Remembering the Battle of Cable Street and its significance 90 years later

The Battle of Cable Street … fought 90 years ago and commemorated in a mural on the side of on the side of Saint George’s Town Hall in Cable Street (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

I have stayed twice in the East End of London in the past decade, staying on both occasions at the Royal Foundation of Saint Katharine, which is built around the old Georgian vicarage of Saint James in Ratcliffe.

The Battle of Cable Street made that part of the East End famous 90 years ago on this day, 4 October 1936, and the events of that day not only shaped the identity of the East End but are also worth recalling today as the far-right is on the rise again, threatening life in cities and towns, ports and suburbs.

The old vicarage at Saint Katharine’s faces out towards Cable Street, which runs through the heart of Tower Hamlets, from Limehouse to the edge of London’s financial district, the City of London.

Cable Street runs parallel to, and south of, the Docklands Light Railway and Commercial Road, and north of The Highway. The area is close to Wapping and Shadwell Basin to the south, Tower Hill to the west, and Whitechapel and Stepney to the north. Because many Londoners define where they live by the nearest station, the Cable Street area is often known as Shadwell.

In the past, Stepney was divided into four hamlets – Ratcliffe, Limehouse, Poplar and Mile End – and the northern part of the hamlet of Ratcliffe, where the 17th century Kilkenny-born mapmaker Nicholas Comberford (1600-1673) lived, is between Shadwell and Limehouse.

A view of Cable Street looking east towards Butcher Row and Saint Katharine’s (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Each time I stayed at Saint Katharine’s, I walked the length of Cable Street through the East End, towards the City of London.

When Saint Katharine’s moved back to the East End in the 1940s, the first Master appointed after the move was Father St John Groser (1890-1966), who had been the Rector of Saint George-in-the-East, on Canon Street Road off Cable Street

He was an Anglican priest and a prominent Christian socialist. He was said to be ‘the best-known priest in the East End’ and Kenneth Leech said that he was ‘one of the most significant Christian socialist figures in 20th century Britain’. He took part in the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, and had his nose broken by a police baton.

Cable Street started as a rope walk or straight path where hemp ropes were twisted along its length into ships’ ropes or cables. These cables supplied ships anchored nearby in the Pool of London, between London Bridge and Wapping and Rotherhithe.

Until Victorian times, the present-day Cable Street had different names for each of its sections, including Cable Street, Knock Fergus, New Road, Back Lane, Blue Gate Fields, Sun Tavern Fields, and Brook Street. The whole central area of present-day Cable Street was named after Saint George-in-the-East Church and Saint George-in-the-East parish.

Up to the 1950s, Cable Street had a reputation for cheap lodgings, brothels, drinking inns and opium dens. In 1868, the Dublin-born Dr Thomas Barnardo (1845-1905) opened his first home for destitute children nearby in Stepney Causeway.

The Battle of Cable Street took place 90 years ago, on Sunday 4 October 1936, when local communities clashed with police who were protecting a planned fascist march in Cable Street in the heart of the Jewish East End.

Local Jewish groups and residents, along with trade unionists, Labour groups, socialists, Communists, anarchists and local Irish organisations, decided to take a stand against a planned march through the East End by Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.

Mosley planned to goose-step thousands of his marchers dressed in uniforms like those of Mussolini’s Blackshirts through the East End, which then had a large Jewish population. Despite the strong likelihood of violence, the government hesitated about banning the march. A large police escort was provided in a bid to block anti-fascist protesters from disrupting the march.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews denounced the march as antisemitic and urged Jewish people to stay away. The Communist Party, under the leadership of Phil Piratin, was one of the leaders of the opposition forces.

The anti-fascist groups set up roadblocks in an attempt to prevent the march from taking place. The barricades were set up near the junction with Christian Street, towards the west end of Cable Street. About 20,000 anti-fascist demonstrators turned out, only to be met by 6,000 police, who attempted to clear the road to allow 2,000-3,000 fascists to march.

The demonstrators fought back with sticks, rocks, chair legs and other improvised weapons. Rubbish, rotten vegetables and the contents of chamber pots were thrown at the police by women from the doors and windows of houses along Cable Street. A bus was overturned and used as a barricade, Mosley’s car was attacked with bricks, and hand-to-hand fighting broke out on the surrounding streets.

After a series of running battles that day, Mosley appeared to climb down and agreed to abandon his march, claiming he now wanted to prevent bloodshed. The fascist marchers were dispersed towards Hyde Park and the police then attacked the counter-demonstrators. About 150 of them were arrested, although some escaped, and several members of the police were also arrested by demonstrators. Around 175 people were injured, including police, women and children.

Many of the arrested demonstrators reported they had been treated harshly by the police. Most were charged with the minor offence of obstructing police and fined £5, but several of the leaders were found guilty of affray and sentenced to three months hard labour.

