IS JEWISHNESS JUST A PERVERSION OF IDENTITY?

Trouble in the leafy shtetl of Golders Green

by Colin Liddell

A little mind experiment (not my actual family history btw):

My ancestors came down from the Highlands and moved to London around 120 years ago. For three or four generations my people have now been living in the leafy London suburb of, say, Cricklewood, but in all that time we have made it a point to marry only with other people who have "come down from the Highlands" (although occasionally it hasn't worked out). We have also made it a point to walk around in our tartan kilts, mumble to ourselves in Gaelic, and occasionally hunt deer in Richmond Park. 

Probably, and quite rightly, you would think that there was something deeply wrong with us; something much worse than mere eccentricity. Some of you might see us as suffering from a collective form of insanity. 

The reason you think this is because assimilation is a relatively natural and rapid process—or should be once you move between the generations—unless there are specific hard barriers stopping it happening.

Why then does Britain even have a "Jewish community" like the one in Golders Green that is now in the news? After all this is mainly made up of people who came here several generations ago!

We have been reminded of this community's existence once again, following the frankly hysterical response to a relatively minor stabbing incident in which no one died. London, it should be emphasised, has around 17,000 stabbing-related incidents a year.

One week after this attack, it is still dominating the UK news with the Prime Minister taking time out from his forthcoming electoral apocalypse to hold an "Anti-Semitism Summit." In fact, the prolonged and artificial prominence in the news of this story is now actually provoking additional attacks, possibly by anti-Semites, possibly by malicious state actors who see this as a cheap way to throw Britain into confusion.

Reception committee for Sir Keir "Himmler" Starmer

But back to the main point, why does Britain even have a "Jewish community" at all? It's not like they are recent migrants unable to speak the language, or radically different in racial appearance. Shave off the beards and take off the kippahs and you wouldn't know them from the Welsh. 

Is it because London, like medieval Eastern Europe, makes it impossible for Jews who emigrated to the UK several generations ago to "blend in" and be English? Of course not!

So what is the answer? Why do so many Jews still cling to Jewishness, when all Jewishness means is a stubborn refusal to blend in and accept the collective identity of what is probably the most tolerant and accepting society in the World?

Of course, over the years, many Jews have indeed accepted Englishness as their identity and allowed their Jewishness to naturally lapse, but what about those that don't? 

You will be told that it's a religious thing. They are Jews and walk about being ostensibly Jewish because they believe in "Yahweh" (or whatever the Ancient Semitic Moon God's name is).

But this is ass-backwards, as the Americans like to say. The "being a religious Jew" thing is downstream from the "refusal to assimilate to jolly old England" thing. We can be sure of this because almost all Jews are too high IQ to believe in a lot of falsified Biblical and Talmudic claptrap. 

I would feel some sympathy for these obvious anti-assimilators if no such thing as the state of Israel existed. In that case, you could claim that they were a "homeless people," hoping one day to go home, and temporarily trapped in alien England, because their own land had been wiped off the face of the Earth (by the Romans), and that, as soon as it was recreated, they would need all their carefully preserved "Jewishness" to go there and get things going again.

That would at least be the logic of that position.

But we all know what happened in 1948, right? The existence of Israeli and an Israeli identity effectively supersedes, negates, or substitutes a Jewish identity.

It's right there, next to the bomb-craters of Lebanon and Gaza, if you want to go on being "Jewish." You can't miss it. Or, if you want to stay generation-on-generation in England/America/France/Australia, etc. there are perfectly good identities there to assume.

Actually, I might have to take part of that back, because becoming "American" would give me pause for thought too, even after several generations. But, hey, that's a detail. To stick to the main point, if you have Israelis, you really shouldn't have Jews (except as a synonym for Israelis). Yet we still have them, generation-after-generation in England and other places in the West, and even in places like Iran. And while many do indeed blend in and escape what is an extraneous identity, a great many don't.

Is it a victim cult, a mutual backscratching network, or is it just a perversion of that thing called "identity," without which, we are told, all humans would just turn into shapeless blobs or clouds of transient dust?

___________________________________

Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying his book here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia), or by taking out a paid subscription on his Substack.

Follow on Twitter and Bluesky