Nick Ross, the presenter of the programme Crimewatch, has become a German citizen 85 years after his Jewish family fled from Germany and the Third Reich. In recent years, Nick, 71, has developed an interest in his family’s roots and found that his grandparents were Felix and Anni Rosenbluth, and his father, Hans, changed his name to John Caryl Ross when enlisting in the British Army.
Record numbers of British Jews – more than 7,500 by this summer – are applying for German citizenship, even though, in many cases, their families were forced to flee from persecution in Nazi Germany. Modern Germany has now made a visible effort to honour German Jews, renaming street names after the victims of Hitler, for example.
The ostensible reason for so many British Jews reclaiming their German heritage is that they feel distressed about Brexit and worried about the consequences of a possible “no deal”.
But I think there may be something deeper involved. Back in the 1980s, I interviewed Sir Keith Joseph, one of Margaret Thatcher’s mentors and a thoughtful, sensitive and serious man. He attracted vilification because he was critical of mothers (or fathers) deliberately choosing to be single parents. He didn’t intend to be unkind, but, he told me by way of explanation, “I believe in embourgeoisement.” That is, the tradition of encouraging middle-class respectability with a two-parent family.
But he also spoke with fascinating nostalgia about the high German culture in which upper-class Jewish families were steeped. His father, Sir Samuel, was head of the Bovis construction firm, and they were related to the Salmon dynasty (of the catering firm J Lyons and Co). He was thus a cousin of Nigella Lawson, through her late mother, the celebrated beauty Vanessa Lawson.
Sir Keith told me that when he was growing up in the Regent’s Park area of London, the family was surrounded by high German culture: German music, German philosophy, German art and literature. Musical evenings on Sundays were nearly always devoted to German music. “Hochburger” British Jews of German origin, he said, seldom mixed with the poorer “shtetl” Jewish immigrants who came usually from Poland and the Tsarist empire.
The persecution of Jews in Germany was, to Sir Keith’s family, all the more horrific because they had considered German culture the most refined, artistic and musical in the world.
Perhaps many of the British Jews who are now re-discovering their German roots are sub-consciously drawn back to that old, cultured German tradition that Sir Keith spoke about. Maybe it’s fundamentally more about Brahms and Beethoven, and less about Brexit and Brussels.
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The Duchess of Sussex has been congratulating the New Zealanders for delivering votes for women in 1893, the first legislature in the world to grant full female suffrage. “Feminism,” Meghan said, “is about fairness.”
OK, but she could have also pointed out that the 19th-century feminists were nearly all committed Christians, and Kate Sheppard, the Kiwi suffragist, led the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union – anti-alcohol campaigns were quintessentially feminist at this time.
Meghan might also have mentioned that the early suffrage victories, as in New Zealand, were carried out without violence. Pointing out feminism’s Christian roots is not, however, very fashionable these days.
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Couples can soon get married “in their back gardens” if they choose to obtain a licence to do so. And I can’t see any reason why a cleric couldn’t perform a basic nuptial service under the apple tree if that is where folk wish to plight their troth.
Formal weddings are beautiful, but the enormous cost of the wedding event really does deter many young couples from matrimony. Making it cheaper would surely be a good thing.
On a side issue, the Government is also introducing civil unions for opposite-sex couples who disdain the “patriarchal” traditions of wedlock.
Catherine Utley and her sister Virginia, who share a home, have been leading an excellent campaign to extend the fiscal advantages of such a civil union to siblings, and other close family members, who can be hit badly by inheritance tax when a family member dies.
Catherine has written persuasively about the campaign on the ConservativeHome website (conservativehome.com).
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