Burchill - Unchosen : the memoirs of a philo-semite

In the September of 2012, in a Times column very appropriately titled Beta Male, one Robert Crampton described a series of recurrent nightmares he had. All the usual stuff was there: zombies, nakedness, being on the run from the police for unspecified but heinous crimes.

And at the end, this one: Another scenario is that I choose to go everywhere wrapped in an enormous Israeli flag. I am aware that many people I come across are sniggering, and some others are downright hostile, and even my most ardently Zionist friends are embarrassed, and yet I insist on wearing the flag everywhere

This made me laugh. What a sap! As an alpha female, this is not my nightmare but rather my dream, and one I have to some extent lived. I have spent my life wrapping myself in the Jewish flag, sometimes metaphorically, sometimes literally. I open my handbag and half a dozen paper ones on toothpicks, fashioned for me by my friend and Modern Hebrew Language classmate Karl, fall out. I look up from writing and see two full-sized ones staring proudly back from my bookcases, framing the Torah. Occasionally, when very drunk, I will literally wrap one around me and cry like a baby.

(And whenever I look at my Torah, I feel a burning thrill of shame, recalling the night not long after I met Karl when we cut our thumbs, smeared our mixed blood on the title page and he agreed with me that Now were with them, whatever happens. But its probably best that we dont tell them about this, in case its blasphemy. Beat. Do they have blasphemy?)

I look across the room and see it on the bunting which hangs around my permanent window shrine to that modern Jewish heroine Amy Winehouse. I look into my heart, and against its calcified black background I see the blue and the white.

*

Israel. ISRAEL! Say it loud and theres music playing say it soft, and its almost like praying. How could any word be so beautiful and still is real? ISREAL! How I laughed, livid with loathing and replete with revulsion, when I read that the half-witted crooner Bobby Gillespie had fashioned MAKE ISREAL HISTORY from a MAKE POVERTY HISTORY poster while at a party with the solemn intent of, yes, making poverty history! a) In my view, its a real indicator of the whereabouts of the moral compass of the anti-Zionist zealot (in most cases, lost down the back of some long-gone sofa in some rancid student house) that he would downplay and devalue world poverty in his blind hatred of a tiny democratic state and b) he would write it incorrectly. You total, ocean-going, numb-nuts, Gillespie. And you cant spell!

Well, I can. And Im going to spell out to anyone with the time and/or the inclination to give me a hearing just why I love the Jews so much. Why, in short, I am a philo-Semite.

*

According to Gertrude Himmelfarbs excellent The People Of The Book:Philosemitismin England From Cromwell To Churchill, the phrase was actually invented by anti-Semites, in Germany in the 1880s when the highly regarded (and avowedly anti-Semitic) historian Heinrich von Treitschke, in a speechreferred contemptuously to the blind philosemitic zeal of the party of progress. (Once more, on reading this, I was struck by how many German names strike the English eye as looking Jewish, and reflected for the nth time that this was partly what historically got the German goat. One cannot mistake Smith, Jones or Johnson for a Hebrew handle, after all but Mann, Stein or Schicklgruber, no problem.)

But I first saw the term in a copy of Rolling Stone magazine, of all things. It was a long essay, first person, called CONFESSIONS OF A PHILO-SEMITE. I would have been somewhere between O Levels and NME, while still kicking my heels in Bristol. Even now, I remember the gist of the essay, and the last line verbatim, even though I havent set eyes on it in more than thirty years.

This man, the writer, remembered adoring the Jews from afar at his high school. Gentile girls were either pretty or clever; if a Jewish girl was one, she was usually the other, I remember he wrote. Something like that. He had one of those generic American surnames with man on the end which are sometimes Jewish, sometimes German in origin. (See the Getting Of The Hunnish Goat, above.) So on graduating from high school he had seen his chance, seized the day, left his hometown, enrolled in a college with a high percentage of Jewish students and he hadpassed.

HE HAD PASSED AS A JEW! I remember shivering with delight and looking around guiltily, almost hugging myself with glee. It had never occurred to me. Could Iat the NME? No one knew me there. I looked at myself in the mirror: white skin, green almond-shaped eyes, big nose, dark blonde hair, narrow but pouty mouth and a great big gap between my two front teeth. I seemed (to myself if to none of my philistine schoolmates) to have what Mary McCarthys Priss Hartshorn in McCarthys brilliant novel The Group, a teenage favourite of mine noted about a classmates baby:

There was no doubt that he appeared to be a child marked for a special destiny, as they said of the Jewish people.

And Jews came in all hues, I knew that now I had seen Goldie Hawn on the TV in Theres A Girl In My Soup, and marvelled that she and Peter Sellers were of the same race. I was sitting with my mum one adorably dreary Saturday night watching it when suddenly, in pursuit of Goldie, Peter Sellers stripped off his swinging skinny-rib polo-neck and presented to her, my Snowball-sipping madre and my permanently-sulking self an upper body so covered in coarse black hair that he looked as though hed been dipped first in tar, then in iron filings and then, as the finishing touch, had had the inner bags from a dozen heavy-duty vacuum cleaners emptied over him.