The Column with Canon Rev Dr Rod Garner When will these people stop blaming the Jews?

WE’VE moved house since my last column – downsized big time but still in Southport. Everyone said it would be massively stressful, equal to bereavement or, even worse, trying to catch a local Northern Rail train that actually arrived or left on time.

In retrospect however such an ordeal.

There were a few minor hitches: over three weeks I ate 986 Twix bars, increased my weight by 4st, woke up screaming regularly at 3am confronted by little green men who smiled fiendishly as they forced jammy doughnuts down my throat, and had to buy a large writing pad to accommodate my blood pressure prescription.

These small setbacks apart, we did pretty well.

Obviously we had to throw a lot of stuff out. I went to the tip so often that the Council has given me a “frequent flyer” badge.

The gates open automatically for me now, day or night and my wife can come too.

At last, the big time.

Junking old newspaper cuttings in preparation for the move, I came across an article from the Times in 1993 written by Bernard it wasn’t Levin, a brilliant columnist and, for many, the outstanding journalist of his generation.

Levin was Jewish and the column was entitled “What is it about us?”

The question was prompted by the fact that in his experience, Jews, good, bad and indifferent, and therefore human like the rest of us, continued to be regarded with curiosity or suspicion at least and singled out for extermination at worst.

With the Holocaust in mind and the twisted intellects that continued to deny it ever happened, how was it that six million of his people were systematically murdered in a European country that had enriched our culture with artists, writers and musicians of sublime genius?

Nobody seemed able to solve the mystery of why Jews were thought of as different or why they attracted so much malign attention.

In common with the rest of our species, they laugh, bleed, hope and grieve. And they represent just 0.2% of the global population.

Yet negative stereotypes still abound portraying them as moneymad, shifty, secretive and separate.

In religious terms, they were for centuries called Christ-killers and therefore eminently suited for punishment to the point of extinction. Only in recent times has the Catholic Church decreed that Jews were not uniquely guilty of this crime. But the fact is that they had been hated long before Christ was born as a Jew.

That he went to the synagogue, was nurtured by the Jewish scriptures and honoured their precepts are facts that seem to have escaped the officials in the death camps as they pushed Jews into the gas chambers.

In the 25 years since Levin wrote his article I can see that in some ways we have moved on. Schoolchildren are better educated about a ghastly period in German history.

College students make visits to Auschwitz and see for themselves the evil that betrayed every decent human impulse and eventually led survivors of Hitler’s “Final Solution” to kill themselves after the atrocities had ceased.

We have an annual Holocaust Day Memorial and people of different faiths gather together to pray, remember and resolve to work for a future where such unspeakable acts should never happen again.

But we have also witnessed recently, the stench of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party and a frightening increase of hate crime against Jews, their synagogues and their cemeteries, both here and elsewhere in Europe and America.

As I write, 11 members of a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, have just been murdered.

In Britain, long-standing members of settled Jewish communities feel that they are no longer safe or welcome in this once hospitable land.

Bernard Levin has departed this earth but his question and the challenge it contains remain.

Do we see Jews as reflections of ourselves or something less?

A negative answer does not bode well as this country faces a political future that is neither self-evidently certain nor bright.

Jews have been made scapegoats before for the economic woes of nations.

We need to be both vigilant and kind to ensure such plagues do not emerge again.