Ask Haviv Anything - 116: Simon Sebag Montefiore on the History — and Future — of British Jews

Episode Date: May 17, 2026

What does it mean to be Jewish in Britain? What happens when centuries of hard-won belonging is suddenly called into question by destabilizing events?In this conversation on history and identity, we sit down with bestselling historian Simon Sebag Montefiore to trace the extraordinary story of British Jewry: from the arrival of Jews with William the Conqueror in 1066, through medieval blood libels and expulsion, to emancipation, empire, Zionism, civil rights and integration, and on to the modern crisis facing British Jews after October 7.We explore how British Jews became one of the most integrated and successful Jewish communities in the world, and why many now feel that a golden age is ending.Montefiore brings the sweep of history to the conversation, while confronting one of the most urgent questions facing Jews in the West today: Can liberal societies still protect Jewish belonging in moments of deep social fracture?--This episode is sponsored by "The Frozen Chosen," Haviv’s supportive Minnesota community. It is dedicated to the memory of Tchelet Fishbein, who was murdered on October 7 at Kibbutz Beeri. She was 18 years old. Tchelet lived in Kibbutz Urim and worked as a babysitter in nearby Kibbutz Be’eri along the border with Gaza. When Hamas invaded Be’eri, she and her boyfriend Dor Rieder, 23, both sought refuge in the home’s safe room. In a different home, 500 meters away, her mother, brother, 94-year-old grandmother, and the grandmother’s caregiver took shelter inside a bunker.What we know about Tchelet is not only how she died, but how she lived — with an instinct to protect others. In the midst of terror, she warned others to stay safe. Her first impulse was care, responsibility, connection. In the midst of the turmoil, Fishbein relayed an urgent message from the kibbutz’s group chat to her family, cautioning them: “Hamas terrorists disguised as IDF soldiers are knocking on doors. Please do not open the doors. Protect your lives. Share." From their bunker, her relatives witnessed neighboring homes being stormed and razed. Fortunately, they all emerged unscathed. But Tchelet and her boyfriend Dor were kidnapped by Hamas and murdered en route to Gaza.She was beloved by many. Tchelet and her mom were an important part of a layered support system for others, including lone soldiers near and dear to our Minnesota community. As the family noted, there are more stories than we will ever be able to tell. Even if we spend a lifetime speaking names and preserving memories, there will always be voices interrupted, dreams unfinished, and lives whose full beauty we will never fully know. May Tchelet Fishbein’s memory be a blessing. And may we honor her — and all those whose stories remain unfinished — through the continuous work of being together and truly hearing each other."--If you like what we do here, please consider joining our Patreon community at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything or our Substack at https://havivgur.substack.com/. You can also Buy Me a Coffee at buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur. It helps us keep the lights on. Patreon and Substack are also the platforms where you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Aschaviev, anything. Thank you for joining us. Simon Siebeg-Montifiori is with me. He's an international best-selling author, historian, his prize-winning books. Both histories and novels have been published in 48 languages. Just a few examples that people, certainly people who listen and watch this podcast, know about Catherine the Great, Stalin, the Court of the Red Tsar, and, of course, Jerusalem, the biography. I probably have three copies on my my shelves. He's the presenter of five history series for the BBC and is someone who has the uncanny talent of bringing incredibly detailed history into vibrant color. He has a doctor of philosophy

from Cambridge University and his new book, The Caldron, The Making of the Modern Middle East 1900 to 2026 will be coming out in the fall. We're going to invite him back. We're going to read it. We're going to talk about it. Very excited for that book. Today our topic is much closer to home. Today we want to talk about the history of British Jews. Who are British Jews? Where do they come from? How did they become the community that they became? How did this illustrious and old community find itself in its current situation of rising anti-Semitism, the sense of a kind of catch-22 where British politics struggle so much to seriously grapple with what the community is going through? Very excited for this conversation. Before we get into it, I want to tell

you this episode of Ask Him If Anything, is sponsored by the Frozen Chosen. That's how they described themselves. It's a wonderful nickname. They are Chaviv supportive community in Minnesota. It's dedicated by the community to the memory of Tchelet Fishbine, who was murdered on October 7 at Kibbutz Be'eri.

Tchelet was just 18 years old. Tchelet lived in Kibbutz Urim. She worked as a babysitter in Kibbutz Beeri along the border with Gaza. When Hamas invaded Beiris, and her boyfriend dol ridder twenty three both sought refuge in the home's safe room in a different home about five hundred meters away where her mother and brother and ninety-four year old grandmother and the grandmother's caregiver all taking shelter inside a bunker we know about chelid not only how she died we know how she lived with an instinct to protect others in the middle of that terrifying moment she was warning people to stay safe her first impulse was care responsibility in the middle of the turmoil, she sent an urgent message on the Kibbutz WhatsApp group chat to her family and to everybody else, cautioning them. Residents of the area surrounding the Gaza Strip,

known in Hebrew as the Otef, Hamas terrorists disguised as IDF soldiers, are knocking on doors. Do not open the doors, protect your lives, and share. From their bunker, her relatives witnessed neighboring homes being stormed and raised. they emerged unscathed, but Tchelet and Dhror were kidnapped by Chamas and murdered en route to Gaza. She was beloved by many. Tchelet and her mom were an important part of a layered communal support system for other people in their communities, including lone soldiers near and dear to the Minnesota community. As the family has noted, there are many more stories than we will ever be able to tell,

even if we spend a lifetime speaking names and preserving memories. There will always be voices interrupted, dream. unfinished and lives whose full beauty we will never fully know. May Tchallel Fischbein's memory be a blessing and may we honor her and all those whose stories remain unfinished through the continuous work of being together and hearing one another. Thank you so much to the Minnesota Jewish community for that sponsorship, for that beautiful memory. I would also like to invite everyone to join our Patreon and subscribe to our substack. If you're interested in asking the questions that guide the topics we talk about.

Join us there. That's where those kinds of conversations are happening. You also get to take part in monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. That's patreon.com slash ask chaviv-anything or chavivgur. Dot substack.com. Those links are in the show notes. Let's get into it. Simon, how are you? I'm fine.

It's great to be with you. And, you know, great to talk finally. It's an honor to have you. I have read you for many years. And so obviously I have a great many questions about Catherine the Great to throw your way, but that is unfortunately not our topic today. Let's do that another time. There's a Jewish aspect to that story too, of course.

Absolutely. Since Prince Petemkin was the first to arm the former Jewish regiment in his Russian army, bizarrely. it was an opening joke, but see, now it's real. Now I actually want to keep going. But let's cover this really, you know, urgent topic. We're diving deep into history. That's what this podcast is about.

We're not, this isn't going to be news. But it's history that is urgent for this moment to understand where, what the significance is of everything that's happening to British Jews right now. So I just wonder if we can lay, get the lay of the land here. The Jewish presence in Britain begins really with the Norman conquest in 1066. And there's that whole medieval chapter, right, of tremendous prosperity, horrific persecutions. It ends in the expulsion in 1290. Can you tell us about that sort of very beginning of what it is to be Jewish in England?

Well, I think one wants to say that, first of all, there were two Jewish kind of experiences in Britain, the medieval one and the modern one, which we're going to talk. We're going to talk about both, of course. And I should just say it's interesting that, you know, overall, again, I know we'll come to this, Haviv, but the British-Jewish experience is, of course, so different from the American Jewish experience, obviously. And, you know, the biggest difference is just the scale of it. I mean, the Jewish presence in Britain has always been tiny. In the Middle Ages, it was, you know, 5,000 people.

in modern times now it's 200, 100,000 people out of 70 million. So we're talking about, you know, by American standards, and I know many of your listeners are American, this is a tiny community with all that that entails. So to go back to the beginning, yes, the first Jews to settle in Britain were, you know, probably arrived with the Norman conquest, probably with William the Conqueror.

