Best for the Jews?
The wonderful attention he received from the carers and management staff was exemplary. Without these carers his last few months would not have been as meaningful and fulfilling as it was.
It was just amazing how they all got on like one big happy family. Two of the carers on their day off even made the schlap to Rainham for his funeral.
We will always be thankful to Jewish Care for providing the warmth and care to all residents. Tony de Swarte and Avril Milner,
Elstree, Herts Jeffrey Nakar, Surrey KT5
I am somewhat puzzled by Prof Yehuda Bauer’s assertions that “Antisemitism grows in monotheistic societies only… and Jews can live peacefully only in relatively liberal societies.” (JC, March 24). The realities are surely more complex. have predominantly monotheistic religions and cultures. And is it correct that polytheistic societies have been more tolerant to Jews? Certainly some have, but these have had minuscule Jewish populations relative to the indigenous ones, for example, of China and India, while the polytheistic societies of ancient Persia, Greece and Rome were hardly benign landlords of Judea. In addition, how “liberal” were these polytheisms to the enslavement of their own and other peoples?
As to Western liberal societies “striving towards democracy” they festered some of the most persistent antisemitism in Jewish history. While, to the contrary, the middle period in monotheistic Islamic history gave the Jews, albeit as secondclass citizens, great security and unrivalled opportunities for the period.
Ironically, while Western liberal democratic societies were agonising how to keep as many Jews out of their countries as possible, totalitarian Japan, for its own reasons, was making the strongest proposals to welcome Jewish refugees in from Nazi Germany. They protected their own Jews, with crucial help from their Chief Rabbi, from Nazi demands for their extermination. But in today’s liberal democratic Japan we find a surprising amount of antisemitic literature.
Despite its many blemishes it has been the slow growth in tolerance of an inclusive Anglo-Saxon monotheism that has given the greatest freedom to Jewish life. The Hebrew Bible has long punctuated its history, from King Alfred, to the Magna Carta, to the Protestant Revolution, to the re-entry of Jews in Cromwell’s England, and to the “new Israelites” sailing out to the “new Promised Land” of the nascent USA. Stanley Jacobs,
London SW1