by Roger Cohen
The examination for election to a scholarship at Westminster is called The Challenge. I took the exam, which is appropriately named, at the age of twelve, between May 28 and May 30, 1968. Among the questions was: Are the Ten Commandments out of date? If so, why? I also had to translate into Latin elegiacs these lines of Dryden:
Soon after, Homer the old heroes praised,
And noble minds by great examples raised;
Then Herod did his Grecian swains incline
To till the fields and prune the bounteous vine.
That I was able to coax those swains to incline in Latin elegiac form, as well as wrestle various mathematical problems to the ground (Can you say anything about the number of lines of symmetry for a regular n-sided polygon?), seems astonishing today, to the point I feel the need to get reacquainted with this talented boy. Who was he, and what did he know about polygons?
I did well enough to place sixth in The Challenge, an exam in which the top ten or so performers earned a Queen’s Scholarship and entered College. But I sat the exam in ignorance of the fact that its rules stipulated that “candidates for Queen’s Scholarships must profess the Christian faith.” My parents had signed an entrance form acknowledging this requirement. My failure to satisfy it was evident. So I was awarded an Honorary Scholarship, a kind of sop to conscience that entitled me to wear the scholars’ ankle-length gown but not enter College or afford my parents its financial advantages.
I thought nothing of this at the time. Such matters belonged to the vast realm of silence. When I inquired of Westminster’s archivist, Elizabeth Wells, how this requirement had arisen, she wrote back saying that in 1958 two new sentences had been added to The Challenge’s regulations. The first was: “No boy who is not a British subject shall be eligible to compete for Election as a Queen’s Scholar.” The second was the Jew-barring condition: “Candidates for Queen’s Scholarships must profess the Christian faith.” Nothing in the school’s statutes justified this change. The school’s records do not clarify who instigated it. The governing body never discussed the matter.
By 1958 many of the children of the Jewish immigrants from Europe who came to England to escape persecution before World War II were of an age to apply to Westminster. My English teacher, John Field, framed the issue this way: “The demography of London began to change markedly in the 1930s with refugees from mainland Europe, and when the school returned to London after five years’ evacuation, the number of Jewish applicants slowly began to increase. The bursar and registrar was an ex–Indian Army colonel with the kind of views you would expect such a background to provide. I recall archiving his notes on Nigel Lawson”—later Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer—when his parents brought him for an interview. “On the lines of ‘Undoubtedly a bright and clever child; very Jewish of course.’ ”
The colonel in question, who controlled Westminster’s entry over many years, was Humphrey Carruthers of the Tenth Gurkha Rifles. Concerned about Westminster’s reputation for anti-Semitism, John Rae looked into the colonel’s notes of interviews with Jewish parents of prospective pupils. Among them, as he relates in Delusions of Grandeur, he found:
I thought her an unattractive parent, ugly voice and really Jewish in appearance.
The mother came to make the registration (jaguar and chauffeur) nice clothes but the bangles! Very common speech and talked through her nose.
Both parents came to make the registration. They brought the little boy with them. They were vulgar and unattractive.
Personally I thought the father was conceited and obnoxious. In fact I took a violent dislike to him. I am sure he is very wealthy.
With Carruthers gone—he left in the mid-1960s (too soon to pass judgment on my mother’s South African accent and “Jewish appearance”)—Rae set to work to rescind the conditions introduced in 1958. They offended him personally; they also limited Westminster’s ability to attract the broadest talent. He wrote in his diary—posthumously published as The Old Boys’ Network—that the effect of the rules was to “exclude candidates, including Jewish boys, who are honest enough to say they are not Christians.” He raised the matter in 1971 with the school’s governing body. The statutes committee began an investigation. It submitted its conclusions on July 14, 1972, six months before I left Westminster for Oxford: “A boy is not precluded from admission as a Queen’s Scholar on the ground either that he is not a British subject or that he does not profess the Christian faith.”