There were already, you know, substantial Jewish communities in France and in Spain, of course, at that time. And they arrived with him. They were actually, I mean, what's fascinating about them is, of course, the Normans spoke French or, you know, a form of French. The Jews spoke Judeo-Judeo-French or Zafatic sort of language, which is an intrus. concept, isn't it? And it had very little Hebrew in it, but it was a specific language that one of those fascinating languages that developed, like Ladino, like Yiddish, that developed in the Jewish diaspora. And they arrived. They were a very small community. Obviously, as is well known, they were, they, they, the usury or money lending was was supposedly banned by the Catholic

church, but Jews could, could conduct that business. And therefore, that, that, was a natural business for them to go into. By the way, they could also serve as doctors. And of course, in the Muslim world, you know, many, many of the sort of sultan's doctors like Moses, Maimonides, et cetera, et cetera, had been or would be Jewish. And that is also true in France and Britain and Spain at this time. And so they arrived a very small community in tiny numbers at first, and then gradually over the next 200 years, some members of that very small community became very wealthy, lending to the kings, and enjoying a sort of weird hybrid status where they were both despised as alien, suspected of being descendants of the

killers of Christ, and yet at the same time, protected by the king as for serving a special purpose, mainly lending money, and also, of course, paying huge taxes when they were short of money, which, like all governments, was often. So that's the beginning of the story. So that story ends in 1290. Why? Why does Edward I expel everybody? Well, the story is fascinating. I mean, you know, the Jewish community really first suffers real anti-Semitism or, you know, anti-Judaism, as I think I prefer to call it at this stage, with the coming of the Crusades. And the Crusades, which are in the 10-9, start in 1095, immediately rebound on the Jews, because the whole point of the Crusades is to go and, retake the Church of the Holy Sepulah from evil infidels. And since there were no evil infidel Muslims nearby to kill, the Jews were the next best thing.

And so this led to all sorts of attacks, particularly as the Crusader Army is headed out towards the Middle East, which is an extraordinary story of itself. But this led to huge praise. on the British, the English kings as well, because they had to rate, they were constantly raising armies, not just the normal armies to fight France, but also armies to go all the way, travel all the way to the Middle East to fight. And this led to higher taxes, higher loans, and all of these things put greater pressure on the tiny Jewish community. And so you have

the beginning of the particular phenomenon that starts in England, I'm ashamed to say, which the blood libel. And that's in 1144. The blood libel starts when an apprentice in Norwich, which was then a major city, William of Norwich, as he was called, a sort of teenage boy, was supposedly murdered by Jews for the purposes of putting, drinking Christian blood, crucifying him like Christ, or putting blood into muttser biscuits for Passover. And that's, That is really the beginning of a blood libel, which has rebounded through the ages. And it resurfaced in 1255, 100 years later. And as usual, anti-Semitism appears when there's great instability, civil war, when society's

under pressure, when, and of course when there's huge shortages of money. And so in a 1255 is another blood libel. And this one is called the Little St. Hugh blood libel, which in which the king, Henry III, actually backed the blood libel and executed a whole lot of Jews. So it's an important moment because then you have state backing for the first time of the blood libel, and which sadly is something that we may talk about at the end of this conversation. But at the same time, there were very, very wealthy Jews. There was, you know, one of the most fascinating is licoricea of Winchester,

who was a woman who became the richest woman in England, certainly the richest non-noble woman in England. And she lent money to Henry III. And she also, one of the big taxes she was forced to pay, helped renovate Westminster Abbey and build the tomb of William, of Edward the Confessor, which, you know, we can still see today. So she's an interesting character, but she was murdered. And I think at 1277, and that was a murder that was kind of may have been,

it may have been an anti-Jewish attack. It may have been, she may have been murdered by retainers of nobleman who owed her money. We just don't know what it was, but it's just an interesting story. And then by the 1280s, by the 1260s, you have a phenomenon where Jewish, loans are owed by many of the nobility. The nobility are fighting a civil war with the king, which entail vast expenses to pay for armies. And this means that their loans are bigger, and then they don't want to pay the loans. At the same time, the Crusades have gone disastrously wrong. Jerusalem's been lost to Saladin and Edward I, the first, the king.

has gone on a sort of minor crusade. And again, the crusade is in peril. The kingdom is in peril. The nobles and king are in death to the Jews. This is never a good place for the Jews to be. And this concatenation of issues leads to, first of all, squeezing the Jewish community for as much money as you can. And once they've been squeezed, Edward I orders their expulsion to purify the kingdom

and save Christians from supposed danger of conversion to Judaism, of which there was very little chance, by the way. And so for 1290, the Jews are expelled. It's really the first of a series of major expulsions that culminate in the expulsion 1492 from Spain, which we all know about. And Jews don't really live in England again for over, for almost 400 years. It's an extraordinary story of the fragility of things or the instability of being a Jewish community.

You could be there for hundreds of years and the politics goes wrong. The finances of the kingdom goes wrong and your whole life as dependent is subject to, is conditional on those conditions. the blood libel specifically. Just can we dive a tiny bit deeper into that? A child is found dead, 12 years old, 13 years old, something like that, in a forest. And at first, nobody assumes anything about it. And then suddenly a Benedictine monk writes a book. The whole thing becomes, you know, and reading about specifically about that blood libel story,

first of all, a Jewish convert to Catholicism who becomes the source of the claim that the Jews are killing them for ritual purposes and then priests all through Europe don't believe the story because it's nuts and then they keep hearing the story because it comes back around and is heard of again once you're hearing it from three different sources,

it doesn't matter that the original source is the same. You've heard it three times and three sources you begin to believe it. It's such an extraordinary path that liables take to becoming entrenched truth without ever having anyone check them, no matter how fantastic they sound at the beginning. It sounds familiar, doesn't it? It's amazing. Just how well that whole system works. So let's get to Oliver Cromwell.

As you said, almost 400 years, 360, 70 years. The Jews cannot come in. And then suddenly Oliver Cromwell readmits them. What happened there? Why? And how many actually would come back? Or they're not the same Jews? Or how many Jews to move to England?

Yeah. Well, it's a very different community. Of course, 400 years later, it's a different world. And the interesting thing is that there was a certain sort of new, a sacred new attitude to the scriptures, to Jews, that was to work extremely well for Jews and right up to the Balfour Declaration, in fact, where it starts with Puritanism.

It starts of Protestantism. Of course, Martin Luther was an insane Jew hater and he was no kind of champion of the Jews. But processantism, which he started, was really a return to the actual words and prophecies of the Bible, the Old Testament particularly. And it meant that they were cutting out the church in effect and the priests, the intermediaries between man and God, and returning to the actual word of the Bible. And that involved the prophecies that the Jews would return to Zion, to Jerusalem.

Jerusalem. And that's really why the Protestants and the Puritans now suddenly regard, started to regard Jews as a positive thing because they were harbingers of the second coming of Christ. And the second coming of Christ might not have been a great thing for Jews, actually. But they weren't thinking about that yet. They were really thinking in the short term. And also the Puritans and the English started to think of themselves as rather like the Israelites as well. And so they started to identify with the Israelites,

as did the early settlers in America, who also started to identify the idea of a city on the hill and so on. So all of this is to do with the new Protestantism. And so Oliver Cromwell, Protestant leader, almost king of England, Lord Protector, fascinating character, military genus, never lost a battle, an extremely tough and complex person. In 1656, Manasseh bin Israel, a rabbi in Holland, and Holland was much more liberal than the rest of Europe. And the most liberal places for Jews in Europe were Holland, parts of Italy, the Ottoman Empire and Poland.

Poland traditionally, though, of course, that would change radically. So he started to correspond with Cromwell and the top British officials, and Cromwell started to raise the idea of allowing the Jews to resettle in Britain. There was quite a lot of resistance to this, and Cromwell, who was a sort of master politician, said, fine, we won't actually come to a conclusion. we'll simply raise, we'll simply ignore the ban and pretend it doesn't exist. And Jews, we will not challenge Jews settling here. And so in the 1850s, in the 1650s, some Jews, mainly Sephardic Jews,

because after all, the Dutch community, Holland had been ruled by the Spanish Habsburgs. And so it was a very Sephardic community, overwhelmingly. And they, certain members of those families started to settle in England in the 1650s. Charles II at the Restoration after 1660 didn't challenge this. And so Jewish families started to resettle. They were overwhelmingly Sephardim with Sephardic names like Lopez and Medina and so on. And they were very small numbers. But as the 17th century went on, more and more came.

And a big step for them was in the late, in the 1690s, with the beginning of the wars against Louis Catoors, Louis XIV, under John Churchill, Duke of Morbara, who was the descendant of Winston Churchill, and Britain's greatest ever general, incidentally, his armies were funded by Solomon de Medina, a Sephardic Jewish businessman who organized the logistics of feeding these massive armies that won the greatest victories in British history,

Blennon and so on. So he began to win access for the first time and he was one of the funders of the synagogue, Beavis Marx, which I don't know if you know, Haviv, but it's the most beautiful synagogue. It's the oldest synagogue in Britain. And it was my family's synagogues, where my parents were married.

