Killings in Manchester: has Britain ignored anti-Semitism?

I am not Jewish. But I have a very close friend who lives up the road, and he’s Jewish. The kids are at school together and are best friends. Two things have happened in recent months, and I have tried not to think about them too much, because of life, work, the kids and the general mess of life. But after today’s attack at a synagogue in Manchester, I cannot ignore them. And perhaps I should not have ignored them in the first place. In fact, I definitely should not have ignored them.

The first thing was a straightforward trip to the pub. We thought we’d have a few after work. We sat at a table, him with his back to the crowd. I was saying something or other when I became aware that he wasn’t listening to me any more. You can tell when someone stops listening to you – when you have kids, you begin to recognise the sudden distance in the eyes. But when it’s a friend who’s stopped listening, you know something is going on. Something’s caught his attention. Something’s wrong.

He was listening to a conversation that was going on behind him, that I hadn’t quite registered. His face had gone red and he looked over his shoulder at a man, who may or may not have been drunk, who was standing in front of a table of other drinkers, ranting about something. And then he shouted, “macht frei, macht frei”.

We looked at each other not quite believing what we had just heard. My friend got up and went to the toilet. When he came back out again, his face had changed. I could see it. He is not a small person – in fact he’s quite big. He walked up to the man who had been shouting the slogan written above the entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and tapped him on the shoulder. When the man turned, my friend shouted at him: “I’m a Jew – what was all that about macht frei?”

I love my friends. The idea that he would ever – ever – have to say this in a pub in Britain in the 21st century: the thought of it now reduces me to tears. In the end, the barman intervened. The man was thrown out. I have seen him again though. I know who he is.

We finished our drinks and left. As we walked up the hill together, he apologised, explaining that almost his entire family had been murdered in a field in central Europe during the war, which made him sensitive about these things. I really didn’t know how to respond to that.

That was the first thing.

The second thing was something he said, off the cuff, not in any dramatic or over the top way, because he is neither a dramatic nor an over the top person, but it came up in the middle of some other conversation we were having. I can’t remember what it was about. It’s irrelevant. But what he said was this: that the other Jewish people he knew, friends and family, had never felt so unsafe in Britain as they did now. He just dropped that into a conversation, and at the time it slipped past without my quite acknowledging what he had actually said.

What he had said was in fact horrific, and terrifying: that Britain was becoming more anti-Semitic. But it was only on reflection that I realised what he was really saying: which was that it was not only other Jewish people who felt unsafe, but that he himself felt unsafe. My friend is a secular person and wears no traditional clothes and I’m not sure he goes to synagogue ever, but I’ll ask him about that next time I see him. Even so, he feels unsafe simply because he is Jewish.

In the days after he said this, I found myself having a daydream – I was wondering to myself, if it came down to it, would I hide people in my house? The children, for example. Would I hide them? They were smaller, and we have some gaps in the attic space upstairs so it would be easy… No. I had to shake my head to stop that monologue from playing out. No no no. Intrusive thoughts like that are good for nothing. I felt stupid for even having those thoughts. But I had them.

And now, the news from Manchester comes. There are people in Britain who want to kill Jews. We do not know what the motives are behind this attack. But then if there are people out there who want to kill your friends, their motives are irrelevant.

The facts are that Britain is becoming more anti-Semitic. Jewish people are becoming more afraid. People are murdered outside their synagogue. My intrusive daydream now feels much less stupid.