This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Ever since their exiles in Egypt and Babylon, Jews have lived with the fear of displacement and deportation. Twice the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. Twice the Romans sought to scatter them to the winds. Neither in the Christian nor the Muslim worlds have Jews ever felt entirely secure. Wherever Jews were allowed to put down roots, they have flourished. All too often, their success has bred envy and enmity, often lethal. And yet they have survived.
In the history of the 20th century, mass deportations and antisemitism were inextricably linked. In Berlin, for example, the Gleis 17 memorial at Grünewald station commemorates 55,000 Jews of the German capital, many of whom were deported from that platform. Hitler’s “Final Solution” involved the deportation of the great majority of the 9.5 million Jews living in Nazi-occupied Europe. Two thirds were murdered.
The Nazi Holocaust is at least well documented. We are less familiar with other mass deportations of Jews. The Ottoman Empire had a long-standing policy of deporting ethnic minorities, known as sürgün. During the harsh winter of 1917-18, the mainly Jewish population of Jaffa and Tel Aviv was expelled: of some 10,000 people, about 1,500 died. This was a small number compared to the concurrent genocides of Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians, but it was motivated by similar accusations of collaboration with the British.
Then there was the often terrible fate of Jews under Russian and Soviet rule. In the years before 1914, about two million Jews fled pogroms in the Russian Empire. Pogroms resumed during the Russian Civil War, in which about 100,000 Jews perished.
Then came Stalin. For most of his long rule, though many Jews were deported and killed, they were not singled out. As he aged, however, Stalin’s antisemitism became as paranoid and poisonous as Hitler’s. By 1953, convinced there was a “Doctors’ Plot” against him, he was planning to deport up to three million Soviet Jews to Siberia — a plan that was interrupted only by his death in 1953. Stalin’s antisemitism outlived him: once Jews were allowed to emigrate from the Soviet Union, an exodus of two million Jews took place, mostly to Israel.
The ordeal of the European Jews was followed by the expulsion of Jews from the Islamic world. After Israel’s creation in 1948, the Arabs and Iranians deported, dispossessed and displaced a total of 850,000 Jews.
This exodus was almost entirely ignored by NGOs at the time and the world at large has forgotten them, even in the places whence they fled. In Israel, however, these refugees are remembered: a large proportion of the population is descended from them.
And now history is repeating itself. In the past quarter of a century, more than a third of a million Jews have emigrated from Europe to Israel. The trend is accelerating: in 2025, 5,103 European Jews made aliyah (emigrated to Israel), an increase of 138 per cent since 2023. And last year 742 British Jews were amongst them — the highest number in more than 40 years.
It should not surprise us if even more of our Jewish fellow citizens vote with their feet in 2026. Who could blame them for feeling intimidated by the ascendancy of an array of antisemitic forces and betrayed by authorities that seem at best supine, at worst complicit?
I grew up believing that the comparative absence of antisemitism from post-17th-century British history was one of the glories of our island story. Whilst our Continental neighbours had almost all descended into the abyss of Jew-hatred, from the Dreyfus Affair to Auschwitz, we British could boast of the Balfour Declaration, the Kindertransport and our lone defiance of Nazi Germany, from the Fall of France to Operation Barbarossa.
As the son of the author of A History of the Jews, I seldom encountered antisemitism until I went up to Oxford in 1975. At an Oxford Union event, I asked the then editor of Private Eye — a figure then idolised by fogeyish undergraduates — how he could justify his all-too-obvious hostility, not just towards Israel, but to its Jewish supporters.
His response was ad hominem: “Is that Dave Spart I see up there?” he inquired, to a gale of guffaws from his adulatory audience. My abiding memory is the contrast between this illiberal appeal to the mob and the unashamed intellectualism of the Oxford dons, some of whom were Jewish refugees from the Nazis.
In 1977, at the end of my second year at Oxford, I spent the summer in Israel, working on a kibbutz and travelling around the country. Ever since, I have understood why the vast majority of Jews in the diaspora feel strongly about Israel. The very existence of a Jewish state means that the threat of deportation, or worse, has lost much of its sting. There is a tiny corner of the earth where Jews will always be welcomed. Israel is the antidote to the poison of antisemitism.