And it's a very interesting synagogue because it's actually built like a Puritan church. And it's got a, the look of it is unusual for a synagogue. It doesn't have a dome. It's built in a rather Puritanical style. And it was partly funded

by, Solomon the Medina. And as the 18th century goes on, more and more Jews arrive. Another important champion of the Jews was Samson Gideon, who was another thunder of British armies. And he managed to get, in 1753, the Prime Minister Pelham, to put forward a Jewish relief bill that would remove the restrictions on Jews. And by the way, it's worth saying here, there were massive restrictions on Jews still. Jews could not go to Oxford and Cambridge.

They couldn't be in the civil service. They couldn't sit in Parliament. They couldn't own land. So all of these things were go right through much later into the 19th century than you'd expect. How extensive was that? I mean, I always, we are taught that emancipation, the ending of the ghetto laws and all these restrictive laws,

come with the French Revolution, spread through Europe by Napoleon. When the British start taking those laws apart, start removing them before the French Revolution? They try to. And like a lot of things in Britain, much of it is done by don't ask, don't tell sort of style of government, which is very British because there's no constitution in Britain. So there weren't Jewish ghettos, because that's one thing. They were the Jewish areas, and there's an area of the city of London called Jewry, for example, where Jews lived. They mainly lived in the city of London.

And so the world's ghettos to abolish, as there were in Europe. And there weren't these single moments of Jewish liberation, the French Revolution that you mentioned in Napoleon and all that. which continued, of course, with the 1848 revolution in France and spread through Europe. But that didn't happen in quite the same way in Britain, because the numbers were also still very small. And so what's surprising is that these restrictions went on much longer. They were only finally abolished in 1858, which I'll come to in a second, because it's an interesting story as well. And so early in the late 18th century, sort of 1790s, families start arriving. And they start to do business and they're allowed to do business.

And there's still not specific laws that allow them to own property, even though the wealthier of them start to buy property. And so you have families like the most famous, obviously, the Rothschilds. In 1798, the Rothschilds arrived, and they come to Manchester, where the Industrial Revolution is happening. And they arrive from the Frankfurt Ghetto, which has now been abolished. And they start to do, they start to do, first of all, they invest in the textiles, which is the huge industry of the industrial revolution that's funneling. industrial revolution, fueling the industrial revolution, rather, and then they start to lend to

the British government and to fund the armies that are fighting the Napoleonic wars, which are vastly expensive. And the Rothschild really fund these armies. And there's all sorts of amazing sort of covert espionage, where the Rothschilds are sort of smundling huge amounts of money to pay the Duke of Wellington's army in Spain, for example. And they're responsible not only for making the loan, but for getting it to the army. And so at the same time, families like my family arrive in the 1790s, the Montefuri family. And they come, they don't come from Frankfurt.

They come from Livorno in Tuscany, in Italy. And they are Italian-speaking Jews, who probably also speak Ladino. A lot of their life is a Mediterranean life, a very different life from the, from the Rovesterner. childs who come from or the Dutch Jews who also are arriving. So the Montefiore's arrive. And as a young man, Moses Montefiuri, my great, great, great uncle or something, starts to work in the stock market. And there's now a position for a certain number, a quota of Jews to work in the stock market. And they're called the Jew brokers. And a certain, you're very lucky if you can get into the stock market. And Moses Montefiore.

the Fury of the Young Man. He's quite a sort of striking figure. As Queen Victoria later said about him, you know, he's, he's, he's what you, when you think of the perfect Hebrew, this is, this is, this is, this is what you think of, because he's like barrel chested, six foot three, blue-eyed, blonde-haired. So he looks like a sort of, he looks like what Queen Victoria thinks a Hebrew should look like, she writes in her diary. Oh, you mean like a biblical Hebrew in the armies of King David kind of thing? Exactly, yeah. Because they're all reading the, but, they're all, They're all reading the Bible, of course, and they all know the Bible.

And the Bible at this time is very important, as you're sort of, as you're suggesting, the Bible is really the national book of Britain and many other Christian countries, too. You know, with the American colonies too. Everybody knows every word of it, you know, and everyone knows every story of it. Everyone knows the name of all the places. So it's worth bearing that in mind as we go through this. And anyway, Moses Montefuri marries the sister of, and of Nathaniel Rothschild's wife, so they become brothers-in-law and they move into

the same house in the city of London, which is now in St. Within's Lane, which is where the bank of Rothschild still is, and they live above the bullion shop and the Montefurias and the Roffchars live there and they become very wealthy and very successful and they have access to all sorts of of people. They have friends in the royal family, for example, and they have enemies, too, who hate them and will never accept them. And as time goes on in the 19th century, they become more and more important, that they rescue the government at one point, when it has a huge banking crisis, they fund the armies, and they buy country estates, which they are now allowed to own. And they become part.

of the English scene in many ways. They meet the royal family. Moses Montefiore is knighted in 1837. But it's very important to understand that there are still in Britain in this time huge restrictions on Catholics and Jews. And in 1829 the restrictions on Catholics are lifted after a huge debate, but they are not lifted on the Jews yet. and repeatedly people put forward the lifting of these restrictions and they can constantly fail. In 1829 and also in 1830 and also in 1834, there are debates on this subject.

And the Duke of Wellington, by the way, is a huge enemy of the liberation of the Jews and speaks against it. And he really thinks that the liberation of the Jews could be an enormous menace to, British society and politics. Why? What's so scary about the Jews? That's the thing. What is so scary about the Jews?

I mean, the Catholics, it's a multi-century internal schism within Christianity. Yes. There are fundamental questions of power. I mean, the monarchy is defined as after Henry the 8th, the Protestant. But who cares about the Jews? I think even though the Jewish numbers are tiny, and by the way, there are now something.

like between 20 and 40, about 25,000 Jews. More are coming. By the end of this, towards the end of the century, there are 40,000 Jews. Most of them are Sephardic, but not all. They're all either Sephardic or German and Dutch. So the sisters that Montefiore and Rothschild marry are Dutch Jews, and they're the daughters of Levi Barron Cohen,

who is a merchant of Amsterdam. So you have this kind of, these Jews are, these are not the Ashkenazi Jews from Russia, which we're going to come to in a minute. These are Western European or Mediterranean Jews. And all the families are, you know, names that you would recognize immediately as sort of Spanish and Portuguese names. And so I think the Duke of Wellington's opposition to the Jews was that they shouldn't be allowed. to sit in Parliament. It wasn't that he was, he knew the Jews extremely well, he knew the Rothschilds extremely well. And in fact, he banked with the Rothschilds. And his armies

have been funded by the Rothschilds until he was very close to the Rothschild. He just didn't think the Jews should be allowed into Parliament to legislate for Britain. And there's a huge debate in 1834 about the liberation, the emancipation of British slaves. And at the same, the same, time in the same debate, in the same parliament, there was another attempt to raise the restrictions on the Jews. And while the emancipation of Britain and the abolition of British slavery goes through, the restrictions on Jews, Jewish Relief Act fails again. So it's an interesting moment. So they've actually abolished slavery and emancipated British slavery. slaves, but they haven't yet emancipated British Jews.

I remember reading about these debates in Parliament where the people opposed to Catholics sitting in Parliament, one of the major concerns they raised was you'll have a very hard time keeping out the Jews if you let in the Catholics. And so it was, your people opposed letting in Catholics into Parliament because the Jews would then be coming in. There was a, it was powerful. It was a powerful argument made by the top leaders of British society in Parliament. Can we take a step back and just we've been talking about the top of the top, you know, the wealthiest, the most powerful, the most influential. What is the ordinary Jew like in England at the time? What is their life?

How much is their existence restricted? Do they, if they can't own land, you know, if the wealthiest of the wealthy can begin to buy country estates, Does that mean that an ordinary shopkeeper can own some piece of London in some place? What is the life of ordinary Jews at this time? How does it change in the 19th century? Well, it's a tiny community. I mean, by the standards of the millions of Jews who are now living in Poland, in the Russian Empire, for example. By 1890, there are 40,000 Jews in Britain.

