Antecedents, 1914–24

Many members of the 1912 Jewish League for Woman Suffrage, such as the Hon. Lilian (Lily) Montagu, daughter of Baron Montagu of Swaythling, her sister the Hon. Henrietta (Netta) Franklin, the Reverends Morris Joseph and Joseph Hochman, and Henrietta (Nettie) Adler, daughter of the Chief Rabbi, Hermann Adler, went on to found the Jewish Peace Society in June 1914. This society had a longer history than its suffrage sister, continuing in existence (if not always in a very flourishing state) between the wars.Footnote ⁹ By December 1918 the JPS could boast – unlike the suffrage League – the presidency of Hermann Adler's successor as Chief Rabbi, Dr Joseph Herman Hertz. In that month it attended a conference with kindred societies, which proceeded to form a National Peace Council; and the JPS's proposal for ‘a League of Religions for the promotion of world peace’, took shape in November 1919. Among its supporters were the bishop of Southwark, the dean of Durham and the Master of Balliol.Footnote ¹⁰ During its brief lifetime, the League of Religions's Jewish committee members included both the Chief Rabbi and the Liberal Jewish minister the Revd Israel Mattuck. By 1922 this League had been subsumed into the Religions and Ethics Committee of the League of Nations Union, but the JPS itself survived, as did a plethora of Christian and secular peace organisations.Footnote ¹¹

With hindsight, 1919 may have been a high-water mark for interfaith collaboration before 1942, involving as it did leading figures within almost all strands of the Jewish and church communities. To many in Anglo-Jewry, this apparent continuity between pre- and post-war interfaith initiatives demonstrated the host society's growing acceptance of, and respect for, the traditions, teachings and congregations of British Judaism. Who would not, indeed, have warmed to hear the bishop of Lincoln, Edward Lee Hicks, introducing the ‘Jewish Rabbi’ (the Revd G. G. Green) as ‘part of the rock from whom we are all hewn’ in 1913,Footnote ¹² and basked in the post-war glow of approbation from the Manchester Guardian? Many members of the JPS and several Christian activists in peace movements, such as the feminist theologian Maude Royden and Charles Cripps, 1st Baron Parmoor, were later associated with the Society of Jews and Christians, which might suggest a seamless transition between pre-war collegiality and postwar relations of tolerance and equality.

There were, nevertheless, indications that, while Christians might on occasion respond to Jewish initiatives, parity of esteem was more apparent than real; or, at least, somewhat ad hoc and instrumental. As the Bulletin of the progressively-oriented JRU noted at the beginning of 1918:

While this statement demonstrated Liberal Judaism's rejection of Zionism and its emphatic wish to identify with a British ‘homeland’, it also expressed a deeper disappointment at the lack of recognition for the minority religion. At the time this reaction was perhaps excessive: the Chief Rabbi's signature was among those appealing for the proceeds of collections on that particular date to be donated to the Red Cross and the Order of St John; and the holding of synagogue services in sympathy with the royal proclamation was reported nationally. However, these concerns were shared and manifested in the wider Jewish community when, in April 1924, the first conference took place of a Christian organisation subsequently known as COPEC – the Conference on Politics, Economics and Citizenship. Jewish observers may have been unaware that COPEC's founders, notably William Temple, included Anglican clergy dissatisfied with many aspects of governance in the Church of England. Striving to apply in peacetime lessons learned in the hard school of battlefield chaplaincy, they wished to extend wartime cross-denominational collaboration, develop greater outreach to the urban working classes, and promote the ideas of such pre-war organisations as the Christian Social Union on intervention in the nation's social and economic life. The archbishop of Canterbury declined to give the conference his official sanction.Footnote ¹⁴

What the Jewish community saw was that, like the religious suffrage leagues and the religious peace movement – with which COPEC shared several members – this new movement wished to develop and assert religious responses to social problems; but, unlike earlier movements, this ecumenical grouping did not invite Jewish membership. Both traditional and progressive wings of Anglo-Jewry felt the snub. Passover sermons alluding to their exclusion were given by two Orthodox ministers, the Revd Isaac Livingstone at Dennington Park Road Synagogue, London, and Rabbi Dr Salomon of the Great Synagogue, Manchester. A sermon was delivered in riposte to the latter by the dean of Manchester, the Very Revd Joseph Gough McCormick: there was nothing to stop Jews organising a conference of their own, he said, and they would surely have something to contribute on the subject of economics. Less tartly, he stated that after the Jewish community had done so, ‘it may be that we shall discover much common ground, and may even be able to proceed to common action’.

