"The growth of antisemitism, the rise of economic nationalism" ………. from the perspective of 1938

I have come back to a book I first read over thirty years ago, and it seems as relevant today as it was when it was published in 1938.

It was written by Louis Golding, who was a very successful novelist as well as literary critic, essayist and film script writer.

He was born in Manchester in1895 to a Ukrainian-Jewish family, described his politics as “strongly to the left” and in 1938 wrote The Jewish Problem which was published as a Penguin Special.

The book examines the history of antisemitism, and Zionism, against the backdrop of “The Nazi Horror” and concludes with a final chapter on  “The Future”.

Reading that last chapter, written in 1938, before the outbreak of the last world war, and the Holocaust is not easy reading.

"A JEW cannot be blamed if, as he considers the present condition of his people, his heart is filled with despair. German Jewry, one of the oldest and most solidly established in Europe has been completely overwhelmed.  Another great Jewry has followed that of Germany into the chasm, within the past few months, with catastrophic suddenness; Jewry strains its eyes, in an agony of apprehension, to know who goes next.

The great Jewish masses of eastern Europe, above all, are in peril.  Today the doom involves more than half a million souls.  What if tomorrow it should involve five millions?  The prospect is too mournful to contemplate, but it is so far from remote that it must be contemplated.
The growth of anti-Semitism, the rise of economic nationalism, and the dark shadow of unemployment have made it increasingly difficult for even refugees from central Europe to find  a haven elsewhere.”*

There will be some who dismiss re reading the book, given that we know what happened, but that is the point, knowing what happened makes reading the book all the more relevant.

And that of course is set against the rising tide of antisemitism, the small but none the less active group of Holocaust deniers, and that bunch that set out to argue that the present wave of antisemitic attacks with reference to Israel, which of course by extension falls into that obscene logic of blaming antisemitism on the Jews.

So, having read this book I am also interested in Mr. Golding, and have on order, Magnolia Street, written in 1933, and set in the High Town area of Manchester a decade earlier.  It too is a book I read along time ago and while I am at it, I will also look out his films.

Picture; the cover of The Jewish Problem 

* The Jewish Problem, Louis Golding, November 1938, reprinted, November 1938, and January 1939

Walking the streets of Hightown .... a full century ago

I remain in awe of those writers who can sum up someone in a few simple sentences.

Outside lavatory, Back Percival Street, 1951

Dickens could do it, and today I came across a short description of a Mrs. Poyser which is up there with the best.

It comes from the novel, Magnolia Street by Louis Golding, which was based on the streets in Hightown in Manchester during the 1920s.

These were the streets he remembered from his youth, and in particular the uneasy relationship between Jew and Gentile.

He was born in the city in 1895 to a Ukrainian-Jewish family, described his politics as “strongly to the left” and in 1938 wrote The Jewish Problem which was published as a Penguin Special.*

The Jewish Problem, 1938

The book examines the history of antisemitism, and Zionism, against the backdrop of “The Nazi Horror” and concludes with a final chapter on  “The Future”

But he was also a prolific popular novelist, and I can see why, because his description of Mrs. Poyser  who ran a grocery shop on Magnolia Street perfectly recreates one of those people we have all come across.   “The Jewish women met socially in Mrs. Poyser’s grocery shop, facing the Lamb and Lion.  

There they forgathered in between the washing up after one meal and the preparation for the next; or they called in on their way from the market, to show what a fat chicken they had picked up or how fine a silver hake for chopping and frying.

On a certain Sunday morning in May in the year 1910, there was news and news of the Mrs. Poyser’s sort.  News was, in a sense, Mrs. Poyser’s prerogative.  She weighed it, she sorted it out into bags, she handed it over the counter, along with a pair of kippers or a pound of sultanas”.**

Back Percival Street, 1951

The book, which was written in 1932, had its roots in a series of short pieces he had sent into the Manchester Guardian a decade earlier, describing life from the Jewish side of Magnolia Street which the newspaper had rejected as “nonsense”.