So it's really pretty small. and they are now beginning to appear in society as they are in the rest of Europe. These restrictions do not restrict the daily life, except that they can't go into Parliament, they can't go to Oxford and Cambridge, things like that, which seem pretty basic. And it's only later in the century

when one of the first universities is London University that allows Jews and Catholics to study there. So, which is a very significant, which is a very significant moment. And of course,

the old universities don't allow Jews yet until the 1850s. So their life is, it's a small community. They live in areas, you know, they live in areas where other Jews live. They are free to,

they are free to worship and to live their Jewish lives. More synagogues are built. Beavis Marx is the sort of grander synagogue, but others are now being built, particularly funded by these big families like Rochchar Montefuri, Goldsmith, and Samuel and others. And so, you know, it's not an oppressive life at all, but it's not a full life either. They're not allowed to enter. But in the 1830s and 40s and 50s,

Roff Chard de Montefuri began this campaign to raise these restrictions. And so they campaigned for it. By the way, they also campaigned for the abolitionist slavery, and they were very much part of that. They were abolitionists too, and they helped fund that. Again, in the 1840s, when you have the Irish huge,

Irish family and millions of people died, all these Jewish families very proudly gave huge, you know, huge donations to feed the Irish in order to, because it was Jewish tradition, to give charity and give arms to people. So, you know, they were strikingly philanthropic and not just for their own communities. Finally, after many, many times of standing for Parliament, Lionel Rothschild, who is Moses Montefiore's nephew and the head of Rothschild's bank, is constantly elected to Parliament, but he can't sit because he can't take the oath. And finally in 1858, Jewish Relief Act passes, and Lionel Rothschild becomes the first Jewish MP in Britain.

And it's a sort of triumph because now the British Jews, of whom there is, you know, 35, 40,000 now. can enter Jewish life, and they do so with great enthusiasm. And, you know, they become close to the royal family. You know, I mentioned Queen Victoria. They receive peerages, and they're able to sit in the house of Lord Rothschild. The Rothschild becomes a lord and considered Moses of Montefuri receives a baronetcy. All these families suddenly start to thrive.

They buy country estates, they build huge, um, palatial mansions. Some people regard them as very vulgar. They become friends with a lot of other people and they have champions. They faced anti-Semitism. And there's the famous story of Moses Montefurie when he went to a dinner party in the 1830s. And a very, and by the way, I think it was a royal dinner party given by the Duke of Sussex, who's one of the king's brothers or one of the queen's uncles. and they start to, a rather sort of horrible anti-Semitic lord starts to say,

you know, listen, everybody, I've just been to Japan. And the great thing about Japan is that there are no pigs there and no Jews. And so there's great awkwardness at this dinner party, and everyone looks at Moses Montefuri. And Moses'Modafuri, quick as a flash, says, well, then, my lord, you and I should go there. So they'll have one of each. And so everyone loves it. It's regarded as a very good way of handling the anti-Semitism by taking it straight on. And these guys, these Jewish leaders at the time, were very aware of their position.

They were very grateful to be in the sort of developing liberal democracy. They loved the royal family. And they regarded the royal family as a sort of guarantor of their freedom. a sort of a trend that we will see developed through the 19th and 20th and to today.

And what we're seeing today with the King Charles III championing the Jewish community and helping protect the Jewish community is a tradition here. And by the 1890s in the early 20th century, big Jewish families

like the Rothschild, now the Sassoon's have arrived from Iraq and from India and from China, the Montefuris and others become great friends with the Prince of Wales and Edward the Seventh. And there are cartoons of him and his Jews arriving, the Jews arriving at court as friends of the royal family. But at the same time, in 1881, now we're in very familiar, we're in very familiar history, Haviv. Everyone in this podcast knows the death of Alexander II, the rise of the third, the pogrom. and the beginning of the mass flow westward.

So that changes everything, right? Yeah, and some come to London. Some come to England. A lot go to America. A lot go to Palestine. And suddenly there's this arrival of these impoverished Russian and Polish, Russian Polish Jews in London. And this creates a new way.

of a different sort of anti-Jewish feeling that these immigrants are impoverished, they're going to depend on us for money, they're going to bring crime, when's this stopping? Where are these people going to stop? And so there's a huge kind of backlash. And the old Jewish families, Rothschild, Montefuris, etc., welcome these. Jewish community and of course, you know, give huge amounts of money and found schools for them and try to try to protect them. And there's another thing happening here, which is also important,

which is that in the 1820s, British and Jewish and British Jews start to travel around the Ottoman Empire and they start to travel to the Holy Land. And in the Holy Land, and in the Holy Land, land, Benjamin Disraeli, for example, goes. And he's played a big role in Jewish life. He's actually the child of a convert who converts when he's six after an argument with the synagogue establishment, which is very familiar to all Jews. And so Benjamin Disraeli is actually can become a member of parliament because though he regards himself as ethnically and culturally Jewish,

he's actually technically a Protestant, so he can take the oath. And he, of course, is great friends with all these Jewish families, like the Rothschild of the Montefioreas, a virtually kind of, Benjamin Israel is virtually a family member. You know, he regularly goes there for dinner, he goes there for Shabbat. He's great friends with the families. And this becomes very important when, in 1875, the Israeli becomes prime minister for the second time in 1874

and in 1875 he delivers the Suez Canal he buys the Suez Canal for Britain and this is really Britain's entry into the Middle East as a Middle East and past very important moment and he does this he does this in a kind of very very flamboyant way by going to his friend Lionel Rothschild and saying we need we need whatever it is

million pounds to buy the French shares and the Egyptian shares in the Suez Canal. And famously, Rothschild sits there, spits out a pip that he's eating and says, you shall have it. And then Rothschild is able to go straight to Green Victoria and say, we've got it. We've bought the Suez Canal. And of course, this leads to the, in 1881, to the effective, not annexation, but the sort of British control over Egypt. And that is really the beginning of the story

which the real British presence in the Middle East, which leads to the mandate and so on. At the same time... Yeah, go on. Yeah, sorry. Well, this... Well, so we're now having this sort of flood of poor Jews from the East. And it creates, you mentioned,

the anxiety and the 1905 Aliens Act In other words, there's a real profound blowback when very large numbers are coming in who are also very different kinds of Jews. Yes. Yeah. And there was great snobbery, by the way, among the Jewish community that will, which would surprise. Among Jews. Among Jews? What?

Snobbery? That's almost impossible. Unimaginable. Unimaginable. So though, like, families like the Montefiories, you know, the Rothschilds, they would marry German Jews and they would marry Spanish, in a sense. Spanish and Portuguese Jews. But there was initially a resistance to intermarrying with these poor Ashkenazis who'd arrive, which doesn't surprise one.

But of course, in the end, in the end, you know, that sort of, that lasted about 20 years. But the point is, absolutely right. There's this huge backlash. And the person who's really kind of, who has to deal with this backlash, this is Arthur Balfourn, Prime Minister, 1902 to 2005 or six. And he brings in the Aliens Act to ban Jewish immigration. And so, which is an interesting moment. So at the same time as that, I just want to step back a little bit

because at the same time as Israeli becomes prime minister, etc., etc., Britain is becoming more and more present in the Middle East. and part of this is to do with British evangelicalist, evangelical Christian belief, who are the evangelicals in Britain are the successors of Cromwell and the Puritans and the early Protestants in Britain. And they embrace the idea of a Jewish return to Zion

or Jewish relationship with the Holy Land because they are Victorian evangelical, who believe that the Jewish return is essential before the Second Coming. So you have these kind of very worldly leaders like Lord Palmerston and Benjamin Disraeli. At the same time, you have their friends like the Earl of Chansprey, who is a passionate evangelical, who have some of the same beliefs as American evangelicals do today, and are pro-Jewish and pro-Rot return to the Middle East for the same reasons. And so that is also going on at the same time.

So we're now reaching the 1890s, the early 20th century. And of course, everybody knows, you know, 1881, the assassination of Alexander II, the arrival of all these Jewish immigrants, the arrival of Jewish immigrants in the Holy Land, which is still an Ottoman villiet. And in 1896, we have Theodore Herzl, of course, and the idea of a state of the Jews or a Jewish state, the Judenstadt. And this immediately causes some disquiet in British, amongst British Jews. Because British Jews have got, feel they have everything arranged.

They're these slightly unpoor Jews who've arrived, but, you know, the Act, the Aliens Act has kind of stopped that flow. But, you know, Jews like these big banking families, which were known, by the way, as the cousinhood, because they were all interrelated. They are now very well established. And in fact, by the early 20th century, you have a British cabinet where you have several British cabinet ministers

who are Jewish, all of them from these banking families. is the Edwin Montague become Secretary of State for India. Herbert Samuel, who will hear of, later becomes Home Secretary. So you have an extraordinary thing now where Jews are so established that they can become cabinet ministers.