Dr Salomon responded with a letter to the Manchester Guardian arguing that since there was no essential difference between Old and New Testament teachings on morality and economics, these issues were non-sectarian; he suggested that such separatist exercises were ‘at the root of that religious and racial hatred that was not diminishing but steadily increasing’.Footnote ¹⁵ It was Liberal Judaism, however, which accepted McCormick's challenge. As Lily Montagu was to write in 1927 to her friend Ramsay MacDonald, ‘We found it necessary to start these conferences because our people could not join the C.O.P.E.C., as the basis of that organisation is definitely denominational.’ Many years later, the memory was still strong: ‘The Society was in a measure called into being because organisations, established to raise the standard of English citizenship by harmonising civic with religious ideas, were based on definitely Christian conceptions, and therefore could not admit the co-operation of Jews.’Footnote ¹⁶

British Jews had less reason to feel excluded by an interfaith initiative which took place later that year. Concern to strengthen imperial ties had by 1924 led not only to the Wembley Empire Exhibition but also to a conference on ‘Some Living Religions of the Empire’. This excluded presentations on Judaism or Christianity as its object was ‘to familiarise the audiences and those who will afterwards read the proceedings with religions of the Empire not widely followed in this country’.Footnote ¹⁷ But some five years later, the JRU Bulletin commented ruefully on Judaism's invisibility within Britain and the empire as a whole:

That these concerns were greater, and more agitating, within Liberal Judaism than within Orthodoxy is unsurprising. Despite the widespread sense of exclusion felt in 1924, Orthodoxy – its many divisions notwithstanding – possessed in the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Empire a nationally recognised leader. Part of his remit was to represent, however infrequently, the opinions of Anglo-Jewry to British officialdom. Liberal Jews were, by contrast, a barely recognised sect whose membership could at most be numbered in hundreds. Liberal Judaism was also the sect most inclined to seek cultural rapprochement with the non-Jewish, or more specifically Christian world. At this stage in their development Liberal Jews wished largely to shed Hebrew, and wholly to lose references to Temple sacrifice and the return to Zion, from their liturgy. Anglican hymns, such as ‘O God our help in ages past’ and Kipling's ‘Recessional’, were regularly sung.Footnote ¹⁹ The drive to present what Liberal Jews saw as the purified truths of their ancestral faith to the host society, to be acknowledged and respected as equals by the religious majority – i.e. the Christian Churches – was very powerfully felt. It was also subject to continual setbacks.

The Society of Jews and Christians, 1924–39

Lily Montagu (1873–1963) is the key figure linking the pre-war suffrage campaign, the Liberal Synagogue, the peace movement and the Society of Jews and Christians. She was an acolyte of Claude Montefiore, with whom she had helped to found the JRU. Montagu, who had received relatively little formal education, was from early adulthood active in public and non-Jewish spheres. Her career in voluntary social work, in national women's organisations, as a JP, and especially as a leader of the Girls' Clubs movement is well documented,Footnote ²⁰ and much has been written about her foundational role in Liberal Judaism in Britain, and indeed in the Progressive movement in Judaism worldwide.Footnote ²¹ However, there is little in print – certainly not in her autobiographical writings – relating to her suffragism and pacifism;Footnote ²² and virtually nothing is remembered of her founding and sustaining role in the forgotten organisation of my title.

Montagu may have felt a particularly personal sense of exclusion from the COPEC of 1924. A significant number of her pre-1914 Christian colleagues were actively involved.Footnote ²³ She later succeeded in getting several of these women to participate in the SJC and its conferences, but initially her principal colleagues in her new interfaith endeavour – until 1927 not known as anything more specific than ‘the Interdenominational Conference Committee’ – were Israel Mattuck and a Mrs Irene McArthur of St John's Wood Liberal Synagogue's Social Service Committee. The original suggestion to hold a conference is attributed to the latter, and the first conference took place in November 1924 on the topic of ‘Religion as an educational force’.Footnote ²⁴ The choice of topic reflected Montagu's own social work experience, and was a relatively uncontroversial one with which to launch a potentially controversial endeavour.

As the surviving papers of the Society appear to date only from 1925, we are dependent on the JRU Bulletin and the Jewish Chronicle for information on its early proceedings. The latter reported on the first conference at some length. From the start its editorial coverage was unremittingly hostile. That Mrs McArthur was a recent convert from Christianity to Liberal Judaism; that an invited participant was the conversionist Father Day, of the Catholic Guild of Israel; that ‘A Voice’ had interpolated ‘Get rid of the Alien’ to a response of ‘Laughter’; and that the conference commenced and concluded with the singing of Anglican hymns, was all grist to the oppositional mill.Footnote ²⁵ The Jewish organisers were accused, at best, of naїveté and of a snobbish disdain for the company of their coreligionists; at worst, of wanting to destroy Jewish identity by assimilationist practices and flirting with conversionists. These were already standard polemics against Liberal Judaism.

