Of Judges - Scotland, Christians and Labour Zionism

 

More than a few of us Scottish Christian Socialists and Scottish Christians on the Left are profoundly influenced by the philosophy of a contemporary political thinker and Labour peer called Maurice Glasman.

Maurice is the founder of the political tendency known as Blue Labour, which is in part, inspired by Bundism. The Jewish Labour Bund was a secular Jewish Socialist movement found in Lithuania, Poland and Russia in the 1890's, based on the principles of solidarity, mutualism, autonomy and local democracy.

Maurice also often speaks about the politics of his father who was a Labour Zionist and his mother who came from a working class family in Stamford Hill and was a lifelong Labour supporter.

Likewise, Christian Socialists with a special interest in civil society cannot think or talk about cooperatives without any reference to the impact of the Jewish Labour Movement.

Just as I’ve learned a great deal from Maurice, so too have I been fortunate enough to learn from leaders within the UK cooperative movement such as Berry Epstein, who taught me about the Kibbutz Movement and the co-operative nature of Israel as a small country reliant on cooperatives in their many forms, through sheer necessity.

 

As such, it was my great privilege to be invited by my friend Sammy Stein from Glasgow’s Jewish community and Glasgow Friends of Israel, to attend a rededication service led by Rabbi Rubin at the recently restored old Jewish section of Greenock cemetery.

I was also proud to play a very small part in helping to get the graves repaired. Our town’s small Jewish community came here, mostly from Russia and Eastern Europe, during the mid-19th Century, arriving in Greenock around the same time my own Lutheran ancestors came here from Bremen.

The little Jewish part of Greenock cemetery which dates back to the early years of the 20th century but the graves were all badly neglected and mostly forgotten for many decades, until Sammy got involved and it’s wonderful to now see the headstones repaired and restored to their former glory.

Everyone involved has done a brilliant job getting the burial plot back into shape and the rededication was a very special and emotional event, with many descendants travelling from all over the UK to attend the service to remember those who came before them.

Including a distant Ahlfeld relative of my own whose mother had married into the Freedman family commemorated on one of the headstones.  

Indeed, just a few metres away, directly across from the old Jewish section of Greenock Cemetery, rest a few of the Bremen sugar bakers whose headstones also date from around 1900, including my own Great, Great Grandfather Bernhard Dietrich Ahlfeld.

Back then, we had so many sugar refineries here, that Greenock was known as Sugaropolis, with my own sugar-baker ancestors working in the Glebe refinery, producing kosher sugar for Pesach. However, the Sugar had to be manufactured under the special supervision of the Greenock Rabbi from the Trafalgar St Synagogue.

In the sugar houses of Greenock, the rod used to stir the Sugar 'Schleck' was called a 'Babbeler' - A word unique to the Bremisch dialect and I quite like the idea of Scots, Yiddish, Gaelic and Low Saxon all being spoken in a Greenock sugar warehouses in the 19th Century.  

More so, the presence of the Jewish community here in Greenock represents a period of our local history which was rich in its diversity and communalism. Greenock’s Jews contributed to a Greenock which was strongly associational and voluntary, with all its very many cooperatives, guilds, fraternities, friendly societies, social clubs, political party branches, trade unions and religious denominations.

These were democratic institutions where people could build human relationships together and have some power and autonomy over their own lives and the Greenock Jews played an active role in our once vibrant civil society.

Similarly, Jewish socialists have always provided a disproportionately large presence within the British Labour and Trade Union Movement since its inception.

For all its faults, our Labour and Trade Union Movement has always been at its very best when it has existed as a space where Scots, English, Working Class, Middle Class, Socialists, Marxists, Social Democrats, Pacifists, Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Jews, Religious, Secular, Black and White, Gay and Straight, all come together to work for the common good. Trying to build a shared common life together, based upon mutual self interest and solidarity, without having to compromise anything of ourselves or give up our identities.