His response was in his own words “to mobilise the Jews on one side of the Street and the Gentiles on the other side and make of them – and this is a thing which has been ignored in references to the book – a study not of Jew-Gentile problems but of the problems which assert themselves when two communities are found in close proximity to one another.  The sort of thing which happened in Magnolia Street to the dwellers on one side or the other are what happened exactly in a street in Belfast in which Orangemen lived one side and Catholics on the other and in Tunis where at the end of a certain area the French lived on side and the Italians on the other”.***

At present I am only on chapter two, with a full 500 pages a head of me, and not wanting to spoil the experience, I haven’t turned to the back, but my spoiler alert, with help from another Manchester Guardian article is that Didsbury features along the way.

Percival Street, Holt Town, 1953

Well, we shall see.

What did intrigue me, was that Mr. Golding was participating in “the formal opening of the new library set up by Messrs. Kendal, Milne and Co. in their Deansgate establishment [to a large audience] “on The workshop of the novelist’s brain”.****

Now that I would have liked to have been part of.

And in a sort of way I should also have liked to have walked those streets in Hightown that he knew so well.

Of course, they have mostly gone, cleared away in the clearance programmes of the second half of the last century.  But there are a few pictures, and in particular the two that appear here.  Both are of Back Percival Street, a small slip of a place which didn’t warrant a listing in the directories and doesn’t get recorded by name on the maps.

But my Facebook friend Bill Sumner, swiftly located the street where I thought it might be beside Percival Street, which was off Waterloo Road which in turn connected Bury New Road to Cheetham Hill Road.

Leaving me just to reflect on those two images of Back Percival Street, which are a powerful reminder of just how tough the area could be, whether you were Jew or Gentile.

Location; Hightown

Pictures; Outside lavatory, Back Percival Street, 1951, m08286 and m08291, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass, cover from The Jewish Problem, 1938 and extract from the OS map showing Percival Street in Holt Town and surrounding streets

* The Jewish Problem, Louis Golding, November 1938, reprinted, November 1938, and January 1939

**Magnolia Street, Louis Golding, 1932

***The Making of a Novel - Mr. Louis Golding and “Magnolia Street”, Manchester Guardian, March 9th, 1935

****Ibid The Making of a Novel

Trapped …… in a country that won’t let you out……. and countries that won’t let you in

I am rereading The Passenger by Alexander Boschwitz, which is to my knowledge the first fictional account of the events which led up to Kristallnacht.*

Alexander Boschwitz, wrote the book in 1939, and it details the experiences of Otto Silbermann a German Jew caught up in the growing nightmare of  state sponsored antisemitism just before the Night of Broken Glass in 1938.

In an effort to evade arrest, Otto takes a series of train journeys from his home in Berlin across Germany. 

In the course of which he encounters a cross section of the population, from rabid Nazi antisemites, to “regular” Germans getting on with their life, and minding their own business.

But there is no doubting the danger he is in, which at one point involves an attempt by an acquittance to cheat him out of the true value of his home, and by the actual appropriation of his business by his partner and long time friend.

Much of the book revolves around his own internal debate about whether he should have left Germany earlier, and the contradiction between those he meets who appear “decent” and those who at best are indifferent and those who are hostile.

And while he flips from despair to optimism that things can’t get any worse, there is also a sense of incredulity that in his own words “in the middle of Europe in the twentieth century” this could be happening.

Along with that observation is the chilling fact that he is trapped, because Germany  won’t let him out  and other countries won’t let him in. "For a Jew, the entire Reich has become one big concentration camp".

What I like about the book is that it offers up no easy key to how he should have acted when the Nazi’s first came to power.

Both he and his wife who is not Jewish found reasons not to leave.

Shop damage in Magdeburg, following Kristallnacht, 1938

Some rest on relatively trivial reasons, while others get to the heart of how most of us might react, balancing the antisemitic policies of the Nazi’s with measured judgements on how far the new Government would actually go, and indeed how long they would stay in power.

