Do British Jews have dual loyalty?

August 28, 2026August 28, 2026 levtaylor

Friends, at this season of teshuvah, I want to begin with an apology. I am terribly sorry, because I have been selling KLS short.

When people asked me over the last couple of years what Kingston Liberal Synagogue was like, I told them that we were a friendly suburban family shul with good Progressive values.

What an embarrassment, because all this time I neglected to tell anyone that we are really the centre of a Zionist conspiracy. That’s right, this community in Thames Ditton is, in fact, the beating heart of a Mossad plot to control the Green Party.

If you’re surprised, you can only imagine what a shock this is for our Green Party members.

Although I joke, something quite serious has happened. The Canary, a conspiracy website owned by a used car salesman, has decided to run “an exposé” on some of our Green-affiliated members.

On their social media channels, they ran with the headline “Zionist synagogues in the pipeline to defend Zionism.” It explains that some of the core Jewish Greens are members of Kingston Liberal Synagogue, which was part of Liberal Judaism, and is now part of Progressive Judaism, then declares: “all these organisations and all member synagogues are formally signed up to the Zionist movement.”

Its author, David Miller, is a TV host for Iran’s state-run media channel, Press TV. He has collected a database of “foreign influences” on British policy, which now includes members of the synagogue Council who are not even members of the Greens. His database looks remarkably like a list of British Jews.

This incident has inspired many feelings. I do feel scared, as this carries frightening historical memories. This is not the first time somebody has decided to collect a list of enemy Jews, whether they were labelled as “Zionists” in Iraq, “counter-revolutionaries” in Russia, or “Communists” in America.

I feel outraged that people I care about should be subjected to such attacks. I feel sad that people who have devoted their lives to causes like sustainable transport, fair economic distribution, and indeed Palestinian human rights, have been tarred with such an ugly brush.

But most of all, I feel proud. Proud to be a Progressive Jew and proud to be a rabbi to Progressive Jews. Proud to know and support people who consistently stand up for their values, even when faced with hostility.

People like David Miller want to stop Jews from participating in public life. But when people want you to shut up, the best thing to do is get louder.

So I want to bolster our members with proud defiance. The values of Progressive Judaism cut across party, affiliation and creed, and those who uphold them should always be encouraged in what they dodo.

Now, if you are not au fait with internal Green Party bureaucracy, you may be wondering what crime these notorious Israel propagandists committed.

Some of them criticised a motion to the Green Party declaring that Zionism is racism. The goal of its proposers was that the Greens would be Europe’s first anti-Zionist Party and declare all Zionists unwelcome.

Unsurprisingly, some Jews had reservations. Party leader Zack Polanski said it depended entirely on how Zionism was defined. There are, we know, versions of Zionism that promote racist and murderous policies.

And then there are versions, such as we have supported here, that involve Jews going out to provide protective presence to Palestinian olive farmers in the West Bank, or that seek democracy and minority rights, or that seek to defend the land’s natural resources.

Any of these projects might be subjected to legitimate critique, from left or right, but I cannot see how any of them would warrant being kicked out of public life. Indeed, the most vociferous critiques, that these are liberal plasters on nationalist wounds, come from the exact people named as Zionist agitators by Miller.

And that is precisely the concern that some raised. Our member, Dr Joshua Alston, warned that declaring the party free from all Zionists would disqualify most Jews from party membership.

As Miller has demonstrated, that is not quite true. The witch hunt for Zionists excludes all Jews from public life.

The logic for Miller in pinpointing our congregants as part of this great conspiracy is precisely in their Jewishness. They are suspicious because they are Jews doing Jewish things.

A Jew goes to synagogue. A synagogue is part of a national organisation. The national organisation is part of an international denomination. And, all of them, says Miller, are signed up to the “Zionist movement.”

Only Jews who have no connection to other Jews or to Judaism could possibly pass Miller’s purity test.

This database of Zionist lobbyists and suspicion of all Jews has roots in a deep-seated European prejudice that Jews have a “dual loyalty.” On the one hand, we may seem to be citizens of Britain, but, in reality, our secret loyalty is to the global network of Jews.

This was notoriously demonstrated by the Dreyfus Affair of 1894. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer in the French Army, was accused of spying for Germany. He was stripped of his title and shipped off to a penalty colony.

As many noted at the time, Dreyfus was a scapegoat for the military establishment. The government and army knew that the real spy was one of their own, but used a Jew to deflect blame and cover up their failings.

Dreyfus worked as a foil because, being Jewish, he could never be trusted to be truly loyal to France, despite having done nothing wrong. Jews would never be true patriots to their country.

