The Tsarist Mindset
On the 'anti-Semitism national security emergency'
During the autumn of 1888, as London’s East End erupted in panic following the Whitechapel murders, blame was soon cast on a convenient target: the area’s large number of recently arrived Russian Jews. Initially the killings and mutilations were linked to a Jewish suspect called ‘Leather Apron’, real name John Pizer, a boot maker known to have used and abused prostitutes, but even after he cleared his name the stories persisted.
The new arrivals had heard this all before; back home these sorts of rumours were usually the trigger for the pogroms which had forced them to leave. Expecting the police to round them up and frame one of their number, many within the community went to ground, closing their doors and waiting for the inevitable. It didn’t come, and instead they reemerged into city life to a new realisation: that wasn’t how things worked in England. The police were not in the business of mob justice; there would be no pogroms, no scapegoating. The process of law and order worked – although, as it happened, they didn’t catch the killer, so not all that well.
Life in Tsarist Russia was different, characterised by a system of policing that ruled by fear rather by consent, a society of low trust, an intense suspicion of out-groups, a zero-sum approach to prosperity and so a particular hatred of anyone whose wealth was seen to be earned on the back of other people’s labour. There was also deep-seated religious prejudice, manifested in, and fuelled by, a range of beliefs about such things as the ritual murder of children, which spread easily among an illiterate population credulous to outlandish stories.
Although the blood libel had originated in medieval England, such thinking had long been suppressed there. There were still people who believed in such things – I’m sure if you polled east enders in 1888 many probably did think the Ripper was engaged in some wacky Talmudic ritual murder - but politicians ignored them and the police made sure to crush them.
Most of Britain’s 300,000 or so Jews today descend from those Russian refugees who settled in the East End; as they became more established and less impoverished, they migrated in an anti-clockwise direction, the most religious settling in Stamford Hill in north-east London and Golders Green to the north-west, with the more secularised thinly populated in the areas in-between. These suburbs were always noted for their tranquillity: cosy, safe and peaceful.
Golders Green today still has the highest concentration of Jews in Britain, accounting for half the local population, but is not so tranquil. On Tuesday a local memorial wall to the victims of Iranian oppression was firebombed, and on Wednesday two men were stabbed in the street, with a suspect now charged with attempted murder. The latest incident follows a number of anti-Semitic attacks in the wider area which began following the war in Iran.
Such violence is contagious and memetic, as the Victorian authorities knew, and seems only likely to escalate, so that anti-Semitism has now been declared a ‘national security emergency’ by a government advisor and Britain’s terror alert has been raised to ‘severe’. The situation is alarming, but also perhaps predictable.
One mistaken idea held about multiculturalism was that, as a country became more diverse, so it would become safer for minorities. Up to a point this may be true, but not as a rule. People looked to the history of the United States and assumed that, with such an ethnic mix, no single group could be singled out and persecuted. They got this wrong because they saw the state, backed by the main ethnic group, as the only danger, while an equally plausible threat comes from an absence of order and political stability.
Taking a look at our own continent’s history, the opposite is true; until the First World War at least, Jews were much safer in relatively homogenous states like Britain, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian kingdoms than they were in the diverse regions of central and eastern Europe. In the west of the continent Jews might be a visible minority, they might even be excluded from certain institutions, and suffer all the usual minor prejudices that outsiders suffer, but they were not subject to state violence or extortion, nor the mob; they could depend on a fair legal system, and stable politics in which ethnic tension was not a driving force. They were not pressured into siding with one political movement because their opponents wanted to oppress or kill them.
This misreading of history may be due to our overriding civilisational memory being that of the Third Reich, which did indeed involve a relatively homogenous European state persecuting its one (highly-integrated) minority. Yet in the wider historical scheme of things Nazism was extremely unusual: it was not an idea whose time had come, but the creation of an evil political genius exploiting a particular set of circumstances, and one whose genocidal beliefs were formed among the the ethnic hatreds of Austro-Hungary.
