Dizzy in Liverpool, Hatred in Britain

LBC yesterday reported that antisemitism has reached record levels in the United Kingdom. Notwithstanding instances in the past may not always have been recorded and that the police and courts now take it more seriously, such news is most unwelcome. From the far right, the hard left and some sections of Britain's Muslim communities, the people of Judah are considered fair game.

Outside of St George’s Hall in Liverpool is a statue of a former Prime Minister, the Earl of Beaconsfield. He is better known by the name Benjamin Disraeli, our one and only PM from an ethnic minority. While the British were electing a Jew as Prime Minister, the Russians were brutally organising pogroms in which they were massacred. Having once been insulted in Parliament for his Jewishness, Disraeli retorted:

“Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the Right Honourable Gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.”

There is much discussion about whether his Anglican faith was genuine. Modern Jewish writers like to consider it expedient, merely converting to achieve political advancement. Others refer to him as ‘a Jewish apostate who lived his entire adult life as a Christian.’ Those of us with a Biblical understanding of the gospel realise there is little distinction between Old and New Testaments; the God of Abraham used the Jewish nation to save the gentiles, for from them did the promised Deliverer come. I do not know if we shall see ‘the Old Jew’, as Bismarck called him, in heaven, but we may be grateful that God’s providence enabled so great a man to lead our nation and bless our people. It was thanks, in part, to him, that my male ancestors received the vote.