Tag: Politics

Arte’s History of Antisemitism: required watching for Jews and Jew-haters alike

A Jew and a Nazi, the joke goes, find themselves walking down a street. “It’s all the fault of the Jews!”, the Nazi explodes. “Yes”, the Jew agrees sagely, “and the cyclists.” The Nazi, perplexed, asks “Why the cyclists?”. The Jew’s answer: “Why the Jews?”

With the stabbings in Golders Green a few weeks ago, answering that question seems more urgent than ever. I might not feel personally threatened, because I don’t look or dress hugely Jewish and I don’t go to synagogue or to the kinds of places where Jewish people associate. But I have plenty of family members who do, and their discomfort is beginning to look justified. My undiluted opposition to Israel’s behaviour in Gaza can’t mask the fact that genuine antisemitism – the hatred of Jews simply because we’re Jews – is alive and well.

All this makes Jonathan Hayoun’s History of Antisemitism, a four part TV series on the Franco-German channel Arte, into required watching for Jews and non-Jews alike. I’ve never reviewed a TV series before, but this one is worth it: with the help of an impressive array of historians from universities across Europe and North America, Hayoun traces the classic antisemitic tropes from their origins through to the present day. The series presents a plethora of historical events which chart the progress of antisemitism from its very beginnings – the earliest documented pogrom having been in 38 CE in Alexandria, then part of the Roman Empire. Well read as I think I may be, much of the material in the series was new to me.

Many things came as a complete surprise. For example, I had no idea that in the Roman Empire, Judaism was a proselytizing religion, so in the fourth century, when the Roman emperor Constantine embraced Christianity as the state-approved religion, Judaism and Christianity could legitimately be seen as being in competition with each other. Nor did I know that in Western Europe in the early middle ages, it was broadly impossible to tell a Jew from a Christian: they looked the same, dressed the same, did the same jobs, lived in the same streets. The advice from an early antisemite was to go to the top of a tall building on a Friday night: if there was no smoke coming out of a chimney, the family was Jewish. Another fascinating insight is that the mediaeval symbols of witchcraft – the hooked nose, the pointy hat – were drawn directly from symbols previously used to target Jews.

Three recurring themes permeate the series.

The first is that throughout history, the instigators of hatred of Jews have had some specific political or economic reason for doing so. Both Constantine’s successors and the early Muslim rulers faced the same problem: in an empire where the state-sponsored religion is still in the minority, how to deal with an alternative religion with a substantial number of adherents? The solution, in both cases, was to declare those adherents as second class citizens: the Theodosian code and the Pact of Omar are strikingly similar. It’s also striking that both these codes were broadly ignored for a number of centuries until other events transpired: in 13th century France, King Louis IX (still revered as St Louis) imposed the first discrimination laws to curry favour with the papacy, while in 12th century Spain, resentment was whipped up when a respected Jewish Grand Vizier was succeeded by his incompetent and unpopular son. In the UK, one of the worst antisemitic massacres came in York in 1190: the Jews were employed as Royal tax collectors and the murders were immediately followed by a bonfire of the records of tax owed to the Crown.

And indeed, the Catholic Church was a consistent promulgator of antisemitism, with notable points being St Augustine of Hippo describing the Jews as “living fossils” in City of God, the massacres during the crusades and the papacy’s enthusiastic support of Hitler. It was not until 1965 that the Second Vatican Council formally renounced the accusation of deicide, that Jews are responsible for the murder of Christ.

The York incident exemplifies the second recurring trope: the blood libel. The accusation that Jews kidnapped children to use their blood in the baking of unleavened bread for Passover was started in 38 CE by Apion, the head of the Alexandria Library, and persisted through the ages and across geography, through the Kishinev pogrom in 1903 (instigated by the Tsarist Russian minister of the interior) and beyond to Nazi propaganda. 

The third recurring trope is the conspiracy theory: that Jews are responsible for the evils of the world by the controlling its financial systems, its media or myriad other ways: these are the theories which started with the hatred of Jewish bankers in mediaeval Europe, were taken up with enthusiasm in the 19th century (the Rothschilds were particular targets), embraced with even more fervency by the Nazis, then Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, then by Sayyid Qutb, who exemplifies the attitudes that caused the Jewish population of Arabic-speaking countries to be largely expelled in the 20th century. The notorious 1975 UN Resolution 3379, whose declaration that “Zionism is Racism” implies that displaced Jews have no right to a home anywhere, still influences left wing antisemitism today.

The series illuminates the fact that the object of hate is an abstract concept of Judaism which has relatively little correlation with the reality on the ground. For example, in the exhibition of supposedly Jewish degenerate art mounted by the Nazis, only 5% of the works were actually by Jewish artists. It’s also striking that the accusations of Jews controlling the world’s finances did not lapse with the rise of the (decidedly non-Jewish) great banking houses of the Florentines in Renaissance Europe.

