Forty years ago, the Iranian revolution was reaching its zenith. 1978 had been marked by demonstrations and a massacre of protesters in Tehran’s Jaleh Square in September. By mid-January 1979, the Shah had gone into exile and the Queen’s visit to Iran in the royal yacht, Britannia, had been abruptly cancelled. On 1 February, the Ayatollah…
The figure of Menasseh ben Israel holds a special place in the hearts of many British Jews. He is regarded as the central advocate in pleading the case to the leaders of the English republic in 1656 to readmit the Jews into the country. A leading Sephardi rabbi in Amsterdam, he spent two frustrating years…
TWO HUNDRED and thirty years ago a small wooden flotilla sailed into Sydney Cove. This First Fleet of 1788 consisted of two warships and three store vessels which contained sheep, cattle and horses plus enough provisions for two years. Its most important cargo was contained in six transportation ships — 789 convicts from Britain accompanied…
At the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the First World War came to an end. Among the vast number of casualties, it had cost the lives of 3,500 British Jews and 12,000 German Jews. It had uprooted millions, demolished great empires and destroyed the ordered worlds of so…
Review of In Search of Israel: The History of an Idea by Michael Brenner, published by Princeton University Press, pp. 372 The renowned sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, a refugee from the anti-Semitic campaign in Communist Poland during the 1960s and subsequently a professor at the University of Leeds, popularised the term ‘allosemitism’. It depicted the ‘otherness’…
Review of Paul Bogdanor’s Kasztner’s Crime (Transaction 2016) pp. 323 Paul Bogdanor has penned a well-researched book on the contentious Kasztner affair – a controversy that commenced in wartime Hungary and has continued until the present day. In the summer of 1944, a minor Jewish figure, Rudolf Kasztner, negotiated with Adolf Eichmann in the…
Oswald Mosley instituted antisemitism as the official policy of the British Union of Fascists only in 1934, some two years after its formation. The annual report of the Board of Deputies for 1932 stated that Mosley had informed the Board that antisemitism formed “no part of the BUF’s policy”. Yet at a BUF meeting a…
”I have no doubts that Wallenberg was liquidated in 1947.” So noted the newly emerged diary of Ivan Serov, head of the KGB between 1954 and 1958 during the post-Stalinist thaw, regarding the fate of the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews in wartime Budapest. It seemed to confirm that Raoul Wallenberg had not…
‘For some people, life was split in two on June 22 1941, for some on September 3 1939 and for others on July 18 1936.’ So wrote the Soviet Jewish writer, Ilya Ehrenburg about the start of war against Nazi Germany. Ninety-nine year old Ubby Cowen in his nursing home in Golders Green remembers that…
In May 1926, a Jewish watchmaker approached a middle-aged man sporting a cane and attending his favourite restaurant in the Rue Racine in Paris. The watchmaker asked the man his name and, after hearing the response, pumped five bullets into him, adding two more as he lay dying on the pavement. The dead man was…