Britain’s Last Anti-Jewish Riots
Encouraged by sensationalist tabloid reporting of events in the middle east, racists riot on the streets, using nazi symbols and language - sound familiar?
British politicians, too, were keen to sweep things under the carpet. James Chuter Ede, the postwar home secretary, dismissed the rioting as mere “hooliganism … rather than an indication of public feeling”, while magistrates condemned rioters as “un-British” and “unpatriotic”. Nations need their feel-good stories and as Rich points out, “The thought that those popular anti-Jewish riots could happen two years after the Holocaust in Britain … runs counter to the anti-fascist mythology of Britain’s role in the war. Who wants to go digging that up?”
Yet the riots were neither an aberration nor the product of an unruly working class. Britain was experiencing an identity crisis: it had won the war but appeared to be losing the peace, with recession at home and the break-up of its empire abroad, in which the events in Mandate Palestine played only a small part. As colonised peoples increasingly demanded independence, Britain turned to a more inward-looking nationalism. Along with it came the question of who would be included and who would be left out.
In 1948, with cross-party support, the Labour government passed the British Nationality Act, marking a shift from a situation where all those living in the empire - in theory, although quite evidently not in practice - were equal subjects under the Crown to one where each country in the Commonwealth could determine its own version of citizenship. Although in the years to come it would be non-white immigrants from the Commonwealth who would most strongly challenge received notions of Englishness and Britishness and who would bear the brunt of racism, Jews, too, were caught up in this, for a brief period.
There is one other reason why this episode is worth remembering. On the face of it, there are striking similarities with the way modern Britain has responded to Islamist-inspired terror. Now, as then, events in the Middle East have violent repercussions on Britain’s streets. Home-grown terrorists have set off bombs in London; tabloid newspapers give sensationalist coverage to attacks on “our boys” fighting abroad and question the loyalty of British people of a different faith, this time Muslims. This in turn has provoked an angry backlash in the form of the far-right English Defence League.
At the same time, ‘integration’ is a demand made of outsiders to adopt ‘our’ values, to become more like us. In doing so, some of today’s integrationists hold up British Jews as a kind of ‘model community’. In 2006 at a ceremony to commemorate the 350th anniversary of Cromwell’s readmission of the Jews into England, Tony Blair told a congregation at Bevis Marks Synagogue: ‘As the oldest minority faith community in this country, you show how identity through faith can be combined with a deep loyalty to our nation.’ Less was said about how we arrived at this point.