It is not an easy read, but it is  fascinating one, which I suspect owes something to the translation, as to the subject matter.

And as a result, I read half the 256 pages in one sitting.

All of which is more poignant because Alexander Boschwitz saw the writing on the wall just two years after the Nazis seized power, and judging that the Nuremburg Laws were just the start, he and his mother left Germany, finally arriving in Britain just before the outbreak of the Second World War.  

Being German, they were interned, and Alexander transported to Australia.

Later with the relaxation of control of who was interned, he was given permission to return to Britain, but his ship was torpedoed by a German U Boat and he perished along with the crew and his fellow passengers.  He was twenty-seven years old.

Pictures; cover The Passenger, 2021, and Kristallnacht, shop damage in Magdeburg, 1938, from Kristallnacht, Wikiperdia, supplied by The German Federal Archive, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht

*The Passenger, Alexander Boschwitz, 1939, published by Pushkin Press 2021

The Oldest Hatred ……..

 I have never understood antisemites.

Never understood their illogical hatred of Jewish people, never understood the lengths they will go to in creating antisemitic falsehoods or propagating them endlessly and resorting to the most hideous acts of violence.

The recent events in Gaza have fuelled that antisemitism giving these purveyors of hatred opportunities to exploit the situation, while some others drawn into the protests about the war slip easily into the same antisemitic slogans.

But equally there are many who have challenged those hate packed ideas.  

And history is full of examples where the antisemites have been rebutted, from the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 to the successful campaigns against fascist groups just after the Second World War and again in the early 1960s.

All of which makes the book, Antisemitism by John Mann an important read.  It was published in 2015 and is “a Reader on the theme of antisemitism ranging from the writings of Charlie Chaplin, Albert Einstein and Jean-Paul Sartre to George Washington, Jesse Jackson and Emile Zola …and .... is published under the auspices of the 'All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Anti-Semitism".

And is a powerful rebuttal to that "oldest hatred".

The 43 Group ......... confronting the Blackshirts just months after the defeat of Fascism

 I once thought that antisemitism was defeated in the ruins of Berlin in 1945, but that was naive as events across Europe and beyond continue to hammer home, and pretty much ignored the experiences of Jewish people before and after that defeat.

Anti fascist demonstrations, Bell Vue, Manchester, 1962

Taking the long view given its history over the last 2000 years, I shouldn’t have been surprised, nor that even after the defeat of fascism at the end of the last world war fascist groups would be emboldened to come out of the shadows just months after the end of that conflict.

And the account of their emergence is the subject of“The 43 Group Battling with Mosley’s Blackshirts”, by Maurice Beckham, which tells the story of the 43 Group which was an English anti-fascist group set up by Jewish ex-servicemen and women after the Second World War. 

They did this when upon returning to London, they encountered British fascist organisations staging meetings in public places, and perpetuating violent attacks on Jewish individuals and property in London.

The 43 Group broke up far-right meetings, infiltrated fascist groups, and confronted the fascists in street fighting. 

Some of the ex servicemen involved in the group had been awarded medals for victory in the field, or like Maurice Beckham had served in the Merchant Navy during the war, living through through two torpedo attacks. 

The group voluntarily disbanded in 1950, after its members considered that the immediate threat had passed. 

But just sixteen years later, Group 62 was established which was largely in response to the resurgence of fascism in Britain at the time, and particularly the creation of Colin Jordan's National Socialist Movement, and modeled itself on the earlier group.**

Picture; demonstration at Belle Vue, Demonstration against Oswald Mosley, 1962, m07971, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

* The 43 Group Battling with Mosley’s Blackshirts”, by Maurice Beckham, 2013

** 43 Group, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/43_Group

"History has had its day in court and scored a crushing victory"*

Now I am part of that generation who grew up just after the last world war, with the images of Pearl Harbour, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust, which were part of the backdrop which informed my thinking and understanding of that conflict.

