In terms of percentages, Jews make up about half of 1% of the British population. As of 2006, out of a total British population of about 60 million, there was a Jewish population of 297,000. That comes from the 2006 American Jewish Yearbook.
The (small) British Jewish community is quite concentrated in a small number of locations; Kenilworth in Warwickshire isn’t one of them. And you should bear in mind that British Muslims are overwhelmingly drawn from easily-recognised ethnic groups; not so for British Jews. Thus you could have met quite a number of British Jews without recognising that they were Jews.
Well, there’s plenty in British/English/Scottish/Irish/Welsh history that I’m not exactly proud of
The St Brice’s Day Massacre in 1002, when Vikings across England were murdered in targeted attacks - the Vikings got their own back eventually, by ruling the country from 1016-42, and their French speaking cousins invading for keeps in 1066.
Various burnings, hangings, general persecutions by Catholics on Protestants and vice versa (fun fact - the English first started interfering in Ireland at the behest of the only English Pope in penance for the murder of Thomas a Becket)
Various smitings of people protesting at their conditions - Peasant’s Revolt, The Diggers and other dissenters during the Commonwealth, Peterloo, etc etc etc.
Loads of stuff during the Empire, various Wars.
I think that some bad episodes have been through inaction. Not giving representation to a bunch of antsy colonists in the 1770’s, not being more incisive in wiping out the slave trade once we’d banned it here, not objecting to the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, …
I could go on, but won’t. The thing is that it is very easy to be ambivalent about pretty much everything discussed. Even when we did something that in hindsight is very obviously bad eg the Opium wars, you can pretty much always find someone who was screaming from the rooftops “What the hell are you doing???” That you can do that in British history, and that often those rooftop screamers are famed more than the evildoers (eg Churchill, Orwell, Gladstone, Wilberforce) is something that I find rather heartening.
Which of course I never said. What I did say is that some sections of society have no problem with it as they were subjected to the same thing. I didn’t say I was a member of that section of society.
Remember, I was commenting on how it polarises opinion in the UK.
Well at one point I did say “I never knowingly met a Jew”.
Maybe Charley’s point about general lack of interest in religion in the UK is a big part of it, although you do run into the Jew as race versus religion question.
What can I say? I feel like you want me to apologise or something, but I was simply stating my experience of growing up in small town Warwickshire (although Coventry was nearby and I did subsequently spend five years in Birmingham and 2.5 in London). To be honest I don’t see how my experience is any less valid than others in the thread. My peer group included many different races and religions but for one reason or another, apart from one guy that said he was half-Israeli, I didn’t come across anyone I knew to be Jewish. In 25 years.
I’m sure there are many contenders.
Maybe the atrocities against the Kikuyupeople:
Note that this was in the 1950s, after the horrors of the Holocaust had come to light, and the Fourth Geneva Convention (inspired by the Nuremberg trials) was signed.
I wasn’t picking up on that - I can quite believe that you never knowingly met a Jew, as people’s religion is hardly relevant in the UK. But I was picking up on this:
…by pointing out that there are more than a few Jews around in Britain. So what is it that you perceive as “fishy”?
See “Antisemitism in Britain,” by George Orwell (1945).
Interesting BBC article on Britain’s Jewish population (from 2008) here. It claims the UK Jewish population is now growing after years of decline. The decline is nothing *fishy *- it’s just British Jews are relatively well educated and tend to have small families combined with a tendancy to marry outside the community. The recent increase is down to larger numbers of ultra-orthodox having large families.
If you are looking for high profiles Jewish people in the UK you would not have had to look too far last week. Ed Miliband the new Labour Party leader is Jewish by birth (although atheist by choice). Antisemitism does not seem to have held Ed or his brother back.
Could you explain what you mean by linking to this? There was blatant antisemitism when Orwell wrote that. Well yeah, but there was blatant racism too. What does this have to the situation today? Are you saying that Jews left Britain due to prejudice? Are you saying that we currently conduct pogroms? I don’t see your linking to a 55-year-old essay has any relevance at all to amanset’s speculations. Particularly not when a Jewish leader of the British parliamentary opposition was appointed just two weeks ago.
