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…
Eighty years ago, synagogues in Germany burned. It was Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass — a turning point in National Socialism’s war on the Jews, when Hitler ordered a state-sponsored assault on its Jewish minority, the first step on the road to Auschwitz. A powerful JC editorial commented: “It is the culmination of a process which…
75 years ago, Hitler sent a message to his representative in Copenhagen instructing him to rid Denmark of its 8,000-strong Jewish community. “The Jewish Campaign” was scheduled to begin on Rosh Hashanah 5704 — 1 October 1943. Danish Jews would be rounded up, incarcerated and “deported to the East”. Danish resistance to the German occupation…
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 Simon Schama’s Belonging: A History of the Jews 1492-1900 Published by the Bodley Head, 800pp, £25 Simon Schama is a teller ofhistorical tales par excellence. As a professor of art history, the long and multilayered history of the Jews lends itself to his expertise. He captures vignettes of forgotten events and paints a…
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’…
In this well-researched and insightful book, British biographer Caroline Moorehead traces the transition of Italy’s pre-1914 liberalism to Mussolini’s Fascist utopia through the beliefs and actions of the Rosselli family and its matriarch, Amelia Pincherle. A Bold and Dangerous Family: One Family’s Fight against Italian Fascism, tells the story of a family who was proud…
Review of Mark Mazower’s What You Did Not Tell: A Russian Past and the Journey Home (Other Press 2017) pp. 400 Mark Mazower’s latest book, What You Did Not Tell: A Russian Past and the Journey Home, is a descriptive voyage of his family’s journey. Mazower’s discoveries are made all the more interesting because…
Review of Jews and Leftist Politics: Judaism, Israel, Anti-Semitism and Gender ed. Jack Jacobs (Cambridge 2017) pp.374 This important book is based on an international conference on Jews and the Left held in New York in 2012. As the subtitle denotes, the chapters explore questions of religion, Zionism, anti-Semitism, Marxism and Soviet Communism and contain some remarkable…