COMERFORD WAY: Patrick Comerford’s online journal on Anglicanism, theology, spirituality, history, architecture, travel, poetry, beach walks ... and more
The Mitre on Bridge Street, Cambridge … the name is an anomaly as there is no Bishop of Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)
Patrick Comerford
Archbishop Sarah Mullally is only the second Archbishop of Canterbury since the 14th century to hold that office without a degree from Oxford or Cambridge. The other was Archbishop George Carey, although he later received an honorary DD from Cambridge in 2006.
Most of their post-war predecessors have had strong links with Cambridge:
• Justin Welby was educated at Trinity College, where his great-uncle, Rab Butler, was the master.
• Rowan Williams studied theology at Christ’s College, Cambridge, was a tutor, chaplain and director of studies at Westcott House, dean and chaplain of Clare College and later the Master of Magdalene College and the honorary Professor of Contemporary Christian Thought at the University of Cambridge.
• Robert Runcie studied at Westcott House, returned to Westcott House as chaplain and then as vice-principal; later he was a fellow and dean of Trinity Hall.
• Donald Coggan studied at Saint John’s College.
• Michael Ramsey was born in Cambridge, studied at Magdalene College, was the Vicar of Saint Bene’t’s Church, and for a short time was the Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge.
But despite all those Cambridge connections – and despite all the bishops associated with Westcott House I mentioned in a posting on Saturday evening – Cambridge is not a diocese. The university and the city lie within the Diocese of Ely, and while Oxford has a bishop and a cathedral there is no Bishop of Cambridge and no Cambridge Cathedral.
Which all goes to show how the name of the Mitre, a public house on Bridge Street and almost facing Saint John’s College, is something of anomaly.
The Mitre stands on the site of two former inns dating from the mid-18th century (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)
While I was in Cambridge over a number of years following summer courses organised by the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies and staying at Sidney Sussex College, the Mitre on Bridge Street and the Eagle on Bene’t Street where two of the places where many of us adjourned on warm summer evenings to enjoy each other’s company and to discuss and debate the day’s proceedings.
During my walking tour of Cambridge last week with a friend from Ireland who was following a short course in theology and staying at Saint John’s College, the Mitre and the Eagle were two of the pubs I pointed out.
The Mitre, a Grade II listed building at 17 to 18 Bridge Street, has a long history and stands on the site of two former inns – the Blackmoor’s Head and the Cock and Magpie. It is said the Blackmoor’s Head took its name from Robert Blackmoor, a mediaeval chantry priest in nearby Saint Clement’s Church.
A plaque outside the Mitre recalls that the earliest record of a licensee at the site was of Robert Clarke in 1752, although the date on the arch says it was founded in 1754 – another anomaly in the story of the Mitre. Later, the Cock and Magpie was run by the widowed Ann Lawrence, a successful wine merchant. She was assisted by her eight daughters, and perhaps the nine women and a constant supply of beer added to the pub’s popularity.
A plaque at the Mitre recalls the names of the previous pubs and Ann Lawrence and her eight daughters (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)
The arrival of the railway in Cambridge took away much of the river trade that the inns by the Cam depended on. By 1856, the 15 pubs of the parish had been reduced to just four; by 1874, the Cock and Magpie was the only pub remaining in the immediate vicinity. William Headdy was the licensee then and he was also the proprietor of the nearby Mitre Brewery. By 1878, the pub was known as the Mitre Billiard Rooms and it was renamed the Mitre by the publican Elizabeth Mays in 1881.
So, it appears the Mitre takes its name from a brewery and not from any bishop or diocese.
The large windows at the front of the Mitre look out onto Saint John’s College and the busy bus and bicycle lanes of Bridge Street. Bridge Street runs between Magdalene Street at the junction with Thompson’s Lane to the north-west and Sidney Street at the junction with Jesus Lane to the south-east. At one time, Bridge Street continued om over the Great Bridge on the River Cam, hence the name, but that part of the street is now known as Magdalene Street after Magdalene College.
A quiet corner in Portugal Place, around the corner from the Mitre (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)
Further along Magdalene Street, the Pickerel Inn at 30 Magdalene Street is widely regarded as the oldest continuous licensed site in Cambridge, and dates from 1608.
Around the corner from the Mitre, my friend and I briefly looked at Portugal Place and Portugal Street, which some say were named because Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula who found a welcome in Cromwell’s England first settled in this part of Cambridge.
However, although the Cambridge Synagogue is in Thompson’s Lane, close to the Mitre and to Portugal Place and Portugal Street, it seems the name only dates from the Peninsular War and houses built for officers returning from the Portugal to or the discovery of some Portuguese coins when the houses were built in the 19th century.
The Eagle is the second-oldest pub in Cambridge and began as the Eagle and Child in 1667 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)
Earlier in the day, we stopped on Bene’t Street, across from Saint Bene’t’s Church, to step into the Eagle, the second-oldest pub in Cambridge, which opened in 1667 as a coaching inn.
For decades, the Eagle was the local pub for scientists at the nearby Cavendish Laboratory. One lunchtime, on 28 February 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson came into the Eagle and announced they had ‘discovered the secret of life’, having finalised their model of the structure of DNA.
A blue plaque was unveiled at the Eagle in 2003. But from 2017, Rosalind Franklin’s name was often added in graffiti and removed. The plaque was replaced in 2023 with one that mentions Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins.
The names of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins are remembered once again at the Eagle (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)
The Jewish Holocaust Memorial at Liberty Square, Thessaloniki … a bronze sculpture by Nandor Glid of a menorah whose flames are wrapped around human bodies (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Patrick Comerford
This year marks the 110th anniversary of the time my grandfather was in Thessaloniki and picked up a deadly strain of malaria. He was sent home from World War I in 1916, and that may have saved him from being sent to the trenches in France, and also provided a time gap in which my father was conceived and born.
None of my father’s sibling – brothers and sisters, half-brothers and half-sisters – had any children. So, without picking up malaria in Thessaloniki 100 years ago, my father would not have been born, and my grandfather would have no living descendants.
But malaria was a killer in those days. Within five years of contracting malaria in Greece, Stephen Edward Comerford had died a sad and lonely death in a hospital ward.
Thessaloniki has been a favourite city of mine in Greece for many years, and I was familiar with and fond of its street and buildings, its history and stories, its poetry and music, its synagogues, churches and monasteries, long before I realised the true and sad story of how my grandfather died. When I realised his story, I went back to Thessaloniki to retrace his steps.
The names of Holocaust victims on the pavement in Vassilisis Olgas Avenue (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
But, as I think of anniversaries in Thessaloniki, I also remember today that another anniversary, 11 July 1942, is remembered in Thessaloniki as ‘Black Saturday’ – the day when the Nazis forced 9,000 Jewish men between the ages of 18 and 45 to assemble in Liberty Square. For hours in the blazing summer heat, German soldiers beat and humiliated them before crowds of onlookers. About 2,000 were sent to forced labour; the rest were eventually ransomed by the community, which sold its ancient cemetery to raise the sum demanded.
Shortly before my grandfather arrived in Thessaloniki, Greece had taken Thessaloniki from the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars and it was incorporated into the modern Greek state in 1912. The Jewish community in the city was 70,000 strong at the time, and was the city's largest ethnic group.
The port city closed every Saturday. Most workers – including the dockworkers – were Jewish and observed Shabbat. Street signs were in Ladino, the Judaeo-Spanish language of Sephardic Jews. Synagogues were found in almost every neighbourhood, newspapers published in four languages served the cosmopolitan population, but Ladino and Greek were the main languages and the dominant voice in the synagogues was Spanish-inflected Hebrew prayers.
In those days, Thessaloniki was known as the ‘Mother of Israel’ and the ‘Jerusalem of the Balkans.’ For over three centuries, it was the largest Sephardic Jewish city in the world and the only major European city where Jews formed the majority.
By 1613, Jews were 68 per cent of Thessaloniki's population – a percentage unmatched anywhere else in Europe, before or since. This was a living reality into the 20th century: Sabbath observance shut down commerce, rabbinical courts wielded authority, Ladino echoed through marketplaces and Jewish printing presses produced books shipped across the Mediterranean.