But at the same time, the idea of Zionism is like throwing a grenade into this group. And there's initially a split amongst these very establishment families. So, but one has to look back and see that really Zionism had one of the initial starters, precursors of Zionism, before it was called Zionism, was Moses Montefuri.

He had gone to, he went to the Holy Land's seven times, and he'd first gone in the 1820s. And people often don't realize that Jerusalem was a completely impoverished, half-empty city when he went in the age and 20s. There were only about two or three thousand people living in the old city of Jerusalem in that time. Half the old city was actually empty. And there was only the old city.

There was only the old city. There was only the old city. And it was partly empty. It was a kind of monumental village with these amazing buildings, the dame of the rock and the wall and so on and the church. but, and he went there, and he saw that the Jewish community there was tiny but totally impoverished. They were almost beggars. And so Montefuri, two things happened.

He decided to help this community and to fund it. He also decided that he would become an observant Jew, which he hadn't been before. And so he had a sort of religious, a religious moment. And lastly, over his many. visits, he decided to promote and sponsor the return of the Jews to the Holy Land, which he sort of saw as either a big Jewish community under the Ottoman Sultan. He went to see the Sultan or perhaps in the future under the British Empire. And so he played a big part in that.

And in 1860, he founded the first Jewish village outside the walls of Jerusalem, which became the new city of Jerusalem, West Jerusalem, and is still where he built the Montefuri windmill. So that was an interesting moment. And at the same time, the Rothschilds, particularly the French Rothschilds, Baron Edmondo Rothschild started to back the founding of small Jewish farming communities, Moshevim, as well. And by the way, they were quite friendly all these big Jewish backers of early Zionism,

but they weren't best friends. They were all slightly jealous of each other. Again, which very surprise you, they all want to do things their own way. That's how big funders of Jewish organizations work today as well. Exactly. It's exactly the same. So, you know, Moses Montefi wants his own thing. Then there's, you know, Baron de Hirsch, who has his own thing. And then the Rothschild have their own thing. And none of them want to do it with each other. So it takes a long time before they merge. But Moses Montefuri was dead by then. But one of the head of the Montefuri family, so Abraham Montefuri decides to back Zionism, becomes a Zionist. Other members of the family were. are very skeptical and they believe that it will create anti-Semitism and that it's actually not a good thing for the Jewish community. And it's the same in the Rothschild family. And in all these families, the Montefarries are Rothschilds, the Samuels and Montague's, the Sassus, all of them,

there are Zionist members of the family and there are anti-Zionist members of the family. And that goes right up into World War I when Zionism has become hugely poised. popular. And I know you all have discussed this in endless, endless podcasts, have these. We won't go into it again. But for the British, this is terribly important because when Herzl and the early Zionists were promoting the idea of a Jewish state or a Jewish return, their lawyer in one of these cases was David Lloyd George, a Welsh, a radical Welsh lawyer. and liberal politician, who later, as some radicals do, became one of the great imperialist statesmen of the British Empire. And another friend of this concept was Alfa Balfour. And the leader of Zionism in Britain was Chaiian Weizmann. And who started, became an academic, a chemistry professor.

and was also a brilliant lobbyist, I guess we'd call it today, and became the Zionist leader in England. But at the same time, there was a Zionist movement based in Berlin in the German Empire. There was a Zionist movement in Istanbul. And for a while, David Ben-Gurian was part of that. So in all of these big imperial capitals, there are these Zionist leaders trying to persuade these great powers to promote the idea of Jewish return and Jewish development of the Holy Land. But of course, an early idea promoted partly by Balfour, discussed with Balfour, that the British had, was to have a Jewish settlement in El Aish, in what is in British Egypt.

And obviously that was not a particularly attractive idea. Another idea was to have a small Jewish homeland in Kenya, Uganda. which was the Ugandan offer, again sort of discussed with British leaders like Balfour and Chamberlain, the father of never Chamberlain, which also didn't really catch the excitement of Jews around the world. And then, of course, World War I begins. And in World War I, a completely different game opens because Britain invades the Holy Land. and invades the Ottoman Empire from Egypt under Lord Alambi and starts to fight its way up.

There are three battles of Gaza in 1917, and then they break through and they head towards Jerusalem. And at the same time, the British are discussing various promises to various powers. And all of these promises, which of course are terribly famous, They make promises to the Arabs, they make promises to the Jews. They also make promises to many powers in Europe, including the Greeks and the Italians, the Armenians and the Kurds as well.

And all of these promises can only really be understood by looking at the British position in the war in 1916, 1917. Britain was bleeding, hemorrhaging men on the world. Western Front, and they were to lose millions of men were killed in that war. And Britain was stuck, stagnated in a stalemate with the Germans on these trenches. And at the same time, millions of people were dying on the Eastern Front, too. And so Britain was just desperate. British statesmen were desperate to find a way, anything that would move the dial in any direction. And so first of all, they start to think about an Arab revolt in the Arab world, which of course was ruled by the

Ottoman, the Ottoman Turks. And the Arabs had their own ideas of nationalism and hoped for autonomy, if not independence. And the rulers of the Turkish, the Ottoman Empire, the three passions were neo, almost neo-fascist, racist, Turkish, ultra-nationalists who were not particularly friendly to Arab nationalism and therefore there was an opportunity for Britain. So the first thing Britain did was negotiate a very amorphous and blurred agreement with the emir of Mecca, Hussein, the Hashemite, a Hashemite Sharif, descended from the prophet, who actually only ruled the city of Mecca as Emir, as his family had since Samir, for a thousand years. But he had the great lineage of dissent. And so, anyway, the British

believed that this man could mobilize the whole Arab world, even though you had about 6,000 men at arms. And while the Ottomans had, you know, millions of people, you know, in their armies, including, you know, a vast amount of Arab troops who remain loyal to the Ottomans all the way through the war, incidentally, interestingly. And so they decided to back him. But he asked for an Arab empire that would encompass the whole Arab world. He asked for what would become the states

of Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan and Iraq. He asked for that as his empire. And this is a man who had this kind of tiny military presence and had never ruled anything more than the towns of Mecca and Medina. So the British, of course, negotiated with this. And they deliberately blur the agreement so that they kind of promised some sort of Arab state. But they said that they couldn't promise everything because they also had promised a lot to France,

who was their chief ally. And this is the Sykes-Pico agreement. but the Sykes-Pieker Agreement should be called the Sykes-Pekker's Sazanov Agreement because it was also with Russia. And what they agreed with the French, the British and the Russians, was a sort of carve-up of the Ottoman Empire, all the way from Constantinople, which they promised to be an international but under the Russians, a huge part of modern Turkey

and the borderlands with Iraq, which would also be Russian, possibly Armenian, possibly Kurdish. and the Holy Land, which would be ruled by the Russians, the British and the French together. So that's Sykes-Pieker Sazonov agreement. And of course, that contradicts. Makes perfect sense. I don't know why it didn't work. Yeah.

And so that made that – well, one reason it didn't work is because the Russians – the Russian revolution happened, which meant the Russians were knocked out of the agreement. So that left the French. So already the promise to the Arabs was kind of constant. contradicted with the promise to the French. And at the same time, they promised the Italians and the Greeks huge swaves of what is now Turkey. And then they turn to the Jews. As your viewers will know very well, the Jews in Russia, there were several million, there were six million Jews in Russia. There were now millions of Jews in America. And America was now entering the war. And Russia was, they were trying to keep Russia in the war. So they believed, as states, did at that time, the Jews had a sort of mat mystical power and were very powerful in those countries

which wasn't completely true, but they believed it. And so part of this, part of the reason for the Balfour Declaration was this belief in the power of the Jews in these two key allies. At the same time, people like Balfour, Churchill, Lloyd George, were the successors of 19th century statesmen like Palmerston and also the sixth, they weren't religious themselves,

they weren't evangelicals, but they were successes of the evangelical tradition. And as Lloyd George said, I know the names of the places in Judea, better than I know the names of the places on the Western Front, which was a interesting comment. And so they believe, for all these different reasons, a third reason was empire. Empires never do anything out of four. philanthropy. And they believed that they were going to give independence to a lot of Arab countries.