The conference was held under the auspices of the Liberal and West London Synagogues, the Auxiliary Movement (the interdenominational organisation joined by members after leaving the Student Christian Movement), the Society of Friends, the Congregational Union, and the Unitarian Church, and with the co-operation of, respectively, the Secretaries of the Evangelical Free Church Union and the Temperance and Social Welfare Department of the Wesleyan Methodist Church. Although speakers included the General Director of the Church of England's Industrial Christian Fellowship, Nonconformist church representatives predominated. Attendance was recorded as 381 Christian, and 180 Jewish tickets.Footnote ²⁶ A conference in 1925 on the subject of ‘Anti-Semitism’ was even better attended (1,060 tickets issued and 100 late applications refused); and although numbers were down in 1926, when the conference discussed religion and the wages system, the positive responses of those attending decided the conference committee, urged on strongly by Israel Mattuck, to set up a more permanent organisation. ‘The Society of Jews and Christians’ was constituted in 1927, with sixty-two Christian and forty-two Jewish members. Within two years membership had reached 250.Footnote ²⁷

The women whom Montagu brought into the organisation, as committee members or conference participants, provided a strong core of support. The contacts from her pre-war activities in social work, Liberal politics and the women's movement included municipal councillors such as Ida Samuel, Miriam Moses and Nettie Adler; her sister Netta Franklin, a recent president of the National Council of Women; Clara Collet, an employment expert at the Board of Trade; Maude Royden, a leading figure in both the religious and the secular suffrage movements; and Constance Smith, active with Montagu in investigations into women's employment and the ‘sweated trades’. In 1929 the Society constituted an additional advisory council of ‘outstanding people’, to meet annually; by the early 1930s the non-Jewish element included Royden, Ishbel Lady Aberdeen (president of the National Council of Women), the historian R. H. Tawney, the Quakers Margery Fry and Dame Elizabeth Cadbury, the bishop of Kensington, the dean of Manchester, the dean of Exeter, and William Temple, the archbishop of York, who was to become archbishop of Canterbury in 1942. At the end of 1937 the Very Revd Dr W. R. Matthews, dean of St Paul's, agreed to become the Society's first president. In 1934 the Society published a substantial collection of essays hailed, in the foreword by the dean of Canterbury, as ‘the first Jewish-Christian symposium ever published in England’.Footnote ²⁸

The Society kept in touch with other sympathetic groups bringing Christians and Jews together, such as those assembled by Nettie Adler to improve communal relations in Clapton and Stoke Newington. It responded to requests for speakers on Jewish religious subjects from groups of young Christians and of Free Church ministers. Although predominantly London-based, it was always looking to extend its reach, and had over thirty provincial members by 1930. Activities were promoted in Stoke-on-Trent, Brighton, Bristol and Leeds; however, provincial branches as such did not materialise as hoped.Footnote ²⁹ We cannot know, of course, how greatly these activities contributed to understanding between communities. A certain degree of enlightenment might be expected given that, as a Christian member of the Society observed in 1933, ‘many Christians had never met a Jew’.Footnote ³⁰ Something of the flavour of the meetings held is conveyed in Montagu's reminiscence: ‘I remember once giving an address on the teaching of Liberal Judaism to a Church Society, and being asked at the close: “Why, with all those fine doctrines, are Jews always twisters?” I had to explain that here and there Jews were at fault, not Judaism.’Footnote ³¹

In 1933 the National Socialists' accession to power in Germany had immediate consequences for all political opposition, and discriminatory legislation began to be implemented against German Jews. The Society's social and theological concerns now took on the added dimension of foreign policy. The executive sent to the German embassy and leading dailies a resolution passed at a public meeting deploring the situation of Jews in Germany, which was published in the Manchester Guardian;Footnote ³² the following year a letter to the Times appealed for ‘those many Christians who have shown sympathy in one way or another with the sufferings of the Jewish community of Germany’ to join the Society, stressing that it ‘expressly excludes any attempt at proselytizing; nor is it the intention of members to promote a common religion’.Footnote ³³ These interventions produced many letters of support and expressions of sympathy, prompting a renewed attempt to found more branches in the provinces.Footnote ³⁴ At the same time, the Society took up the JRU's suggestion to contact church leaders and Sunday school teachers concerning the portrayal of the crucifixion. After circularising a number of clergy, invitations to address meetings, held mainly in London and the home counties, were received from Anglican, Congregational, Baptist and Free Church ministers, the YWCA and the dean of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.Footnote ³⁵