But, in the space of five months in 1943, the Nazis erased all that almost completely.
Jews started arriving in Thessaloniki in large numbers following the expulsions from Spain in 1492 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
The story begins in 1492, with catastrophe transformed into refuge. When Spain’s Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand issued the Alhambra Decree expelling all Jews from Spain, between 15,000 and 20,000 Sephardic Jews fled across the Mediterranean. Many settled in Thessaloniki, a bustling port city in the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II welcomed them. He realised that Spain’s loss could be his empire’s gain. The Jewish refugees brought skills in medicine, printing, textiles, metalwork, and international trade, they spoke multiple languages and they had commercial networks spanning continents.
‘The Spanish king is a fool,’ Bayezid reportedly said, ‘impoverishing his own country to enrich mine.’
The Sephardic Jews transformed Thessaloniki. They established the city’s first printing press in the late 15th century, making Thessaloniki a centre of Jewish scholarship and book production. They built synagogues – eventually 42 of them – each named after the Spanish or Portuguese city their founders had fled: Catalán Yashan (Old Catalan), Aragon, Lisboa, Evora, Castile.
They created networks that made Thessaloniki one of the Ottoman Empire’s most important trading hubs. Jewish merchants shipped wool, silk and ceramics across the Mediterranean, Jewish craftsmen became the exclusive tailors for the Ottoman Janissaries, and Jewish bankers facilitated trade between east and west.
By 1519, just 27 years after the expulsion, Jews made up 56 per cent of Thessaloniki’s population. By 1613, that figure reached 68 per cent. Thessaloniki became the only major European city where Christians and Muslims were minorities.
The former Bank of Thessaloniki founded by the Allatini family … now the Malakopi Arcade (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
For over 300 years, from the 16th to the early 20th century, Jewish life defined the rhythm of life in Thessaloniki. The city essentially shut down from Friday evening until Saturday night, honouring the Jewish Sabbath alongside the Muslim Friday prayers and Christian Sunday observance.
The community thrived during the Ottoman era. The millet system granted religious minorities autonomy to order their own affairs. Jewish courts handled civil disputes, rabbinical authorities oversaw education, marriage and religious life, and the community paid collective taxes but otherwise it was self-governing.
Wealthy Jewish entrepreneurs led Thessaloniki’s industrialisation in the mid-19th century. The Allatini brothers established the first modern flour-milling plant in 1854, followed by textile factories, brickmaking facilities, and tobacco-processing plants. By the early 20th century, Jews owned 38 of the city’s 54 largest trading houses.
The community also had a vibrant working class. Jewish stevedores controlled the docks, Jewish weavers supplied textiles throughout the Balkans, and Jewish printers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and merchants filled every sector of urban life.
Intellectually, Thessaloniki became a Jewish powerhouse. Schools flourished; the Alliance Israélite Universelle opened modern educational institutions that taught French alongside traditional Jewish subjects; a whole generation became conversant with both Jewish tradition and European modernity; and newspapers in Ladino connected the community with Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman world.
Politically, Thessaloniki’s Jews were active in Ottoman reform movements. Many supported the Young Turks revolution of 1908, which sought to modernise the empire with constitutional government.
Zionist leaders who visited the city saw it as a model. David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, and Ze’ev Jabotinsky all visited Thessaloniki in the early 20th century, seeing in its Jewish majority a preview of how a Jewish state might work.
The Jewish Memorial at the Aristotelean University of Thessaloniki, on the site of the city’s ancient Jewish cemetery (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
But even as Thessaloniki’s Jewish community reached its peak, forces were gathering that would unravel its world. Four years before my grandfather’s arrival there, Greece captured Thessaloniki in 1912 during the Balkan Wars. The Jewish community – 70,000 strong at the time and the city’s largest ethnic group – faced an uncertain future.
At first, the Greek government recognised the community’s rights and traditions. But tensions simmered, Greek merchants resented Jewish commercial sway, and some people saw the Jewish presence as a remnant of Ottoman rule.
On 18 August 1917, a small kitchen fire in central Thessaloniki exploded into an inferno. For 32 hours, flames consumed over one-third of the city. The fire destroyed 9,500 buildings, and left 70,000 people homeless, 52,000 of them Jews, and 16 of the 33 synagogues were burned. Jewish schools, libraries, charitable institutions, and the grand rabbinate's archives, with the records of centuries of births, marriages and deaths, rabbinical decisions and community history, vanished in smoke.
The entire documented history of one of the world’s great Jewish communities went up in flames, and the fire devastated Jewish Thessaloniki. Over 20,000 Jews, unable to find shelter, left the city for Athens, France, the US and Palestine.
The community rebuilt itself on the outskirts of the city, but it never recovered its former glory. The balance in the population shifted dramatically in 1923 when Greece and Turkey negotiated a population exchange. About 1.5 million Greek Orthodox Christians were moved to Greece from Turkey, with roughly 100,000 settling in Thessaloniki. For the first time in four centuries, Jews had become a minority in the city they had once defined.
The tracks to Auschwitz … old railway tracks at the port where the convoys left for the death camps (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
By 1940, Thessaloniki had a Jewish population of about 56,000 in a city that had grown to about 250,000 residents. The community had survived fires, political upheaval, and demographic transformation, they kept open their synagogues, schools and cultural institutions, and they remained a vital part of the city’s fabric. But nothing prepared them for what came next.
On 9 April 1941, German forces occupied Thessaloniki. Within a week, Nazi authorities arrested Jewish community leaders, confiscated Jewish homes and hospitals, and began the systematic looting of Jewish cultural property. Tens of thousands of books, religious artifacts, and artworks were shipped to Germany.
On 11 July 1942 – a date remembered to this day as ‘Black Saturday’ – the Nazis forcibly rounded up 9,000 Jewish men aged between 18 and 45 in Plateia Eleftherias (Πλατεία Ελευθερίας, Liberty Square). For hours in the blazing summer heat, German soldiers beat and humiliated them before the crowds. About 2,000 were sent to forced labour. The rest were eventually ransomed by the community, which sold its ancient cemetery to raise the demanded sum.
The Jewish cemetery, with 20 generations and over 500 years of burials, was destroyed. The tombstones were purloined as building materials for footpaths, university stairs, and barrack latrines. Aristotle University now stands where the Jewish dead had been buried rested.
In February 1943, Adolf Eichmann sent Dieter Wisliceny and Alois Brunner to Thessaloniki. They were specialists in Jewish deportation and they implemented the Nuremberg Laws immediately, imposing yellow stars, movement restrictions, property confiscation. Within days, Jews were forced into three ghettos. The largest, the Baron Hirsch transit camp, was beside the railway station.
The first train left Thessaloniki on 15 March 1943. Between March and August 1943, 19 trains took as many as 46,000 Jews from Thessaloniki to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Each train held 1,000 to 4,000 people crammed into cattle cars. The seven-day journey across Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, Austria, and Czechoslovakia was torture itself, with no food, no water and no sanitation, bodies crushed together in suffocating heat or freezing cold.
When the trains arrived at Auschwitz, SS doctors carried out ‘selections’ on the platform. Most were sent directly to gas chambers. Of the 46,000 deported, about 1,950 or 4 per cent survived. The Jewish population that had comprised 68 per cent of Thessaloniki in 1613; 96 per cent of the city’s Jewish population was exterminated in 1943. In five months, the Nazis accomplished what four centuries of disasters – plagues, fires, wars, and economic transformations – had failed to do: they destroyed the Jerusalem of the Balkans.
The survivors who returned after the camps were liberated found a ghost community. Fewer than 2,000 Jews remained in Thessaloniki. Their synagogues were destroyed or vandalised, their homes had become the homes of others, their cemetery was razed, their archives were burned, their commercial networks were shattered.
Many survivors could not bear to stay and emigrated to Palestine, the USA or other diaspora communities. Others rebuilt what they could, establishing small institutions to preserve memory.
