The benefits of learning Jewish history
The other day I saw a tweet by Stephen Pollard, former editor of London’s Jewish Chronicle, columnist, TV personality and Zionist — no, not the one complaining about all the ads on dating websites saying “no Zionists” since some mysterious event that started around last autumn, but one commenting on Gary Lineker’s departure from the BBC’s Match of the Day programme. It said “Wishing Gary Lineker well in his new role as Emeritus Professor of Jewish History at Qatar University”. Lineker is not leaving immediately; he has said he will step down after covering the current Premier League season (which finishes next May) and then cover the forthcoming FA and World Cups, which will keep him at the BBC until the summer of 2026. Lineker left school with four O-levels (one of two predecessors to the GCSE exam), so I very much doubt he will be taking up a professorship in anything but, perhaps, football. An honorary doctorate may beckon, maybe from Leicester university. But the tweet was intended as a taunt, but in an age where accusations of antisemitism are used to slap anyone down who challenges Israel’s right to oppress or massacre Palestinians, learning a bit of Jewish history is essential to answering these claims.
I studied politics and history at what is now Aberystwyth University (then the University of Wales) in the 1990s and did a module on Jewish history in my second year, under Professor William Rubinstein, who died earlier this year. I asked Rubinstein about his politics and he told me that he supported the peace process, as a lot of people did at the time as hopes in it were high then, but had been a Likud supporter in the 1980s. He was, by his own admission, quite right-wing and nobody would accuse him of being a “self-hating Jew”. But he taught the history of the Jews of Europe focussing on the period from the 18th to the mid-20th century, through the Tsarist persecutions, the migration to North America and western Europe, Zionism and the Holocaust. This includes the development of anti-Jewish prejudice from being religiously-based, from societies defined as Christian and the Jew perceived at best as foreign, as regarding their home as the Middle East rather than Europe, and at worst as the rejectors or even killers of Jesus Christ, peace be upon him, through to the race-based antisemitism and conspiracy theories of the 19th century onwards. I don’t recall feeling that I was being preached to although other students did complain about him; one student accused him of presenting opinion as fact.
He taught us about pogroms. He taught us about the blood libel. These are phrases that are bandied around a lot nowadays, often by people who know what these terms mean but count on their audience not knowing. The blood libel involves using the blood of Christian children as a food ingredient for Passover, so not every claim of Jews killing non-Jews (especially in Gaza where most Palestinians are Muslim, not Christian) is a blood libel, and if there is video evidence, it’s not a libel at all. A pogrom (the term originates in Tsarist Russia, where such attacks on Jews were a frequent occurrence) is not a fight; it’s an organised mob attack on a community (not, say, a group of football hooligans) in which the state is often either involved or looks the other way. Jewish conspiracy theories (such as found in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion) were about large, global conspiracies which control or spearhead multiple opposing ideologies; they do not include any accusation of political corruption or collusion involving a group of Jews. Anyone who has studied the history of antisemitism will know that an awful lot of recent accusations of it bear no resemblance to the real thing, nor to anything that would be called racism if it was about any other group.
The two books I studied from were The Course of Modern Jewish History by Howard M Sachar, which is readily available in both print and E-book, and The Jew in the Modern World by Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, which is available secondhand fairly cheaply on Amazon or in a ridiculously expensive newer edition from Oxford University Press. The latter is a collection of texts depicting the development of European Jewry from the 18th to the 20th century, some written by Jews, others by non-Jews including samples of the antisemitism of various times, including racist tracts and examples of anti-Jewish legislation. I didn’t pursue it after I finished that course, so I couldn’t recommend any shorter books than those two that would be useful to anyone looking for an overview of the history rather than to actually study it in depth. But an understanding of the history is vital for anyone advocating for Palestinian rights, or for Muslims’ rights in modern western society where Zionists routinely profess to be triggered by the mere reminder that Arabs, and especially Palestinians, exist and that other points of view exist than theirs.
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