To think that, only a year ago, Kingston Liberal Synagogue was a touted hot bed of anti-Zionism. It feels like only yesterday that our little synagogue was expelled from the Board of Deputies for being insufficiently loyal to Israel.

Our elected Deputy committed the heinous offence of joining with Israeli civil society by opposing the war on Gaza. Along with 35 other representatives, she condemned the Israeli government for breaking the ceasefire and attacking civilians in Gaza, rather than engaging in diplomacy to bring the hostages home.

These incidents are, I believe, related. They show examples of Progressive Jews refusing to be forced into binary choices. Whether it is Greens defending the presence of Zionists in their party, or Deputies insisting on their right to oppose war, these are people demonstrating real compassion and nuance in an increasingly polarised culture.

And they are both examples of that Jewish dual loyalty. The Jewish Greens have refused to hide their Jewishness to appear more palatable as Progressives.

The rebellious Deputies refused to compromise their Progressive values for their Jewishness. They would not engage in slavish national loyalty when they saw core ethical principles violated.

So, perhaps British Jews do have dual loyalty. This was the reason given by Tory politicians in the early 19th Century for refusing to allow Jews civic rights in England. In 1830, Catholics had just been emancipated, and the Jews hoped they were next.

One of the greatest advocates for Jewish emancipation was a Whig MP named Thomas Babington Macaulay. Macaulay was a liberal historian and powerful orator with a firm belief in equal rights.

Macaulay issued a pamphlet addressing the claim by opponents of progress that Jews “are not Englishmen. They are a separate people, living locally in this island, but living morally and politically in communion with their brethren who are scattered over all the world.”

Rather than refuting the charge of being insufficiently patriotic Macaulay said: of course they are! So is everyone!

Who is so simple minded that they can only swear allegiance to one nation, or so naive that they only feel sympathy for one cause?

Look at those pesky Quakers, the cantankerous Wesleyans, or those treacherous Huguenots. Everyone feels loyalty to multiple people and causes.

Just look at the Catholics. If you wait two hundred years, one of them may even become prime minister!

Macaulay argued that if Jews didn’t feel passionate enough about Britain, it was the job of the government to give people reasons and responsibilities to care about building the country.

People are not mindless servants. They are full human beings, with ethical codes, family attachments, sacred texts, personal histories, and values. The role of Britain wasn’t to force Jews into some box, but to make the box bigger.

Jews, in turn, responded to the Whigs’ call. They threw themselves into English civic life and volunteered for every posting where they could be helpful. If you’ve ever wondered why we say weekly prayers for the King and his government but no other religion does, it’s a hangover from Victorian efforts by Progressive Jews to be accepted in Britain.

We have fully embraced the modern world, and taken on the universal promises of the Enlightenment: peace; equality; human rights for everyone; the triumph of love over all. And we have synthesised them completely with our love of Judaism, its ancestral traditions, its strange ways, and its peculiar people.

We have indeed embraced our multiple loyalties: to the country where we have; to Jews everywhere; and to our deeply-held beliefs in universal religion.

This is the way of Progressive Judaism. It requires a constant mediation between our particular attachment to the Jews and our universal concern for human rights. It is an ongoing struggle to love one’s people and all other people in a world beset by hatred.

How easy it would be to only have one! To only be Progressive or only be Jewish. To ditch empathy for pride and be a vulgar nationalist. Or to forfeit self-respect for compassion and welcome our own annihilation.

In late October 2023, as Israeli society was still reeling from the horrors of Hamas attacks, and violent reprisals against Palestinians were well underway, the peace activist Neta Hazan reflected precisely on this dichotomy.

The Israeli Left, she said, is constantly accused of dual loyalty for advocatimg for the Palestinians as well as their own. She said that now it was time to take that label as an honour. She wrote:

“Dual loyalty is probably not the right word. It is double pain, double heartbreak, double caring, double love. It is holding onto everyone’s humanity. And it is hard. It is so hard to hold onto humanity here. It is exhausting, and it feels like time after time the world simply asks you to give up. It would be so much easier to “choose a side”—any side. Just to choose, to stick to one, and at least reduce the amount of pain you hold. At least to feel part of a group and less alone in all of this… And this pain that some of us in our small community hold, this “dual loyalty,” is probably the only hope this place has.”

So, dear Progressive Jews, we will never be sufficiently British for the white supremacists. We will never be Zionist enough for Netanyahu’s cheerleaders. And we will never be anti-Zionist enough for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard.

And that’s great. That’s a cause for real pride.