The Monasterioton Synagogue is the only surviving, pre-war working synagogue in Thessaloniki (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Today, about 1,000 Jews live in Thessaloniki, less than 0.2 per cent of the city’s population of over 800,000. Three synagogues remain of the original 42. The Monastir Synagogue survived only because Nazis used it as a Red Cross warehouse. The Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, which attracts about 30,000 visitors a year 2023, documents the community’s history.
Dr Leon Saltiel is a historian specialising in the Holocaust in Greece. His publications include The Holocaust in Thessaloniki: Reactions to the Anti-Jewish Persecution, 1942-1943, which won the 2021 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research, and ‘Do Not Forget Me’: Three Jewish Mothers Write to their Sons from the Thessaloniki Ghetto.
Dr Saltiel is a member of the Central Board of Jewish Communities of Greece and of the Greek delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. He currently serves as Director of Diplomacy, Representative at the UN Geneva and UNESCO, and Coordinator on Countering Antisemitism for the World Jewish Congress.
A lecture organised by the Melbourne Holocaust Museum included an excerpt from ‘Do Not Forget Me’, directed by Grigoris Apostolopoulos, and written by Dr Leon Saltiel.
On 15 March each year, the anniversary of the first deportation, thousands gather for a silent march from the city centre to the old railway station, holding white balloons reading ‘Never Again’ and place flowers on the train tracks.
In 2008, Thessaloniki erected a Holocaust memorial by Nandor Glid near Liberty Square, where Jewish men were beaten on Black Saturday, 11 July 1942. One of Thessaloniki’s last Holocaust survivors, Heinz Kounio, died earlier this year (April 2026) at the age of 98. The Holocaust Museum of Greece (Μουσείο Ολοκαυτώματος Ελλάδος) in Thessaloniki is due to open later this year (2026). It will be the first museum dedicated specifically to telling the story of Sephardic Jews in the Holocaust.
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
The Jews of Thessaloniki: From antiquity and the Inquisition, to the Holocaust and today (Melbourne Holocaust Museum)
By late 1942, the Jewish congregation in Dunstable had moved to 132 Luton Road (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)
Patrick Comerford
It is quite some time since I posted a variety of blog postings on Friday evenings, reflecting on an aspect of Jewish spirituality and prayer life or looking at synagogues or the sites of synagogues I have visited and places of interest in Jewish history, culture and life.
However, with the rise in antisemitism across these islands in recent months, I suspended these posts, unwilling to identify the location of synagogues or Jewish sites I was visiting. My fears seemed to be confirmed when the former East London Central Synagogue on Nelson Street in the East End suffered an arson attack shortly after I had written about its sale and its past history.
However, when I was in Dunstable last week I decided to resume me searches, looking for the sites of places that had served as synagogues, albeit briefly, and searching for stories of local Jewish history and past Jewish communities in the south Bedfordshire town.
Dunstable, with a population of about 40,000, is the fourth largest town in Bedfordshire, about 30 km south-east of Milton Keynes, 8 km west of Luton and 50 km north of London.
There is no active, organised Jewish community or synagogue in Dunstable these days, and the nearest active Jewish congregation is Luton United Synagogue, about 8 km away. But Dunstable has had two Jewish communities in the past: a mediaeval community that survived until Edward I proclaimed the Edict of Expulsion in 1290; and a war-time community, mainly of evacuees, that lasted until the early 1950s.
Mediaeval Dunstable had a small but notable Jewish community in the 12th and 13th centuries. Thomas, the Prior of Dunstable, borrowed £50 from Aaron of Lincoln, a Jewish banker and financier, in 1185. Aaron of Lincoln (1123-1186) was a prominent financier and one of the wealthiest individuals in 12th century England. He ran a major banking network with agents across the country, he financed major building projects, including Dunstable Priory, St Albans Abbey, Lincoln Minster, Peterborough Abbey, and several cathedrals.
Aaron of Lincoln died in 1886, and three years later, during anti-Jewish riots and violence in 1189, the entire Jewish community in Dunstable was forced to choose accepting baptism or facing massacre.
However, Jews may have returned to the town quite quickly, albeit in small numbers. In what seems to have been an antisemitic diatribe in 1210, when a great storm destroyed the Priory Church, the Prior of Dunstable, Richard de Morins, documented his vision of two Jews who said the Anti-Christ would be born 40 years later.
Mossy, a Jew, unsuccessfully sued the same Prior of Dunstable for £700 in 1221. His friends paid the king a mark of gold and £100 to save him from hanging for forgery. A converted Jew named Henry obtained a letter from the Pope in 1275 promising that the prior, William le Breton, would maintain him and his family.
Following the Edict of Expulsion in 1290, all Jews were forced to leave England, effectively ending the mediaeval presence of Jews in Dunstable, although there is no record of the number forced of people who were forced to leave the town.
Aaron of Lincoln (1123-1186) financed major building projects, including Dunstable Priory (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)
In the inter-war and war-time years, the Cohen family owned Barwythe Hall, near Dunstable, from 1931 until 1945. The most prominent member of the family was Harold Cohen (1873-1936), the Liverpool-born businessman, communal leader and philanthropist. He was a major benefactor to Liverpool University and Harold House, which was named in his honour, was the main centre for Jewish communal organisations, youth activities and social events in Liverpool from the 1920s until it closed in 2009.
In the mid-20th century, a modern Jewish community was established in Dunstable during World War II, mainly for evacuees who had fled from other parts of the UK.
The Dunstable United Synagogue Membership Group was formed following a meeting in October 1941 called by Jewish residents and World War II evacuees. During the war, the congregation first met in a hut until it was requisitioned by builders, with Jewish refugees worshipping at a temporary synagogue in Poynters Road, Dunstable.
The Revd Louis Blumenthal (1912-1985) was the minister in Dunstable from 1941 until at least 1943. He had previously served as the reader of Leyton and Walthamstow New Federated Synagogue, later known as Queen’s Road Synagogue, east London (1936-1939).
For most years, festival services were held in Dunstable Town Hall or in a school hall and Hebrew classes for the children were held by Rabbi Waxman at Burr Street School. Weekly Hebrew classes were held at Dunstable Grammar School and other schools in 1942.
By September 1942, the congregation had moved to 132 Luton Road, Dunstable, and this continued as the community address until at least late 1946. Following the appointment of the Revd Judah Hosea Rockman in 1946, Hebrew classes were held at two separate venues on Sunday mornings.
By 1946, the congregation was also using a temporary synagogue at Watling House, 123 High Street North, which was described as ‘very unsuitable’ and ‘bleak’. This developed into the Dunstable Hebrew Congregation, which was established about 1947. A hall adjoining 119 High Street North, Dunstable, was offered to the congregation in July 1947 for its exclusive and free use for services, classes and other activities by Barnett Green president of the congregation from 1947 to 1955.
The membership group was affiliated to the United Synagogue. When the war-time membership group scheme came to an end, the congregation was one of only five small membership groups that applied for affiliation status with the United Synagogue. The congregation became an affiliated synagogue of the United Synagogue in 1948.
The last recorded minister in Dunstable was the Revd I Gross, from 1950 until about 1952. There appears to have been no further references to the congregation in the Jewish Chronicle after 1951, the congregation had closed in 1955, and the Dunstable United Synagogue membership group, which met at the Town Hall, was disbanded by the mid-1950s.
For community events, religious services, or kosher resources today, most Jewish people living in the Dunstable and Central Bedfordshire area are connected with the Luton congregation. There is no Jewish cemetery in Dunstable, and Bushey Cemetery, about 30 km away, was established in 1947. Any former members of the Dunstable congregation were probably absorbed into the Luton Hebrew Congregation.
When I went looking for signs of the Jewish community in Dunstable last week, it seemed the two addresses at High Street North have been replaced in recent decades by social housing, although the house on Luton Road is still standing.
As for the former Dunstable Town Hall at 11 High Street North, which had hosted festival services for many years, it was sold in 1965 and demolished in 1966, and the site has been redeveloped for commercial purposes. The present building is a branch of the Santander bank, while the town hall has been located since the 1990s in the Grade II-listed Grove House.
