation together, a short answer was given in a famous lecture by the French philosopher and historian Ernest Renan. According to Renan, speaking at the Sorbonne in 1882, two things make a nation: ‘One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form’.[3] There is more that could and should be added here, but Renan grasps the essential point: that nations exist by virtue of their members’ continuing will to live together, but also by virtue of the culture and other features that they share, including historical memories, that support that desire. This is what makes them into genuine communities and creates a range of emotional attachments – national loyalty, national pride, and so forth – that in turn provide the source from which special moral obligations to compatriots arise.

If we now ask about the content of these obligations, the answer is that in circumstances where the nation’s very existence is endangered – in time of war, especially – they become very extensive, and the cost of carrying them out potentially very great. But in more normal times, they are largely transformed into the obligations of a good citizen: obeying the law, paying taxes fairly, voting in elections, opposing the government when it is acting in ways that are harmful to fellow citizens, and so forth. To these we should add duties to help strengthen the nation when it is at risk of becoming fragmented, which include taking steps to integrate with others who do not share your race, ethnicity or religion.

The more heavily contested question is what is owed to outsiders, people who are not part of the national community. I began by explaining why Peter Singer’s view, that at a fundamental level we owe them exactly the same as we owe to our compatriots, is mistaken. The relationships that support national obligations do not exist globally. But at the same time it would be wrong to suppose that we have no such obligations at all. There are indeed universal obligations that we owe to people simply by virtue of their humanity. For some people, but not everyone, these will have a religious basis. But rather than delving more deeply into their source, I want to focus on their content. 

The main point to make is that these universal obligations are mainly negative in character: in a broad sense, they are duties not to cause harm. We can begin with the more obvious of these obligations, such as duties not to kill, injure or abuse individual people, but then we should move beyond this to include duties not to take from people what is rightfully theirs (stealing their natural resources, for example), duties not to exploit (forcing them into one-sided trading relationships, for example), duties not to coerce (imposing forms of political authority without consent, for example), duties not to destroy the natural environment on which people depend for their livelihoods, and so on.  It is important to list these duties, because what we can then see is that a world in which governments and the people that they serve took seriously the maxim, ‘cause no harm’ would be a very different world from the one we currently inhabit.

But are these negative duties, even if conscientiously fulfilled, sufficient? Is it enough to say that all we owe to people beyond our borders is to leave them alone to sort out their own lives without our unwanted interference?  Well, sometimes we find that a special relationship exists with someone who is not a compatriot that requires us to take positive steps to provide a benefit or service. In fact, the example with which I began, rescuing a drowning child, illustrates the point. The duty of rescue is the same no matter what the nationality of the child. It would be monstrous to ask, ‘But is she British?’ before jumping into the pond. But in that case the special relationship created by urgency and physical proximity provides the explanation for the duty.

More often, the relationship that brings positive duties into play comes about in a different way.  There may have been an explicit or implicit promise to provide certain forms of aid to an outside group. Some of us may remember the Kenyan Asian crisis of 1968, when the government was rightly criticized for attempting to deny entry to British passport holders who now found themselves threatened by a hostile government.  By issuing them with passports, the British state was committing itself to providing the Kenyan Asians with protection in case of necessity, and in the circumstances this meant allowing them to immigrate to Britain. There may also be a duty to help those who have rendered services to the nation without being citizens – for example, the interpreters who supported British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and now find themselves endangered as a result. And there may also be duties of reparation – duties to repair damage caused by not respecting the negative duties outlined above in the first place.

Sometimes a convention may arise whereby states agree to provide each other’s citizens with certain forms of aid, and this can be seen as a form of mutual insurance against disaster. Today when countries are hit by earthquakes, tsunamis or extreme weather events, rescue teams are sent internationally to help the survivors, and although this wouldn’t be regarded as an enforceable duty, it would be regarded as a failure of reciprocity if a country with specialist teams and equipment simply refused to join in a rescue operation. We might expect to see this practice extended as climate change has its predicted effects. And although it is grounded in reciprocity, it goes a step beyond strict reciprocity, because, for example, even countries that are at no risk of experiencing earthquakes themselves will join in the practice and send rescuers when earthquakes strike elsewhere.

Then finally, we should acknowledge what Cicero once called ‘duties of liberality’. These are the duties that arise when it is possible to benefit someone else at virtually no cost to yourself. Cicero, from whom much of what I have said above could also be gleaned, gave as homely examples allowing someone take a light from your fire or water from your freely-flowing stream.[4] Today we might think of allowing others the opportunity to benefit from scientific knowledge or technical advances created by members of the nation. A country that refused to share such human achievements merely out of spite or in order to preserve its position of relative advantage would, I think, be behaving illiberally, in Cicero’s original non-partisan sense.

