Of This Place

Introducing Torat Albion - Creating a Torah of Britain

The Jews’ House and Jews’ Court, Medieval Jewish buildings in Lincoln, UK

It’s customary to devote the first post of a newsletter to introducing yourself and discussing what the newsletter is going to be. I didn’t manage to do that, I simply dived in headfirst and started in on one of the meaty subjects I wanted to cover. But I think it’s still worth doing that introduction, so idiosyncratically enough I’ll do it here, as my second post.

Mostly I want to talk about the name – Torat Albion. Torat is from Torah – teaching, wisdom, the name for the Pentateuch (the Greek term for the first five books of the Hebrew bible, a term which nobody except Jews know, see also phylacteries), and more broadly it can describe the whole canon of Jewish textuality. Torah is not wholly fixed; in Judaism there are two Torot, a written and an oral Torah. In its most expansive meaning, Oral Torah includes all the debates Jews continue to have about the nature of Judaism; we are continuing to create Torah in our own time and places. I admit that describing your own writing as Torah is rather grandiose, perhaps we can also translate it more modestly: thoughts, ideas, suggestions.

Albion is an ancient name for Britain, dating back some two thousand years; not quite as old as Judaism but getting there. It may mean ‘white land’, in reference to the white chalk cliffs on the south coast of England. There’s a story about Albina and her sisters, who were banished from ancient Greece on a rudderless ship and ended up on an unknown island. Albina was the first to step on the land and named it after herself. Then there’s some fantastical stuff about how the sisters mate with spirits called ‘incubi’ and produce a race of giants, who are eventually defeated by Brutus of Troy, the alleged first king of Britain, and a possible source for the name ‘Britain’. Anyway, Albion was (re)popularised by William Blake in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, when he rewrote the myth to turn Albion into a male giant, a kind of primeval British man. Albion’s fall mirrors the Christian ‘fall of man’, and a promised future rising of Albion represents, for Blake, a kind of restoration for both Britain and humanity in general. (Here’s a really interesting podcast episode on this mythology from Dash Arts).

All this is an enjoyable diversion. Essentially, I use Albion to mean Britain, but more broadly than the modern British state. I’m trying to speak about the land of Britain, and if one can do so in a non-imperialistic way, of the British Isles in general. And I appreciate the romantic, mythical and folk-culture echoes of the word ‘Albion’. The Celtic fringe, as much as the English colonial metropole. Torah, or thoughts from Britain then. British Torah. British Jewish ideas. The theatre director Jonathan Miller famously once described himself as being Jew-ish, perhaps this will be Brit-ish, both in having only a partial commitment to Britain and only a semi-covenantal understanding (Brit means covenant in Hebrew) But we are still not clear about what this really means, how it will be applied going forward. Let me explain in relation to a text which inspired me, around a decade ago.

In 2013 the American Jewish studies scholar and rabbi, Shaul Magid, released American Post-Judaism: Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society. Magid explained how Jewish thinkers and practitioners such as Felix Adler, Mordechai Kaplan, Zalman Schacter-Shalomi (particularly the Jewish Renewal denomination which he founded) and Shlomo Carlebach had created a new form of Judaism which was deeply and authentically American. It was rooted in the land, the climate, the writings of Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoureau, an anti-elite spirit of democracy and egalitarianism. Magid suggests that some of these thinkers went beyond the Jewish world to influence America in general, suggesting that the Jewish Renewal movement ‘is not only an alternative vision of American Judaism; it constitutes a new articulation of an indigenous form of American spirituality.’ (p.59). My interest in this bold thesis is by way of analogy; what would this look like in Britain? What would forms of Judaism, or Jewishness, that were specific, rooted and indigenous to the UK look like? Do they exist already or would we would collectively need to build them?