Uncomfortable as it may be for an Englishman to admit it, antisemitism, or at least anti-Judaism, has an ancient lineage on these shores. In 1290 Edward I expelled the Jews from England — an unspeakably cruel edict that resulted in the deaths of many of the 3,000 members of the community.
The mass deportation of the English Jews had a wider significance for two reasons. This, the first such atrocity by a European monarch, paved the way for others on a larger scale, culminating in the edict of expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, later extended to include Portugal.
Second, the expulsion followed the emergence of the Blood Libel in Norwich around 1155 — the most monstrous of lies, which was then repeated many times, first in England but later across Christendom. Today, versions of this libel are recycled endlessly, reinforcing the narrative of Jews as the source of all evil. Only against this background is it comprehensible that the monstrous and mendacious allegation of genocide by Israel could gain traction, even amongst mainstream politicians and media organisations.
Mass deportations would feed the narrative of alienation
But the fate of the English Jews in the 13th century shows how the connection between antisemitism and mass deportation was established. From a philosemitic standpoint, therefore, any proposal to deport hundreds of thousands or even millions of people from Britain should be treated with suspicion, if not outright indignation. Yet deportations on an unprecedented scale are the centrepiece of Reform UK’s putative programme.
Only last year, Nigel Farage ruled out such a policy on grounds of impracticality. Now Zia Yusuf, one of his party’s largest donors and now its “shadow Home Secretary”, has pledged to remove at least 288,000 migrants a year — a Financial Times analysis claims that the criteria could put up to two million at risk — and to set up detention centres in areas that did not elect Reform candidates.
The human scale of this policy is unprecedented in British history. In 1940, there was a panic about “enemy aliens” (mainly German-Jewish refugees from the Nazis) and Churchill ordered the authorities to “collar the lot”. About 30,000 men and women were interned on the Isle of Man, in conditions that had scarcely improved since the camps were set up in the First World War.
As a teenager, I was a Schachfreund (“chess friend”) of Heinrich Fraenkel, a historian and sometime screenwriter in the Weimar cinema. He had the dubious distinction of having been interned on the Isle of Man in both world wars. Whilst the harsh treatment of Jewish victims of Nazi persecution offended against their idealised view of British “fair play”, they trusted that the threat of Nazi espionage was genuine and not a pretext for antisemitism. Protests in Parliament brought relief; within a year most internees had been released. Many later devoted themselves to defeating Hitler.
The detention centres that Reform would need for their mass deportations would be at least ten times the size of the wartime internment camps.
Arresting hundreds of thousands would also necessitate an army of snatch squads on the lines of Trump’s ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) — an agency that has lost more than 10,000 court cases but that arbitrarily extended its own remit to arrest and incarcerate millions of people who had lived, worked and paid taxes for years. We should not deceive ourselves that the methods of a British equivalent of ICE would be very different.
Most people would support the deportation of foreign criminals and those whose claims to asylum have been rejected by the courts. Last year the Home Office deported 38,000 migrants and the numbers will continue to rise as legal obstacles are removed. But the introduction of mass deportations would normalise miscarriages of justice and change British society very much for the worse.
There is no doubt that the present wave of antisemitism in Britain is partly an import from the Muslim world. Yet it does not follow that the answer is therefore to deport vast numbers of Muslims. By all means deport those who are convicted of antisemitic crimes, including hate preachers and other extremists.
But a policy of mass deportations based on a presumption of Muslim guilt would be disastrously counterproductive. It would feed the narrative of alienation rather than that of integration. I am sure that my friend, the late, great, Jonathan Sacks, would have thundered against this diabolical engine of division — the antithesis of the “covenantal” politics he professed.
Mass deportations are never the solution to antisemitism; they are part of the problem. There is no more potent symbol of the radical evil that is Jew-hatred than the cattle-truck crammed with dead, dying and desperate human beings.