Even after we have recognized the several different ways in which positive duties to benefit those outside the nation may arise, it is still important to insist that there is no duty to create a universal welfare state. The special duties we have to compatriots and the general duties we have to human beings everywhere have a different character and different sources, and failing to notice the difference – trying to treat everyone as though they were already compatriots – is likely to have very bad consequences.

Despite everything that has been said so far, I can imagine an objection along the following lines: you have conceded that nations, which you have been treating as the source of special obligations, are ‘imagined communities’. So why cannot imagination be stretched so that humanity itself is seen as one enormous inclusive community? One reply to this is that the attempt to do so will always be insincere. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote scathingly about ‘supposed Cosmopolites’ who ‘justifying their love of the fatherland by means of their love of the human race, boast of loving everyone in order to have the right to love no one’.[5] But another reply is that even if it were possible to realise the cosmopolitan dream, we would be in danger of losing something of equal if not greater importance: our experience of human diversity, the richness that comes from living in a world of many contrasting cultures which depend for their survival on a certain degree of closure, each country taking steps to preserve its own distinctive way of life. As Isaiah Berlin once put it, ‘if the streams dried up, as, for instance, where men and women are not products of a culture, where they don’t have kith and kin and feel closer to some people than to others, where there is no native language – that would lead to a tremendous desiccation of everything that is human’.[6]

 

David Miller is an English political theorist. He is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Oxford and an Official Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. He previously lectured at the University of Lancaster and the University of East Anglia.  He is the author of a number of publications, including Social Justice, On Nationality (Clarendon Press, 1995) and Citizenship and National Identity (Polity, 2000). 

 

[1] P. Singer, ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1 (1972): 229–43.

[2] B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2^nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991).

 

[3] E. Renan, ‘What is a nation?’ in E. Renan, What is a nation?: and other political writings, trans. and ed. M. Giglioli (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 261.

 

[4] Cicero, On Duties, ed. M. Griffin and E. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 22.

 

[5] J.–J. Rousseau, The Social Contract and other later political writings, ed. V. Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 158.

 

[6] N. Gardels, ‘Two Concepts of Nationalism: An Interview with Isaiah Berlin’, New York Review of Books, 21 November 1991, p. 22.

What are our Moral Duties as a Nation?

 

By Nick Spencer [1]

Fforestfach Colloquium VI 

The topic of what (if any) responsibilities we as a nation owe to others – refugees, immigrants, other nations, etc – is never settled. But, of late, it has been particularly unsettled.

Moreover, it is one that Christians are seriously (and increasingly?) unclear about, opinion being spread wide along a spectrum that stretches from one group of usual suspects who are satisfied by some boilerplate moral universalism backed up by a few airy references to the Good Samaritan, all the way to another, increasingly associated with the phenomenon of Christian Nationalism, who want to preserve the Christian culture of our nation by keeping immigrants out.

It’s not an easy discussion, nor one that is amenable to answers, perhaps even to any answer at all. But it is an important one, that we do ill to shy away from.

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About 10 years ago I wrote a book on the different ways in which the Parable of the Good Samaritan had been used in British politics. It turns out that not only has the parable been used a lot but it had been used by a number of very prominent politicians, including Margaret Thatcher, John Smith, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Nicola Sturgeon, Hilary Benn and Jeremy Corbyn.

Needless to say, they weren’t all using it in the same way.

The recurrent presence of the Samaritan in our political discourse should give some cause for reflection among those who think modern politics is (or should be) a wholly secular affair. You can’t keep a good Samaritan down, it seems.

This is of obvious relevance to the question of what responsibility we have as a nation because the parable has been repeatedly invoked over recent years as a way of justifying a kind of moral universalism, and countering what its critics would call a morally myopic approach to our international responsibilities.

Last year saw a public spat between J.D. Vance and Rory Stewart over the Christian approach to the proper ordering of love and loyalty, sometimes known as the ordo amoris. The US Vice President had said in an interview on 30 January that he held to ‘an old school – and … very Christian concept… that you love your family and then you love your neighbour and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world’ – an ordering, he went on to say, that had been inverted by the contemporary far left.[2]

This drew a number of responses, not just from Rory Stewart but, more notably, Pope Francis who, in a letter to the American bishops published 11 days later, wrote, with unusual directness:

Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups… The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.[3]

Here we have, as it were, two theologically-flavoured answers to our presenting question.

