The duchess, the miner, and I

HAVE YOU BEEN caught up in royal baby fever? I know I have. No sooner had the announcement been made that the Duchess of Cambridge had been safely brought to bed of the future King George VII than my so-called “smartphone” went meshuggeh.

The power of the internet is such that the world’s media had tracked down my JC column of April 13 2007, in which (you will doubtless recall) I had let slip the fact that the mohel who bris’d me (the Rev Dr Jacob Snowman) had also bris’d Prince Charles, grandfather of the new arrival. A rumour — fuelled by a letter from the BBC’s former Court Correspondent Michael Cole that no less a newssheet than The Times had seen fit to publish (June 15) — had also gone viral, insisting — on nothing better than the dubious evidence of surnames — that the future King George VII’s mother (formerly Kate Middleton) was halachically Jewish.

This argument had been admirably exposed by Doreen Berger, chair of the Jewish Genealogical Society (in a letter that The Times published three days later), but of course rumours have a habit of persisting, and in this case the persistence was underpinned when some smart-alec of a journalist discovered that an ancestor of the Duchess had been a coalminer (or possibly the wife of a coalminer) in the Durham village of Hetton-le-Hole, and (here the rumour became not so much weird as sinister) that no less a person than my good self had been brought up in that very same pit village.

Well, so I had, in the tiny two-up twodown cottage rented from the colliery company that owned it by the late Mr William Cottee, a miner (and teetotal Methodist) who had actually retired in 1939 but had volunteered to go back down the Hetton Colliery during World War II. Now the fact that Mr Cottee and I lived under the same roof no more makes him a Jew than me a Methodist. However, such was royal baby fever that this smart-alec of a journalist put it to me that Hetton had in fact been full of Jews; that Kate Middleton’s ancestor could well have been Jewish him or herself, that the fact of Prince Charles’ Jewish circumcision made him a Jew (!), and that the future King George VII was — therefore — as nearly Jewish as made no practical difference. And (as if to seal his argument against any further challenge) the journalist put it to me that the future king had been born in a maternity ward named after a Jew (the late Frank Lindo, whose family were members of the nearby Sephardi congregation at Lauderdale Road, west London) — which is true.

All these arguments ad absurdum may be easy to counter one by one. But their cumulative effect is frightening, as I dis- covered. On the day after the royal birth I fielded at least a dozen phone calls (not to mention countless email inquiries) on the subject of the future king’s alleged Jewish ancestry, while an approach from Le Figaro, one of the largest circulation French newspapers, asked me whether I could confirm that the royal baby would be bris’d, and if so whether the mohel would be Dr Snowman (who, I had to point out, had died in 1959).

But none of this gossip-mongering survives comparison with the lunatic rantings of an Iranian news agency, which alleged not merely that the Duchess of Cambridge was a Sephardic Jew but that her wedding was “Jewish” and that the result of her marriage amounted to nothing less than the placing of the British crown in the hands of the Jews!

Never in my entire career have I had to confront so many Jewish-conspiracy theories in one 24-hour period. I have come away from this experience convinced that denial is of limited value. Paradoxically, denial can even bolster the convictions of those who promote such stories. After all (as one of my inquirers remarked), the fact that Kate Middleton’s ancestors are not known to have been Jewish doesn’t mean they weren’t Jewish, does it? They might (he ventured) have been “secret” Jews. As unlikely as it may seem, Hetton-le-Hole was undoubtedly a place where Jews (me and my mum for starters) once lived. Prince Charles was indeed bris’d and his grandson was undoubtedly born in a facility named after a Jew.

To those of a certain malign inclination, all this can amount to a new chapter of the Protocols. Be warned!