You could easily have the same experience in a lot of small towns in the US. We Jews, especially those of us who practice some aspect of Judaism, tend to live in the cities near the coasts (or large inland cities, like Chicago) rather than in small towns. If you keep kosher, it means you can’t buy your meat at just any supermarket. Of course, you’d want to live somewhere where you could buy meat. Even if you don’t keep kosher, if you wanted to buy Jewish foods that are not a part of mainstream culture, you’d want to live in a Jewish area. You also wouldn’t want to have to drive a long distance to go to synagogue, if you were a regular attendee of one.
When Mr. Neville was looking for jobs in academia, we talked about where we would be willing to live. We ruled out everywhere except large cities with a substantial Jewish population, for these reasons. I imagine a lot of British Jews make the same kind of decision, with the same results.
The ones who don’t take the Jewish population of an area into consideration when deciding where to live are probably less likely to identify as Jewish. There are a lot of Jewish people who you wouldn’t know were Jewish from their looks or their names. I converted to Judaism as an adult. My ancestry is mostly Scandinavian and British, and people can’t generally tell by looking at me that I’m not Jewish by birth.
When we visited London in 2000, we went to Golders Green, which is an area with a large Jewish population. There certainly are Jewish areas of the UK, that you can find if you look.
I was hoping it might provide some insight into the mindset of someone who regards the mere presence of large numbers of Jews in the UK as somehow “fishy” . . . assuming that was what amanset was actually saying. The point being, it’s a cultural attitude much older than the state of Israel. But most of all, the last sentence in the essay: “But that antisemitism will be definitively CURED, without curing the larger disease of nationalism, I do not believe.” Which includes not only British nationalism, but Israeli nationalism as well as Palestinian nationalism; all are equally diseases.
There are a lot of people “identifying as Jewish” in the great American middle and there are synagogues in a lot places other than the coasts and Chicago. I’d bet that precious few of them are Orthodox or keep kosher, however.
N.B.: In America there is no nationalism, only patriotism. 
How would you know if you had?
In what way? What sort of thing are you referring to as “fishy” here? I’d really like to know what you meant by this remark. Oh, and who is “us” in this context?
Again, how would you know if you had?
I believe you are 180 degrees incorrect here: amanset was regarding the absence of large numbers of Jews as “fishy”.
At least that was how I took it.
I still don’t get what relevance a 55-year-old essay has to the situation though, given how completely different this country is now.
The same way I did with all the other races and religions. By talking. Chatting. Surely I don’t have to point this out?
“Us” is “Brits”.
Regarding “fishy”, I just can’t help but feel there are less than I would expect there to be. There is evidence of copious amounts of antisemitism in the UK over the centuries. I have seen large amount of discussion on this very forum of Jews and/or pro-Israeli supporters being, for want of another phrase, quite anti-British as if there is still some kind of endemic antisemitism in the UK. I took that, along with my own experience, and made a statement that I thought that maybe these things are connected.
And again I say, by talking to them. Maybe you are communication-challenged, but I am not.
Correct. I’m amazed that anyone could have taken what I wrote any other way.
Edit:
And on that I am leaving it. I have said my bit. I’ve explained my reasoning, given background and whatnot. This is in danger of becoming quite the highjack.
Thanks for your reply.
One final thing that I shall add, I am aware of this. I mentioned (somewhere) about going to a shopping centre in North London (maybe Bluewater, it has been a while) and seeing lots of homes celebrating Hannukah.
I currently live in Kenilworth, and I know [or know of] a couple of Jewish families.
There’s a synagogue in Solihull, and a house-synagogue circuit in Leamington.
The Jewish families here tend not ultra-orthodox so you wouldn’t necessarily identify people as Jewish if you saw them in Sainsburys.
That’s not to mention people who are non-practising, so you’d never know either way.