They were going to have to deal with the French and the Russians in the Middle East. And they believe that the Jews, a small Jewish entity there would be supportive of the British Empire and back the British Empire in the Holy Land because they wanted the Holy Land. They didn't really want to share it with the French and the Russians. So for all these reasons, they promised, along with promises to the Kurds, the Armenians, and all these other promises, they promised to the Jews in the Balfour Declaration, which we all know about, which really should be called the Lloyd George, the Lloyd George Declaration, since he was really the driving force. But they agreed that they would create a homeland, by some definition, in the Holy Land,

as we know well. So all of this, the Jews are central to the story. So we have this mass wave of Jewish immigration. It lands in London. It is impoverished. It's forming Americans will know the Lower East Side, right? It's forming these little informal ghetto type communities. There's a big debate in Britain over whether they're even assimilable.

At the same time, the Jewish question is now front and center on the world stage, fundamental to how the imperial ordering of the Middle East, what is happening to British Jews in the 1900s, tens, 20s, 30s as they go through this period where the question of the Jews overtakes European politics, but also is a fundamental imperial question, you know, for Britain. As we discussed, first of all, the Zionism thing is a division. And in the cabinet, in the in the cabinet that's within the general community in other words. Yeah, but in the cabinet that gives the powerful declaration, there are Jewish cabinet ministers who are supportive of it, Herbert Samuel,

who is Home Secretary, Liberal Home Secretary, and there are Jewish cabinet ministers like Edward Montague, who is also a powerful cabinet minister, who are entirely opposed to it. So it's an interesting split. That split goes through in the community. But the community is now beginning to thrive in Britain. But the very fact of that increasing success and assimilation and acceptance leads to the backlash that we saw in France and Austria in the 1890s, for example.

And the beginning of a fascist movement in Britain under, under Moly, under, Mosley, under Oswald Mosley in the 1930s. So we're jumping ahead now to the 1930s. Britain has created, Britain now rules a substantial sway of the Middle East, incidentally. And Sykes-Pico, contrary to popular belief, was never activated. What happens are the treaties of Severa and San Remo, which give mandates, League of Nations mandates to Britain and France to rule Britain gets Palestine, a large version of Palestine, which includes Jordan, and what they call Mesopotamia, which they rename Iraq, and the French get Syria and Lebanon. And within that entity, as you all know, they allowed substantial Jewish immigration to Palestine. And they name the Holy Land Palestine.

It's the mandate of Palestine. And that's where Palestine becomes an official name for the region of the first time since the Byzantimes. Yeah. So they're allowing mass immigration of Jews to Palestine at the time when they're still not allowing mass Jewish immigration into Britain. That's correct. When the doors to the United States are closed in the early 20s, right? So it's an interesting, you know, there is an anti-Semitism to the pro-Zionism of some of the members of the British elites. That's correct.

In that regard. And, of course, in the early, in the 20s, though, you know, even though there are kind of crises, you know, in 1920s, the 1929, 21, the Nabimuzer riots, the Jaffa riots and so on and so forth, culminating in 1929. in the massacres in Hebron and Svatt and in Jerusalem. But at the same time, the British mandate is allowing him huge numbers of Jews to immigrate, you know, to create what may be some sort of definition of a Jewish homeland alongside, you know, which at this time, by the way, is a binational concept, really. there's not much hope of a Jewish state. The idea is that there'll be a kind of Palestine

with these joint communities united at the top in a legislative committee. That's the idea of the British idea for Palestine. But at the same time, you know, back in England, yeah, there's minimal immigration as there is in America. and there's beginning to be a rising feeling against Jews. And of course, in 1933, Hitler comes to power. And that changes everything suddenly.

There is a copy-capped fascist movement in Britain, the black shirts under Oswald Mossey, a former Labour cabinet minister, incidentally, who is this kind of slick, very good-looking, sort of glamorous and very wealthy aristocrat who leads this movement really aimed at attacking Jews and there are sort of terrible scenes in the Jewish East End which is where all the poor Jews live

and this is a period of kind of rising alarm for British Jews and at the same time Britain is beginning to struggle with ruling Palestine. And in the mid-30s, at the same time, Jewish immigration suddenly starts to surge because of Hitler and Nazism. And this leads to a full-blown Arab revolt in Palestine and an Arab civil war within the Palestinian,

what became the Palestinian Arab nation, where half of the Palestinian Arab's want to negotiate a sort of agreement, a sort of compromise with the Jewish community in Palestine. And half of them, under the Mufti of Jerusalem, I mean al-Hassani, want to drive out that community and see Palestine as an Arab-Muslim ethno state, sacred territory, and which only a tiny, deemy Jewish community would be acceptable. And so they launched this kind of this revolt, this insurgency against the British, but also against the Jews. And at the same time, there's this struggle between the Nashashibi family that leads the sort of compromise, the pro-compromise Palestinian Arabs and the Hussein and his gangs who want to wipe them out.

And it's a brutal war. and in the middle of it, the British offered the Peel Commission idea, which is the first idea for a partition. But interestingly, that partition offers a Jewish entity alongside a Palestinian Arab entity which would be ruled by Abdullah Emir of Jordan, which has been hived off from the Palestine mandate. And he's backed by the Palestinian Arab leader Nashashibi, who's mayor of Jerusalem as well. And the failure of this is a sort of tragedy because it's one of those kind of ideas that could have worked and could have created an entirely different. A different world than were the one we know today. There wouldn't have been Israel in the same circumstances.

And there wouldn't have been a Palestinian movement that we see today either. But anyway, it failed. a huge Arab insurgency exploded. And the British brutally put this down, while at the same time training Jewish armed commandos for the first time, including people like Moshe Dayaan, who become the heart of the Haganah and the future Jewish militia. And at the end of this war, they've absolutely crushed the Arabs

and really destroyed the power. Palestinian Arab community. The general in charge, by the way, is General Bird of Montgomery, who says he thoroughly enjoys the war, typical British, tough British imperialist commander. By 1939, the British had decided that they've had enough of Zionism and the Balfour Declaration, and they reverse it completely.

Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain says, world war is coming. We'd prefer to fall out with the Jews than we would with the Arabs and we're going to back the Arabs and we're going to reject the Jews and they reverse the entire

powerful declaration and that policy and they offer they offer the Mufty of Jerusalem and the Palestinian Arabs a Palestinian state a full Palestinian state it has one problem for them

it has to have a Jewish entity in it because there are more than 400,000 Jews now in Palestine. And amazingly, the Mufty of Jerusalem rejects this offer of a full Palestinian state. Call Palestine, call the state of Palestine. And all he has to do is, all they have to do is acquiesce in the existence

of a large Jewish community within this land. And they reject it regarding that is unacceptable. It's interesting. because the word ephno state is often cited towards Israel now, but only an ephno state would be acceptable, and a large Jewish community was not acceptable in what he called the sacred Arab land of Palestine. To an interesting moment,

and the moment doesn't last long, nor does the offer, because Neville Chamberlain Falls, World War II is started, and everything is put on hold. And the Jewish community, by the way, during World War II is very threatened. There's a real possibility in 1940 that Britain will be invaded by the Nazis. There are Nazi lists of well-known British families who were to be arrested and executed. And among them are the Montefiore family and the Rothschild family, of course, and so on and so forth. And I remember my father telling me that many members of the Montefuri family had discussed what to do if the Nazis had landed.

And one of the things they decided they would do, some of them decided they would do, would be to commit suicide with their own children, with all their, with their families and children, rather than be captured by the Nazis. So it's just an interesting because one thinks that Britain was bound to define the Nazis and be on the winning side. But for the Jewish community, there was a real possibility that they wouldn't. And so, end of the war, there's a new government, the Atli government. And by now, of course, the Holocaust is known, you know, six million Jews have been killed in Europe. and there is now real call among the Palestinian Jewish community for independence. And Haviv, you've covered this many times. So we're sort of almost up to modern times.

I mean, the Attlee government has now decided to, what they call scuttle from many of the British Empire's expensive colonies. and provinces. And the biggest one they decide to scuttle from is the Indian Raj. But they also make a last ditch attempt to agree a Palestinian settlement with the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs. And they again offer in 1947 a Palestinian state, a Palestine state to the Mufdi of Jerusalem, who despite being a major colluder and promoter of the Holocaust and Nazi Hitlerite ally is still effectively the leader of the Palestinian Arabs. And they offer him a state again.