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
The two buildings used by the Jewish community in Dunstable in the 1940s have been replaced in recent decades by social housing (Photographs: Patrick Comerford, 2026)
Tomorrow is polling day in local elections in many parts of England and in assembly elections in Wales and Scotland (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Patrick Comerford
There is an old adage among football fans that ‘you don’t choose the club, the club chooses you.’
So, on Sunday night, as I stood in the bar in the Old George, I really wanted – hope against hope – as five minutes of added time stretched into an agonising six, that Aston Villa would clinch an equaliser, and rise back into the top four in the Premier League.
I have been a Villa fan since my teens for no other reasons than that Villa Park is a few stations south of Lichfield on the trainline from Lichfield into Birmingham. I seldom go to football games these days, but I still watch Villa matches in my local pub, and I have benign, avuncular feelings when I see Villa fans at Lichfield Trent Valley and Lichfield City heading off to games.
In the present political climate, I recall that Aston Villa has a proud tradition of standing up against antisemitism and racism. When Aston Villa was invited on a three-match tour of Germany in 1938, the players refused to give the Nazi salute. Later, during World War II, local lore says, the Villa reserve team were all captured at Dunkirk, and in captivity they thrashed their SS guards.
But on Sunday night I had something of an internal conflict – I didn’t want to see Tottenham Hotspur relegated either. Spurs have been my second team since my teens too, but for very different reasons.
Part of Spurs’ traditional support base was for long in the Jewish community in London, so that to fans of Chelsea and other clubs, Tottenham Hotspur is a Jewish club. In response to racist and antisemitic taunts, Spurs fans long ago adopted as their own chant: ‘We are the Yids’, embracing the label to render the abuse impotent.
Since 1982, Spurs have had three chairs who were Jewish businessmen with pre-existing degrees of allegiance to the club. It is said about 5 per cent of the Spurs fans at games may be Jewish.
The Jewish community in Tottenham began to grow early in the last century. East European Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia arrived in London from the 1880s on, and a fresh wave in 1905-1906 as the persecution intensified. Many Jews settled in the East End, and other families then moved further north to the Tottenham area. In time, Tottenham Hotspur became part of the lives of working-class Jewish men in the Tottenham area.
Jewish numbers at home matches rose after World War I, when improved public transport made it possible to be in synagogue in the morning and to catch a tram from Aldgate in time for a 2:30 kick-off at White Hart Lane. In the 1920s, the Jewish Chronicle claimed, almost all Jews who followed soccer were Spurs supporters, and the Jewish fanbase continued to grow in the 1930s. Several reports in 1935 estimated as many as 10,000 Jews in a Spurs crowd, or about one-third of the total.
When White Hart Lane was the venue for an international between England and Germany, the choice seen as an affront to the Jewish community. The swastika flew over White Hart Lane on 4 December 1935 and the German team gave a sinister Nazi salute to the crowd before kick-off. But a fan climbed onto the roof of the West Stand and tore down the Nazi flag. Perhaps it was irony, certainly it was justice, that Germany was defeated 3-0 that day.
After the war, Jewish fans still felt they belonged at White Hart Lane, although the local community was shrinking from the 1960s on. In the late 1960s, fans from opposing clubs began chanting abuse at Spurs fan using the ‘Yid’ word. When Spurs beat Chelsea in the 1967 FA Cup Final, the antisemitic abuse from Chelsea fans was so undiluted that many were deeply disgusted.
Throughout the 1970s, opposition fans openly labelled Spurs fans as Jews, and the chants descended into extreme racism. These chants raged from ‘does your rabbi know you’re here?’ to ‘I’ve never felt more like gassing the Jews,’ and ‘Spurs are on their way to Auschwitz.’ Nazi salutes were common, and hissing sound that resounded was intended as a reminder of the gas chambers.
In response, Spurs fans embraced the label and on the terraces, they took to chanting, ‘We are the Yids.’ They do not use the word in a derogatory way, nor is it an example of cultural appropriation. They use the label imposed on them by others to celebrate their history, continuity and identity in a form of defence mechanism against virulent and often uncontrolled antisemitism.
At a game between Spurs and West Ham some years ago, songs about Hitler and gas chambers could be heard from the away crowd, and Nazi salutes were also seen. In recent years, Chelsea supporters have chanted anti-Jewish songs on the London Underground, a group of Chelsea fans forced an Orthodox Jewish passenger to move carriages after targeting him for abuse, and a Chelsea season ticket-holder was banned for three years after making 13 Nazi salutes at Spurs fans.
This reminds me of behaviour by Nigel Farage that he refuses to acknowledge, to accept responsibility for, or to accept how offensive his refusal and responses to continue to be. The leader of Reform UK has faced significant allegations regarding antisemitism and racism, largely stemming from his time as a student at Dulwich College in the late 1970s and early 1980s, alongside criticism of his political rhetoric in later years.
Over 20 former classmates and teachers report having witnessed Farage engage in racist and antisemitic behaviour, including singing ‘gas ’em all’ songs, mimicking gas hissing sounds, and telling Jewish pupils that ‘Hitler was right’. Jewish contemporaries have recalled him as a school bully who targeted them and other ethnic minority students with abusive language.
Farage has either denied these claims, calling them ‘complete made-up fantasies’, or, in an apparent admission of their truth, has claimed he never intended to be hurtful or racist, dismissing his past comments as nothing more than ‘banter’.
A 1981 letter from a teacher previously described him as a ‘publicly professed racist’ with ‘neo-fascist views’, according to reports. In recent months, 11 Holocaust survivors have joined calls for Farage to apologise for the alleged school-era antisemitic remarks, but Farage’s response has not been to deny or to apologise, but to claim his critics are ‘politically motivated’.
Jewish groups and MPs have also criticised Farage for using the term ‘globalist’ to describe public figures, describing it as an antisemitic ‘dog whistle’. Farage has been accused of adopting antisemitic tropes by labelling financier George Soros ‘the biggest danger to the entire western world’ and alleging a ‘globalist’ plot, themes often linked to far-right conspiracy theories. Farage has gladly been guest on far-right US shows, with hosts such as Alex Jones and Rick Wiles, who has made overtly antisemitic claims, such as calling a political event a ‘Jew coup’.
And so, it is nothing less than galling to see Farage visit Golder’s Green after last week’s attack, trying to make political capital in advance of tomorrow’s local elections out of the mounting fears of antisemitism in the Jewish community, and accusing the government of failing to respond adequately to rising antisemitism, arguing that political considerations are preventing stronger action, particularly fear of offending a key voting bloc of Muslim South Asians.
My worst experience of racism was at a bus stop late one evening, when two burly men stood by me, one on either side, and started a conversation across me with each other with one saying: ‘’itler was right about ’em.’ I have no doubt it was my beard, black hat and black coat.
The coward’s response would have been to tell them that I’m not Jewish. It may have implied it was not OK to victimise me but was OK to victimise people who are Jews. And once one group of racists identify or perceive you as a Jew, you are always going to be a Jew in the eyes of racists and antisemites everywhere, no matter what ruling is made by a beth din, no matter what definitions are built into the Law of Return, no matter how narrow interpretations and applications of Halakha may be. On the other hand, even Chabad activits approach me on the streets, from London to Paris or Krakow, and ask me very direct questions about my identity.
In a recent discussion on a social media platform on how people are perceived as being Jews, one contributor wrote: ‘You will always be a Jew no matter what. When I was a kid I told my father I hated being a Jew and did not want to be one anymore, he told me you will always be a Jew. When the nazis come, you will be a Jew. When the PLO hijacks a plane and takes the Jews, you will be a Jew.’
My father grew up playing on the streets of ‘Little Jerusalem’ in Portobello in Dublin, where many of his uncles and cousins lived and where his schoolboy friends included Chaim Herzog and the Levitas brothers. I was born a few doors a way from the synagogue on Rathfarnham Road and I too played on those same streets in my younger schooldays, familiar with the small shuls on Walworth Road, Lennox Street, Lombard Street, Saint Kevin’s Parade and Oakfield Place, and the larger synagogues then on the South Circular Road and Adelaide Road. The late Kevin Martin, ‘a cousin of cousins’, was an expert in Sephardic genealogy, and constantly encouraged me to explore our shared stories of the Comerford, Mendoza, Martinez and Nunez families and his descent from the family of the Irish-Jewish prize fighter Daniel Mendoza.