Jewish figures from the East End in a work by Dan Jones in the corridors of the Royal Foundation of Saint Katharine (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Two days after the Battle, Mosley was married in Joseph Goebbels’s drawing room, with Hitler as his special guest. The Battle of Cable Street was a major factor leading to the passage of the Public Order Act 1936, which required police consent for political marches and forbade the wearing of political uniforms in public. It provided a short-term boost for Mosley’s fascists but eventually proved to be a significant moment in their decline in the years immediately before World War II.

Piratin was one of the heroes of the day. In 1937, he became the first Communist elected to Stepney Borough Council, and in 1945 he was elected as the Communist MP for Mile End.

Beatty Orwell, who took part in the counter-fascist protests was then a 19-year-old. She went on to be the Mayor of Tower Hamlets and served as councillor for 10 years in the 1970s and 1980s. She is now a great-grandmother 18 times over.

In the 1980s, a large mural depicting scenes from the battle was painted on the side of Saint George’s Town Hall in Cable Street, immediately west of Shadwell station and next to Library Place. This building was originally the vestry hall for the parish and later the town hall of Stepney Borough Council.

Little is recognisable from that period on today’s Cable Street, apart from the faded street signs. Cable Street is now home to a large South Asian community, a cycle route to the City, and some parts of it look as though they are becoming up-and-coming residential areas for young hipsters.

At a rally ten years ago to mark the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, the speakers included 100-year-old Dublin-born Max Levitas, a veteran of the battle, a Communist councillor in Stepney for 15 years, and still active then in political causes. He died at the age of 103 on 2 November 2018 after a life of political activism fighting for housing for the poor and for social justice. He was buried in Rainham Jewish Cemetery.

His brother, Maurice (‘Morry’) Lavitas, was a veteran of the Connolly Column in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. He took part in the commemoration of the Connolly Column in Liberty Hall, Dublin, in 1991, when he was chosen to read out the list of members. He also attended a ceremony hosted by the Lord Mayor of Dublin in the Mansion House in 1997 to honour the surviving Irish members of the International Brigade. He died in London in 2001.

Their father Harry fled from Lithuania and their mother Leah from Latvia in 1913, both escaping the antisemitic pogroms of Tsarist Russia. They met in Dublin and were married in the Camden Street Synagogue. However, on the other side of Europe, Harry’s sister Sara was burnt to death along with fellow-villagers in the synagogue of Akmeyan, and Leah’s sister Rachel was killed with her family by the Nazis in Riga.

Levitas House on Jubilee Street, new flats in Stepney Green in 2020, are a fitting memory and tribute to Max Levitas, the Dublin-born hero of the Battle of Cable Street and a veteran political activist. But the most fitting tribute to the Levitas brothers and the heroes of Cable Street 90 years ago is to continue to resist the far-right which is on the rise again.

My first visit to Cable Street came immediately after visiting Auschwitz, Birkenau and the Old Jewish Quarter of Kraków. In a time when we are seeing the rise of political extremism and racism not only in Britain but throughout Europe, and holding a tight grip on political power in the US, it is good to be reminded of the courage and resilience of people who stood against the rise of fascism in years immediately before World War II.

Part of the mural at Saint George’s Town Hall commemorating the Battle of Cable Street (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Martha Nussbaum: a philosopher’s odyssey from an Episcopalian childhood to Reform Judaism’s pursuit of political justice

Looking out from Preveli Monastery in Crete towards the island of Gavdos, said to be the Ogygia of Calypso where Odysseus stayed for seven years (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

While Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey was the topic of conversation, I was writing in recent weeks how the Revd Dr Giles Fraser, in ‘Thought for the Day’ on Radio 4 last month (24 July 2026), talked about an essay on why Odysseus is right to refuse the temptation to eternal life while he stranded with the nymph Calypso on the island of Ogygia.

He referred to the American philosopher Professor Martha Nussbaum of the University of Chicago, who he interviewed for The Guardian many years ago (29 June 2012). In his Thought for the Day’, he referred to how she argues that there are some things that the immortal gods are not able to do that mortal human beings are: not least amongst them is to show courage. If I cannot risk everything because I cannot die, he asked, then how could I possibly be courageous?

Martha Nussbaum, who is Jewish, suggests that there is something about this refusal of invulnerability that explains one of the key features of Christian theology: of God becoming human, of God who is prepared to suffer and die in the name of love. ‘What is attractive about both Odysseus and Jesus is that they are prepared to have skin in the game, which is pretty much the very definition of incarnation’, Giles Fraser says.

Since then, I have found myself reading some of the work of Martha Nussbaum, who is one of the world’s foremost public philosophers. She is Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, where she is part of both the law school and the philosophy department and and an associate member of the Divinity School faculty. She has also taught at Harvard and Brown.