And again, from the same reasons he turns it down in 1947, in which time, Atlee and Bevin, the British leadership, says, we throw up our hands, we're going to give this to the United Nations, the new international organisation. And at the same time, Ben-Gurion and Minarkin-Begh launched the Jewish revolt against Britain, which is preventing the arrival of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust camps into Palestine. And Minarchan Began and the Urgun blow off the King David Hotel, as you know. They hang British officers.

and that leads to anti-Jewish riots in Britain in 1946. Against the British Jewish community. Against the British Jewish community, which is an interesting precursor of what we are seeing today. And, but as you know, they are short-lived episodes.

And in 1948, you know, the British, the British scutters. from Palestine and Israel is established. Initially, Britain is very, I'd say, hostile to Israel. And Israel is extremely suspicious of Britain for obvious reasons. Since really Israel was created in an anti-imperialist anti-British revolt, which is often forgotten today. And, you know, it's only in 1956 that Britain

becomes a sort of ally of Israel with the sewers countenade. The whole history, the whole story is extraordinary because the Arabs often talk about Israel being founded by the British to serve British imperial interests. The Jewish memory of all of that period was that everything the British did. Of course the Zionist tried to influence the British people. policy, use British imperial power to serve their agenda, their needs, their desperate need to create a refuge. This is Ben-Gurion is a man seized by desperation at the terrible fate that he thinks await

the Jews of Europe, a view of what was about to happen that begins with Herzl. That's right. Even before Herzl. But the Jewish memory of it is that the British Empire, everything it did for the Jews, never mind against the Jews, were evidence of it. the need for Jewish self-reliance, for Jewish ability to control our situation. For example, the Kinder Transport, which was this great act of moral, you know, kindness and generosity, except that all those kids were orphaned, right?

10,000 kids, I think it was, allowed into Britain because war is coming that could be so catastrophic that we have to take in these 10,000 kids so they don't die. But the condition we nevertheless place on taking in the kids is that we don't take in their parents because we're not letting Jews in. So the British decision was to rescue kids on the condition that those kids would be orphaned. And the vast, vast majority of the parents who stayed behind were killed. And every year now, Britain celebrates the great moment of its great generosity and kindness in the Kinder transport. The Jews remember that as a great symbol of never-referial. relying on someone else, a vulnerability of desperate need.

And it's true in, you know, 1930. When does the British Empire turn on Zionism? I mean, really, at the gates. At the gates of Auschwitz. Yes, it did. 1939. In 1939. So it's like, you know, yes, okay, we, every small people will use every imperial

power they can get their hands on. It's not like the Arabs weren't turning to the Ottomans, turning to the Russians, turning to anyone they could over the course of this history. but the idea that we are the arm of some kind of imperial project when in fact at the key moments it always backfired and in the end only self-reliance works and of course when the British public is angered at what the Jews are doing over in Palestine riots against the Jews. It is an extraordinary moment of clarity but also of how different things can look to different people the same set of facts can just lead to very different conclusions.

Let's bring it up to the present. What does the post-war period look like for British Jews? There's obviously the deconstruction of empire, the British welfare state is built out. The Jewish community continues to grow. What does all that look like? It's the golden age of Jews in Britain. Really from my, maybe.

from 1948, we should say, but maybe after 1945, it's a golden age. It's, you know, you've got this, you've got this amazing influx of Jewish refugees from Germany and from Austria. You know, people like Isaiah Berlin, Lord George Weidenfeld, who founded the publisher, you have this, you have an amazing, you have an acceptance of Jews in British society. and again, you know, they all looked to the royal families particularly. There were Jews in both, they were Jews were pretty, many Jews were socialists, in fact, and were members of the Labour Party at this time.

And you have a great sort of, you have a great prosperity and success that really comes all the way through to two years ago, three years ago. And, you know, you have these, you have, again, you have, you know, many Jewish cabinet ministers. They're represented in the, they're represented in the arts. They're represented in business. They're represented in business. It's still a tiny community, 200, 250,000 people out of 60 million.

And it's a golden age. And, you know, it goes right. Totally comfortable. It's comfortable. Totally. It's tolerant. It's integrated. It's very.

I listen to some British Jewish comedians. They don't sound like. like being Jewish is something exceptional that they have to grapple with in their day-to-day life. And then we come to October 7, or does it precede October 7? Something has changed. There's something earlier, which I think happens. And in this case, I think it's something that's in common with the discourse in universities across the Western world.

And so here's a point where this is, you have this, you have this Anglo-Jewish communities, call ourselves. And it's extremely patriotic, extremely English. We sound English. We live English. There are areas like Golders of Green and in Manchester where there are Orthodox Jewish communities live in what are known as Jewish areas. But there are also a lot of Jews like myself. We don't live in a Jewish area, but are very proudly British and Jewish. And that's how we regard ourselves. and that is completely unchallenged from really from the end of those small riots in the mid-40s to October the 7th.

But as in exactly as in America, there are, in the universities, particularly universities like London University, for example, which ironically, many of the colleges there were founded as colleges where Jews would be acceptable, Jews and nonconformists would be, could study when they were banned from being at Oxford and Cambridge. These very, what were then called progressive universities, an ideology of decolonization was becoming extremely fashionable, exactly like in America and in fact influenced by America. And it really, I think it really started, of course you can go back to the 60s and look at the real, real

decolonization and the new radicalism, Mukawama of resistance in the Arab world, but also, you know, extreme radicalism in Western universities, in its most extreme, in its most extreme, Red Brigades and Bartem Meinhof and all of that. But that's really dormant. And in the early 2000s,

you're at the beginning of this new decolonization movement in much. which the world is divided into goodies and baddies to oppressors. And the oppressors are white settler colonialists who are engaged in the destruction of indigenous peoples. And it comes from, as you know, and I think you've discussed a lot, it comes from originally from Australian academics looking at Australian colonization. It's immediately applied through a new journal founded in 1999, the Journal of Genocide Studies, and it's immediately applied and focused on the case of Israel. And there is an under, there's a, without us re-realizing it,

and people like me knew about this and saw it in universities and just thought this was just a sort of, a sort of, a sort of slightly demented radical fetish, anti-Israel fetish that really belonged in a small amount of, in a small number of radical professors in the academy. And, you know, not for a moment did I think that this would explode into becoming, you know, a movement among, among many young people and many professors across the Western world. And, but the worst signs of this, and this was when Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader in, I think, 2016 or around and I forget the exact date now even though I should remember it well at that moment for the first time the Labour Party which is you know one of the two main

parties in Britain was suddenly captured by a radical entriist group of progressives as they were called who who treated who have who have treated Jews as outriders for Zionism and who believed that the Jews were a wealthy white community, who therefore could not face racism themselves and who in fact were extremely suspect because of their economic opposition and their alliance to Zionism in Israel. And so this was this was immediately recognized as real anti-Semitism. And in fact, the fight against Jeremy Corbyn, I mean, partly he was extremely anti-unpatriotic. He always supported anti-Western dictatorships, you know, Putin or...

Hamas and Hezbollah. And Iran. And Iran. Yeah. And he always supported those against the evil West and the evil America. And part of it was. anti-Americanism. But a lot of it was a strong strain of anti-Semitism was recognized within this movement. And that was the first we'd heard of this idea that the Jews couldn't be,

couldn't be anti-Jewish racism because Jews were rich and white. And this concept was completely new to us and was extremely alarming, particularly since, you know, it's completely a-historical. And in fact, this whole kind of ideology rests on a completely a factual, a historical approach, which is alarming. And I think its greatest danger is not only to the security of Jews, but actually to as to British society, you know, societies that don't recognize and don't respect facts, sources, history, and accept fabrications and conspiracies. societies like that ultimately fail. And so that is one part of where we are today. But what we saw on the day after October 7th was this movement re-surged.

You know, Corbyn had lost the general elections, been removed from the Labour Party. And the Labour Party had purged itself of its more notorious anti-semites. And it seemed like that that battle was over and won, how wrong we were. And then October 7th, you saw this movement burst out of the universities

and into the streets, and in an alliance of radical decolonialized ideologues, and in an alliance with ultra-Islamists from amid the four million strong Islamic community, much of which, by the way, is assimilated, patriotic and thrilled to be in Britain, but there is also a strong minority, I hope it's a minority, who are supportive of Islamism within Britain. And this alliance, I say it's an unholy alliance.

