The remarkable Maisie Peters sings “Please don’t give up on me yet, I promise I’ll get better, I’m just not better yet.” She also sings “We think your girlfriend is a bore, but we’re nice to her in public ‘cause we’re grown up and mature,” but that’s not the lyric that was in my head when I woke up this morning which is perhaps a good thing for this assembly. This morning’s stories don’t always show humanity in its best light and the thought I want you to carry through is Maisie’s line – don’t give up on me yet, I promise I’ll get better, I’m just not better yet.
In my last assembly, I said that my best friends are those who make me better, who get better with me. Such friendships are built over many years and I’m fortunate to have friends I’ve known for decades. There is one group that I have been away with every May half term since 2004. Back then we had just acquired our first set of three babies and were wrestling with the idea that this made us, at least those of us responsible for the babies, grown up. Over the years the group has been a bit flexible but has settled down to four families with a total of 9 children, the oldest of which – those babies – are now 22 and beginning to consider being grown up themselves.
Each May we get together, make a huge pile of cheese or tuna-sweetcorn sandwiches, put them in a rucksack with packets of crisps and chocolate biscuits – there is a long-running argument over whether kit-kats or penguins are the superior art form – and set out to explore. Last May we were based in York and one day did a circuit of the city walls, taking in what remains of the old castle.
York Castle was built by William the Conqueror as part of subduing the north of England but what remains now is a stone keep that is almost exactly contemporaneous with the building we’re in, having been put together in the second half of the 13th century under Henry III. If you visit the keep you can read about both pieces of castlebuilding together with its subsequent uses right up to its modern existence as a tourist attraction – you can also read about the events of 16th March 1190, but to understand those we have to go back to William the Conqueror who, as well as bringing armed knights, Norman French and a fashion for tapestries, introduced a group of Jewish merchants to England, probably from Rouen.
This is the beginning of the history of Jews in England – there’s no record of a Jewish population before the invasion – and from the very start they were treated as special by the law: living under a list of restrictions such as not being able to own land, but also one very important freedom: they were allowed to lend money to people and charge interest. The Catholic church of the time – which claimed authority over everyone else – forbade this practice (which is crucial to the existence of business, and also important if you’re a king who wants to, let’s say, put an army together to invade another country). The Jewish population was small and, until 1135, restricted to London but as time went by they prospered despite being a popular target for taxes for kings who wanted to do an invasion but didn’t fancy paying the cost back afterwards.
In 1189, Richard the first became king – you might know him as the lionheart - and crusading went from a niche interest in England to being extremely popular. Richard took an army to the Middle East and in the spirit of supporting him, those people left behind became very keen on Catholicism and violently opposed to those of different religions. This meant attacks on Jews, and in York on 16th March 1190, the Jewish population of the city, about 150 men, women and children, asked the warden of York castle to protect them from violence. A mob of crusaders surrounded the keep demanding that they convert to Christianity. Realising there was no way out those trapped inside killed themselves and burned down the castle – the few who survived were murdered by the angry crowd.
I’m not sure what to say about this except it’s awful and that there are still those who link patriotism to the support of one particular religion and excuse violence against those who differ. It was wrong then, it’s wrong now. We’re not better yet.
On the way home from York, my wife and I dropped in on Lincoln Cathedral and in between searching for the Lincoln Imp we saw the memorial to Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln. Hugh was a boy who died in 1255 at the age of 9 – almost certainly murdered: his body was found dumped in a well. At the time state-sponsored antisemitism had reached hysteric levels: a statute of 1253 banned the building of new synagogues, banned Jews from eating meat during lent, demanded that they lower their voices in synagogues so that Christians couldn’t hear them praying, banned what they euphemistically called “secret familiarity” between Jews and Christians (yes, that does mean what you think it does), and commanded that they wear a conspicuous yellow badge.
I say hysteric because the outcome of this was, fairly predictably, that Jews were seen as fair game for whatever xenophobic unpleasantness the people of England wanted to indulge. Little Hugh’s death was such an opportunity and it was put about that he had been killed by the Jews of Lincoln so they could use his blood in their religious ceremonies. This might sound ridiculous, but not only did it lead to the arrest of 90 and the execution of 19 following a London show trial in the case of Little Hugh, but it has been repeated often enough to be a form of antisemitism with its own name – the blood libel.
