I've long wanted to post something on Jewish identity, if only for the reason that anyone who follows my writing will have seen me argue two incompatible positions. There's a piece I wrote two and half years ago for the magazine Jewish Socialist arguing that you could base a solid left-wing politics on contemporary Jewish identity. There's also a much more recent article I put up here as a blog in which I reported myself as having said to a friend, 'Hasn't Israel so consumed so much of what it means to be a Jew, especially a secular Jew, that the opportunities for left-wing Jews to organise as such, has been narrowed almost to nothing?' As I think I went on to argue, or as perhaps I should have made clear, I wasn't really saying that there was no longer the space in society for a left-wing Jewish identity: only that I didn't know what the experiences were, on which such an identity could be based.

Let me situate the argument: I'm talking about Jewish people living in Britain, and given the generational, class, and geographical dynamics of Jewish experience in the UK, I'm really talking about people in London.

The history starts a long way from here, in the Jewish milieu of the nineteenth century. There is an extraordinary process which shapes the history of nineteenth century Poland and Russia and which enabled the Jewish people living in this region to go over swiftly and clearly from a religious identity, which took in violent intra-communal sectarian fighting, to a completely different identity, which was largely secular, and in which trade union and socialist values dominated. Paul Kriwalcek remarks somewhere that more people died in the nineteenth century Pale as a result of wars between Jews than actually died in all the pogroms of the same period combined. Contrast that to the world of the Bund. When Jewish people adopted socialism, they did so in many ways, taking in the incompatible politics of Marxism, Zionism and Bundism.

From my own experiences, I think I can guess some of the continuities in Jewish experience that made this transition possible. For one thing, people's political and religious loyalties are surprisingly heritable. Maybe not immediately, but people tend to adopt some of the worldview of their parents. When Jewish people adopted socialism, also, I think they had a certain tendency to attach it to long-held cultural traditions in Jewish life, some of them of religious, some of them of secular origin. When British working-class Methodists became socialists, in much the same period, their socialism reflected the values of their religion: it was slow and cautious, but determined. When the Jews of the Pale adopted socialism, they most often chose Marxism, a Millenarian doctrine which stressed the potential alliances between workers of different races: in a context framed by racism so harsh we can barely comprehend it, it was an optimistic and necessary vision. So religion, the Jewish enlightenment, the actual social conditions of the Jews as the industrial revolution spread: all played a part.

There was an identity that you can root in religion, or in race, or in the memory of religion, or in pride in a people, or in pride in a place. Wherever it came from, the culture was confident, optimistic and enormously attractive. It was a culture that could also be exported. It traveled to London and New York and many other cities where it took common forms including the Workers Circles, which have been written about by many people, not least Henry Srebrnick. It was a way of living that led to Cable Street. There was a politics rooted in both ethnic identity and class.

It should also be noted, of course, that many socialist Jews rejected even this identity, becoming what one child of the Pale Isaac Deutscher later termed 'non-Jewish Jews'. Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky for example were not culturally Jewish, did not speak Yiddish, and exhibited at times a complete indifference to the suffering of the Jewish communities of their day. Trotsky, in fairness, understood this gap. His biography makes clear that he was educated in a culturally non-Jewish family, and was removed from Jewish schools at an early age. Towards the end of his life, Trotsky wrote a number of articles expressing admiration for this Yiddish culture that wasn't his own. Trotsky was also of course almost the only person in pre-1939 Europe who took Hitler seriously, predicting that a world war would culminate in the extermination of the Jews. Between Trotsky and the Yiddish-speaking majority, there were no doubt a dozen shades of emphasis between cultural autonomy and assimilation.

After 1914, in Poland and Russia, the space for Bundism was simply annihilated: by emigration, by the rival appeal of Bolshevism (at least initially) by the forced migrations of the Stalinists and the death camps of the Nazis, by wars, by hostile non-Jewish nationalist movements, by the appeal of Israel (which at first was modest) as an alternative home for the Jews. Today, of course, there are almost no Jew living in the region.