In her work, Martha Nussbaum has engaged with ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy, existentialism, feminism, and ethics, such as animal rights. She has written more than two dozen books, including The Fragility of Goodness (1986), she has received a number of prestigious international prizes, and some years ago she was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Martha Nussbaum was born Martha Craven in New York on 6 May 1947, the daughter of George Craven, a Philadelphia lawyer, and Betty Warren, an interior designer, and grew up in an affluent Episcopalian home in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Her mother was an alcoholic whose forbears arrived on the Mayflower; her father was a successful southern-born lawyer from Georgia and she has described him as ‘bigoted against African Americans and Jews.’

She has spoken of her upbringing as ‘East Coast WASP elite … very sterile, very preoccupied with money and status’. She later explained her impatience with ‘mandarin philosophers’ and her dedication to public service as a repudiation of her own upbringing: ‘I don’t like anything that sets itself up as an in-group or an elite, whether it is the Bloomsbury group or Derrida’.

She studied theatre and classics at New York University (BA 1969) and philosophy at Harvard (MA 1972, PhD 1975), and went on to teach philosophy and classics at Harvard, Brown University, and the University of Chicago Law School.

Her book The Fragility of Goodness, Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986) made her a well-known figure throughout the humanities. In that book, she confronts the ethical dilemma that individuals strongly committed to justice are nevertheless vulnerable to external factors that may deeply compromise or even negate their human flourishing, and she defends the practical ethics of Aristotle over the metaphysical supernaturalism of Plato.

She rejects the Platonic notion that human goodness can fully protect against peril, siding with the tragic playwrights and Aristotle in treating the acknowledgment of vulnerability as a key to realising the human good. Her interpretation of Plato’s Symposium in particular drew considerable attention.

Further books, including The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Frontiers of Justice (2006), established her as a theorist of global justice. She has also written about the unequal freedoms and opportunities of women, and has developed a distinctive type of feminism, drawing inspiration from the liberal tradition but emphasising that liberalism, at its best, entails radical rethinking of gender relations and relations within the family.

In her philosophical work, she has also written widely about emotions and about grief, compassion, and love, and about disgust and shame. Following a court trial in Colorado in which she gave evidence, Nussbaum wrote a lengthy article on ‘Platonic Love and Colorado Law’, drawing on Plato’s Symposium and his interactions with Socrates as evidence for her argument.

In Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (1997), she appeals to classical Greek texts as a basis for the defence and reform of the liberal education. She notes how Greek cynic philosopher Diogenes aspired to transcend ‘local origins and group memberships’ in favour of becoming ‘a citizen of the world’.

In Sex and Social Justice (1999), she argues that sex and sexuality are morally irrelevant distinctions that have been artificially enforced as sources of social hierarchy, and that feminism and social justice have common concerns. She shows how sex is used to deny some people, including women and gay men, social justice.

In Hiding from Humanity (2004), Nussbaum examines the arguments for including two emotions – shame and disgust – as legitimate bases for legal judgments, and notes how projective disgust has wrongly justified group subordination, mainly of women, Jews, and homosexuals. She dismisses disgust as a reliable basis of judgment.

In From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (2010), Nussbaum analyses the role that disgust plays in law and public debate in the US, including the constitutional legal issues facing gay and lesbian people. She argues that the fundamental motivation of those advocating legal restrictions against gay and lesbian people is a ‘politics of disgust’.

She explicitly opposes the concept of a disgust-based morality as an appropriate guide for legislating. Nussbaum notes that popular disgust has been used throughout history as a justification for persecution, and recalls how at various times, racism, antisemitism and sexism, have all been driven by popular revulsion.

In Creating Capabilities (2011), she outlines a unique theory on the Capability approach or the Human development approach. She criticises existing economic indicators, such as GDP, for failing to fully account for quality of life and assurance of basic needs, instead rewarding countries with large growth distributed highly unequally across the population, and she argues the Capability approach should be prioritised by development economics policymakers.

In The New Religious Intolerance, Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age (2012), she writes a vigorous defence of the religious freedom of minorities in the face of post-9/11 Islamophobia. And, as Giles Fraser said in The Guardian at the time, by minorities she mostly means Muslims.

Her book The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal (2019), engages critically with important examples of the cosmopolitan ideal from ancient Greece and Rome to the present. The cosmopolitan political tradition in Western thought begins with the Greek Cynic Diogenes, who, when asked where he came from, responded that he was a citizen of the world. Rather than declaring his lineage, city, social class, or gender, he defined himself as a human being, implicitly asserting the equal worth of all human beings. Nussbaum pursues this ‘noble but flawed‘ vision of world citizenship as it finds expression in figures of Greco-Roman antiquity, Hugo Grotius in the 17th century, Adam Smith during the 18th century, and various contemporary thinkers.

