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Jews And Conservatism

Jewish Quarterly

I was 8 years old when politics first made its mark on me and complete with megaphone and leaflets the Conservative candidate weaved his pied piperish way through the busy shoppers of Putney High Street. It was 1974 and it was then that my mother told me that our family would be voting for Mr Heath. This was the first explicit reference I'd had to my parents' political allegiances, and yet I had already absorbed enough to have formed some understanding of left and right and to know that we were most definitely on the right.

As I set about writing a memoir I planned as a vehicle for reviewing the fate of the Conservative Party since 1979 several questions loomed large. How and why did the fact that my father was Jewish affect my precocious take on politics? And was this especially curious given both that his influence on me was necessarily curtailed by his early death in 1978 and that he and my nominally C of E mother were resolutely secular? It wasn't as though I was brought up in Jewish household and yet when I came to look back I realised that dad's identity was definitely a contributing factor to my early interest in the right.

On a day to day level I could say that having a Jewish father made virtually no impact on me in that we did not follow any traditions and, other than fasting once a year, James Nadler was non-observant. But its also true that the impact was incalculable. I always knew that dad was proud to be Jewish and to have been born Polish, as proud as he certainly was about being British. I knew also that his journey from a childhood in Poland to his eventual naturalisation in Britain years later had been torturous and could very easily have failed. Escaping Lvov and Hitler's encroaching army in 1939 he had scraped his way into Palestine and finally reached Britain on a student visa ten years later, where he met an English rose, set to become my mother, in the establishment setting of Kensington Young Conservatives.

As a child hearing his story I was fascinated and appalled. What terrible things could men do that drove children across continents in fear of their life, fleeing because they were different? Growing up in 1970s London my parents told me that I was lucky to live in a civilised and free society. I didn't know exactly what these things meant back then, but I knew enough to be sure they were right. So although it was my parents' generation whose childhoods had been ripped apart by the holocaust its influence was still a potent one on me when I came to develop my own political allegiances. Its enormity gave my burgeoning interest in politics a moral and idealistic dimension, and later a sense of conviction and certainty that has traditionally been the reserve of the left and which I recognise today in America's now rather discredited Neo Conservatives (most of whom started their political journeys on the left). Its no coincidence and hardly suspicious, as today's crypto anti-Semitic left try to suggest, that many of the Neo Cons are Jewish.

While it is no surprise that this family background would have provoked my early interest in politics, perhaps it doesn't follow automatically that I would lean to the right as a result of having a Jewish father? Even as a child my dad had been an anglophile and his idealistic enthusiasms were only reinforced by the role Britain played in defeating Nazi Germany. Add to that the power of so iconic figure as Churchill and I can see why, unlike the majority of his contemporary Jewish intellectuals of the 1950s who saw the left as the obvious bulwark against Fascism, he made a beeline for the Conservative Party when he first came to Britain, especially as even the democratic left maintained a romantic and indulgent attitude to the brutal Soviet system that over run his native Poland. What he considered great about Britain; its laws, its freedoms, its traditions, he believed could only be undermined by the left. As a Jew he had been forced out of Poland by Fascists and then prevented from returning by Communists, whose lineage and philosophy was none too tolerant of Jews either. He had, and he instilled in me, a contempt for both extremes and a keen sense that both had more in common than not. Both were different types of socialism after all and when I was growing up the cold war was still pretty chilly. There was right and left, right and wrong, politics was still tribal.

I certainly absorbed these ideas from my non Jewish mother as well as my Jewish father, but I think that it was the gravity of his experiences and the choices he made as a Jew that had a particularly profound effect on me. In setting his heart on Britain and in marrying out he followed one of the logical consequences of the integration that had been the pattern of middle Europe's bourgeois Jews before Hitler determined to end that tradition. My father could have pursued a life in the new state, Israel, but although his Jewish heritage was an indivisible part of his identity he did not want it to be the only one. His aspiration to become British was to realise freedom as completely as he could, freedom both from obvious persecutions and freedom to live as he chose and define himself as he chose. That he considered Britain the ultimate home for these ideals was in part romantic but also echoed the experience of many who had throughout history similarly looked to this country for a new start. Both my parents considered socialism inimical to Britain's individualistic traditions but knowing that one of them had actually chosen to be British and had so closely allied that identity with also being on the right was particularly influential to me and a considerable spur to my teenage participation in the Young Conservatives.

I was twelve years old when post war British politics changed in 1979. That I was one of Thatcher's children and that Jews played such a significant role in her timely redirection of the Conservative Party also strikes me as no coincidence. Many of the sharpest and most influential architects of the new right were Jewish and the connection I think goes much deeper than the rather trite observation that a talent for enterprise and a penchant for family values make many Jews natural Tory sympathisers. Rather I think it is to do with the curious contradictions in Thatcherism, that combination of tradition and radicalism, which stressed the meritocratic as well as the aristocratic. I can see why that reinterpretation of Conservative values did have a particular appeal to people who admired the British establishment but whom also, as outsiders, aspired to compete for a place within it.

My father joined the Conservative Party in the 1950's but it was the ideas of Keith Joseph, Alfred Sherman, Milton Freedman of which he particularly approved and which I, as an inquisitive teenager, found particularly seductive. This 'enabling', market driven logic was subversive. It challenged the old school tie and the soggy thinking of the Shire County set and that rather English fear of ideas. It is no surprise to me that this radical element of Thatcherism was, though not exclusively, particularly championed by Jews. In fact as a Thatcherite myself I'd go so far as to argue that Jews - and other groups with mixed heritage - make the best Conservatives, understanding as they do the need both to respect tradition and to promote dynamism. That way the Party of privilege has beaten the identity politics of the left in giving this country its first Jewish and its first female prime ministers. When Michael Howard began his premiership with a speech celebrating the 'British Dream' of opportunities available to all whatever their background I felt a sentimental reminder of the ideals that first brought me to the right as well as a particular empathy with the influences that inspired his own Conservatism, and which, in large part inspired mine.

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