But in today’s climate of induced fear, many Jews are increasingly afraid of openly discussing or displaying their identity, of having that long beard and black hat and coat. For my part, I have suspended my once regular blog postings, often on a Friday evening, discussing the history, architecture and heritage of synagogues, for fear of adding to the feelings of vulnerability among the people and congregations using those synagogues. This fear was confirmed yesterday with news of a fire at the former East London Central Synagogue on Nelson Street in east London. I have written about this synagogue many times in the past, including its recent sale to a Muslim group. Police are concerned that the attack on Tuesday morning may be part of an arson campaign linked to Iran, and now I am concerned about writing about other synagogues and their locations in the weeks, possibly months, ahead.
None of these fears and concerns takes away in any way from the reality of the disgusting misogyny that makes women feel afraid on our streets, the open Islamophobia that sees verbal and physical attacks on Muslims on the streets and on mosques, and the unfettered racism that is expressed against refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants but, is in fact, targeting all minorities of Africa and Asian heritage or descent, and even many with European origins. All this combines in a lethal cocktail that is being stirred by the far-right and that is being served up by their candidates in these elections.
The Labour politician Margaret Hodge, who was born in Alexandria in 1944 to Jewish parents who had fled Germany and Austria, has spoken of how her father advised her always to keep a packed suitcase by the front door. That fear has returned to many Jewish people in recent years, in an atmosphere that must not be linked only with the current crisis in the Middle East, but also with the actions and statements from far-right parties, their candidates and their leaders.
We have nation-wide local elections tomorrow. I shall be up early in the morning to vote: democracy has come at a very heavy price in too many countries, and once it is eroded it is very difficult to recover, as people in Hungary have learned, and as voters in the US are going to realise later this year.
How we vote tomorrow may determine whether the racist atmosphere on our streets is given permission to become even more vocal and more extreme, whether Farage becomes more smug about the past he agressievly sidesteps away from whenever he is challenged about it, hectoring and berating the interviewers while smiling smugly, and whether many people feel the need now to pay greater heed to the advice from previous generations to ‘always keep a packed suitcase by the front door’.
I shall be hoping for a better result tomorrow evening in the second leg of the Europa League semi-final between Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest. But I fear for the results from tomorrow’s elections.
Democracy has come at a very heavy price in many places, and once it is eroded it is very difficult to recover (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
The Hin Ho Bio temple, seen from our kitchen window in Kuching … Malaysia has a population of about 36 million people (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)
Patrick Comerford
The viewing and reading figures for this blog have become overwhelming. These figures reached the 36 million mark late yesterday afternoon (2 May 2026), having reached 35 million before mid-day the day before (1 May 2026). They passed the million mark four times in April, reaching 34 million on 29 April, 33 million on 25 April, 32 million on 19 April and 31 million on 8 April.
The viewing and reading figures are, quite frankly, overwhelming over these recent weeks and months. I continue to see a phenomenal amount of traffic on this blog this year, and it continues to reach a volume of readers that I could never have expected when I first started blogging 16 years ago. Half the total hits (18 million) have been within the past six months, since 2 November 2025. The total hits in March 2026 were the highest monthly total ever (4,523,648), followed by the figure of 4,365,464 hits for last month (April 2026).
At the end of last year, this blog had 21 million hits (31 December 2025). So far this year, there have been more than 15 million hits or visitors in 2026.
I first began blogging in 2010, and it took almost two years until July 2012 to reach half a million readers. Throughout this year and last, the daily figures continue to be overwhelming on many occasions. Of the 12 days of busiest traffic on this blog, one was on Friday last (1 May 2026), three were last month (26, 29 and 30 April 2026), three were in March, three were in February, and two were in January 2025:
• 1,124,925 (1 May 2026)
• 509,644 (29 April 2026)
• 344,003 (30 April 2026)
• 323,156 (27 March 2026)
• 322,038 (26 April 2026)
• 318,307 (1 March 2026)
• 314,018 (28 February 2026)
• 301,449 (2 March 2026)
• 289,076 (11 January 2025)
• 285,366 (12 January 2025)
• 280,802 (26 February 2026)
• 273,022 (27 February 2026)
The number of readers continues to be overpowering and the daily averages were about 145,000 or more hits a day last month. Ten years ago, in 2016, the daily average was around 1,000.
A Saharan dust moving north over the Mediterranean towards Greece last month, as seen from the Meteosat-12 geostationary weather satellite 36,000 km (36 million metres) above the Earth (Credit: Meteosat-12 imagery)
To put this figure of 36 million into perspective:
Reports indicate about 36 million people are living in modern-day slavery, including forced labour, trafficking, and forced marriage. Data suggests about 36 million people in the European Union are living with rare diseases.
Last year Donald Trump pardoned the stars of a reality TV show who were convicted in 2022 of $36 million bank and tax frauds. Todd and Julie Chrisley had an extravagant lifestyle that was chronicled in a show that ran for 10 seasons on the USA Network.
Todd and Julie Chrisley were given prison terms of 12 and seven years respectively In November 2022 for conspiring to defraud banks in Atlanta of more than $36 million and evading taxes. Trump’s act of clemency was yet another example of his unusual use of his powers of pardon.
The Bank of Ireland is investing €36 million in a three-year project to restore its College Green buildings. The project involve the repair, upgrading and restoration of College Green’s 280 windows, 45 staircases and 200 km of electrical cabling, as well as its 54 roofs and 2.5 km walkways, promising improved facilities for customers and workspaces for colleagues. The Bank of Ireland bought the former Irish parliament building in 1803 and opened it to the public as a banking hall in 1808.
Malaysia has a population of over 36 million people (36,385,115). Dhaka in Bangladesh, where more than 36 million people live, work, and compete for space, is one of the most intense and overcrowded cities on Earth.
36,000 sq km is 36 million sq metres, the approximate area of the ‘Republic of China’ or Taiwan, a territory with disputed status in Asia that Includes Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu (36,188 sq km). It is also the approximate size of Guinea-Bissau in Africa, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Russia, and Pahang, the third largest state in Malaysia.
The Jewish Autonomous Oblast (JAO) is in the Russian Far East, close to Heilongjiang province in China, with Birobidzhan as its capital. The JAO was designated in 1928 and officially established in 1934. At its height in the late 1940s, the region had a Jewish population of 46,000-50,000, about 25% of its population; today, only 800 or so ethnic Jews are left there.
The JAO is Russia’s only autonomous oblast, one of two officially Jewish jurisdictions in the world, the other being Israel, and one of the few places in the world where Yiddish is a recognised minority language.
36,000 km is 36 million metres. At an altitude of 36,000 km (36 million metres), hundreds of satellites orbit in a special zone called geostationary orbit, moving at exactly the same rate as Earth rotating beneath them. From the ground, they appear frozen in one spot of sky. These satellites handle everything from television broadcasts to military communications, and unlike their low orbit cousins that zip across the sky in minutes, geostationary satellites can remain within a telescope’s field of view for hours.
36 million minutes is about 68 years, 5 months and 10 days. In other words, if this blog was getting only one hit a minute, it would take almost 68½ years, from late 1957, to reach today’s latest figure of 36 million.
I retired from active parish ministry over four years ago, on 30 March 2022. These days, though, about 120-140 people on average are reading my daily prayer diary posted on this blog each morning. A similar number have been reading my current series of postings on churches and local history in Staffordshire, and were reading my recent series of postings on the churches and chapels of Walsingham. I imagine many of my priest-colleagues would be prayerfully thankful if the congregations in their churches totalled 800-1,000 or more people each week.
This afternoon, I am truly grateful to the real readers among those 36 million hits on this blog to date, and in particular I am thankful for the faithful core group of 120-140 people who join me in prayer, reading and reflections each morning.