Earlier that year, the Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in 2019, claimed the American middle class had been betrayed by an out-of-touch ‘cosmopolitan elite’ that catered to the needs of multinational companies while forgetting ‘the heartland’. Given Brexit, Donald Trump’s election, and a global turn to nationalism more generally, Hawley’s comments were anything but exceptional. What made them unique was that he directed his ire at particular academics for promulgating the beliefs of what he called the ‘cosmopolitan consensus’. Perhaps the best-known of these was Martha Nussbaum, wh o was accused by Hawley of teaching her students that ‘world citizenship’ trumps being the citizen of a nation-state.

Her latest book is The Republic of Love: Opera and Political Freedom, published earlier this year by Oxford University Press.

Nussbaum has criticised Noam Chomsky as one of the left-wing intellectuals who hold the belief that ‘one should not criticise one’s friends, that solidarity is more important than ethical correctness’.

She is known for her contributions in developing the capabilities approach to well-being, in which she asks, ‘What is each person able to do and to be?’ She asserts that all humans – and non-human animals – have a basic right to dignity. To provide human dignity, she insists governments must provide ‘at least a threshold level’ of a number of capabilities: life; bodily health; bodily integrity; senses, imagination, and thought, emotions; practical reason; affiliation; other species; play; and control over one's environment, including political and material environments.

‘Knowledge is no guarantee of good behaviour, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behaviour’ … Martha C Nussbaum (Photograph: University of Chicago Divinity School

From 1969 to 1987, Martha Nussbaum was married to Professor Alan Nussbaum of Yale and Cornell, a linguist and classical philologist known for his work on the language of the Homeric epics. During their marriage, she converted to Judaism and her commitment to Judaism has continued. She became a bat mitzvah at Temple KAM Isaiah Israel in Chicago in 2008, delivering a D’var Torah on the connection between genuine, non-narcissistic consolation and the pursuit of global justice.

For Nussbaum, coming to Judaism was both comfort and reprieve. She has described ‘the combination of joy and relief I found in entering a community in which outrage at injustice was normal.’

She soon came to appreciate the Jewish tradition of spirited debate. ‘In great contrast to my Christian education, focused on catechism and professions of faith,’ she wrote, ‘I discovered that in a Jewish conversion process it was possible to dispute about everything.’

Whether treating literary, legal, or political issues, she has consistently argued that any comprehensive ideology that claims to understand the good life fails unless it is accompanied by a love for that which is imperfect and vulnerable. ‘Philosophy does not compel, or threaten, or mock,’ she has said. ‘It doesn’t make bare assertions, but, instead, sets up a structure of thought in which a conclusion follows from premises the listener is free to dispute. In that way it invites dialogue and respects the listener.’

In her essay ‘Judaism and the Love of Reason,’ she describes her love for the ideas of the leaders of 19th century Reform Judaism, a movement she praises for its rationalism, its moral mission and commitment to justice, and for ‘returning the religion to its original Biblical core.’

In Women and Human Development (2000), she criticises secular feminists for ascribing patriarchy to religious traditions. In ‘Judaism and the Love of Reason’, she cites feminism and cosmopolitanism as ‘issues that have been at the heart of the Reform movement since its inception and to which Reform Judaism gives … more satisfactory answers than do other varieties of Judaism.’

In an interview with Benjamin Balint in Sources in Spring 2022, Martha Nussbaum said she does not ‘even really think that Biblical Judaism is inherently patriarchal. I once wrote a paper on the Creation stories in Genesis and learned a lot about how great interpreters have read Genesis 1 as holding that the first human was a hermaphrodite. And there are many other ways in which the apparently misogynistic aspects of the text have been differently interpreted by great textual scholars.’

Asked why religious ritual is important for people who seek to live a moral life, she cited Immanuel Kant, who ‘said that people have a duty to join a religious group of the right sort (the rational sort, and Reform Judaism is pretty much the rational religion he had in mind), because we are all weak and inclined to deviate from the moral law, but in a group with others our resolve is strengthened.’

In her speech when she received an honorary degree from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, she painted a portrait of the Judaism that inspires her, including the commitment to correct injustices in the community and to welcome all strangers.

The Israeli novelist David Grossman, who received an honorary degree the same day, said to her that that is the sort of Judaism Israel needs. In his speech, he talked about the capacity of the literary imagination to see the infinite in each person, and to cross the boundaries that divide us in life. He then asked whether that capacity is being lost in the Israel of today.

She told Benjamin Balint, ‘So that is what Reform strengthens, I believe: that imaginative capacity to see the infinite in each person and to welcome the stranger.’ And, she added, ‘the Judaism I belong to requires the pursuit of political justice.’

