Towards the Millennium a Merchant of Hamburg P.7 N Britain the Approach of the Year 2000 Has Middle Ages
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Information Volume L No. 6 June 1995 £3 (to non-members) Don't tDiss . .. A numbers game with incalculable consequences Rudolf Jones p.2 Radical chic - or cheek p.3 Towards the Millennium A merchant of Hamburg p.7 n Britain the approach of the year 2000 has Middle Ages. As the jubilee year 1500 AD ap promoted the creation of the Millennium Fund proached, the monk Savonarola advocated the I disbursing money to charity, sport and the arts. purging of sinful mankind by fire; his fellow Among minds less pragmatic than those of the pro Florentine Botticelli was sufficiently impressed by saic Brits the word millennium connotes something such preaching to consign his own canvases to the The vastly different, i.e. an expectation of the end of the flames of the bonfire of the vanities. Oklahoma world. The age-old notion of the 'end of days' Over the next 150 years millennarianism flared up (originally a Judaic concept) is not to be understood further north, in the Germany of the Peasants' Re bomb simply as the final destruction of the earth - but volt and the England of the Civil War. Then, in the rather as a chaotic interregnum ending the corrupt early nineteenth century Messianic expectancy he fact that world we know and ushering in the perfect world to changed direction and centred on the United States initial come. spawning cult religions Hke the Seventh Day Advent- T suspicion of The early Chistians took over Jewish Messianism, ists and Jehovah's Witnesses. Arab terrorist an idea that bubbled up every so often during the Back in Europe in the twentieth century, the fires involvement in the of an - irreligious - belief in a better world to outrage turned out come flared up in Soviet Russia. Communism to have been ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING claimed to be the harbinger of an earthly paradise, unfounded, may free of poverty and injustice. Hot on its heels came have disappointed Will be held at the ultimate perversion of the idea of the millen some readers - but nium: Hitler's symbolically named Thousand Year need not have. A 15 Cleve Road, Reich. Nazi wartime poetry chillingly conjured up politically sick USA West Hampstead, NW6 3RL visions of the end of the world: ultimately poses a Brach Etzel's Haus in Glut zusammen onThursdaySJune 1995 greater danger to als er die Niebelungen zwang at 7.30 p.m. Israel and to world Dann soil der Erdball steh'n in Flammen peace than Islamic AGENDA bei der Germanen Untergang. Jihad. The (If Attila's palace collapsed in ash, when he sub Oklahoma outrage Annual Report 1994 dued the Nibelungs, Then let the globe burst into administered a flames, when the Teutons meet their doom). Hon. Treasurer's Report salutary shock to Discussion During the last half century the madness engen the American Election of Committee of Management dered by millenarianism has hardly effected Europe. political system It has, however, ravaged the Far East, pace China's which had been This will be followed by a talk to be given by Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution and drifting Prof. Edward Timms Cambodia's Pol Pot regime. dangerously entitled: In contrast to China and Cambodia, Japan has rightwards since the The 'Wandering Jew' and the 'Ewige Jude* throughout this time been governed pragmatically - mid-term elections. a comparative analysis of two stereotypes. yet the tensions modernity imposed on a hidebound From the realisation Enquiries: AJR, I Hampstead Gate, society were such that millenarianism flourishes in of where anti- la Frognal, London NW3 6AL the country. And this brings us bang up-to-date. The Washington phobia Tel:OI7l-43l 6161 millenarian sect Aim Shimsri Kyo, suspected of nerve can lead, a better gas attacks on the Tokyo underground may, alas, balance between only be one of several crackpot groups whom the government and For list of candidates to Committee of Management proximity of the year 2000 will entice into commit people should and biographical notes, see page 12. ting apocalyptic outrages so as to hasten the coming emerge D of the millennium D AJR INFORMATION JUNE /995 Otto Schiff Housing Association Profile r. R.W. Mattes stepped down from his position as Chairman Rudolf Jones spent time in a jail where the guards were M of OSHA, and membership of nightly executing Republican prisoners. its Council and Management Committee, Eventually helped by the British ambassa at the end of May, a position he has held he fact that Nazism overwhelmed dor, Sir Samuel Hoare, the couple for the past eight years. During his time Austria five years after Germany eventually made it to England where in office the Association has