It means that we are full people with open hearts, who care about ourselves and about others. We are capable of love that the small-minded cannot comprehend.

Yes, we hold all these loyalties.

At different times, different members will prioritise the universal or the particular in their expression of Progressive Judaism. But at all times, we are members of this community, and deserve each other’s solidarity.

As a community, we span ideologies and political parties. The way we vote and hold party memberships is just one of our loyalties.

Another is the love and support we show for each other. Let us strengthen that loyalty.

Our loyalty to our members. To our movement. To our cause. And to our God.

Let us hold our hands together and keep our heads high, in love and pride.

Shabbat shalom.

sermon · social justice · theology

Who am I to judge?

July 17, 2026 levtaylor

Have you ever heard someone say “who am I to judge?”

Not just casually. I’m talking about major situations, when something clearly is wrong. There are those who will shrug off great indecencies, and say they don’t feel qualified to provide a moral assessment.

There is a tendency, in the modern West, to avoid moral judgment, even when something quite clearly deserves condemnation. There are situations when people say “who am I to judge?” when they really ought to be judging.

This desire not to act as judge likely comes from certain interpretations of the Christian tradition. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus teaches: “Judge not, lest ye be not judged” and in the Gospel of Luke, he instructs: “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned.”

There is a fundamentally Christian idea underpinning the notion that we shouldn’t judge. We are flawed flesh and blood, whereas God, who is perfect, is the only one who has the right to judge.

This is, I think, the direct opposite of the Jewish attitude towards judgment. Quite on the contrary, we are expected to be God’s hands in the world. We are expected to look at the world, analyse it, judge it, and find ways of making it better. We are supposed to be active participants in the world, working towards holiness and justice, by discerning right from wrong. God is not going to intervene for us: we have to intervene for God.

(I should be clear here that I don’t want to set up a false dichotomy between Christian and Jewish teachings. Some Christians say the verses I quoted from the Gospels are really about avoiding hypocrisy; and some Christians are in fact overly quick to judge others. I draw this distinction only to show that, in Judaism, judging is good. According to our Torah, our Prophets, our Mishnah, and our philosophy, judgment is the key to living righteously.)

In our parashah this week, Moses recalls the system of government he established with his father-in-law, Yitro. He reminds the Israelites that he appointed judges and told them: ‘You must hear the cases of your fellow Israelites and the foreigners living among you. Be perfectly fair in your decisions and impartial in your judgments. Hear the cases of those who are poor as well as those who are rich. Don’t be afraid of anyone’s anger, for the decision you make is God’s decision.’

For Moses, it’s not that God makes perfect judgments in Heaven and we make flawed ones on Earth. The process of judging is sacred. Finding a way to judge everyone fairly is doing God’s work.

We are supposed to judge. Fairly, honestly, without deference to the rich or patronising the poor, without fear or favour, human beings are supposed to judge each other.

In our haftarah, the Prophet Isaiah tells us exactly what happens when we stop judging. He chastises Israel: “Your leaders have become rebellious and companions of thieves; everyone loves bribes and runs after payments; they do not advocate for the orphan, and the quarrel of the widow does not come to them.”

When you abrogate responsibility for judging, it is the most vulnerable people who suffer. Unless people are willing to say that something is wrong, the people with the least power are left without advocates or intercessors. In Isaiah’s time, he saw that this created “a sinful nation, a people heavy with iniquity.”

Not everyone will sit on the Sanhedrin, but all of us are supposed to be on the lookout for infractions against the moral order. In the aftermath of the Second World War, this became especially relevant.

Hannah Arendt, one of the 20th Century’s greatest philosophers, escaped from the Nazi Gestapo in 1933. She was a stateless refugee in Paris throughout the war, during which she spent some years in an internment camp.

Afterwards, Arendt moved to New York, and became one of the only foreign journalists to report on Israel’s trial of the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann. Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to refer to the Final Solution’s pen pusher. Anybody, said Arendt, could perform the most wicked acts in the most indifferent ways. She warned that, if the most disgusting crimes could be prosecuted, they could almost certainly be committed again.

When Arendt wrote her reports, and turned them into a book, she received considerable backlash from readers. Sometimes, she defended what she had said. Some of it caused her to revise her position. But only one criticism made her truly incensed. What got her truly angry were those who said she had no right to judge.

“Who are we to judge?” her critics asked. “How can we say that we would behave any differently to Eichmann under the circumstances? How easy it must have been to get swept up in the fog of committing genocide. Maybe anybody else would do such a thing.”