There’s far more fascinating material in the series than I could possibly go into here. And yet, for all this clarity and virtuosity in the telling of events, Hayoun and his filmmakers leave a question largely unanswered: why has anti-Jewish libel been so easily believed by so many different people in different places over the centuries, to the point where Jews are almost invariably the scapegoats of first choice? Many of the interviewees point in the direction of this being the fruit of millennia of indoctrination, principally by the Catholic Church but also by Islamic rulers. I’m less than 100% convinced that this is the whole story.

Meanwhile, none of this has moved me from my view that whatever the historical roots of antisemitism, the problem has been inflamed in an appalling way by the actions of Israel  – most evidently in Gaza, but also in the West Bank and Lebanon. Antisemitism may be an ancient movement, but today, its most effective recruiting sergeant is Benjamin Netanyahu.

I am also convinced that the insistence of many Jews on crying foul whenever anyone criticises Israel’s actions – of conflating any criticism of Israel with antisemitism – has been a catastrophic mistake. These are the boys who cried wolf: the real antisemitic wolf is now coming fully into view, and it doesn’t make a pretty sight.

But, anyway, this series should be a must-see for anyone with a mind to blame Jews for the ills of the world, as well as for Jews seeking to understand them. It’s freely available at https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/RC-017590/a-history-of-antisemitism. Audio dialogue is in a mixture of languages (or you can choose French-only or German-only); English subtitles are available. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Palestinian freedom, seen from Paris at Passover

Palestinian freedom, seen from Paris at Passover

Our Seder night this year was a small affair, with just close family. I’m not very religious, so for the last few times we’ve been hosting Seder, we’ve used a Haggadah I’ve put together that focuses on telling the full story from the Bible. Within that, there is a space entitled “Other stories” for discussing tales of enslavement from other peoples – last year, this was the African slave trade and the oppression of the Uighurs.

This year, it hit us like a thunderbolt: the people suffering the most severe oppression are the Palestinians, and the oppressors are the Israelis. Every day, we are hearing stories of atrocities perpetrated by Israeli forces in Gaza; every day, more Palestinians are forced from their homes. The difference between their plight and that of the Jews in Egypt is that we were able to flee from our oppressors and find some vacant territory to which we could migrate. The Palestinians are unable to do so.

Just War theory includes a doctrine called proportionality: even if a war is just in all other ways, it cannot be just if the degree of force used is so massive as to be utterly out of proportion to the initial events that triggered the war. If a terrorist commits a single murder, it’s unjust to annihilate a whole village in reprisal. The October 7th attacks were heinous – but it cannot be right to use them to justify the devastation of the entirety of Gaza.

It worries me greatly that several of my Jewish friends and family members seem unable to see this. Have they so absorbed the idea that the attack was so bad that any level of violence is justified in response – even tens of thousands of deaths? Do they consider Palestinians to be so subhuman that anything the Israeli government does to them is just fine? Do they really think that any criticism of Israel is anti-semitism, regardless of how it behaves?

The word genocide is an unhelpful distraction in this context. Clearly, Israel is not attempting to exterminate all Muslims or all Arabs in the way that Hitler attempted to exterminate all Jews. As a result, when faced with accusations of genocide, it’s all too easy for Israelis to let themselves off the hook by denying them. What cannot be denied, however, is that Israel is engaged in major league ethnic cleansing: they’re turning Gaza into such a hell-hole that no person could reasonably expect to live there. I assume that they hope that at some point, other countries will open up their doors to a flood of Palestinan refugees, willingly or not, but that’s guesswork on my part. In any case, it presupposes that Israel has a single coherent strategy, which may well not be the case.

But regardless of this, I don’t believe that Israel’s real priority is the return of the hostages. And since the arrival of Benjamin Netanyahu, I don’t believe that Israel has shown any intention of making a just and lasting peace with the Palestinans – their overwhelming strategy for many years has been one of oppression and landgrab, dressed in the name of needing to maintain security.

I’m not denying that there is a great deal of anti-semitism in the world, much of it founded on a tissue of ancestral lies and hatreds. But right now, the actions of the Israeli government are the biggest thing feeding the anti-semitic fires. It’s time to tell them to stop. To tell them that the Jewish nation is not a barbaric people in this way, that they do not represent us and that we do not support them.

Yesterday, from the window of the Paris apartment where I am currently staying, I saw a large and powerfully crafted demonstration demanding the freedom of Palestinian prisoners. As a Jew, I felt frightened, but I also felt like I was on their side.

Unelectable opinions no.2: a National Pension Service

I would love to change our country and our world for the better. But there’s one overriding reason that I don’t go into politics: there are too many things that I think should be done that will never get taken up by any of our major political parties. So whether you agree or disagree with me, I’d love to hear from you.

