Last month I was asked to be one of the first “signatories” of the October Declaration, which has to date been signed by 130,000 others including Tom Stoppard, Liz Truss and Richard Dawkins. This open letter condemns all acts of terrorism against civilians in Israel on October 7.
I agreed with everything in the letter, hosted by the British Friends of Israel. I too find it sickening that Hamas’s attacks led to a spike in anti-Semitism from the playgrounds of Jewish schools in Hendon to the tarmac of Dagestan airport, and am also discouraged by the way that London is splitting into two tribes.
One (Jewish) writer I know is so intimidated by the sulphurous mood — made worse by people endlessly WhatsApping each other shattering videos from Israel/Gaza, New Yorker/Ha’aretz pieces and the appalling images from the strip — that she will not walk even the quiet streets of Notting Hill without her husband and large dog as security detail.
As I’ve written previously, I don’t think it helps to pick sides. I use my name and the fact that I have Jewish, Muslim and Christian grandparents as cover here.
Rachel is Hebrew (it means sacrificial ewe lamb). Sabiha is Arabic (it means dawn). Johnson means — forget it. Johnson is not really my name anyway, as my paternal grandfather was born Osman Ali, and a Muslim, and only became Wilfred Johnson — a decorated RAF pilot and a Exmoor hill farmer — after he was orphaned.
We can hold these feelings at the same time — that we hate Hamas and we hate seeing Gaza turned to dust
I think we can hold both these feelings at the same time — that we hate Hamas and we hate seeing Gaza turned to dust. It doesn’t have to be either-or. It can be both-and. So that day I sent a polite note to my old friend Toby Young explaining why I wasn’t going to sign his Declaration. I was a British Friend of Israel and Palestine, I said, explaining my conveniently Abrahamic forefathers.
And then, you know what? I felt like a heel. A coward. I felt I was denying my roots, and that my decision was an act of anti-Semitism in itself. I am not a Jew. But I am Jew-ish. After all, partly thanks to the wonderful researchers of Who Do You Think You Are (they did Boris a few years back), I know that my great-grandfather Elias Lowe was born in Moscow and emigrated to New York aged 12 in 1891, for the usual reasons.
The researchers found cuttings from The Times for the months before the family fled. One piece, datelined Moscow, was headlined: “The Persecution of the Jews” and detailed the expulsions, pogroms, and edicts both with and without the Pale of Settlement. The Lowes called it, and sailed with their five children to the Promised City in the Land of the Free, where they anglicised the surname to Lowe. I have the naturalisation document of my great-great-grandfather in front of me now. I am proud to say his occupation was “embroiderer” and he lived on the Lower East Side (Jewish men, being less hung up on machismo, embraced the needle trades).
I met his son, my great-grandfather, in Princeton a few times when I was a small child. He just seemed like a tiny elf with glasses and halo of white hair but Elias Lowe was in fact a giant of a man: he was one of the first professors at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, alongside Albert Einstein and J Robert Oppenheimer (of the eponymous film, yes), he was a professor at Oxford, and his bust by the sculptor Jacob Epstein is on display at Corpus Christi College, where I once went through his letters.
“There is a kind of poison in the world-atmosphere which makes natural breathing difficult. One isn’t oneself,” he wrote in 1938. “We are all trying to whistle to keep up our courage.”
Though he never practised Judaism he always stood in solidarity with the Jewish people.
I think of his flight from the pogroms aged 12 every time I see the Statue of Liberty or walk the tenements of the Lower East Side, with its “world-famous” Jewish delis.
As October passed, I felt more uncomfortable with my weaselly note back to Toby. So I trolleyed and signed, not in hope that it would do anything to stop the persecution of the Jews, but in despair that the poison in the world atmosphere my great-grandfather described in pre-Holocaust 1938 is back, and the eerily similar headlines in The Times of 1891 and The Times of 2023 seem only to prove it.