Remembering 11 July 1942, the tragedy of ‘Black Saturday’ and the destruction of Jewish life in Thessaloniki

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 Aristotele 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)

Saint Mary Magdalen Church on Comerford Road began as a mission in Brockley in 1895

Saint Mary Magdalen Church, on the corner of Comerford Road and Howson Road, Brockley, was designed by Young Bolton and built in 1898-1899 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Patrick Comerford

When I was visiting Comerford Road in Brockley, south-east London, earlier this week, I visited Saint Mary Magdalen Church, which stands on the corner of Comerford Road and Howson Road. Saint Mary Magdalen is a much-altered Italianate church built in 1898-1899 and designed by the little-known architect Young Bolton, who died in 1903.

The mission at Brockley began in 1895 and a plot measuring 1,321 square yards was bought. A school was opened that year, with an upper floor that was used as a temporary chapel. This was soon inadequate and Bishop Francis Bourne sanctioned building an inexpensive church, for which he advanced £2,000. Bishop Bourne was Bishop of Southwark (1897-1903) and Archbishop of Westminster (1903-1935), and in 1911 he was made a cardinal.

At the time, about 370 Catholics were living in the area, and the church was built to seat 300 people. Bishop Bourne blessed and laid the foundation stone on 9 July 1898. The new church was blessed and solemnly opened by Bishop Bourne on 16 March 1899.

Inside Saint Mary Magdalen Church, Comerford Road (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

A new Angelus bell was blessed and hung in one of the towers in 1900 and was rung for the first time on Easter Sunday 1900.

The stone pulpit was blessed and used for the first time on 24 July 1904, the patronal feast. It was presented to the mission priest, Father James Hayes by parishioners from his previous parish in Sutton.

When two new missions were opened in Nunhead and Forest Hill in 1905 and 1906, they took away parishioners from Brockley. Subsequently, the Bishop of Southwark, Bishop Peter Amigo, decided to place the Augustinians of the Assumption in charge of Saint Mary Magdalen. Bishop Amigo is often remembered as the bishop who imposed ‘minor excommunication; on the Modernist priest George Tyrrell and restricted the possibility of a full Catholic burial when Tyrrell died in 1909.

The Assumptionists, formally the Congregation of the Augustinians of the Assumption (AA), were founded in Nîmes, France, in 1845 by Father Emmanuel d’Alzon. In late 19th century France, the Assumptionists were controversial at the time of the Dreyfus Case as they actively promoted the conspiracy theory that unnamed Jews were destroying French institutions, in particular the army and the Catholic church.

The Assumptionists were suppressed throughout France in 1900, accused of accumulating a fund to support a royalist movement to overthrow the Republic. Many priests went abroad, including the Assumptionist priests who arrived on Comerford Road in 1906. They remained at Comerford Road for 91 years, until July 1997.

The first Assumptionist mission priest at Comerford Road was Father Marie-Louis Deydier, who spent three terms at Brockley.

The sanctuary and High Altar in Saint Mary Magdalen Church, Comerford Road (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

The richly decorative high altar is one of the few original furnishings to survive in the church. It was designed by Father Gregory Chedal, was blessed on 10 December 1911 and survives as the present high altar.

A Calvary designed by Joseph Dutton was unveiled as a war memorial in 1917, and it was completed a year later with the addition of a marble tablet in the form of an open book with the names of the war dead.

When Father Chedal returned from World War I in 1919, he began completing the four side altars dedicated to the Sacred Heart, Saint Vincent de Paul, Saint Peter and Saint Joseph. But, apart from their statues, nothing survives of these four side altars.

Father Chedal also began work on the Lady Chapel with a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes. By December 1919, the altars were in place, the sacristy was enlarged by removing a wall and inserting a door that connected the sacristy and the presbytery. The new altars were blessed at the silver jubilee service on 7 October 1920, and Brockley became an independent parish that year.

The Lady Chapel in Saint Mary Magdalen Church, Comerford Road (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

The presbytery on Comerford Road was refurbished, the church roof repaired in 1926, and a statue of Saint Theresa was blessed. The church was repaired in 1926-1927 and the Lady Chapel was decorated.

Two bells cast at the Paccard foundry at Annecy, France, were blessed and hung in the tower in 1929. Electricity was introduced to the church along with an electric organ blower by the end of 1930.

During the inter-war years, the Catholic community in the Comerford Road area and in wider Brockley grew to over 2,000 with the development of the Honor Oak Estate, rehousing people from Deptford, Rotherhithe and Bermondsey.

The organ was repaired and overhauled about 1937, and repairs were also made to the west front, towers, and the wall along Comerford Road.

Inside Saint Mary Magdalen Church, Comerford Road, facing the west end, entrance and organ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

During World War II, a time bomb fell nearby on 16 September 1940 and the parish priest removed the Blessed Sacrament and the Lady Chapel’s altar stone before the bomb exploded the next day. The Lady Chapel was completely destroyed, the north wall pushed inwards and the sanctuary furnishings were severely damaged. Only the high altar and Saint Peter’s altar remained intact. Although the presbytery was rendered uninhabitable, the priests returned to the house by late 1940.