In Britain, the chances for a secular, Yiddish-speaking socialist politics also narrowed rapidly: as a result of immigration controls after 1905, as a result of the destruction of the parent community after 1939, so that at a certain point Yiddish-speaking people simply stopped traveling in any large number from Poland or Russia to Britain. (A friend conducted research into the number of Eastern European Jews who arrived in Britain after the liberation of the death camps: he told me that the number stood at around 100 for the years 1945-51 combined. By contrast, 100,000 non-Jewish Poles arrived in Britain in the same period). 

There were other processes at work: the breaking up of the Jewish East End, the disappearance of Yiddish as a spoken first language, the social movement of people  from East to North West London. One of the most painful things I've done as a historian is read through the papers of the Workers' Circle, held in the Hackney Archives. Almost week by week, the meetings seemed to get smaller; the opportunities for community organisation seemed to diminish. As late as 1951, it is estimated that 1 in 10 members of the Communist Party of Great Britain were still Jews. After 1956, however, and the revelations of Stalin's anti-Semitic murders, the number of prominent Jews still in the Party fell rapidly.

In the last two decades, there has been a counter-process of the reinvention of memory, with adults learning to read and speak Yiddish. But you can't learn a language outside of its living social context: the words have a completely different social meaning. The Jews of Poland didn't chose to speak Yiddish because they thought the language was especially poetic or well-suited to irony, or whatever. They spoke Yiddish because it was the language of their friends and their home. The experiences of Jewish communities anyway were so diverse, that to choose the Pale for an identity is always to select. In my family, there have been no Yiddish speakers for at least three generations, maybe more. If my son was to learn Yiddish, and my grandparents were still alive they'd be baffled.

The point in writing all this is look for the experiences on which a present day left-wing identity can be based. What follows is just an attempt to jot down a few ideas. Other people will have much better lists.

1) If you look at any socialist group in Britain, you'll find that it has many Jewish members. The Socialist Workers Party, for example, has many more Jewish members than it has Sikh or Muslim members, even now. That suggests to me that the heritability of ideas continues: that people join the SWP, in part because their parents were Communists or Trotskyists or on the Labour left, and the SWP seems to be the nearest equivalent, it just 'feels' familiar. What I've said about the SWP, could also be said I'm sure for the ISG, the SP or Workers' Power, in fact most far-left groups in Britain except perhaps the AWL whose recent adoption of intense Zionism and philo-Semitism makes no sense to me at all.

What's true of the parties is also true of the unions: around 1 in 20 of the people who work with me at our union offices are of Jewish origin, around 1 in 10 of NEC, and many of our lay activists too. No-one ever stops and says 'hey aren't you Jewish? Me too!' but the people exist, and there must be similar experiences that drove union identification in the first place.

The simplest transition is just when a parent talks to a child and tries to persuade them of values of equality, or describes ways of thinking that might or might not be socialist, but which can be absorbed easily later within a socialist perspective. The example I always give is when my mother turned to me and showed me her hand and said 'See my hand, there are five fingers, each of them is easy to pull, but put your fingers together, that makes a fist. It's stronger. A family is a fist.' At another time, in another mouth, the fist might have been the union, the class, the party, whatever. When ideas are transmitted, they often take new forms, but the old forms sometimes revert to the old meanings.

2) I also think there's a process of generational leap. There are stock ways of being that recur in Jewish history, socialising and sometimes social climbing, the argumentativeness of pilpul. Many of the Jewish socialists I know aren't left-wingers because their parents were, but just the opposite: because their parents were so horrible, so right-wing, so absolutely elitist, that any sort of coherent rebellion almost inevitably took political form and socialism was the outcome. I call this 'generational leap' mot because all of these people had right-wing parents and left-wing grandparents (although some did) but more subtly, because many people, Jews and non-Jews become socialists and for all sorts of different reasons. The only difference between these Jewish socialists and the others is that when the former discovered that there was also a Jewish socialist tradition, and having broken (to whatever extent) with their parents, it has been immensely reassuring to discover that your grandparents, or people like your grandparents, were in unions or fought Mosley in Hackney.

3) The politics of Zionism and anti-Zionism. Israel says to the world's Jews 'you must support us'. When people refuse, other identities fill that space.