had to come T brought us few enough advan Rudolf joined the Royal Army Service to terms with the new legislative environ tages. One of them, though, was that we Corps. He admittedly showed little me ment and adapt to the 'Care in the could read authors banned, and burned, chanical aptitude but did useful work at Community' concept. As a consequence, by Goebbels. I first realised the true na Denazification trials in immediate post OSHA has been called on to cope with the ture of Nazism by reading Lion war Berlin. increased frailty of residents entering its Feuchtwanger's The Brothers Oppermann homes. as a young teenager. A little later I de A former Deputy Chairman of the Meat voured Yolanda Foldes' Die Strasse der and Livestock Commission and Chairman fischenden Katze, a depiction of the life of Mattesons Meats, a Unilever eked out by hapless refugees in crumbling subsiduary, he was born in Neuwied, Ger Paris tenements. Safe in the UK, I contin many, 71 years ago. ued to rely on Feuchtwanger for catching Following Mr. Mattes's resignation, the the flavour of refugee life across the Council has appointed Mr. M.M. Channel, first in Paris Gazette and then Ko'hmann as Acting Chairman of the in the grim 1940 memoir The Devil in Council and Management Committee of France. the Otto Schiff Housing Association, To encounter this month's profilee is to pending the appointment of a permanent meet a flesh-and-blood revenant risen chairman in due course. Mr. Kochmann from the pages of Feuchtwanger and has been a member of the Council for ten Foldes. Born just before the Great War, years. He is Chairman of the Association Rudolf Jonas was the son of a Berlin of Jewish Refugees, Chairman of the Leo manufacturer and inventor. The father, al Baeck Housing Association, Hon. Treas lowed to keep his factory in the early urer of Belsize Square Synagogue, and Nazi years, could finance Rudolf's con associated with many other charitable tinued education in France after the causes D latter's expulsion from German universi ties. An economics graduate by 1935 Ruldolf was allowed to stay in France but forbidden to take up employment. He Dr. Rudolf Jones eked out a living as a ghostwriter for Demobbed he took a job with the Petro ^ Georg Bernhard (ex-editor of the leum Press Bureau and advanced via ^^^ Vossische Zeitung, now publisher of the various trade journals to the editorship of Pariser Tageblatt) and by working for a Solid Fuel, the coal trade paper. He ac BELSIZE SQUARE South African news agency as well as the quitted himself so well that on retiring in SYNAGOGUE World Jewish Congress. But there were 1980 he received glowing testimonials also intervals of normality in this precari from Coal Board luminaries Lord Robens 51 BELSIZE SQUARE, NW3 ous existence as when he met and married and Derek Ezra. As a pensioner he re Eva, a fellow refugee who performed turned to the academic life he had been We offer a traditional style of anti-Nazi cabaret songs in a cafe owned missing for over four decades. He enrolled religious service with Cantor, by Isadora Duncan's brother. at the LSE, gained an MA and wrote a Choir and organ The outbreak of war brought a rapid doctoral dissertation on Allied wartime deterioration in their situation. There policy towards Spain. Further details can be obtained were police round-ups, internment, con But Dr. Jones - as he is now called - from our synagogue secretary scription into the Foreign Legion and, is not the only writer in the family. Eva, a above all, chaos. After the collapse of singer in Paris became a novelist in Lon Telephone 0171-794 3949 France the young couple escaped into the don. (Her titles include Thirteen, Double Unoccupied Zone. There Eva found ref Decker and Taboo.) Some years ago she, Minister: Rabbi Rodney J. Mariner uge in a convent, but pressure to convert however, suffered a stroke which obliged Cantor: Rev Lawrence H. Fine made her come out again. Warned off Rudolf to abandon the scholarly career he Regular services; Friday evenings at 6.30 pm, crossing into Switzerland - 'the Swiss had so enthusiastically embarked on in his Saturday mornings at 10 am hand escapers over to the Nazis' - they 'Third Age'. Despite this setback he can Religion school: Sundays at 10 am to 1 pm finalled walked over a 9,000 ft. Pyrenean look back on a life crowded with as much mountain into neutral Franco Spain. achievement as incident. Space donated by Pafra Limited There they were arrested and Rudolf AJR INFORMATION JUNE 1995 camps. Only at the grim crematorium, on the most sceptical observer must conclude Radical chic - or cheek the edge of the town, was there a memo that Jewish chic is a vast improvement rial to the thousands of Jews who on what preceded it for the previous six t's quite an eye-opener visiting Vienna perished here.