A school room served as a temporary chapel until the church reopened on Easter Sunday 1943 while repairs were continued.

The second phase of restoration began in late 1948, the sanctuary roof and the Lady Chapel were rebuilt and the smashed pulpit was reconstructed. New coloured glass was inserted in all the windows and an upper room was added to the sacristy. The restoration was almost complete by 1950. A new floor was planned, as well as refurbishing seats and kneelers, repairing the organ, and works to the lighting and cleaning.

Bishop Cyril Cowderoy blessed the new Lady Chapel and the new altar in December 1951.

Father Patrick O’Neil repositioned the west doors in the tower in the 1950s, creating a central large door in place of a row of five windows, and the two side doors were replaced by windows. The former south-west porch inside became a baptistery but is now a toilet.

The organ choir gallery in Saint Mary Magdalen Church, Comerford Road (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

There were plans to demolish the presbytery and three adjoining houses to build a larger church, but these came to nothing. The parish bought Saint Cyprian’s Hall from the Anglican parish of Saint Hilda, Crofton Park. There were renewed plans to build a new church in 1968, but once again these plans were not realised. The font was moved closer to the sanctuary in 1980. A new hall was built behind Saint Cyprian’s Hall in 1981 and opened in 1982.

The organ was overhauled in 1985 and alterations involved raising the sanctuary floor, removing the altar rails and the pulpit, and inserting a sound-proof confessional.

The Lady Chapel altar was brought forward and a reconciliation room was created. When the Lady Chapel was renovated in 1996, its small tabernacle was removed.

The high altar survives largely as it was designed by Father Gregory Chedal in 1911. It is made from Bath and Portland stone and marble. The frontal depicts the Last Supper and is flanked by statues of the four evangelists. The reredos includes a Calvary with a kneeling Saint Mary Magdalen. On either side are niches with the patron saints of the Assumptionists, Saint Monica and Saint Augustine of Hippo, mother and son.

The west façade of the church facing Howson Road has a second floor niche with a statue of Saint Mary Magdalen. The side elevation now facing Comerford Road has five large round-headed nave windows separated by shallow wall strips.

The World War I memorial in the ground of sSaint Mary Magdalen Church, Comerford Road (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

The World War I memorial in the church grounds has a wooden cross with a sculpture of the Crucified Christ, set on a brick plinth with plaque. It has been designated with a Grade II listing because of its design and ‘as an eloquent witness to the tragic impact of world events on the local community’ during World War I. The memorial was the idea of Father Marie-Louis Deydier, who had been a military chaplain. It was unveiled on 7 July 1917 at a ceremony attended by the Mayor of Lewisham, Sir John and Lady Knill, the Assumptionist Provincial, the Lord Mayor of London, and relatives of the dead. The marble tablet designed by Joseph Dutton was added the following year.

The Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart, or the Cabrini Sisters, opened a day and boarding school in Wickham Road in 1902, and stayed until 1922, when their lease expired. Three years after they left, the Oblate Sisters started a new school in Wickham Road. Saint Cyprian’s Hall was sold in 2009, and the school hall is now used as a church hall.

The Assumptionist Fathers left Comerford Road in 1997 due to a fall in vocations, although they continue to run communities in Bethnal Green, London, and Hitchin, Hertfordshire. The parish is now under the care of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit or Spiritans, known to many as the Holy Ghost Fathers. In Ireland, they are associated with places such as Kimmage Manor, Blackrock College, Saint Mary’s College, Rathmines, and Saint Michael’s in Dublin and Rockwell College, near Cashel, Co Tipperary.

• The parish priest is Father Nathaniel Ewusi; Father Christian Enechukwu is the assistant parish priest; and the Revd Willian Dunphy is the parish deacon. Weekend Masses: Saturday, 6:30 pm Vigil Mass, Sunday, 8:30, 10 and 11:30 am; weekday Mass: Monday to Saturday 9.30 am; Holy Day Masses: 9:30 am and 8 pm.

Saint Mary Magdalen Church, Comerford Road, is under the care of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit or Spiritans, once known as the Holy Ghost Fathers (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

When you vote, consider the people who feel the need to ‘always keep a packed suitcase by the front door’

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 ‘lost Jews’ of Malacca survived the Inquisition but are losing their language, heritage and identity

The Kristang or ‘Portuguese-Eurasians’ of Malacca include people of Sephardic descent

Patrick Comerford

During my first visit to Sarawak at the end of 2024, I tried to learn about the history and the stories of Malaysian Jews, and heard about the lost community of the Jews of Penang from Zayn Al-Abideen Gregory, the Kuching-based writer and academic and author of The Last Jews of Penang.

