Hadassa Magazine August/September 2003 Vol. 85 No.1
By Charley J. Levine

With a decade of service as Great Britain’s chief rabbi and leading spokesman of the British Jewish community, Jonathan Sacks is a respected thinker and force in world Jewry. The 55 year old is a visiting professor of theology at King’s College London and his latest book is The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (Continuum).

Q. Recently, for the first time ever, foreign suicide bombers infiltrated Israel. They were British citizens. What does this say about anti-Semitism in England?
A. This does not reflect widespread anti-Semitism in Britain—quite the reverse. It has to do with the tolerance and openness of British society, which has been abused by a handful of extremist groups. I spoke to government ministers about it as long ago as 1995, and our students have experienced some of this on university campuses, Islamist splinter groups that are very extreme. This recent incident was a wake-up call, not just to the British public but specifically to the British government.

Q. A year ago, you were embroiled in a controversial interview in The Guardian, a newspaper critical of Israel. The headline indicated the tone: “Israel Set on Tragic Path, Says Chief Rabbi; Guardian Interview Will Shock Jewish Community.” What happened?
A. I have consistently supported Israel and made its case in the British media with all the love I feel and with all the power I have. To make Israel’s case effectively, I have spoken not only to the media who support Israel but also to Israel’s critics. As anyone who has read The Guardian interview in full will see, it contains a strong defense of Israel, the strongest that this paper has printed. Mine was passionate support in a hostile newspaper. They ran a headline that distorted the message. Two days later the paper published much of the material that they had omitted the first time around.

Q. Many Americans, and American Jews in particular, strongly admired Prime Minister Tony Blair for his stance on the Iraq war. And yet there is an undercurrent of apprehension that, unlike President Bush, he might be prone to undercutting support for Israel as a means of closing the gap with Europe or appeasing the Arab world.
A. Tony Blair believes profoundly in two things: No. 1 in Israel and No. 2 in peace. He bears no hidden agenda but is anxious to restart the peace process following the war in Iraq on the grounds that a window of opportunity has been opened not unlike the period following the first Gulf war. I believe he is acting in good faith. None of us can know what will be the outcome, none of us could tell until the last moment that Camp David and Taba would end in failure. He is a true friend of Israel and a true lover of peace. I believe he wants to play a part in that process.

Q. Is contemporary European anti-Semitism a new strain or old wine in a new bottle?
A. It is a new mutation. We are entirely wrong to see anti-Semitism as an ideology. It is rather a series of contradictions. Any mutation of this virus of anti-Semitism is a major event in world history. By my calculation there have only been three mutations in 2,000 years. One came with the birth of Christianity…. Greeks and Romans didn’t like Jews before Christianity just because they didn’t like most foreigners; it wasn’t personal. But with Christianity it became very personal, because it was directed specifically against Jews who, as they saw it, rejected their own messiah. Mutation two took place around the first Crusade in 1096 when Christian hatred of Jews turned demonic. That’s when we first saw myths like blood libel, alleged poisoning of wells, Jews held responsible for all the evil in the world. The third mutation began in 1879, when the political, racial concept of anti-Semitism was forged.

Q. And today?
A. We are now living through the fourth mutation. Today’s anti-Semitism has three components: The first is anti-Zionism, the notion that Jews alone have no right to a nation of their own, a place in which to govern themselves. No. 2—all Jews are Zionists and therefore legitimate targets like Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl. No. 3, Israel and the Jewish people are responsible for all the troubles in the world, from AIDS to globalization. Put those three propositions together and you have the new anti-Semitism. I am concerned that, unlike in Britain, tolerance has not been the default option in Europe for the past few centuries.

Q. What is your long-range perspective on the condition of British Jewry?
A. Britain as a whole has largely adopted a default option, which is tolerance. That is a great achievement. During the Middle Ages, England was a world leader in anti-Semitism. The first blood libel took place here nearly a millennium ago. There was the infamous massacre in York. In 1290 England was almost the first country to expel its Jews, two centuries before Spain. I am not naïve about British history. At the same time, when Jews were readmitted, under Oliver Cromwell from 1655 onward, Britain became a leader in tolerance. This was the country of [John] Milton, of John Locke, of [John Stuart] Mills.

Q. In your youth, is this where you imagined you might one day be?
A. I had no intention of being a rabbi at all. I had already begun another career as a secular academic teaching philosophy. My becoming a rabbi came from a seed planted during the Six-Day War [1967] when I was in my first year at university. For many of us that was a time when we suddenly realized that being Jewish was tied up with something called the state and people of Israel and that we were implicated in one another’s fate.

Q. I understand that process triggered a “grand tour” of self-discovery?
A. After my second year at university I did a long tour of the U.S. and Canada, because I knew there were great rabbis there whom I wanted to meet. I took one of those $100 Greyhound bus tickets and spent two months on the road meeting as many as I could. I had the privilege of meeting Rabbi [Norman] Lamm, Rabbi [Emanuel] Rackman, the great thinker Abraham J. Heschel. Most significantly, I had long conversations with Rav [Joseph B.] Soloveitchik and the Lubavitcher Rebbe [Menachem Mendel Schneerson], and this kindled in me a desire to learn more and study more. Once a rabbi, I was about to go back into secular academia, but the Rebbe’s counsel guided me. It was he who told me I had to do two things: become a rabbi myself and then train other people to be rabbis.

Q. As the High Holy Days approach, what message would you care to impart?
A. This period contains the days of judgment, awe and trembling. Yet look at the readings of the Torah for these days: Sarah’s prayer for a child, Hannah’s prayer for a child…. We learn about the first Jewish child, Yitzhak…. On the second day we read Jeremiah, and the whole of Rosh Hashana is focused on the longing of the Jewish people for children. Abraham’s first words to God are, “What can you give me if I don’t have a child?”

Q. Why this recurring focus?
A. Judaism is the Western world’s oldest faith. How did we stay young? We put children first. When the Second Temple was destroyed…the Jewish people’s answer by the first century was the world’s first ever system of compulsory universal education. We lost the Temple, so we built schools. That is what the great leaders of Eastern Europe who survived the Holocaust did as well. They persuaded their followers to have children and they built schools. That is why every single Jewish organization must ask itself today, during this High Holy Day period, how can we direct our priorities to putting children first?