The Bank of Ireland is investing €36 million in a three-year project to restore its College Green buildings in Dublin, the former Irish Houses of Parliament (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) … died 75 years ago on 29 April 1951
Patrick Comerford
Today marks the 75th anniversary of the death of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, who died in Cambridge 75 years ago, on 29 April 1951.
Wittgenstein was a Viennese-born Cambridge philosopher who had been influenced at an early stage by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. He taught at the University of Cambridge from 1929 to 1947 and worked primarily in the fields of logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.
During his lifetime, he published just one small, 75-page book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), one article, one book review and a children’s dictionary. His major work, Philosophical Investigations, was not published until two years after his death, yet it has become an important modern classic.
Bertrand Russell said he was ‘the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived; passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.’
A plaque at the Ashling Hotel in Parkgate Street, Dublin, recalls Wittgenstein’s time as a guest (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889. A family tree shows his paternal great-great-grandfather was Moses Meier, a Jewish land agent who lived with his wife Brendel Simon in Bad Laasphe in the Principality of Wittgenstein, Westphalia. Napoleon decreed in 1808 that everyone, including Jews, must adopt an inheritable family surname. Moses Meier’s son, also Moses, became Moses Meier Wittgenstein.
His son, Hermann Christian Wittgenstein (1802-1878), took the middle name Christian to distance himself from his Jewish background. He married Franziska (Fanny) Figdor (1814-1890), who was also Jewish and a first cousin of the violinist Joseph Joachim (1831-1907), who worked closely with Brahms. They both became Protestants before they married, and the couple began a successful wool trading business trading in Leipzig.
Their 11 children included the philosopher’s father, Karl Otto Clemens Wittgenstein (1847-1913), who became an industrial tycoon. By the late 1880s, he had an effective monopoly on Austria’s steel cartel and was one of the richest men in Europe. The Wittgensteins became one of the wealthiest families in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, second only to the Rothschilds.
Karl Wittgenstein married Leopoldine ‘Poldie’ Maria Josefa Kalmus in 1873. Her father, Jakob Maximilian Kalmus (1814-1870) was a Bohemian Jew from Prague; her mother, Marie Stallner (1825-1921) was a German-speaking Catholic born in Sevnica in present-day Slovenia, and was Ludwig Wittgenstein’s only non-Jewish grandparent.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was born on 26 April 1889 in the ‘Wittgenstein Palace’ at Alleegasse 16, now the Argentinierstrasse, near the Karlskirche in Vienna. He was one of nine children who were all baptised as Catholics and received formal Catholic teaching. Gustav Klimt painted Ludwig’s sister for her wedding portrait, and Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler gave regular concerts in the family’s many music rooms.
In an interview, his sister Gretl Stonborough-Wittgenstein said their grandfather's ‘strong, severe, partly ascetic Christianity’ was a strong influence on all the Wittgenstein children.
While Ludwig Wittgenstein was at school at the Realschule, he decided he had lost his faith in God and became an atheist. But his religious faith and his relationship with Christianity and religion in general would change over time. He resisted formal religion, saying it was hard for him to ‘bend the knee,’ although he once said, ‘I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.
With age, his personal spirituality deepened, and he wrestled with language problems in religion. At a time when he was finding it difficult to work, he wrote in 1947, ‘I have had a letter from an old friend in Austria, a priest. In it he says that he hopes my work will go well, if it should be God’s will. Now that is all I want: if it should be God’s will.’
In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein asks, ‘Is what I am doing really worth the effort? Yes, but only if a light shines on it from above.’ His close friend Norman Malcolm later wrote, ‘Wittgenstein’s mature life was strongly marked by religious thought and feeling. I am inclined to think that he was more deeply religious than are many people who correctly regard themselves as religious believers.’
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s steps in the Great Palm House in the National Botanic Gardens, Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Wittgenstein visited his Irish friend, the psychiatrist Dr Maurice O’Connor (‘Con’) Drury (1907-1976) in Dublin in August 1947. They first met in the chapel Westcott House, Cambridge, when Drury had been an Anglican ordinand.
When Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge he resigned his professorship, planning to move to Dublin. From December 1947 to April 1948, Wittgenstein lived at Kilpatrick House, the home of the Kingston family near Redcross, Co Wicklow, where he worked on one of his major treatises, Philosophical Investigations, now accepted as a classic of 20th century philosophy.
By April 1948, he had moved from Kilpatrick House to Dr Con Drury’s holiday home in the west of Ireland, Rosro Cottage in Renvyle, Co Galway, and stayed there until the following October. This is now the Killary Harbour Youth Hostel.
From Co Galway, Wittgenstein moved to Dublin and to Ross’s Hotel, now the Ashling Hotel in Parkgate Street. A plaque by steps in the Great Palm House in the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin recalls how Wittgenstein liked to sit and write there in the late 1940s.
He remained in Dublin until June 1949. In all he spent 18 months in Ireland before returning to Cambridge.
Kilpatrick House near Redcross, Co Wicklow … Wittgenstein lived and wrote there from December 1947 to April 1948 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Back in Cambridge, Wittgenstein became very ill on the evening of 27 April 1951. When his doctor told him he might live only a few days, he reportedly replied, ‘Good!’
Four of his former students arrived at his bedside – Ben Richards, the Limerick-born philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, Yorick Smythies, and Con Drury, once an Anglican ordinand at Westcott House, Cambridge, and later a regular communicant at Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.
Anscombe and Smythies were both Roman Catholics. At their request, the Dominican friar and philosopher, Father Conrad Pepler (1908-1993), also attended; he was the founding warden of the Dominican retreat centre at Spode House near Rugeley, Stafforshire, which I revisited in a posing last week (22 April 2026). Wittgenstein had asked for a ‘priest who was not a philosopher’ and had met Father Conrad several times before his death.
His friends were unsure at first what Wittgenstein would have wanted. But they remembered he had said he hoped his Catholic friends would pray for him, and so they did. He was pronounced dead shortly afterwards, 75 years ago, on 29 April 1951, and was given a Catholic burial in Cambridge.
A plaque in the chapel of Trinity College Cambridge recalls Wittgenstein’s time as a fellow and professor (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Wittgenstein’s influence reaches almost every discipline in the humanities and social sciences, and he has influenced many current Anglican theologians, including Andrew Davison and Alison Milbank.
On his religious views, Wittgenstein was said to be greatly interested in Catholicism and was sympathetic to it. However, he did not consider himself a Catholic. According to Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein saw Catholicism as a way of life rather than as a set of beliefs he personally held.
So, did Wittgenstein see himself as Jewish?
Wittgenstein wrote repeatedly about Jews and Judaism in the 1930s, and many biographical studies present that his writings about Jewishness as a way in which he thought about the kind of person he was and the nature of his philosophical work.
On the other hand, as David Stern points out, many philosophers regard Wittgenstein’s thoughts about Jews as relatively unimportant, and many studies of his philosophy do not even mention the topic.
Yet, some writers have referred to Wittgenstein as a ‘rabbinical thinker’ and a far-sighted critic of anti-Semitism.
There is much debate about the extent to which Wittgenstein and his siblings, who were of three-quarters Jewish descent, saw themselves as Jews. The 1935 Nuremberg laws in 1935 defined as Jewish someone with three or four Jewish grandparents.
In a diary entry shortly after the German-Austrian Anschluss, he described the prospect of holding a German Judenpass or Jewish identity papers as an ‘extraordinarily difficult situation’ and compared it to hot iron that would burn his pocket.
In his writings, Wittgenstein frequently referred to himself as Jewish, at times as part of an apparent self-flagellation. For example, while berating himself for being a ‘reproductive’ as opposed to ‘productive’ thinker, he attributed this to his own Jewish sense of identity.
He wrote, ‘The saint is the only Jewish genius. Even the greatest Jewish thinker is no more than talented. (Myself for instance).’
While Wittgenstein would later claim that ‘my thoughts are 100% Hebraic,’ as Professor Hans Sluga has argued, if so, ‘His was a self-doubting Judaism, which had always the possibility of collapsing into a destructive self-hatred (as it did in [Otto] Weinberger’s case) but which also held an immense promise of innovation and genius.’