Penang was home to a Jewish community until the late 1970s. But there were Jewish communities in other parts of Malaysia too, especially in Negeri Sembilan and Malacca.

Traces of these lost Jewish communities were found among Mizrahi Jews, the majority of whom are Baghdadi Jews, Malabar Jews and Ashkenazi Jews. But there are also people of Sephardic descent who continue to live among the Kristang people and who have tried to maintain or recover their traditions.

The Kristang – also known as ‘Portuguese-Eurasians’ or ‘Malacca Portuguese’ – are a creole ethnic group of people primarily of Portuguese and Malay descent, but also with substantial Chinese and Indian ancestry. They are found mostly in Malaysia, Singapore and Australia.

The number of Kristang people is estimated at between 37,000 and 54,000 and in Malaysia they are found particularly in Malacca, Kuala Lumpur, Penang and Johor. Kristang groups are also found in Singapore, and due to significant migration in the second half of the 20th century there is a diaspora that has spread to Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.

The Jenti Kristang or Orang Serani people are predominantly Roman Catholics, but small numbers of them are Jews, and some are Sunni Muslims and secular people too. Their languages are Papia Kristang, English and Malay.

These people are mainly Malay and Portuguese in their ancestry, but they also have some Dutch ancestry due to intermarriage. This group emerged with their own particular identity in Malacca in the 16th and 17th centuries, when it was part of the Portuguese Empire. Today the Malaysian government classifies them as Portuguese-Eurasians.

The name Kristang comes from the Portuguese creole Kristang, meaning Christian, and in turn it is derived from the Portuguese Cristão. A derogatory term for the Malacca Portuguese community was Grago or Gragok, a slang term for Portuguese camarão (shrimp), referring to the fact that the Portuguese Malaccans were traditionally shrimp fishermen. They also call themselves Gente Kristang (Christian people).

The Padrão dos Descobrimentos or Monument to the Discoveries in Lisbon recalls the Portuguese explorers who set out for the new world (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Portugal was once one of the world’s largest and longest-lived maritime empires, with colonies that included Brazil in Latin America, many African countries such as Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, and many port cities throughout Asia, including Goa and Macao. Places that were once part of the Portuguese Empire remain home to small ethnic groups of mixed heritage such as the Macanese in Macau, and the Kristang people in Singapore and Malaysia, with their own unique languages.

The Kristang community traces its origins back to Portuguese sailors, soldiers and traders who came to Malacca during the age of Portuguese explorations and colonialism. There they formed relationships with local women who were indigenous people, Malays and Chinese.

The arrival of Vasco da Gama in India in 1498 sparked Portuguese interest in Malacca as a key, wealthy spice trade hub, and Malacca became a major destination in the great wave of sea expeditions launched by Portugal, becoming part of the Portuguese Empire. The first Portuguese expedition to reach Malacca landed in 1507. The geographic and fiscal advantages of Malacca were obvious, as one Portuguese official noted: ‘Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice’, the Venetians being the great rivals of the Portuguese as importers of spices to Europe.

In the early years, the Malays called the Portuguese Serani, a Malay contraction of the Arabic Nasrani, meaning followers of Jesus of Nazareth. One story records a Portuguese landing party inadvertently insulted the Malaccan sultan by placing a garland of flowers on his head, and he had them detained. A Portuguese fleet was sent from India to free the group in 1511 and then conquered Malacca.

From 1511 on, Portuguese officials encouraged the explorers to marry local indigenous women, under a policy endorsed by Afonso de Albuquerque, then Viceroy of India. The King of Portugal granted freeman status and tax exemption to Portuguese men (casados) who ventured overseas and married local women. With Albuquerque’s encouragement, these mixed marriages flourished and 200 were recorded by 1604, leading to new families and settled communities.

The Dutch took Malacca from the Portuguese in 1641, and almost all political contact between Portugal and Malacca ended. A large number of people of Portuguese descent were sent to Batavia (now Jakarta), the Dutch East India Company headquarters, as war captives and there they settled in an area called Kampung Tugu.

The tomb of Vasco da Gama in the church in Belém in Lisbon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Even after Portugal lost Malacca in 1641, the Kristang community largely preserved its traditions, practicing Catholicism and using the Portuguese language, and they also absorbed some Dutch crypto-Catholics.

Many Sephardic Jews from Portugal and around the Red Sea and Malabar settled in Malacca in the 16th and 17th centuries, and then assimilated into the local Portuguese-Malay community to escape persecution. They were anusim or conversos – Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism under the pressure of the Inquisition. It continued in the Portuguese colonies until 1821, enforcing Catholic orthodoxy, policing ‘blood purity’, suppressing heresy, and persecuting Jewish ‘New Christians’, often resorting to extreme severity, including public torture and execution.

