Page 4 - Kol Bogrei Habonim - January 19

BRITISH JEWS AND ALIYA
A STUDY OF POST-WAR JEWISH LIVES
GAVIN SCHAFFER
H ‘Oh, er no-one…no-one says that’, she quickly
istory, of course, is always personal.
What we choose to research, what we
choose to write about, can’t be divorced
from our personal pasts and feelings. If it could
be, we wouldn’t be human. We all take the past to
work with us every day. It makes us who we are,
and we very literally couldn’t be any other way.
On these terms, historians have long since ditched
the idea of achieving total objectivity in our work.
In my research, on Jews and aliyah, my personal
past is pretty clear to see, so it is only fitting to
preface this story by explaining how I ended up in
Zikhron Ya’akov talking about the history of
aliyah with the Bogrim of Habonim in 2018.
Like many of the Bogrim I met in Zikhron, I am a
graduate of the Machon L’Madrichei Chutz
L’Aretz, albeit from a slightly different
generation. I attended the Machon in 1995, having
been through all the rights of passage in the UK
and Israel that lead a person to that particular
programme. I loved my time at the Machon – who
didn’t - but I did not come to Israel in the end.
Instead, I started the next term at the University of
Birmingham and never left British academia. That
was in 1996. But the issues raised in my youth
movement background, and the bigger issues they
represented, never really left me and I decided a
few years ago to write a post-war history of
British Jews. When I announced to my wife that
this was to be my new project she laughed (not an
uncommon reaction from her).
‘So’, she said. ‘You’re now going to write the
history of yourself. Do you think this is going to
help with the people who already say you are self-
obsessed?’
‘People say I’m self-obsessed?’ I replied,
wounded. ‘Who says that?’
4
retracted, adding: ‘It’s a great idea darling’.
So here we are. But the reason this project attracts
me, aside from the egomania of course, is that I
think it has the potential to get to the heart of
Jewishness in the contemporary world, helping to
explain what Jews are, and where we ultimately
feel that we belong.
Most migration, and Jewish migration is no
exception, occurs when people have little choice.
They flee persecution or poverty, poor
opportunities and failing states. Most of us, if left
to our own devices, don’t uproot and change our
lives unless there is a pressing reason. Of course,
this reality is true of British Jews. Since 1948
about 35000 British Jews have come to Israel. In
an average year, the numbers are in the hundreds,
not the thousands. As Chaim Bermant put it, in his
1969 book, Troubled Eden, this ‘hardly constitutes
an exodus’. Nonetheless, I am deeply interested in
those people who decided to up and leave, to start
new lives and communities in the State of Israel. I
want to know what these personal decisions say
about identities and feelings of belonging. How
can someone think that they belong more in a
place where they know no-one, don’t speak the
language, sometimes have never even visited, than
they do at home in Britain? And what might this
say about Jewish identity, Zionism, anti-Semitism,
and the viability of British multiculturalism? Let
me offer a tiny example from the 1930s (taken
from Stephan Wendehorst’s book on British Jews
and Zionism which I thoroughly enjoyed).
Wendehorst recounts Marks and Spencer’s Simon
Marks, returning from a visit to the Yishuv in
1934 and lamenting, ‘Will I ever be able to
understand or express the simplest of my views in
my own maternal tongue?’