The UK has a pensions problem. Everyone would agree that it’s a bad idea to let the elderly die in penury, and you have to go a very long way right to find someone who doesn’t think the state should play a part. But the level of the basic state pension is derisory (£4,566 per year in 2019, compared to a median pre-tax income of £29,400). At the same time, the cost of the old age pension is one of the biggest items of government spending – in 2019-20, it’s expected to be £101 billion or around 12% of total government expenditure (which is higher, for example, than education).

And it’s getting worse. People are living longer and requiring more money to be spent on their healthcare. Increased labour mobility has broken up families, destroying the model of multi-generational households and making it hard for people to care for elderly relatives who are now distant.

But there is little political agreement on what to do about it: in fact, there are hardly any ideas for a comprehensive solution. Rather, successive governments of all political flavours have provided a series of kludges: the Thatcher-era push towards private pension provision with “contracting out” and the “state earnings-related pension scheme”, the Blair-era “stakeholder pension schemes”, the “auto-enrolment” workplace pension system of the Cameron-Clegg coalition.

Each of these kludges has piled legislation upon legislation into the pension area. More regulation came about in response to scandals like Equitable Life (where a major pension provider became non-viable because it had not anticipated changes in the financial markets); more still resulted from the decreased trust in financial institutions in the wake of the 2007-8 global financial crisis. The result is a morass of complexity so great as to be almost totally impenetrable to the overwhelming majority of the population. To give you a flavour of how bad it is, here is a typical extract:

The trivial commutation rule will only apply to defined benefit schemes. This is because defined contribution benefits may be taken as an ‘Uncrystallised Funds Pension Lump Sum (UFPLS). You have to add all the benefit values of all types of pension (company pensions/personal pensions/stakeholder pensions/retirement annuities/buy-out plans, but not any state pension) together. If they do not exceed £30,000 trivial commutation may be a possibility. In addition, trivial commutation can apply from age 55, or earlier, if in ill-health.

Do you have the foggiest idea what this is talking about? Because I don’t. I’ve run multi-million pound businesses including subsidiaries of major public companies and I’ve done my own tax return and company VAT returns for years, which I figure puts me in the top 1% of financially literate people in the country. But when it comes to pension documentation, I don’t even come close to understanding enough to make a reasonable decision about anything. I currently have four pension schemes, none of them enormous,  accumulated from different jobs. They all send me masses of mandated documentation, all of which is largely incomprehensible. I have no idea whatsoever how to manage these schemes wisely.

Many of the reforms, from Thatcher onwards, have been made in the name of giving consumer choice. But when consumers are utterly unequipped to make any kind of informed choice, that’s a nonsense. The official response to this is to suggest that you get professional financial advice, but that’s simply shifting the problem: consumers are equally unequipped to make a good choice of financial adviser. Take a look at a “find an independent financial adviser” page like this one: I defy you to give me a reliable set of grounds for working out which of these providers are any good.

My one good pensions experience has come not in the UK but in the 18 months that I worked in Singapore in the early 1980s. The system was really simple: I paid what felt at the time like an alarmingly high percentage of my salary into an account held in my name in the “Central Provident Fund”. Had I stayed in Singapore until retirement age, my pension would have been paid out from the fund (since I left the country, they paid out early).

I believe the UK should have a National Pensions Service: a single fund in which every individual has a named account, into which they make substantial contributions from an early age. Everyone should get the same investment return rate: the whole concept of consumer choice and the morass of documentation around it should be abandoned. The concept of a workplace pension should also be abandoned, getting rid of the massive risks for pension-holders of the bigger schemes and the recent onerous bureaucracy of auto-enrolment for small businesses.

This isn’t to say that the private financial services sector has no role to play. I have no problem with anyone being able to make private investments: I just don’t see why they should be subject to any special tax relief. And I also think there could be a role in the National Pensions Service for private investment managers: the NPS could parcel out chunks of the fund for management by private companies, who would tender for the work and would be assessed according to their performance. Their fees, however, should be a small fraction of the 1-2% of capital per year currently charged by the industry.

The level of contribution – and to what extent the state should top up the contributions of those at the lower end of the income scale – is a matter for the usual left-right political debate. But the principles are clear: (a) have a system where the investment returns are the same for everyone; (b) get rid of the titanic confusion levels; (c) get rid of the titanic waste of money currently expended in the financial institutions on management, marketing and compliance as well as on their own salaries and profits.

The transition plan would need a lot of attention (and is probably the hard part of all this). Most probably, a deadline would be set for people to migrate any private schemes to the new NPS, or face loss of their tax advantages – but a softer transition may be more viable.

Are you listening, UK political parties? In the Labour Party, are you too mired in the past glories of the workplace pension to countenance such an idea? In the Conservative Party, are you too much in bed with the Financial Services sector? Or are you both too timid to tamper with something that is so long term and won’t translate into an easy vote-catching slogan?

Sources for the data:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/benefit-and-pension-rates-2019-to-2020/proposed-benefit-and-pension-rates-2019-to-2020