In the 16th century, Malacca was a significant hub for these communities, with reports of active, though often hidden, Jewish culture. Many of the Jews who remained in Malacca during Portuguese rule (1511-1641) integrated into the local Eurasian or Kristang community, which carries a mixture of Portuguese, Dutch, Jewish, and local Malay heritage.

Diego Hernández Vitoria ‘the elder’ (or Diogo Fernandes Victória) was a Portuguese merchant from Porto but also a Judaeo-converso and one of the most important Sephardic merchants in the late 16th century. He protected and financially helped the Judaeo-conversos who were poor or on the run and also tried to develop a closer relationship with the Jesuits.

Diego Hernández Vitoria lived in Spanish America, South-East Asia and Manila. His commercial network extended through Mozambique, Mombasa, Cambay, Gujarat, Sindh, Bijapur, Golconda, Malabar, Ceylon, Coromandel, Bengal, Orissa, Pegu, Siam, Malacca, Moluccas, China and Japan. In these places, 89 per cent of Vitoria’s investments were centred on trade with China and Japan. But because his Jewish origins were well-known In Malacca, he was ostracised by the resident Portuguese trading community.

Thanks to the protection that Vitoria granted to the Judaeo-conversos living between China, Japan and the Philippines, it is possible to list the main traders of Jewish ancestry who had settled in the region: Afonso Vaez, Diego Jorge, Francisco Rodrigues Pinto, Francisco Vaez, Góis, Luís Rodrigues (Manuel Fernandes), Manuel de Mora, Manuel Farias (Manuel Faria), Manuel Gil de la Guardia, Manuel Rodrigues (Manuel Rodrigues Navarro), Paulo Gonçalves, Pero Nabo, Pero Rodrigues, Rui Perez and Vilela Vaz.

The rules surrounding ‘the status of purify of blood’ (limpeza de sangue) blocked any convert or a descendant of converts from many spheres of public activity, and from many privileges, including honorific titles. This discriminatory legislation was based on racial criteria: it was no longer a question of religion but of ‘blood’. One had to provide a certificate, following thorough genealogical investigations, going back as far as possible in the lineage, that one had no Jewish ancestor in his genealogical tree.

A memorial at the Igreja e Convento de Sao Bento da Vitória in Porto apologises for the treatment of Jews during the Portuguese Inquisition (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The Inquisition continued its presence until the Dutch captured Malacca in 1641. Because of its persecution of Jews, many of the Jews of Malacca assimilated into the Kristang community. Most of the Sephardic-Asian creoles became genuine Christians, but in some cases, conversos managed to preserve their Jewishness in secret.

Nowadays, intermarriage occurs more frequently between Kristang and people of Chinese and Indian ethnicity rather than Malay because of religious laws that require non-Muslims who marry Malay Muslims first to convert to Islam.

The Kristang people in Malaysia do not have full bumiputera status, a status that applies to indigenous ethnic groups. Since Portuguese times, the Kristang have been living by the sea. It is still an important part of their culture. Even today, with only 10 percent of the community earning their living by fishing, many men go fishing to supplement their income.

Kristang traditional music and dance, such as the Branyo and the Farrapeira are derived from Portuguese folk dances, Kristang or Malacca Portuguese cuisine is similar to the Eurasian cuisine of Singapore and Malaysia, and the Kristang people traditionally used Portuguese and Christian first names, while their surnames were Portuguese.

In general the Kristang practice Roman Catholicism. Christmas (Natal) is the most festival and celebrate many saints’ days, including Saint John (San Juang) on 24 June and Saint Peter (San Pedro) on 29 June.

Kristang Jews are a small, often hidden, subgroup. They trace their ancestry to the Sephardic Jews who survived the Inquisition in Portuguese-controlled Malacca. They had assimilated into the Catholic Kristang community but retained some residual cultural practices. These ‘hidden’ Sephardic Jews are identified in a number of analyses of Asian communities with Jewish roots.

In recent decades, some Kristang people were interested in rediscovering their forgotten Jewish heritage. This led to the formation of the Kristang Community for Cultural Judaism (KCCJ) in 2010, although it is no longer active. Edgar Pinto Xavier also wrote a book about the Jewish history of Malaysia and how the Inquisition persecuted heretics and non-Christians in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Asia.

Today the Kristang community in Malaysia is primarily based in the Portuguese Settlement in Ujong Pasir, Malacca. They speak Papia Kristang (Malacca Portuguese Creole), a language that continues to mark them out from their Chinese and Malay neighbours.

The Kristang language is threatened with extinction and is classified as critically endangered by Unesco. The work of Kristang language activists has been compared by one writer to that of Yiddishists. But their work in Malaysia and Singapore is no guarantee that Kristang will survive as a living language for future generations.

Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום‎

The Melaka or Malacca River … once known to European seafarers as the ‘Venice of the East’ (Photograph: Engin Akyurt - Pixabay / Wikipedia)