Rae still had to make the case before the governing body at a meeting the following November. He encountered stiff opposition. One knight of the realm, Sir Henry Chisholm, declared that he would resign rather than accept the change. Rae countered with the argument that, as he puts it in Delusions of Grandeur, “we needed all the bright boys we could get.” Chisholm had second thoughts. If pragmatism demanded the change, he might not resign after all. “With no further discussion,” Rae writes, “the requirement that a Queen’s Scholar must ‘profess the Christian faith’ was swept away.” Jews could now go openly to College. So could pupils of every faith. They no longer had to convert to Christianity or lie low.
The change was enacted for The Challenge of 1974. By then I had already made my way to Balliol College, Oxford, after a diversion of several months on the hippie trail to Afghanistan. The Afghan king was deposed in a coup during our stay in the summer of 1973, not that we noticed much or could possibly have imagined the world-changing turmoil that would follow over the ensuing decades.
In those days you could drive around Afghanistan for months in a VW Kombi, named “Pigpen” after the keyboardist of the Grateful Dead, and nobody bothered you. We sat on the heads of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, since destroyed by Taliban fanatics, and got high. We drove through the Salang Pass at almost thirteen thousand feet, returning from Mazar-i-Sharif to Kabul, only for the engine to blow as we emerged from the tunnel. We rolled down the other side in neutral for fifty miles. Every time I read about the battles of the 1980s for the Salang Pass between the Soviets and mujahideen fighters, I imagined us heedless hippies in our downward glide. The pass was not yet “strategic” in our time. It was just too much for our engine.
My friend Martin Orbach—the goalkeeper on that soccer team of slow-fading glory—was also on the hippie trail at that time. He had attended College and was also headed for Oxford. His great-grandparents, Hungarian Jews who had converted to Catholicism, were killed by the Nazis in the camps. Conversion made no difference, of course, to Hitler’s murderers. Not remaining a Jew was impossible. His grandmother committed suicide in flight from the Nazis. His father’s family was also mostly Jewish. Martin, however, had been raised a Catholic and so passed muster to enter the scholars’ house at Westminster.
The whole sixteen-year interlude, from 1958 to 1974, during which Westminster allowed a form of British prejudice against Jews to infect its regulations, was a betrayal of the values the school embodied and Rae defended: the civilized openness that forged questing and questioning minds. Still, among the manifold gifts it gave me, I have Westminster to thank for opening my eyes, however inadvertently, to the fact of my Jewishness and the slight discomfort, like a recurring twinge, that accompanied being Jewish in England—a country, then at least, of quiet Jews, many converted or wholly assimilated. They would never make a commotion about some slight that was, they tried to persuade themselves, not quite anti-Semitic, even if it did carry the faint but unmistakable reek of the sewer.
In 1938, on the eve of the outbreak of World War II, my uncle Bert wrote a short monograph called On Being a Jew. He was twenty years old and had lived all his life in Johannesburg. It begins:
The problem of being a Jew is one that has teased my mind. I have been vexed. I have been puzzled. I have been proud. To the depths of despair I have been plunged by petty humiliation, and alternately I have been strangely raised to crests of silent exhilaration, I have felt a surge of strength at the thought of an imposition I bear—a magnificent stigma, the magnificent stigma
of being a Jew.
My first recollection of being a Jew was that it caused me fear; this was when I was a child, for Jew boys were singled out to be especially bullied. This was my first taste of a status of inferiority bestowed upon me by my very birth, an unpleasant phase it was, but which served to foster a spirit of sturdy independence. Successively fear was followed by resentment, despair, steadfastness, and indeed a tumultuous gamut of similarly conflicting emotions. Until eventually I reached a state of mental equilibrium, a balance, inward harmony. I am now no longer actively and persistently conscious of the fact that I am a Jew. Aware of it, yes, but no longer am I ashamed of it, or afraid of it, nor indeed proud of it.