On the one hand, there is the ordo amoris at least as interpreted by J.D. Vance, which sees love and neighbours extending from the moral agent in question, in a series of concentric and temporally sequential circles: first family, then neighbour, then community, then fellow citizens, then country and only then after that the rest of the world.

This ordering of love demotes care for those beyond your nation to the lowest possible priority. And given that no nation is ever likely to be free from problems or possessed of a surfeit of resources on which there is no domestic call, it is highly unlikely that any nation will ever be in a position to ‘focus and prioritize the rest of the world’.

Such an ordering risks legitimising wholly self-interested national policies while entirely ignoring those beyond its borders. Our duties are not beyond the nation, but within it (and they may not even extend that far within it.)

On the other hand, and at the other end of the spectrum, we have the ordo amoris as filtered through Pope Francis and the Good Samaritan which insists that there are no limits – and certainly no ethnic, religious or national limits – on those who have a claim to my attention and generosity.

By this reckoning, we might end up with a kind of political ethic that the former cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell is quoted, by David Goodhart, as having advocated during a conversation at Oxford High Table; namely:

When I was at the Treasury I argued for the most open door possible to immigration… I think it’s my job to maximise global welfare, not national welfare.

As an aside, Goodhart goes on to remark that the other person he was sitting next to, Mark Thompson, then Director General of the BBC, agreed with O’Donnell, which led Goodhart to observe that,

Both men’s universalist views are perfectly legitimate and may reflect their moderately devout Catholic upbringings.

I can’t vouch for how moderate or devout were the Catholic upbringings of either Gus O’Donnell or Mark Thompson, but I think it’s fair to say, J.D. Vance notwithstanding, that the weight of Christian opinion, certainly in the UK, leans towards the universalist end of the spectrum.

There are many reasons for this, some of which are circumstantial. Many Christians see who stands at the other – nationalistic – end of the spectrum. Some Christians are mindful of the highly compromised ecclesiastical stances to nationalism in the early 20^th century. And so they position themselves as far down the other end as possible.

But the position is underpinned by principle. We do find in the scriptures and supremely in the life and ministry of Christ, a more or less uncompromising attitude to the extent of our moral responsibilities.

Old Testament Israel was a tiny and vulnerable people, sandwiched between imperial superpowers. It could have been excused for adopting highly exclusionary and isolationist policies, which is more or less what it did for a time when it returned from exile.

But central to its identity – buried in the law – is the self-identification as aliens, which came with a particular responsibility. The Torah famously declares:

When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.[4]

This sets the tone. In a similar vein, however much we might try and attenuate his teaching, the life and words of Christ are uncompromising.

The American scholar Bart Ehrman, who is no orthodox believer (indeed no believer at all), in a book published this month called Love Thy Stranger, puts it this way:

Kindness to strangers is not hardwired in our DNA. Nor was it esteemed by the great canon of ancient Western philosophy – the Greeks and Romans prioritised generosity to your friends and family. When Jesus told his followers to give up everything they owned to the poor, he heralded a moral revolution. The needy, the sick, the outcast were to be cared for – even if they were unknown to you. This was a tough pill to swallow for early Christians, and to this day, many insist Jesus didn’t really mean it. Nonetheless Jesus’ most radical commandment transformed the moral conscience of the West: its legacy lives on in public hospitals, the billions given in charity each year and even government welfare.

These views offer us an uncompromising answer to our question. You are to love everyone – friends, neighbours, even enemies – and your neighbour is emphatically not limited to those with whom you share physical space or family loyalty. Try as we might to domesticate the teaching of Christ, it will not be tamed.

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However, a direct translation from the pages of scripture to a Government White Paper is never a great idea. Those states that have tried to realise eschatology through the statute book and to legislate for Christian morality have ended not as New Jerusalems but as oppressive and dystopian nightmares. The possession sharing of the early Church in Acts has been successfully imitated in many small, committed, volitional communities through the ages, most famously monasteries. But it didn’t work out so well when ruled out across entire societies in the 20^th century.

For those who claim to follow Christ, his words have a direct authority that we should heed – albeit we usually don’t. Archbishop William Temple once remarked that the church is the only organisation that exists for the benefits of its non-members, and though there may be more than a bit of idealism in this, the principle is right. The church should have a centre but no borders and should seek to extend love and responsibilities as far as possible.

But there are two reasons why this doesn’t translate into a straightforward universalist political ethic such as Gus O’Donnell might advocate.

First, humans are temporal, located, embodied, relational, dependent beings. We exist in certain times and places. And we show love by helping one another in those times and places. And so we form communities, groups, networks and the like, in and through which we collectively seek mutual goods. To serve our universalist aspirations we must take account of our actual neighbours.