It never occurred to me, that outside a small deluded minority, there would be people who denied the existence of the Holocaust or embraced antisemitic views, views which I naively believed had been extinguished in the ruins of Berlin.

But I was wrong, and in truth I suppose I am not surprised.  Antisemitism has been around for thousands of years and it is now fashionable to look for conspiracy theories under every stone leading some to question the mass extermination of Jews, the Romany and any one the Nazis thought should die.

I long ago gave up on those who question the American space landings on the moon, the outlandish theories about the assassination of Dr King and J F Kennedy or that popular idea from the 1970s that all human achievement was the result of contact with aliens in the far distant past.

And of course, at the heart of all historical research should be a willingness to revisit events and interpretations of the past along with the perceived view of the achievements of the “great and the good”.

But Holocaust denial seems out of the box and raises serious questions about the motivation of some of those who deny it happened.

All of which has brought me back to Deborah Lipstadt’s books  Denying the Holocaust and Antisemitism Here and Now.**

I followed the court case, when David Irving sued Ms. Lipstadt and Penguin books and will be rereading her latest book on anti-Semitism which will be an important contribution to our understanding.

*The Times newspaper, April 14, 2000 commenting on the outcome of the trial brought by David Irving against Ms. Lipstadt and Penguin books

** Denying the Holocaust 1993, and Antisemitism Here and Now, 2018

Repeating history ..... yesterday in London

History is full of those moments when good men and women come together to challenge the voices of hate, discrimination, and prejudice.

London, 2023

And yesterday over a 100, 000 walked through the streets of London calling out the rising tide of antisemitism.

Manchester, 1962

It is a sad fact that such a demonstration is repeated by almost every generation from those who stood against Oswald Mosley’s attempts to revive his fascist message in the early 1960s, to the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 and back through history.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War returning Jewish and non-Jewish servicemen and women had to confront the activities of various antisemitic groups, which they successfully did.

Nor of course is it just antisemitism, Islamic hate crimes are on the increase, as are examples of prejudice and outrageous treatment of other ethnic groups.

But yesterday it was to draw attention to antisemitism and to reiterate that in a modern diverse Britain antisemitism has to be challenged.

Manchester in London, 2023

Location; London, 2023

Pictures; of yesterday’s demonstration courtesy of Stephen Gilchrist and demonstration at Belle Vue against Oswald Mosley, 1962, m07971, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Six million accusers........ the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg

The German city of Nuremberg will mean different things to people.  

Maxbrücke in Nürnberg bei Nacht, 2012

For those born in the last decades of the 20th century it will be a pleasant German city, a place worth visiting for its university, castle, its cultural and culinary attractions and a heap of Renaissance art.

For my grandmother, who was born in Cologne in 1897, the city was that place where the Nazis held their rallies.  

She once told me she listened occasionally to the broadcasts of those rallies on her wireless in the back room of her home in Derby, with a mix of mounting anxiety and revulsion. 

And for me, born just four years after the end of the last world war it is forever linked to the the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, which sat from November 1945 till October 1946, and oversaw the prosecution of leading members of the Nazi State, who planned or participated in the Holocaust and other war crimes.  

Verdict, David Low, 1945

The trials were conducted under international law and the laws of war and involved judges from the four main allied powers.

Now, I am not usually a fan of historical drama, but I will make an exception for Nuremburg which goes out today on the wireless at 2.15. 

In all there are eight episodes which explore various aspects of the events of the trials.  

The first, Welcome to the Ashcan, by Jonathan Myerson, sets the scene,  in the aftermath of the war’s end with Germany “in chaos – five million former soldiers, foreign nationals and those liberated from the concentration camps, all trying to get home. 

View from above of the judges' bench at the International Tribune, 1945

And hiding somewhere are the top Nazis.

Seen through the eyes of a US Army Sergeant at the stripped-out hotel in Luxembourg where the prisoners are taken, they track down and arrest Kaltenbrunner (Himmler’s Deputy), Frank (Governor of Occupied Poland) and others.