Arendt wrote a furious riposte to such critics, called Responsibility and Judgment. She said:

“Who am I to judge? actually means We’re all alike, equally bad, and those who try, or pretend that they try, to remain halfway decent are either saints or hypocrites, and in either case should leave us alone. Hence the huge outcry the moment anyone fixes specific blame on some particular person instead of blaming all deeds or events on historical trends and dialectical movements, in short on some mysterious necessity that works behind the backs of men and bestows upon everything they do some kind of deeper meaning.”

This reluctance to judge Nazi war criminals who oversaw death camps was offensive to Arendt, as one who had survived that terrible era. But it was also, she felt, philosophically abhorrent.

If you can’t judge, says Arendt, nobody can ever take responsibility for anything. And if nobody can take responsibility, then history is just a bunch of forces acting on us all, that never requires us to take action.

On the contrary, judgment is the prerequisite for recognising when something is wrong in the world, and doing all we can to change it.

You can’t blame psychology or circumstances or material realities. Everyone must take moral responsibility.

That is by no means easy. The Christian rebuttal against judging warns that if you judge someone, you will be judged to the same standard.

Yet surely that is the point! Saying that something is morally wrong means making a commitment not to do it. Labeling another’s actions as monstrous means we commit ourselves never to be like them.

Arendt saw Eichmann, the mass murderer and war criminal, as an everyman. He was a mindless bureaucrat, who had never given any thought to whether what he was doing might be wrong. To adopt the familiar phrasing, Eichmann was “just following orders.”

One of the central goals of Shoah education must be moral instruction. Not only to teach about what happened to our people, but to show what any person is capable of doing. It must be to train people to look critically, with judging eyes, at all that happens in the political sphere, and never excuse it by blaming circumstances, history, psychology, or upbringing.

No, let us never say “who am I to judge?” Let us instead insist on appraising right from wrong and good from evil at every possible opportunity. Let us be willing to assess, without fear or favour, what we feel lives up to and defies God’s law.

May we fulfil the words of the Prophet, and live out Isaiah’s proclamation, that we shall be redeemed through justice and find repentance through righteousness.

Shabbat shalom.

judaism · sermon · torah

Who created the Jews?

January 10, 2025January 10, 2025 levtaylor

One day, word came to Joseph, “Your father is failing rapidly.” So Joseph went to visit his father, and he took with him his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim.

When Joseph arrived, Jacob was told, “Your son Joseph has come to see you.” So Jacob gathered his strength and sat up in his bed.

Jacob was half blind because of his age and could hardly see. So Joseph brought the boys close to him, and Jacob kissed and embraced them. Then Jacob said to Joseph, “I never thought I would see your face again, but now God has let me see your children, too!”

He drew them close, so close, and kissed their foreheads, then offered his blessing, his last testimony upon his grandchildren. He placed his hands on his grandchildren’s heads and said:

“The whole world hates us! They’ve always hated us, right from Pharaoh until today. They’ll never accept us, because they’re jealous of us. They can’t stop thinking about us, even though we’re a tiny fraction of the world. Well, good! We’re going to keep being Jewish to spite them. That’s it, boys, be Jewish to wind up the antisemites. As long as they hate us, wear your yarmulkes.”

Of course, this is not what Jacob said to his grandchildren.

What would have happened to Jews and Judaism if this was all Jacob had to pass on?

Ephraim and Mannasheh would have nothing on which to base their identities but a negative. They would see themselves as Jews only by victim of circumstance. Their choices would be to reluctantly accept their Jewish status as a miserable burden from previous generations; or to concoct a paranoid worldview that lashed out at everyone; or to ditch being Jewish as soon as they got the chance.

Jacob would just have left the boys a neurotic mess, with no pride in themselves or joy in their lives.

Jacob would not have said this to his children, but what are we teaching to ours? Are we teaching them to love being Jewish, with all its culture, rituals, festivals, beliefs, and ways of building community? Are we showing them how to love themselves and their heritage so that they can delight in it for many generations?

Or, are we imparting a negative identity based on misery and fear?

If you open up some of our communal newspapers or listen to some of our representative bodies, it is very much the latter. Maybe it is not as vulgar as the parody I just made up for Jacob, but it comes through in how they talk, and what stories they choose to tell.

It is as if, for them, Jews only exist because of antisemites, and our Jewishness is only exerted when defending ourselves against antisemitism.

This idea is not new.