A few years ago, the journalist Jenny Kleeman wrote a book looking at how much value we put on a life in different social contexts. She went to San Francisco and visited the headquarters of the effective altruism movement, which pours huge amounts of money into poverty reduction schemes abroad, the effectiveness of which has been relentlessly and rationally calculated. But the streets around their offices were littered with the homeless and drug addicts.

‘I appreciate that it takes a certain kind of moral courage to be dispassionate enough to have these convictions,’ she wrote. ‘[But] is it a good kind of courage? Can you save more of humanity if you’re prepared to have [such convictions]? Or does this way of thinking require you to deny your own humanity?’

As embodied and located human beings, we do not consider the person who lets their child starve in order to feed others abroad as a moral hero. The ‘telescopic philanthropy’ of Mrs Jellyby in Dickens’ Bleak House comes to mind.

The second point is that the nation-state is not the church. The nation-state is not beholden to the same Christ-like ethic of welcome and boundless generosity as is the church. That does not necessarily mean we are bound to default to the kind of concentric, sequential loyalties that J.D. Vance outlined. I think you can still make the case for more and wider, rather than less and narrower, love and responsibility – but you have to make it within the space of actual public views.

You can make the case that international development aid, assuming it is well-targeted and effective, is the right thing to do: a moral duty. I think we should. You can make the case that we have a moral responsibility to welcome refugees. You can make the case for a national responsibility for those in society who are . You can make a case for trade relations and immigration policy that are more than a blunt assertion of my country first.

But you have to do so cognizant of the fact that the nation is not the church, and operates by a complex, shifting, plural set of moral visions, and if you do want to make that case, you are going to have to persuade people who care not two hoots for Christian ethics, moral universalism or the parable of the Good Samaritan.

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Let me end by returning to the Good Samaritan and saying one more thing about what principles we might draw on to navigate the universalist challenge it, and the gospel, places before a nation state.

Like all good stories this parable has been interpreted in different ways. Beyond the politicians I mentioned earlier, Christian ethicists have read it as underlining the message that our ethical responsibility should extend to those whose needs you become aware of. In this vein, as Luke Bretherton said recently in the FT, the parable may be interpreted as saying that although people do have primary responsibility to their close circles, these may be superseded by the urgent needs of strangers.

The implicit ‘moral universalism’ of the Samaritan story (and indeed the gospel) tells us that there should be no arbitrary limitations to our love. But that still leaves open the practical question of who should be loved, when and how. The principle of ‘becoming aware of their need’ is an important one and should be included in the mix. But the problem today is that in a hyperconnected, always-on world, we are constantly aware of the genuinely desperate needs of many people across the world.

So I would argue that this cognizance of need should be tempered by the principle, outlined in Catholic social teaching, of subsidiarity, namely that that decisions and responsibilities should be handled by the smallest, lowest, or least centralized competent authority, with higher authorities intervening only when necessary to support or coordinate those efforts.

I suspect this was what J.D. Vance was trying to get at in his interview – at least that would be a generous interpretation of his words. But as a principle – just as our cognizance of need today needs to be tempered by a commitment to subsidiarity – because otherwise we might end up becoming like the people Jenny Kleeman visited in San Francisco…

… so our commitment to subsidiarity needs to be tempered by a cognizance of need – because otherwise we will end up ignoring the needs of those a long way away who happen to have no competent national government or effective civil society to help them in their need.

The question of our national moral responsibilities is an inherently agonistic one and not amenable to any final answer. In one respect it is good that we are having these kinds of debates openly in society today. But it will have escaped nobody that the mood music of our current political moment is to retreat, to downgrade the needs of the distant and to slip into the logic of a global zero-sum game. And I think that would be a profound mistake.

Dr Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos. He is the author of a number of books and reports, including Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion (Oneworld, 2023), The Political Samaritan: How Power Hijacked a Parable (Bloomsbury, 2017), The Evolution of the West (SPCK, 2016) and Atheists: The Origin of the Species (Bloomsbury, 2014). He is host of the podcast Reading Our Times.

[1] I would like to thank Jonathan Chaplin, Hannah Rich and Esmé Partridge of their helpful comments on an earlier draft.

[2] J.D. Vance: President Trump is looking after American citizens

[3] https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2025/documents/20250210-lettera-vescovi-usa.html

[4] Leviticus 19.33-34. The word for foreigner here, gerim, may be legitimately translated as refugee rather than simply immigrant, because the root carried connotations of strife, and usually also carries the connotation of someone who had thrown in their lot with the Hebrew people. Other Hebrew words sometimes translated as foreigner do not usually come with similar demands on hospitality.

 

 

 

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