A Promenade production for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds"

Location; Nuremburg, 1945-46

Picture; Maxbrücke in Nürnberg bei Nacht, Andreas Flohr, 2012, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license, Verdict, 1946, Low Visibility A Cartoon History, 1945-53, David Low, 1953, View from above of the judges' bench at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.  Photograph | Photograph Number: 61332, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, 1945 October 18 - 1946 October 01

* Nuremberg, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000z1k2

Stories from Kristallnacht …………. The Passenger ...... Alexander Boschwitz ..... rediscovered 83 years after it was written

Today I have ordered up the Passenger from Chorlton Bookshop.

It was written by Alexander Boschwitz, in the weeks after Kristallnacht.*

“It tells the story of a Jewish businessman called Otto van Silbermann, who hears a knock at his door from Nazi Storm Troopers and quickly realises he must flee.

Alexander Boschwitz himself had left Germany three years earlier after anti-Semitic laws were enacted.

His book was published in the US and UK in 1939 and 40 respectively, but made little impact and soon went out of print."**

Alexander Boschwitz and his mother emigrated to Norway, later living in France, Belgium and Luxembourg before coming to Britain just before the outbreak of the Second World War.

They were arrested as enemy aliens and Alexander was sent to Australia, where he spent two years in an internment camp.

In 1942, Boschwitz was allowed to leave the camp, but the ship taking him back to England was torpedoed by German U-boats.

Picture; book cover, The Passenger; Alexander Boschwitz, 1939

* Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass,  was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi SA and civilians throughout Nazi Germany on November 9 &10th 1938 during which the German authorities did nothing to intervene.

**The Passenger; Lost German novel makes UK bestseller list 83 years on, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-57141856

Reading the unacceptable ……..

In the month that the Equality and Human Rights Commission published Investigation into antisemitism in the Labour Party, I am rereading “That’s Funny You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic”, by Steve Cohen.

Steve Cohen was a member of the International Marxist Group and wrote the book in 1984.

In the forward his son has written that after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon his father started a book condemning the invasion and “During the research stumbled across Left antisemitism by self-described ‘anti racists’ time and time again … This racism perpetuated by leaders of the radical and revolutionary Left was an affront to his sense.”

The book ranges over historic “left antisemitism", highlighting the actions of Ben Tillett, Robert Blatchford and even Keir Hardie, and in a series of chapters focuses on the position of leading members of the left in the 1970s and 80s.

For those of us who always identified with the Left, the book makes disturbing reading particularly in the light of the current debate around the failure of the Labour Party during 2015-2019 to effectively address the issue of antisemitic complaints.  

And leaves me reflecting on those who currently seek to portray the previous leader of the Labour Party and some of his allies as the victims in the fall out from that report.

*“That’s Funny You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic”, Steve Cohen, 1984, republished by No Pasaran Media Ltd 2019

“She should not be forgotten, since she was found again”…… the lost paintings of a Jewish artist murdered by the Nazis

Sometimes a story jumps off the page, and so it was with this one which  I came across today.

 

It concerns  a Jewish artist who was murdered by the Nazi’s 78 years ago and the discovery of a collection of her paintings found on a construction site.

 The story comes from the  Campaign Against Antisemitism, which "has expanded its coverage of antisemitism worldwide”.*

 And today published the story of Czech artist Gertrud Kauders, which I have taken from their site.**

 “Plans are currently in progress to find a new home for a collection of paintings by a victim of the Holocaust that were only discovered in 2018 by a construction worker during the demolition of a dilapidated house near Prague.

 The paintings by Czech artist Gertrud Kauders (1883-1942), who perished in a Nazi concentration camp, were discovered 78 years after her death.

 Initially 30 paintings were recovered, however around 700 more canvases and sketches were subsequently uncovered in the walls and under the floorboards of the building in “near perfect condition”. The artwork is dated between the 1910s and the 1930s.