In fact, the movement is a sort of really a post-Christian religious moral movement, a sort of moral hysteria. But that immediately exploded after October the 7th in demonstrations calling for globalized the interfaida, for calling Israel genocide, and for calling British Jews who was, supportive of Israel, genocidal supporters. And out of that came a series of Kalamazza libels in demonstrations that, you know, Israel was a genocidal baby-killing organization embarking on an attempt to exterminate the Palestinian people.

while also pretending that the Hamas attacks in October 7th had not happened at all, and that the war in Gaza was actually just a massacre, not a war against, not an extremely, sadly brutal war against an extremely well-armed and ruthless armed on militia. So that's what happened. And I think British Jews then very quickly started to, feel a change in their position here. And suddenly for the first time since in this golden age of being Jewish and Britain, which I said it really started in 45, but really it started much earlier.

It really started in the 1850s. And it went, started in the 8050s and it lasted right until 2023. And suddenly then you start to feel that Jews are being looked at differently. Jews are being challenged in the arts, in politics, on the streets, in their areas, and the effect of these calumnies and liables. When you're really accusing Jews of these demonstrations now happening every week and accusing Jews of being party to cosmic evil, to cosmic evil, suddenly starts to rebound on Jews.

And suddenly you find that, you know, Jewish synagogues have to be, have to be effectively armed into fortresses, Jewish schools, fortresses with high walls and guards all the time. In the 60s, a tough British Jewish businessman, Gerald Ronson, had created the Community Security Trust to protect Jewish community building. schools, synagogues, etc, etc. And it was always a kind of, it was essential because, you know, there were terrorism against Jews in Britain, but it was very minor.

By the time you get to, by the time you get to the Jeremy Corbyn era, suddenly there is a real danger to Jewish buildings and to Jewish community. And after 2023, after October 7th, The Jewish community, remember how tiny it is, 250,000 people roughly, give or take, out of 70 million people. This community is suddenly battening down the hatches. You know, it's going to synagogue.

You have to go through metal detectors, go through guards. The British government backs the CST, this community, which we have. I don't know what your equivalence is in America, but we have this amazing organization. which once seemed kind of, you know, since like slightly necessary, but not that important. Now it's absolutely central to Jewish life and Britain, this security trust, still run by the great Sir Gerald Ronson, who is now and is now an optogenarium. But, you know, this organisation is now completely central. And as the two and a half years or three years since 2023 roll on with,

every week these demonstrations accusing Jews of cosmic evil, of genocide, of baby killing, of blood drinking, and these calls for globalized the interfaida and from the river to the sea, suddenly you see that these marches are being deliberately fueled past synagogues. And the police in Britain are quite innocent compared with, you know, know, the police in America, for example. And they're also... What do you mean innocent? They're innocent in the sense that they've kind of...

They've been politicized to the extent in anti-racial ideology and multiculturalism that they cannot believe that a minority of any sort could ever reveal malicious behavior to anybody. And, you know, there are all sorts of cases of Britain where we see that this has now, this view has now been radically challenged by events. And the Metropolitan Police and the Manchester police now have had to become, suddenly, change their approaches. By the way, British security forces and the British anti-terrorists of forces within these police forces have always been extremely good, by the way, and are not innocent, are in fact, you know, coldly realistic and an expert at stopping attacks by Islamists, few of which have got through. But what they weren't good at understanding

was how these demonstrations, some of which were, some of these demonstrators, of course, were humanitarians rightly criticizing Israel for things that Israel should be criticized for, and there's much to criticize in Israel as we know. But they were very slow to realize that a large part of these demonstrations were hate marches, accusing Jews of cosmic evil and really inciting rage and hatred and violence against Jews. They couldn't attack Israel, but they could attack Jews who were here. And those attacks then started. inevitably, if you accuse people of,

if you accuse an entire people of killing babies and drinking their blood effectively, in the end, fanatics and sort of vulnerable people in those communities will attack them, and that is exactly what's happened. And so we have attacks by Islamists against Jewish communities, and we have the killing in the Heaton Park Synagogue at Yon Kippur.

We have the bombing of Jewish ambulances, the Hatzala ambulances in North London. We have the stabbings of Jews in Gold's Green just the other day. And everywhere, we have attacks on Jewish buildings, threats against Jewish people, school children being threatened. And the government has been very very... slow, has been very slow at really recognizing this and doing anything about it. But what we've realized, and I know we've been talking a long time, so we must end this. But what's happened is a huge change in the Jewish awareness, of Anglo-Jews, of who they are and where they are,

for 150 years, more than 150 years, for 170 years, for 170 years, British Jews were the luckiest Jews in the world. We are still really grateful to be here. We still have many friends and allies. And we still have the majority of the Jewish people, the majority of the British people, who are extremely, I'd say, pro-Jewish and sympathetic to the dangers that Jews are now facing.

But we also have to realize that the Golden Age is over. and when you have tens of thousands of people walking through Jewish cities, threatening Jewish communities on a weekly basis, then you have to realize the Golden Age is over and we are a small Jewish community in a large high population and we have to adapt to where we are today. I want to finish with one very brief question, given the attacks, given the marches, I keep telling people, just think about those marches a moment, sit with them. They are totally unprecedented in the history of marches, of British marches, in Brazil, in the United States, and Amsterdam.

Everywhere they have been, these marches over the Gaza War are totally unprecedented. And that means something because not even while the Gaza War was underway, was the Gaza War the worst war underway, including wars funded by the West with Western allies and Western weapons. And so there's something here that isn't about specifically Gaza. It's about the countries where the marches are happening. It is an anti-Western argument. It is a civilization argument.

It is an elite competition thing happening. So much is happening here that isn't just critique of the Gaza war. And the vocabulary being used is the Jews. The Jews are the way to talk about so many other things that people are trying to advance. And the violence is beginning. One of the extraordinary themes that came out in everything you have said over this conversation is that the Jews have always sought to contribute tremendously as much as they could. They tended to be corralled by literally British law into financial professions,

and that was their contribution, but it was an immense contribution. And they were loyal and patriotic, and as soon as they could become part of Parliament and the House of Lords and the elites, They thrilled to the chance and being British meant to British Jews, something very profound, something very profound in their identity. And always, always, always, until the 1850s. And maybe a little bit after the 1850s as well, but certainly you could say the 1850s begins a trend to the other direction.

Always they discover that it was all conditional, that it was all temporary, that it was all temporary, that it was all until the next great crisis. Britain is now going through a very great crisis. It's not quite a crisis of immigration. Maybe it's a crisis of integration. Maybe it's a crisis of identity. It's some sort of crisis. The left and the right are debating and arguing about this,

but there's no question that there's a sense of urgency to it. And in this moment of deep crisis, the Jews are the vocabulary somehow. And whether or not the immigration is happening or not, the violence ends up being about Jews. It's been a period of extraordinary patriots. It's been a period of extraordinary integration and extraordinary loyalty and extraordinary gratitude by British Jews for being British. Is it conditional again?

What's the future look like? Are we back? You just said something has changed where, you know, the golden age has ended. What does the golden age ending mean? Do British Jews have a future in Britain? There are, by the way, options today. Obviously, I'm talking about Israel. But I'm also talking about the United States.

There are ways and places to go easily, more easily than in the past. Has Britain once again swung back that pendulum to the conditionality of Jews, the fragility of Jewish life? Do you think the future for British Jews is healthy and happy? Well, I think that we're seeing a backlash against this in part. And I think you'll see the king, for example, Charles III, has. has, he, he, he, he offered to become, you know, the patron of the community security trust. The, the government has, you know, he's bringing in measures against these, these, terrorism and hate marches. The Metropolitan Police just put out a statement yesterday or today,

even, you know, really admitting that these are hate marches that threaten Jewish communities. So I do think that most of British society is sympathetic to Jews. But the question is, will they do enough about it? I think that for most Jews I speak to, they are talking about things. Like should we have a muzzuzza? Should we wear our star of David? Most of the attacks are against Jews who are recognizably Jewish. and where Kippa and so on.

But most Jews are now beginning to wonder, how Jewish can we be in Britain? But I think very few Jews are really discussing whether to leave Britain. And very few Jews are really discussed. I mean, they say it. And there is a regular conversation over Jewish family tables in Britain now.

Where would we go? I mean, I have not met a Jew in Britain who has not asked that. question, by the way, even in a slightly kind of, even in a slightly humorous manner, as Jews do, where would we go? And so definitely British Jews are asking that question. And definitely I think that Jews still have a future in Britain and I am certainly planning to stay here and I want to stay here and I love Britain and I'm a patriot. But that said, the world is darkening.

simon sibeg montefiori thank you so much for joining me this was absolutely fascinating and unfortunately we're giving context to darkening times maybe context gives strength thank you very much for coming on thanks for having me love it to see you