Wittgenstein once wrote, ‘Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbüchlein, “To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby.” That is what I would have liked to say about my work.’
In a letter to Bertrand Russell in 1912, he said Mozart and Beethoven were the actual sons of God – both composers died in Vienna.
The plaque at the entrance to Kilpatrick House marking the 50th anniversary of Wittgenstein’s death (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
‘Genesis’, a sculpture in resin bronze by Naomi Blake (1924-2018) in Saint Mary and All Saints Church, Little Walsingham (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)
Patrick Comerford
The closing acts of worship during this week’s Ecumenical Pilgrimage to Walsingham were in the Shrine Church, led by Prebendary Norman Wallwork and the Revd Dr Richard Clutterbuck, and in the Parish Church of Saint Mary and All Saints in Little Walsingham, where the celebrant and preacher was Bishop Lindsay Urwin of the Diocese of Southwark.
The parish church in Little Walsingham, which I hope to describe in another posting, holds three important works of art from the 1980s, commissioned in association with ‘Art in Churches’: ‘Genesis’ (1986) by Naomi Blake; Ruth Duckworth’s untitled ceramic relief installed in 1988; and ‘Spring Carpet’ (1985), a painting by John Riches.
‘Genesis’ is a sculpture in resin bronze by Naomi Blake (1924-2018) which she ‘dedicated to the sanctity of life’ and depicts a mother and child. Both the title of the sculpture and its subject suggest her Jewish background and faith. Naomi Blake is a Jewish sculptor who was born in the former Czechoslovakia, and her work can be seen in cathedrals and churches and other locations throughout England.
Blake’s works that I have written about in the past include two sculptures at the Royal Foundation of Saint Katharine in Limehouse, London, ‘Genesis’ (1994) and ‘Love is My Meaning’ (2000), and ‘View’ in Fitzroy Square Garden, London.
Naomi Blake was born in Mukaĉevo, Czechoslovakia (now Mukacheve, Ukraine) to Jewish parents in 1924. The youngest of 10 children, her original name was Zisel Dum – she was named Zisel, meaning ‘sweet’, by her parents. She survived the Holocaust as a child in Auschwitz, although many members of her family died there.
In 1942, her family included 32 members: four grandparents, her parents, nine siblings, six spouses and 10 young nieces and nephews. In 1944, when Naomi was 20, most of her family was deported to Auschwitz and she was separated from everyone except her older sister Malchi; her father, another sister and her nieces and nephews were led into the gas chambers. She returned to Mukacevo in July 1945 to find her family home in ruins and that of the 32 family members before the war, only had seven survived by 1945.
After World War II, she lived in Milan, Rome and Jerusalem, before making her home in North London. She changed her name to Naomi in 1948 and she left Israel in 1952 to seek medical help and rejoin members of her family.
She met and married a young German refugee, Asher Blake, they settled in London, and they were the parents of two children, Jonathan and Anita (Nin). The early days were not easy as she knew no-one, spoke poor English and had no qualifications. But Asher encouraged Naomi to pursue her love of sculpture as a career. She enrolled at the Hornsey School of Art, now Middlesex University, and she studied there in 1955-1960.
Naomi’s work began with ceramic pots and portrait sculpture, progressing to figurative and then abstract work. Sculpting originally in clay and then in polystyrene for casting in bronze, she gradually reintroduced figurative elements in her work, showing the influences of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.
Her work developed through a cycle of embryonic forms, enclosed and protected figures, gradually opening out ‘to free the figure from its haven to stand against all adversity and spread its free wings.’ With her great interest in Jewish life and learning, she also sculpted imposing, expressive Biblical figures, bringing to life their strength and character.
Through her work, Naomi Blake promoted understanding between faiths. Her work has been exhibited in many galleries in Britain and abroad, and her sculptures can be seen in many places of worship such as the cathedrals in Bristol, Chelmsford and Norwich, Saint Ethelburga’s Church, London, Saint Botolph’s Church, Aldgate, Saint James’ Church, Muswell Hill, All Saints’ Church, East Finchley, the Royal Foundation of Saint Katharine’s, Limehouse, and synagogues in Finchley, Hampstead Garden, Kingsbury, Leeds and Oxford, as well as the National Holocaust Centre in Newark, Nottinghamshire. Her work is also in many royal collections and in public places such as Great Ormond Street Hospital, the University of Leicester, and Fitzroy Square.
Naomi Blake’s ‘Genesis’ (1994) in the gardens of Saint Katharine’s, Limehouse … given ‘to promote understanding between people of different faiths’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Naomi Blake’s ‘Genesis’ (1994) in the Royal Foundation of Saint Katharine’s, Limehouse, is a figure of a mother and child with an inscription explaining that the work was given in honour of Lady Elizabeth Basset and ‘to promote understanding between people of different faiths.’
Her ‘Genesis’ (1984) in Little Walsingham predates that by ten years. The viewer may, perhaps, recall the words of Isaiah: ‘Look to the rock from when you were hewn, to the quarry from which you were dug; look to your father Abraham and to Sarah who gave you birth’ (Isaiah 51: 1-2).
In its present setting, in a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the sculpture is interpreted, inevitably, as a Madonna and Child. In this context, the title ‘Genesis’ reminds the Christian that the Incarnation is about a new beginning, or genesis for humanity.
‘Genesis’ was the gift of the artist to the church. She dedicated the sculpture to ‘The Sanctity of Life’ and this dedication proclaims the common conviction of Jew and Christian that human life has a special holiness through the gift of God.
In spite of her Holocaust experiences, Naomi Blake believed ‘there is something positive in the human figure – there is a lot of good in people … with my past, if I were pessimistic, somehow, it wouldn’t have been worthwhile surviving.’
Naomi Blake died on 7 November 2018. Her daughter Anita Peleg, published two books devoted to her life and work: Naomi Blake: Dedication in Sculpture, a comprehensive catalogue of her sculptures; and Glimmer of Hope: The Story of Naomi Blake, telling the story of how she defied the odds and survived to bring joy to thousands.
Ruth Duckworth’s untitled ceramic relief, installed in the church in Little Walsingham in 1988 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)
Ruth Duckworth’s untitled ceramic relief was installed in the church in Little Walsingham in 1988 with the support of Art in Churches, and was the gift of Peter Palumbo. The artist has deliberately left the mural untitled so that no one interpretation is imposed on the person looking at it. It evokes different ideas and thoughts in different people, but ultimately the subtlety of line and colour is sufficient to make it appropriate to its setting. The coloured folds which emerge from the alcove in two distinct sections suggest, on some interpretations, this present life and the life to come.
Ruth Duckworth (1919-2009) was a modernist sculptor who specialised in ceramics, she worked in stoneware, porcelain and bronze. Her sculptures are mostly untitled. She is best known for Clouds over Lake Michigan, a wall sculpture.
She was born Ruth Windmüller in Hamburg, the daughter of Ellen Strack, a Lutheran, and Edgar Albert Windmüller, a Jewish lawyer. She left Nazi Germany in 1936 to study at the Liverpool College of Art and later studied at the Hammersmith School of Art and at the City and Guilds of London Art School.
She married the British artist Aidron Duckworth in 1949 and they later moved to the US in 1964, where Ruth taught at the University of Chicago and was a visiting professor of sculpture at the University of Illinois. The couple divorced in 1967.
‘Spring Carpet’, a painting by John Riches (1941-1999) in the church in Little Walsingham (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)
‘Spring Carpet’ in the church in Little Walsingham is a painting by John Riches (1941-1999), who was originally from Norwich and who returned in 1972 to teach at the Norwich School of Art. His later work was strongly influenced by his interest in church iconography and mediaeval decoration.
‘Spring Carpet’ speaks of new life by means of light filtered through branches speckling the earth which harbours the new buds of life.
It was appropriate that I saw this work in springtime, because The artist asked that his painting should hang in a place where the sunlight would fall on it, with the shadows made by the window tracery giving the impression the sunlight was filtering down through the branches of trees onto the earth, earth in which new plant life is springing up.