 In 1939, the Nazis invaded the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, and consequently Ms Kauders asked her classmate, the Russian-born Natalie Jahudkova, to hide her life’s work, which comprised Impressionist portraits and scenes from nature, in her house that was then under construction. Ms Kauders was deported from Prague in 1942 to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and from there to the Majdanek extermination camp in Poland, where the artist was murdered. Ms Jahudkova passed away in 1977, taking with her the secret of the hidden paintings.

 

Photojournalist Amos Chapple and his colleague Dana Katharina Vaskova found Jakub Sedlacek, the owner of the house and a descendent of Ms Jahudkova, on behalf of the artist’s relatives living in New Zealand. Mr Sedlacek reportedly agreed that the works would be housed together in the Czech Republic, with family portraits going to the Kauders family currently residing in New Zealand.

 Upon first seeing Ms Kauders’ artwork, the chief curator of Prague’s Jewish Museum believed that the discovery was unique given the history of art in the Czech Republic. A spokesperson for the Jewish Museum in Prague reportedly said that she would be updated about the “whole intense process” and provide a “concrete result” as to whether it would be possible for the museum to house some of the paintings.

 Ms Vaskova stated: “[Ms Kauders] should not be forgotten, since she was just found again.”

 And if you want to see a collection of those rediscovered paintings, the Campaign’s article includes a link to a story by Amos Chapple, and Dana Katharina Vaskova.***

The story was published in September by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which is I have to acknowledge is a United States government-funded organization that broadcasts and reports news, information and analysis to countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East, and given its Cold War connections , not a site I have ever visited before.

 Campaign Against Antisemitism has expanded our coverage of antisemitism worldwide. Please contact us if you would like to share feedback or volunteer to assist with this project.

Picture; Gertrud Kauders, date unknown, courtesy of the Campaign Against Antisemitism

 *Campaign Against Antisemitism, https://antisemitism.org/introduction/

 **Campaign Against Antisemitism, https://antisemitism.org/she-should-not-be-forgotten-since-she-was-just-found-again-78-years-after-she-was-murdered-by-the-nazis-a-jewish-artists-paintings-were-discovered-in-a-construction-site/?mc_cid=e9261ed543&mc_eid=5199852f38

 ***Hidden From The Nazis, Murdered Jewish Artist's Trove Of Paintings Discovered In Prague House, Amos Chapple, Dana Katharina Vaskova, September 25th, 2020, https://www.rferl.org/a/murdered-jewish-artist-paintings-kauders-nazis-prague/30858168.html

Challenging antisemitism ………. a darkly comic tale of one man's journey through the conspiracy underworld

Now at a time when antisemitism is again on the increase all efforts to challenge it are welcome.

The Community Security Trust’s publication, Antisemitic Incidents Report, records “a high total of 1,652 antisemitic incidents in the UK last year. 2018 was the third year in a row that CST has recorded a record high incident total and means the problem of rising antisemitism in our country continues to grow".*

And the show, A Lizard's Tale, performed by Marlon Solomon and hosted by Chorlton Labour Party last night was a comic, and thoughtful rebuttal of all things antisemitic. *

The show has been performed at Edinburgh and other fringe events and has received rave reviews.

Mr. Solomon is Jewish and set about creating the show after he realized that some people, he knew didn't believe the Holocaust. What followed was a production which ranges from 9/11 to shape-shifting lizards and Holocaust denial and is a darkly comic tale of one man's journey through the conspiracy underworld. He explores why conspiracy theories are more popular than ever and examines how fake news gives fresh currency to ancient slander.

The show was performed in Edinburgh and since then in venues across the country including Manchester.

Location; Chorlton



Pictures; in the night with A Lizard's Tale, by Marlon Solomon, courtesy of Laura Wright

*Antisemitic Incidents Report, 2018, Community Security Trust, https://cst.org.uk/public/data/file/c/7/IR_2018_Web.pdf

** A Lizard's Tale, https://medium.com/@marlonsolomon/for-this-british-jew-balfour-week-was-a-new-low-819809150a97

On the turn of a word ………………

Now it was Humpty Dumpty who said “When I use a word, …. it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’*

As a statement and a reflection on the power of language, it is a fascinating comment.