In 1944, as the war came to an end, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was trying to understand antisemitism. He wrote “Portrait of an Antisemite,” in which he looked to his contemporary antisemitism in France. Sartre saw antisemitism as a lie to uphold class distinctions. The rich relied on antisemitism because it gave them an excuse to put the blame for inequality and injustice somewhere else. The poor turned to antisemitism because, by creating outsiders, it gave them a feeling of belonging to a nation in which they really had no portion.

Antisemites, he said, were people who couldn’t face their own reality, and absconded from their own freedom, to project their fears onto Jews, both real and imagined. From this, he coined the famous saying that “if Jews didn’t exist, antisemites would invent them.”

This was a useful way to begin to understand antisemitism – as a fear constructed about Jews, but in spite of what any Jews were actually like.

Sartre then goes on to ask a question: “does the Jew exist?” That is, if antisemites are just angry at imaginary Jews, what does that make of real Jews? Sartre concludes that Jews do exist, because of their shared experience of antisemitism. Jews exist in response to the persecution they face. Quite literally, he says, “the antisemite creates the Jew.”

The Jews themselves, he said, were outside of history, but victims of its oppression. If antisemitism were to disappear, then, so, too, would Jews. If only everyone were to throw off the shackles of class society, the Revolution would resolve the contradictions that antisemitism needed, and Jews would be able to assimilate into a newly-ordered utopia. Then, they could give up being Jews, and finally become citizens of their countries.

What he outlines is really a popular Bolshevik understanding of antisemitism, sprinkled with existentialism. For many opponents of antisemitism, its appeal was that it could suggest a way out of hatred and racism.

But, for those of who are Jews, that’s not helpful at all. If being liberated as people means being destroyed as Jews, why would we want such a thing?

Sartre had a friend, interlocutor, and fellow intellectual, in Albert Memmi. Like Sartre, he was a French-inflected socialist. But, unlike Sartre, Memmi was a Jew. Born in Tunisia in 1920 to a poor Jewish family, Memmi became a leading thinker, and a revolutionary in Tunisia’s war for independence. Sartre admired Memmi, and brought his anticolonial writings to a European audience.

In response, Memmi wrote “Portrait of a Jew,” and its follow-up, “The Liberation of the Jew.” Memmi was able to describe first-hand experiences of antisemitism on two continents. His personal struggles with prejudice elucidated very clearly why Jews would not want to assimilate into Christian France, even in the classless society Sartre imagined. Centuries of racism and religious discrimination showed him that neither Christianity nor Frenchness offered much hope for Jewish emancipation.

More interestingly, Memmi decided to answer for himself the question, “does the Jew exist?” For Memmi, the answer was a resounding “yes.” Jews exist, and, contra Sartre, have our own history, culture, and civilisation. Yes, that has been created in response to antisemitism, but also in spite of it. Jews were constantly creating our own culture.

Jewishness, said Memmi, was what Jews decided to create in each generation, and could be constantly remade, as part of Jews’ engagement with their own heritage. For Memmi, if antisemitism did not exist, Jews still would. Even if, as many Bolsheviks imagined, the world could be freed of superstitious religion, the Jewish national culture would carry on, and thrive in new ways.

So, antisemitism may create the Jewish condition, but it was the Jews who created Jewishness. We were the authors of our history.

After the service, we will hear from Rachel Shabi, as she talks to us about antisemitism and its challenges. Her thoughts are prescient, and we should pay close attention to them. We need to understand antisemitism, where it comes from, and how to combat it.

Yet we must remember that studying antisemitism can only tell us about antisemites. It cannot teach us about Jews.

Jews make Jews. We decide who we are. Through our love of our heritage and community, we build up Judaism, and we make it what it should be.

So, when we talk to the younger people in our communities, we cannot let their identities be formed by fear of antisemitism.

We must tell them why we have chosen to keep on being Jewish, and give them good reasons to keep it up too. Whether raised Jewish, converted, or affirmed, all of us have chosen being Jewish, and for good reasons that are bound up in love, not defined by hate.

Tell them about your favourite recipes and the best of Jewish songs. Show them Jewish art and take them to Jewish plays. Celebrate the festivals with them because you truly want to bring them to life. Mourn and fast with them because it is filled with meaning.

Teach them that God has given us a sacred task on earth; that we exist in this world to perfect it. That everything we do can light up divine sparks. That we are called upon to unify all that exists with its Creator.

Bless them with the words that Jacob actually spoke, and say:

“May the God before whom my grandfather Abraham and my father, Isaac, walked—
the God who has been my shepherd all my life, to this very day, the Angel who has redeemed me from all harm. May the Eternal One bless these children. May they preserve my name and the names of Abraham and Isaac. And may their descendants multiply greatly throughout the earth.”