These three works of contemporary art were added to Saint Mary and All Saints Church following exhibitions in the church from 1985 to 1988 and with the support of Art in Churches. They were originally grouped at the entrance to the Lady Chapel. But Naomi Blake’s ‘Genesis’ has since been moved to a corner at the west end and sadly it is easily missed by people entering and leaving the church by the north door at the west end.
Naomi Blake's ‘Genesis’ is hidden when the north-west door is opened in the church in Little Walsingham (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)
The traveller Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela visited a Jewish community in Muscat in the 12th century (Artwork: Sefira Lightstone / Chabad)
Patrick Comerford
My hasty furtive rush through the airport in Muscat in the early hours of Friday morning got me to Gate C6 just three minutes before boarding began. Looking back on it all at the end of the day after, it is an experience I am glad to have behind me.
On our way through Muscat two weeks earlier, the airport was much calmer and more peaceful, with enough time to have coffee and a modest breakfast. The atmosphere has changed so dramatically since then and so unexpectedly.
Oman sits on the strategic Straits of Hormuz, a mere 29 km from Iran at its choke point. in normal times, 30 per cent of the world’s liquified natural gas and 25 per cent of the world’s oil pass through it on tankers. It is the most strategic spot on all of the world’s oceans, which explains why Oman is at the centre of the political and military tsunami that has overwhelmed the world in the past week.
But Oman has long played a quiet role as mediator between countries in the Gulf that have accepted it as an honest broker, which explains how it has come to be a safe place to many thousands of people trying to get away from the present crises.
Oman has a reputation for being gentle, friendly and warmly welcoming, while Dubai in the neighbouring United Arab Emirates is known as being brash, noisy, full of bling, supercars and temptations, and the people of Abu Dhabi are regarded as more conservative, and less brazen and expressive.
I had hoped when we were booking these flights that I might have had more time in Muscat to learn about the religious traditions of Oman, including the history of Jews and Christians in Oman as well as its Ibadi Muslim community, which is neither Sunni nor Shia.
Oman does not provide official statistics on religious affiliation, but it seems Muslims are 85.9 per cent of the population. They predominantly follow the Ibadi school of Islam, with smaller numbers following the Shafi’i school of Sunni Islam and the Twelver school of Shia Islam. Most non-Muslims in Oman are foreign workers, and the religious minorities include Christians (6.4 percent), Hindus (5.7 per cent), Buddhists (0.8 per cent), Jains, Parsees and Sikhs. The Christian communities, mainly in Muscat, Sohar and Salalah, include Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and others, and are organised along linguistic and ethnic lines.
Although there is no longer a Jewish community in Oman, the history of the Jews in Oman dates centuries. The grave of the prophet Job is said to be 45 miles from Salalah, in the south of Oman and close to the border with Yemen. But this is only one of three supposed gravesites of Job: another is in the village of Deir Ayyoub near Ramle, and a third is in Istanbul.
The Jewish presence in Oman probably dates back to the ninth century, with a Jewish presence for many centuries, mainly in Muscat and Sohar.
Ishaq bin Yahuda, a ninth century merchant, lived in Sohar and sailed to China between the years of 882 and 912 CE after an argument with a Jewish colleague. He made a great fortune, returned to Sohar and sailed for China again. But his ship was seized and bin Yahuda was murdered in Sumatra.
The traveller Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela mentioned a community in Muscat in the 12th century. He undertook a journey from 1165 to 1173 to visit far-flung Jewish communities that also brought him to the area that is modern Oman. His journey began as a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, although his travels may also have had a commercial motive. He was the first known European traveller to approach the frontiers of China and his account of his journey throws light on the lives of Jews and Jewish communities in Europe and Asia in the 12th century.
Benjamin of Tudela tried to catalogue the Jewish communities on the route to the Holy Land as a way of providing a guide to where Jews might hospitality. He often gave a count of Jews in the towns and countries he visited, and he reported a Jewish community in Muscat in the northern part of the Arabian Peninsula.
Later, in the 17th century, travellers reported the presence of Jews in Muscat in 1625 when the port was under Portuguese control, and a synagogue was built there in 1673.
The Jewish community in Oman grew with the arrival of refugees from Baghdad in the 1820s. A British naval officer, Lieutenant James Raymond Wellsted (1805-1842), documented the Jews of Muscat in his memoirs Travels in Arabia. He recorded ‘a few Jews in Muskat (sic), who mostly arrived there in 1828, being driven from Baghdad … by the cruelties and extortions of the Pacha Daud.’
Dawūd Pasha of Baghdad (1767-1851), was born Davit Manvelashvili in Tbilisi, Georgia, and was the last Mamluk ruler of Iraq (1816-1831). Under his rule, the Jews of Baghdad were grievously persecuted resulting, and many of the leading Baghdadi Jewish families such as the Sassoon and Judah families, fled to India.
Wellsted noted that Jews were not discriminated against in Oman, unlike other Arab countries. They did not have to live in ghettos, nor were they forced to publicly identify themselves as Jews, nor walk in the road if a Muslim was walking on the same street, as was the case in Yemen.
By the mid-19th century, Oman had as many as 350 Jewish families, many of them the descendants of Iraqi or Baghdadi Jews and Yemeni Jews. The merchant society in Sohar included Jews originating from Persia and Iraq. They worked mostly in making silver objects, trade, finance and selling liquor. Between 1830 and 1860 they represented British interests, as in the port of Aden. Wellsted also found 20 Jewish families in Sohar, where they had a synagogue and owned a few buildings.
By the early 20th century, the Jewish community in Muscat was in decline, many had left and some had converted to Islam. During World War II, a Jewish American army enlist, Emanuel Glick, met a small community of Omani Jews in Muscat, but this community consisted mostly of recent migrants from Yemen.
The last native-born member of the community is thought to have been Sulayman al-Yehudi. He left at the time of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and it is said his children and grandchildren converted to Islam.
Oman does not have any formal relations with Israel, but the two countries had exchange offices from 1996 to 2000. A series of visits by Israeli leaders have visited Oman in recent years, including Yitzhak Rabin in 1994, Shimon Peres in 1996, and the Omani foreign minister visited Jerusalem in 1995.
Diplomatic were cut off from 2000 at the start of the second intifada. But Tsipi Livni, then Israel’s foreign minister, visited Oman in 2008, and the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited in 2021, to the surprise of the international media at the time.
Professor Alexander Honeyman, once described as the ‘real India Jones’ … recorded the Jewish cemetery in Sohar in 1958
The surviving 19th-century Jewish cemetery in Sohar is known locally as Qumbaz Al-Yahud, the cemetery of the Jews. It has brick-built graves with Hebrew characters, and its size indicates how large the Jewish community in Sohar once was.
Wendell Phillips (1922-1975) and the archaeologist Alexander Honeyman (1907-1988), Professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages at the University of St Andrews and once described as the ‘real India Jones,’ measured the cemetery in 1958 and they investigated a few of the then surviving 200 tombs.
But many of those graves have been lost over the years. The Italian archaeologist, Professor Paolo M Costa (1932-2019), recorded 95 graves or tombs in the cemetery in 1980.
Dr Aviva Klein-Franke has been a Senior Lecturer and Assistant Professor at the University of Köln in Germany, specialising in the history and cultural heritage of Yemenite Jews, Middle Eastern minorities, and Diaspora communities. She visited Oman twice to visit the Jewish cemetery in Sohar. There she took many photographs and documented the names written on the bricks of the Memorial Wall.
In her visit to Sohar in 2005, she could count only 12 full tombs and another five half-open tombs, and found bones were strewn across the ground. She copied many of the Hebrew names engraved into the bricks on the four sides of the wall.
Today there is no official, organised Jewish community in Oman, although a small number of expatriate western Jews live in the sultanate. The houses and the synagogue described by 19th century travellers have all disappeared.
A Map of Oman (1838) by James Raymond Wellsted … he documented the Jews of Muscat (Wikipedia / CCL)