Interestingly, the popular Greenock Labour Cllr and shop owner David Wolfe retired to Israel in the 1970s, taking with him the two Torah Scrolls of the Law belonging to the Trafalgar street Jewish community. My Granny Ahlfeld used to speak often about going to Mr Wolfe’s shop, David Adams was another notable Jewish Labour councillor from Greenock.

Sadly, to some contemporary Leftists, the idea of committed socialists who were also Zionists, is something of an oxymoron and even a blasphemy because today, far too many of us on the Left, like to try to disconnect Jews from Israel, and divide the Jewish community into ‘good Jews and bad Jews’ as the saying goes.

That is to say, we are often ok with Jews but not those with any kind of attachment to the state of Israel, some voices on the Left even like to suggest that the Jewish remembrance of Israel is some kind of modern invention, which is absurd.   

For example, Greenock’s Jewish community had its own Zionist Society from its earliest days; the Greenock Bnei Zion was established in 1905.

Meanwhile, just as our Greenock’s Jewish community established its Zionist Society, newly arrived parishioners evicted from the village of Gweedore in Donegal, arriving at my own local parish of St Ninian’s in Gourock, were establishing a branch of the ‘Irish Land League’ here.

It seems both Jewish and Irish people having been driven from their homes, both dreamed of having a small piece of land which they could one day call their own.

Of course, for centuries we Gentiles have self-appointed ourselves to the position of judges, defining who the Jews are. As the late Rabbi Jonathan Sack’s points out - In the Middle Ages, Jews were persecuted for collectively identifying as a religion, and then in the 18th and 19th centuries when Jews began to collectively identify as a people, they were then hated and exterminated for being a race.

Today, Jews are predominately despised for their primary expression of collective identity being embodied in a nation state.

These are really all just different ways of saying Jews have no right to an expression of collective identity and no right to exist collectively, with the same rights as every other people and nation state.

And yet, it is this ancient appeal to collectivism expressed in the aforementioned Labour Bunds, Labour Zionists and Kibbutzim, which appeals to us and calls out to all us religious socialists today.

Equally, we share the vision of a creating a just society drawing inspiration from the Hebrew Bible, based on welfare, justice, the sanctity of life and caring for the stranger.

Yet, does any of this require us to support each of the most recent evictions and settlements or every single action of the Likud Party or everything the IDF does? No, it does not, because like every other democratic country, not everyone in Israel supports all the actions of its current ruling Government or everything its armed forces does.

In reality, Israeli politics is broad and its society is diverse, with a full spectrum of rightwing and left-wing, liberals and conservatives, secular and religious. Israel also has a vocal peace movement opposed to the worst excess of all militarism and violence.

Glasgow Friends of Israel for example flies both the Israeli flag and the Palestine flag at their regular stall in Glasgow, describing themselves as pro-Israel, pro-Palestine and pro-peace.   

Like many countries, Israel has its ‘workers’ teams like Hapoel Tel Aviv FC and Hapoel Jerusalem FC, alongside their big rivals Beitar Jerusalem FC, with its links to the Likud Party.      

Perhaps we on the Left would be better off judging Israel by the same standards as every other country? Maybe a good starting point would be to accept Israel’s fundamental right to exist?

It’s certainly high time we stopped trying to pretend that Jewish Socialists must all be hostile to Israel or that the Jewish community’s connection with Israel is a new creation, even here in the Greenock, Israel remained the focus of Jewish prayers for generations, Israel was never forgotten.

The truth is, many individuals within the wider Jewish community are indeed supportive of Israel and some aren’t especially interested but that’s entirely up to those individuals, not us.

Most of all, we must stop some of our fellow Leftists shamefully associating our Jewish friends and neighbours with usury and by default, capitalism and instead encourage everyone to come together and work for peace and the common good.  

As the good Rabbi prayed at the rededication service: ‘'May the One who brings peace to the universe bring peace to us and to all the people Israel'