I DON’T know why, when we were children, we told jokes about Jews but we did.
We didn’t know any Jews. I had no sense that I lived in a toxically antisemitic culture. But clearly the culture in which this humour circulated was amenable to making space for hateful people.
The jokes we told didn’t deal in any tropes that might have required a familiarity with big global or cultural concerns, like whether Jews ran the world media or ate babies. They were just about obsessive miserliness.
How do you know you are living next door to a Jew? That sort of thing.
I had to grow a bit older to know something of history and even of the then fairly recent global war in which six million Jews had been slaughtered.
That reality sank in one night when I was watching a television documentary with my mother and saw images from Belsen of scrawny naked bodies being flung into a burial pit.
During that war, Ireland had remained neutral. Jews who lived here were among the safest in Europe but in the Republic there was precious little shelter for Jews fleeing Europe.
Neil Belton’s novel A Game With Sharpened Knives (Weidenfield and Nicholson) is based on physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s stay in Dublin for the war years and illustrates the unwillingness of the Irish government to provide shelter for refugees.
Northern Ireland was more open.
A new book by Noel Russell tells the story of how Jews in Austria discovered a scheme for bringing skilled workers into Northern Ireland.
The Saved and The Spurned (New Island) says that scheme wasn’t devised with refugees in mind but when some in Vienna discovered it they saw it as an escape route from Nazi oppression.
Russell’s book details their experiences and the often cold officialdom which dealt with them.
There were still other routes for bringing people to safety here. Jewish children were brought to a camp in Millisle, Co. Down.
Camps were opened for displaced people, including some that took in the whole civilian population of Gibraltar into Northern Ireland, 250 Jews among them.
In a recent article in the Irish Times Amy Chosick asks if Jews are safe in Ireland today.
She was appalled that after the slaughter of innocents on Oct 7, 2023, many in Ireland leapt to defending the Palestinian cause.
She says she and her Irish husband ‘watched aghast from abroad as some of the kindest people we know sympathised not with the 1,200 people slaughtered by Hamas - but with the terrorists’.
Can that be right, that kind people sympathised with Hamas?
Well she is the one who knows these people and describes them as kind so we have to take her word for it.
What I saw was an awakening sense of urgency about resolving an historic problem and a conviction that this atrocity had a context.
And perhaps the precedent of our own peace process had orientated our thinking in that direction for we had accepted that grotesque sectarian atrocities here had also had an historic context and that political agreements might open the way for former terrorists to sit in government.
Chosick says, “Ireland has been called ‘the most antisemitic place in Europe’ - not exactly a title to own alongside all those Eurovision wins”.
This is stereotyping too. You don’t get to call someone out on their prejudices by deploying your own.
Like Howard Jacobson in a recent Guardian article, she says that critics of Israel are deploying the myth of the ‘blood libel’ that Jews are child killers.
But Israel has actually been slaughtering children with abandon, by the thousand. It’s a bit weird to be touchier about the criticism — and even the racist tones you hear in it — than about that carnage itself.
There is undoubtedly prejudice against Jews in Ireland on some scale that I can’t assess. I’ll take her word for it. There is also another prejudice here which regards them as innately superior.
I was aware of that too in my youth, after the Six Day War, when Israel seemed to embody courage and intelligence in an exceptional way and many of my generation - that didn’t go off to join ashrams - joined kibbutzim. It was the cool thing to do.
I’ve heard the term ‘philosemitic’ by people who are proud to be prejudiced in favour of Jews; once even by a senior advisor to a political party here.
Mary Kenny, a prominent writer, attacking those who criticised West Bank settlers - surely among the most deserving of our derision - writes on X/ twitter ‘When you think of what the Jews have given to civilisation, to philosophy, music, culture…’
Really? The hoodlums who drive Palestinian farmers from their land are to get the credit for Einstein and Spinoza? That’s racism too.
I don’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable for being a Jew, but I don’t want the charge of antisemitism to be a distraction from Israel’s appalling behaviour.
Malachi O’Doherty’s latest book How To Fix Northern Ireland is published by Atlantic Books