Little Hugh was never officially canonised but that didn’t stop the Bishop of Lincoln profiting from pilgrims to his grave and didn’t stop Edward I building an elaborate memorial as a piece of anti-Jewish propaganda. Edward I was Henry III’s son and, like his father, is buried in a tomb just behind me. He was a man of action, famous for hammering the Scots, building castles all over Wales and spending most of his time fighting the French. In between this, he took his no-nonsense approach to the Jews of England and in 1290 issued the Edict of Expulsion, the first time a European state went so far as banning Jews, expelling them from the country.
There were only a few thousand and they all had the choice of converting to Christianity or leaving their homes, taking only what they could carry and starting a new life on the continent. As is always the case, this was worse for the poor than the wealthy, but it was bad for everyone. Ships sank, captains overcharged their passengers, and one unpleasant character deliberately abandoned a group on a sandbank and left them to drown. The king cynically seized the property that they were forced to leave behind.
It was another 360 years before Jews were allowed to return to England but we move on even further to 9th November 1938 and move abroad to Germany to where again we have state-sponsored anti-semitism leading to rioting and death. A series of laws had made it illegal for Jews and Germans to marry (or have extra-marital relations which, again, means what you think it does), they had lost their rights as citizens and Polish Jews had been expelled from the country, forced to leave with just what they could carry in a suitcase. In retaliation against this, a diplomat called Ernst vom Rath was shot and when he died riots broke out across Germany, shattering the windows of Jewish stores and businesses, looting goods and ransacking Jewish homes. It’s not known how many died, estimates range from 91 to 1500 with a further 30,000 arrested and sent to concentration camps.
In Frankfurt the Jews fleeing the violence arrived at the British Consulate pleading for help. The consul, Robert Smallbones, was visiting London, but his daughter, Inga, opened the doors and let them in, creating a small refuge from both violence and arrest. When Robert came back he recognised the need for a refugee scheme to get Jews safely out of Germany before something worse happened. The problem was that antisemitism outside Germany hadn’t suddenly gone away, other countries weren’t really welcoming to German Jews: there was an American visa scheme that a lot were on, but there was a limit to the number of places every year: a cap on immigration if you will. Meanwhile, the idea of mass Jewish immigration to England was considered unpalatable to both parliament and the public. Smallbones was a small cog in the machine, I doubt you’ve even heard of him, but he was clever and determined and principled. He put together a plan that could be ordered without a vote in parliament to allow Jews to come from Germany to England in order to wait for their turn on the American visa scheme. This was signed off in London with the limiting restriction that it only applied if the consul personally signed their visa form. Smallbones returned to Germany determined to make the most of his small loophole. For the next 9 months he worked 18 hour days signing visas and arguing with the Gestapo. He turned the consulate into a machine for rescuing Jews from Germany and would wake up after three hours sleep feeling guilty that there were people in the camps he could be saving if he weren’t in bed.
When war was declared the consulate staff were evacuated to the UK and Smallbones was put on the Gestapo list of people to find when Britain was invaded (and I guess that means what you think it means too). By then, 48,000 people had been rescued from the Nazi regime by Robert Smallbones and his ingenious loophole. Smallbones worried that things would get worse after Krystallnacht – we all know how right he was.
You are all clever and determined and principled – you are all going to have jobs where you have influence over those around you. I truly hope that none of you are ever put in the position where your decisions could save 48,000 lives but I think you will be in a position to do more than you think possible, to make other lives happier, safer, better and I think about the 600 of you in this room going out into the world committed to making a better tomorrow.
I hope that you are all privately and sincerely making that commitment now and I just want to finish by circling back to Lincoln Cathedral and the memorial to Little Hugh, to that dirty, shameful piece of our country’s history, because that memorial, built as anti-Jewish propaganda by Edward I is now marked with a rather wonderful plaque on which is inscribed a prayer that may require rewording to fit your tradition or beliefs but whose spirit, I think, applies to us all. As written in Lincoln Cathedral it reads: “Lord, forgive what we have been, amend what we are, and direct what we shall be.”
Or, as Ms Peters would put it, please don’t give up on us yet – we promise we’ll get better, we’re just not better yet.
Footnotes
1. The previous assembly about Friendship was Stranger Things
2. Maisie Peters can be heard singing You Signed Up for This on YouTube