4) Anti-racism. One of the questions I think all Jews do ask themselves at one moment or other is – was the Holocaust wrong because it happened to Jews, people like me, or was it just wrong? Depending on how you answer that question, different politics follow: intense loyalty often to Israel, or sometimes instead to a non-Israeli Jewish diaspora, intense hatred for all racisms, often. In a world where racism takes cultural and colour forms, and where virulent anti-Semitism exists chiefly as a glue holding together the package of neo-fascist ideology, then a lot of Jewish anger against racism is necessarily going to be vicarious: 'we' are included in white conversations which take place to exclude black people. We opt out of those conversations, reject and despite the people who take part in them.

Many Jews in that situation become 'Race Traitors', the white person who doesn't want to be white. Many other Jews are silent. But even those who fight racism know that we aren't black either. And if we try to play active or leading roles in anti-racist campaigns we threaten to stifle the opportunities for new generations to express themselves. We see racism as a movement of skinhead thugs culminating in violence against property. Black members of the union see racism in the way that they start at work on relatively low salaries while white counterparts are automatically positioned in better-paid jobs or  the way their kids are treated at school. Muslim members of my union see racism in the tendency of white people to make faces when they hear the Muslim person's names. Even on agreed terrain, as anti-racists, our experiences are just different.

In much the same way that there is only a limited space for a socialist politics based on Jewish identity, there is a surprisingly narrow space for an anti-racist politics based on Jewish identity. Going to a black history event as a white person is usually a statement of personal hostility to racism (it can be other things, too). Going to a Holocaust memorial event, as a Jewish person, is rarely seen outside Jewish circles as a step of similar significance. And given the exclusion from many such events of the history of the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, maybe the people watching aren't so wrong in making that judgment.

The barriers against a consistent Jewish anti-racism explain also that odd combination: the presence of many Jews in anti-fascist campaigns, and the absence of Jews also from other black-led campaigns against institutional racism. Rather than be excluded, we exclude ourselves.

5) Vicariousness. Isn't the problem about class as well as race? Exile Bundism was an experience of working-class people. They knew poverty. Much of the strength of the Workers' Circle was that it provided sickness, unemployment and old age insurance. The people who contributed didn't want to be looked after in Jewish homes (although that may have been a secondary motive): above all, they just wanted to be looked after. This also explains, incidentally, some of the timing of the Workers' Circle's demise – after 1945, in competition with the NHS.

With the demise of East London Jewry, most left-wing socialists that I know are culturally middle-class. We read books, we discuss ideas. Jewish immigrant history have provided us with the skills so that we rarely have to campaign for ourselves. Instead our energy is spent in campaigns for new migrants, or solidarity campaigns with the movements of the Global South, but usually in other people's causes. Can you have a collective identity of which involves a set of people all sympathetically participating in the experiences of other groups? If enough people are doing it, is there a stage when the collective experience of lots of people bringing solidarity is just that, a group, collective experience, and people aren't being vicarious any more: they're actually looking after themselves?

The frustration for me in the list I've put above is what's missing from it: groundings in time and place. I've sat with a Jewish audience in Hampstead laughing at Ivor Denbina. The jokes were good but they weren't enough to root an identity. I often read Jewish Socialist, but its politics strike me as nostalgic, and characterised by an intense sense of longing for a set of places and a historical moment that are largely gone. There's no equivalent today of the Whitechapel Library. Nor of the Workers' Circle, nor of Jewish Brick Lane or Petticoat Lane at its height. I don't believe that compulsory Yiddish lessons for the children of left-wing Jewish parents would bring it back (and, if you missed it, that last was a joke anyway).

The collective identity of Jewish London was based on places and institutions and the common knowledge of many generations. That Jewish experience is over. In England, it exists as history. Memories can bind for hundreds of years but they're memories of before, they're not experience itself. But ask a different question. Are there secular, left-wing people out there who are proud to call themselves Jews? Yes, thousands of us. We don't meet, we don't talk, we rarely even acknowledge one another. But Jewish socialist identity continues, in a web of common emotions and in feelings. It is more diffuse, but it still exists. And in its own way it thrives.