There is something agonizing about my uncle’s struggle to cast off the humiliation of repetitive school-yard insults—the daily ritual of huddling outside class with other pariah Jews while morning prayers were held—and declare himself at peace with his Jewishness. He ponders how to navigate a middle course between the loud and “objectionable Jew” and the “cringing and cowardly Jew.” Neither “unnatural assertion” nor “servile subjection” is the answer. The Jew must “go to even greater heights to overcome the handicap imposed on him” and achieve greatness, while avoiding the “vaulting ambition” that would be another form of excess. His fundamental dilemma is that “society as a whole has not risen above judging by a primitive or fundamental dogma—a single Jew is regarded not as an individual to be separately appraised but as an example of a type.” Or, as he puts it in another passage: “A Jew may be brilliant, he may be an intellectual genius, he may be one of mankind’s most perfect productions; he will be recognized as such by a precious few, but eventually it will be said of him that he is a Jew, one of the same category as any other Jew, be that Jew the most wretched individual.”
My uncle was then about to begin his studies at Witwatersrand University. There an anti-Semitic professor would fail him twice in pathology, holding him back a year, before eventually allowing him through and commenting to a fellow student who did not make the cut: “I’m sorry I had to fail you and pass the Jew.”
Three decades and a world war and several thousand miles separate Bert’s South African experience and mine of England, and yet there is something recognizable in his sense of not quite belonging. In America, where Jewish shallow-rootedness existed beside the shallow-rootedness of just about everyone, the situation was different. As Karl Shapiro observed, “The European Jew was always a visitor and knew it. But in America everyone is a visitor. In this land of permanent visitors, the Jew is in a rare position to ‘live the life’ of a full Jewish consciousness.” Yet a struggle still existed. Irving Howe said of the Jewish writers published by Partisan Review: “We wanted to shake off the fears and constraints of the world in which we had been born. When up against the impenetrable walls of the gentile politeness we would aggressively proclaim our difference as if to raise Jewishness to a higher cosmopolitan power.”
The Jewish experience over millennia demonstrates that no amount of scholarly questing, of religious devotion, of determined emancipation, or of proud patriotism and service could provide security. People and entire nations might turn on you. Scrolls without swords did not work. Zionism was born of that reluctant conclusion. It was prescient, given the fate of European Jews in the Nazi camps. Israel, by giving Jews at last a small piece of earth, was supposed to create what David Ben-Gurion called “a self-sufficient people, master of its own fate,” rather than one “hung up in midair.”
Bert, in 1938, was hung up in midair all right. Considering my family story—the pits in the Lithuanian forests, the repetitive school taunting, the displaced persons’ camps where my uncle Bert saw the bedraggled Jews in 1945, the frustrated attempts to fit in whether in South Africa or England, the Jewish precariousness, the annihilation angst, the inner exile—I can only concur with the necessity of Zionism. Israel, for all its failings, helped assuage at least some of my uncle’s fear. The state’s message has been clear: Know your history, be proud of your history, and end Jewish meekness and shame, the acquiescence that took your forebears to the ditches and the gas. Never again would Jews be so diminished as to inspire the revulsion my uncle felt on seeing his desperate Jewish “kith and kin” in Italy in 1945, just seven years after he penned On Being a Jew. By this time his words had redoubled resonance: “The Jews crave equal treatment. Let them take their place then amongst the peoples of the world and seek no preferential consideration from their fellows.”
Fifteen years after I left Westminster, in 1987, Jonathan Katz was appointed master of the Queen’s Scholars. Katz, a lapsed Anglican, had a Jewish father from Leipzig who fled the Nazis, a Christian mother, and a Hindu wife. In order to marry Kalyani, he had officially become a Hindu, a persuasion that, like being a Jew, mixes belief and ethnicity: even if you stop believing you do not stop being one. Katz had stopped believing. He had no religion. He was deeply conversant with several.