And I was reminded of it while rereading Deborah Lipstadt’s book, Antisemitism Here and Now. **

It is to quote the sleeve notes “a timely analysis of the new antisemitism, by the historian who defeated Holocaust denier David Irving in Court”.

It “connects distinct currents in contemporary culture, such as the resurgence of racist right-wing nationalisms, left-liberal tolerance of hostility to Jews, the plight of the Palestinians, and the rise of Islamic extremism, to explore how contradictory forces have found common scapegoats”.

And very early on the book explores the correct way to spell antisemitism, observing that this not “an arcane academic argument” but “is part of its ugly history and its contemporary reality”.

It was popularised by Wilhelm Marr, who was a German journalist in the late 19th century, who wanted an all-embracing term which could be used against all Jews who he saw as the “enemy within” and included those who had converted to Christianity.

In turn it utilised the word Semitic, coined by a German historian in 1781 to describe “a group of languages that originated in the Middle East and that have some linguistic similarities, [although] there is nothing that binds speakers of these different languages together as a people”.

When the word first appeared in English in 1893 it was given a hyphen, but in French and Spanish it always appeared without the hyphen and in lower case.

This Ms Lipastadt argues is how it should be, “because the word both as its creator had intended and as it has been generally used for the past one hundred and fifty years, means, quite simply, the hatred of the Jews”.

And she continues, that as antisemitism is illogical and shot through with contradictions “it doesn’t deserve the dignity of capitalisation, which in English is reserved for proper names”.

All of which I think would have made perfect sense to Lewis Carroll and provides the answer to Alice’s question of “whether you can make words mean so many different things”.

History is littered with examples of how words have been used to obscure the actions of the powerful or to confuse the outcomes.

And so it is with the word antisemitism.

*“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll, 1871

** Antisemetism Here and Now, Deborah Lipstadt, 2019

A decision taken in Austria ..........

The news headline that “Austrian State May Require Jews to Register to Buy Kosher Meat”* is profoundly disturbing but fits the bigger concern that anti-Semitism is on the march again.

I belong to that generation, born just after the last world war who thought that its worst excesses had been buried in the ruins of Berlin in 1945.

And while you overheard the casual comment spoken in a matter of fact way, the horrors of Pogroms and the Holocaust were locked in the past.

But not so.  The story comes from Haaretz, the respected and influential Israeli newspaper, which revealed that “A regional politician in Austria defended a plan to limit access to kosher meat, conditioning its sale on permits that would be individually issued to observant Jews.

The Wiener Zeitung daily reported Tuesday about the draft decree in the state of Lower Austria, one of nine states that make up the federal Republic of Austria. Gottfried Waldhäusl, the cabinet minister in the state government of Lower Austria who is in charge of animal welfare and several other portfolios, defended the plan as necessary ‘from an animal welfare point of view.’”

And this would involve the authorities in compiling a list of Jewish people which has echoes of the racist laws passed by Nazi Germany and implemented in Austria after its merger with Germany in 1938.

Now “the regional leader of the ruling Austrian People’s Party told the ORF broadcaster that the plan will not be implemented”*, but the mere fact that it should have been put forward is disturbing at a time when there has been a rise in recorded anti-Semitic incidents.

In 2017 CST recorded 1,382 such incidents in the UK - the highest total ever recorded for a calendar year. Three-quarters of these were in London and Greater Manchester.  In Greater Manchester 261 were recorded, which is an increase of 27% from the 206 incidents recorded in 2016.**

It is unclear if the decision extends to halal meat as well.

Picture; Italy, 2017, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

* Austrian State May Require Jews to Register to Buy Kosher Meat, Haaretz, Jul 18, 2018, https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/austrian-state-may-limit-kosher-meat-sales-to-registered-jews-1.6289229

**CST, https://cst.org.uk/