I once asked a Masorti rabbi I know this question, and he replied that this already existed – it was represented by the denomination ‘Liberal Judaism’. Liberal Judaism is after all, a movement indigenous to Britain, it emerged in London, in the early twentieth century, originally entitled the ‘Jewish Religious Union’. I don’t think it was the indigenousness of Liberal Judaism that the rabbi was referring to – I think he meant its tendency to include much of the service in English, to valorise good manners and decorum, to have an organ and choir, modelled on the Church of England, to be the Judaism of the aristocratic anglicised Jewish elite, whilst doing outreach to the Jewish working classes of the East End of London and other inner city areas. I think that the rabbi meant the reference pejoratively – he was suggesting that Liberal Judaism was British in the sense of being stuffy, churchy, stiff upper-lipped. In truth these ‘anglicised’ elements are found in all the denominations: top hats; rabbinical and cantorial vestments, modelled on those of Anglican priests; demonstratively patriotic prayers for the monarch and the British state; special services for coronations and royal jubilees, a great deal of shushing; most of it with the aim of presenting a positive image of Jews to wider British society. So, a Judaism rooted in the United Kingdom does exist, in a way. And it has produced many important texts and cultural artefacts. But it isn’t quite what I’m trying to articulate.

My suggestion is that rather than associate Judaism with the British state - the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, its monarchs and its venerable institutions - we connect it to Britain’s legacy of revolution, protest and counterculture. Britishness from below. What might this alternate approach look like? I hope to explore this over many articles, but here are a few brief initial thoughts.

The English Civil War, the radicalism of the New Model Army, and the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, under which, let’s not forget, Jews were first permitted to openly live and practice Judaism in England and Wales for the first time since 1290. The Diggers, taking land and farming it in 1649 on what they understood to be a Jubilee year and memorialised by the British Jewish folk singer Leon Rosselson in his remarkable song ‘The World Turned Upside Down’. The radical Jewish trade unionist movement of the late 19^th and early 20th century that put indigenous unions to shame by their militancy. The Kinder Scout trespass of 1932, in which many Communist Mancunian Jews, including the leader Benny Rothman, participated in the mass trespass in the Peak District, which helped pave the way for the creation of public National Parks by the Atlee government after 1945. The militant activism of diverse figures, such as Nina Salaman (suffragette and the first woman to preach in a British Orthodox Synagogue), Phil Piratin (Communist MP for Whitechapel, 1945-1950), Manny Shinwell (trade unionist in Glasgow in the red Clydeside era and longstanding Labour MP), Anna Mendelssohn (Angry Brigade organiser and poet) to mention just a handful. There is, I think an as yet untold story of Jews and British counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s, and for that mention should be made of the British Jewish beat poet, and creator of the Poetry Olympics, Michael Horowitz, who died in 2021, having been born in 1935 in Nazi Germany. Horowitz used to mash up the poetry of Blake with klezmer music, so if anyone is an icon of Torat Albion it’s him.

This is just some initial history to get us started. There is much to do. Engaging seriously with British Jewish culture – novels, films, plays, television programmes, songs – and not assuming that American Jewish culture is always superior. Diving into the rich canon of British folk music, and bringing it into contact with Hebrew texts, not least those of our liturgy. To embrace the climate and land of where we are – and not make out that sitting in a sukkah in a British October is some kind of aberration that needs to be remedied by relocation. To use lakes and rivers as mikvehs. To create pilgrimage routes to mediaeval Jewish sites across England, and to tell stories en route in the manner of The Canterbury Tales. To connect the ghostly festival of Shemini Atzeret with All Hallows Eve. To keep up our existing tradition of ‘matzah rambles’ at Pesach, whatever the weather. To build youth movements focused on doyikayt (hereness, or local-ness) rather than connection with far flung locales.  To hold Havdalah and Lag B’omer bonfires on beaches and on mountain tops.  The wonderful Miknaf Ha’aretz, which means ‘the ends of the earth’, has already begun some of this vital work, based not in the Jewish heartlands of North-West London, but in Devon.

This is the work of diasporism, the new Jewish movement that has bubbled up in the last two decades. Its work cannot simply be a negative rejection of the centrality of Israel in Jewish life, important though that is. And it cannot be about venerating a generalised, ersatz ‘Jewish Diaspora’, as if that could be identical in all times and places. It must celebrate the Judaism and Jewishness of very specific, particular places, in all their messiness, imperfections and lack of glamour. For us, it’s about thinking and doing Judaism on this beautiful, backward, maddening, rainy Island in the North Sea. And trying to write some kind of Torah here.

Doing this work is a big task, but it can be gradual and piecemeal, and the prize is worth it: building a Jewishness that is truly of this place. To paraphrase Rebbe Nachman in a British key: we don’t have to do all the f***ing work, but we can’t just skive off from it either.