This rumpled and eclectic man—a brilliant classicist who had taught at Westminster early in his career before becoming the Indian Institute librarian at Oxford’s Bodleian Library—represented a departure for College. The scholars’ house was intimately associated with the Abbey. It had begun admitting Jews who were open about their identity only a dozen years earlier. So there were bound to be hesitations. Katz received a polite letter before his appointment from John Rae’s successor as headmaster, David Summerscale, inquiring about his religion. Somebody on the Abbey end of the governing body had raised concerns with the dean, Michael Mayne, about appointing this fellow called Katz.
Katz wrote back to Summerscale asking that his letter be passed on to Mayne. He said he was equally interested in several religions but could not profess any; that he would encourage scholars to follow their own conscience in such matters; that he would be happy to lead students into Abbey for the by-now-twice-weekly services or run a compulsory compline; and that if any of this was a problem, he would remain in his job at the Bodleian.
Mayne invited Katz down to London for a chat. He had been reassured by the letter and asked Katz not to take the inquiry amiss. His concern was that Katz be a good teacher and look after the scholars well and have cordial relations with the Abbey. All was now in order.
“Michael,” Katz responded, “put me right if I’m wrong. What you seem to be saying is that what is saving the situation is that I have no religion. But what if I did, and it was the wrong one?”
Well, Mayne suggested, the less said about that, the better.
In 1921, at the age of ten, Bernard Katz, the father of the future master of the Queen’s Scholars at Westminster, takes an exam similar to The Challenge for entrance to the Schiller-Realgymnasium in Leipzig. His own father, a fur trader, is one of fifteen children from an Orthodox Jewish family in Russia that has fled persecution a few years earlier and settled in Germany, where the environment seems more liberal. They live above a bakery on König-Johann-Strasse in an area of Leipzig with a large Jewish population; the future Israeli novelist S. Y. Agnon lives on the same street.
Bernard Katz is a brilliant student, who will go on to win the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1970, one of countless Nobels of which Hitler deprived Germany. However, when the list of successful candidates for the Schiller school is posted in Leipzig, Katz’s name is not there. His family is informed that his failure has nothing to do with his grades; they are excellent. But priority for places has to go to “full-blooded ethnic Germans.” Katz is admitted to another school, the König-Albert-Gymnasium.
Here this gifted boy excels. The following year he goes home for Yom Kippur. When he returns, a friend tells him that some pupils have been talking about what should be done to the Jews. One has boasted about his father’s idea: all the Jews should be gathered, taken down into an underground shopping area in central Leipzig, and asphyxiated with poison gas. Katz later tells his son Jonathan that it was at this moment that he knew he would eventually have to get out of Germany. Heinrich Heine, the German Roman
tic poet, had noted, “Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn people.”
A student of medicine at Leipzig University, Katz is forced from the student union by Nazi pressure in 1933. He considers going to Palestine. A chance meeting in Karlsbad in 1934 with Chaim Weizmann, the future president of Israel, changes his plans. Weizmann has contacts in the scientific community in Britain. With his help, Katz secures a position with Professor A. V. Hill of the biophysics department at University College, London, and escapes Germany in 1935. Hill is a Nobel laureate in medicine. He has made it his business to welcome refugee scientists from Germany and takes the young Katz, who soon becomes known as “BK,” into his home in Highgate in north London.
After completing his doctorate at UCL in 1938, BK is offered a job in Australia. He has managed at last to get his parents out of Germany. Shopkeepers, they resisted leaving until Kristallnacht dispelled the last doubts about the Nazis’ intentions. Together the Katz family sails for Sydney in 1939. Here BK spends the war in the Royal Australian Air Force. He meets his wife, Marguerite Penly. Together they return to England in 1946, eventually settling in the Kenton area of northwest London, where Jonathan Katz is born in 1950.
To BK, who had arrived stateless and penniless, England is a haven of tolerance. He would later say that coming to Britain in 1935 felt like David Copperfield’s experience of coming “home” to Aunt Betsey Trotwood and being given a good, warm bath.