On Safety

Sam Wagman’s reflection on Jewish safety, identity, and belonging, made all the more urgent in light of today’s attack on the Jewish community in north-west London.

“We did not know, but our fathers told us how the exiles of Israel came to the land of Polin (Poland). When Israel saw how its sufferings were constantly renewed, oppression increased, persecutions multiplied, and how the evil authorities piled decree on decree and followed expulsion with expulsion, until there was no relief for Israel, they went out on the road and sought an answer from the paths of the wide world—which is the correct road to take to find rest for one's soul. Then a piece of paper fell from heaven:

Go to Polaniya (Poland)!

So they came to the land of Polin and they gave a mountain of gold to the king, and he received them with great honour. And God had mercy on them, so that they found favour with the king and the nobles. And the king gave them permission to reside in all the lands of his kingdom, to trade over its length and breadth, and to serve God according to the precepts of their religion. And the king protected them against every foe and enemy.

And Israel lived in Polin in tranquillity for a long time. They devoted themselves to trade and handicrafts. And God sent a blessing on them so that they were blessed in the land, and their name was exalted among the peoples…

…When they first arrived from the land of the Franks, they found a forest in the land, and on every tree a tractate of the Talmud was carved.”

Attributed to a selihah delivered by Rabbi Moshe Katz Narol, 17th Century

We hear it every Pesach; that in every generation there are those who rise up in an effort to destroy the Jewish people. We see it etched throughout our history: Shoah, Inquisition, Intifada. Words imprinted on the collective Jewish soul, seared in memory and repeated around dinner tables. There’s no radical idea in conceding that Jewish diasporic culture is centred around a history of persecution and struggle; our literature is borne around death, our humour forged in crisis, and our foods created out of necessity.

Yet, our past also shows us the hope, perhaps retrospectively naïve, that persists in each new land we arrive in. The furriers of East London and the taverners of Galicia clung to the prospect of opportunity in the landscapes they would come to call home. As Rabbi Narol articulated, in Polin we found “on every tree a tractate of the Talmud was carved.” The ability to forge a sense of home and place in every earthly corner we find ourselves in is our rebuttal to persecution. The creation of safety, fragile and disjointed, is the hallmark of our nomadic nation, ferried across borders and continents, maimed and murdered. We carry sacred texts and precepts; we carry a belief that this next place, our next Polaniya, will be our salvation.

As 21st-century British Jews, our lives have been dictated by this safety: the ability to recount the family politics of a Seder to your Christian neighbour; to explain how a shiva works to your atheist colleagues; to moan and relate about Jewish guilt with your Irish flatmate. This was our safety, dragged out of the shadow of Cable Street and made gilded by our community’s successes. That idea of a constructed safety came with us from the Pale of Settlement and was realised by both our determination to make Britain our home and the gradual welcome of our new compatriots. We were raised as proud north-west Londoners, Mancunians, as British Jews.

October 7th is pinpointed as a moment of profound change in our relationship to our adopted land of milk and honey. A moment of conscious re-evaluation of our surroundings; when the walls went up around a new, ephemeral ghetto. But the past 20 years have been marked by the sliding descent into a more guarded reality. There are the security-manned gates outside our schools and the CST watchmen spread out in the streets bordering our synagogues. There have been the warnings, yearly shots across the bow, to hide your kippahs and Stars of David. The incipient gangrene of a conditional existence, a fortified existence, has been present in our lives far longer than we credit it. October 7th, to anyone paying attention, did not represent a watershed so much as a closing salvo.

For young people, this represents a familiar conundrum. Abraham Rotfarb, a young man writing from Warsaw in the 1930s:
“I have also become a Pole. I love Poland…But I do not love that Poland which, for no apparent reason, hates me…Poland has taken away my happiness…Poland has brought me up as a Pole, but brands me a Jew who has to be driven out.”

It’s difficult not to draw parallels with the existential question facing young British Jews today. To be brought up by naturalised British parents, taught in schools funded by the British state and learning the value of a distinctly British identity, all the while sensing the emergent hostility of that very society. To be brought up as a Brit, to be branded as a Jew. What constitutes safety when the rabid dog no longer claws at the door, but barks from inside our home?

It’s a question that strikes at the very core of our constructed safety. Antisemitism is not an entity we’re unfamiliar with; it’s not something we’re unaccustomed to. The occasional shout on the way to our synagogue or the graffiti of a public toilet is an accepted part of our lived experience. But when it travels further, when it digs deeper and more profoundly into our established ways of coping with an adverse world, what does safety mean then? Is it higher walls, greater security, focused vigilance? When our children fear walking the streets, has the scaffolding already collapsed in on itself?

There’s a world in which the words Heaton Park, Finchley Reform, and Kenton United are blips in the story of British Jewry; reminders of a fragile safety and a story we tell our children from Friday night dinner tables. That they laugh at the thought of a Britain that resented their presence, their incredulity carrying through candlelight onto Mill Hill Broadway.

And there’s a different world, a future in which the word safety came to mean a dogged survival. Where safety no longer meant the freedom to worship and practise faith together, to converse on the street and walk to Jewish schools. Where safety simply means the absence of violence; a pitiful subsistence on the dregs of goodwill. A world where our children ask us when we can leave rather than if they can stay.

As the British Jews we were raised to be, there falls a pressing decision. To be swept away by the tide of fear and insecurity that has plagued us a thousand times before. Or to push against the current, to fight for the safety we came up in; to wish that world of ghost stories and incredulity into existence. Safety is not an infinite resource but a practised tradition, a luxury we must work for. Our forebears brought it with them as a remnant of a bygone society and moulded it into the fabric of our lives. It is our duty to fight for its preservation, not to throw the towel in or compromise their ideals into a bastardised exercise in endurance. To fight for a real and lasting safety, a doykeit [hereness] embedded in British soil.

Jula Wald, another young person writing from Poland in the 1930s, described her passion for the sight of her people in Polin, in spite of the cresting wave of antisemitism:
“Was I supposed willingly to give up this sight which gives me such a wonderful feeling? Oh no, never!”

N.B.: Since first writing this piece, there have been further attacks on British Jewry: an arson attack on a memorial wall for victims of the Iranian regime and Hamas, an arson attack on a Jewish-owned shop in Watford, and the stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green.