While this was progress it was still, in a sense, Hamlet without the Prince. The Orthodox community's refusal to engage with the Society was complete and unyielding. The objection was not to interfaith activities per se: the Chief Rabbi was content to represent his flock at the World Congress of Faiths in the 1930s, attending a conference at which Lily Montagu was a speaker, and sitting on the National Council which included the Liberal minister Leslie Edgar – just as he had accepted Israel Mattuck as a colleague on the Council of the League of Religions.Footnote ³⁶ A few sympathetic Orthodox individuals joined the Society and took part in its meetings; they were often pre-1914 social work and suffrage colleagues of Montagu's, notably Nettie Adler and Hannah Hyam. While remaining staunchly Orthodox in practice, these women remained, also, profoundly dissatisfied with institutional refusal to acknowledge women's equality in even the most prosaic and non-ceremonial aspects of synagogue administration.Footnote ³⁷ More or less Orthodox laymen might also be persuaded to address meetings and conferences. But for an Orthodox minister to accept membership of an organisation originating in the Liberal Synagogue and, by implication, to accept parity with – if not, indeed, the leadership of – its ministers and congregants, remained out of the question.

Unfortunately, the Society's proceedings never ceased to provide ammunition to Orthodox critics. It was easy for them to argue that, far from raising the profile of Judaism in national life, the Society's functions lessened respect for the community. The issue of conversionism was a running sore. Missions to the Jews may not have been high on the agenda of interwar Churches,Footnote ³⁸ but the Society acted as a magnet for those still committed to the cause. If Father Day was the first conversionist to see an interfaith conference as an opportunity, he was not the last. The Anglican vicar of Holy Trinity, Shoreditch, the Revd Paul Levertoff, attended the 1925 conference and spoke from the floor, despite being known to preside over a conversionist ‘Jewish Christian Union’.Footnote ³⁹ In 1928 a Mr MacGregor ‘distributed cards of invitation of a missionary nature’ at one of the Society's meetings; being advised that he appeared ‘to have misunderstood the purpose of the Society to which he must conform in letter and in spirit’, he and his wife resigned.Footnote ⁴⁰ Early in 1933, when the Baptist Union's new representative wrote that ‘as Chair and Treasurer of one of the Baptist Jewish Missionary Societies, he felt that his presence on the committee might not be acceptable’, the committee, gratefully, agreed.Footnote ⁴¹

Nevertheless, a year later Israel Mattuck had as good as thrown in the towel, writing to the Revd James Parkes – who, as will be seen, did not accept his argument – that although the Society offered no platform for proselytisation, given that ‘Christianity considers missions essential to its practice … if we were to adopt an attitude of hostility to missionary work, the position of some of the Christians on our Committee would probably become difficult’. Indeed, as the Secretary of the Auxiliary Movement wrote shortly afterwards to the Church Mission to the Jews: ‘our Jewish friends … fully realise that we are still free to carry on missions among Jews even while we undertake not to use the Society … for any kind of missionary work’.Footnote ⁴² A member of the Society's advisory council, the Revd A. Herbert Gray, revealed a remarkable indifference to the aims of the Society's Jewish founders, writing privately that ‘When all repression ceases and education is really offered to them all will not Judaism certainly die? And when it is dead will not a very large degree of assimilation be possible?’Footnote ⁴³ As late as 1942, the Society actually accepted onto its Executive a Committee member of the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Jews.Footnote ⁴⁴

This level of compromise fell far short of the status of civic equality that Liberal Jews had been seeking since 1917. A community willing to be regarded as merely Christians-in-waiting could hardly expect to exercise any influence on national life. And if the conversionist members of the Society might be considered false friends, worse was to come as the international situation deteriorated. Former colleagues in the peace movement, although appearing to share Jews' anxieties, often saw them principally as the source of potential conflict in the Middle East, and found reasons to blame them (and even the British government) for the rise of antisemitism on the continent.Footnote ⁴⁵ While large numbers of churchmen and -women denounced Nazism, many pacifists succumbed to the anti-war agitation of Nazi sympathisers. Thus Peace News, in July and August 1939, spoke of ‘world Jewry's’ campaign to get support for an anti-Nazi war.Footnote ⁴⁶ In spring that year John Beckett, latterly of the No More War movement, founded the British Peace Party, ‘open to all adults of British descent’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Its Council included Maude Royden, still a member of the SJC's advisory council. The British Peace Party announced a campaign against ‘war and usury’ – the latter term a familiar synonym for ‘Jewry’. It established the British Council for a Christian Settlement in Europe: a spokesman, recently associated with the Society of Friends, endorsed Hitler's right to invade Poland.Footnote ⁴⁸ Royden signed this Council's request to the government to participate in peace negotiations, as did Ruth Fry, a well-known Quaker and supporter of interfaith activity.Footnote ⁴⁹

Parkes ex machina?

In both these areas of difficulty it took neither divine nor Jewish, but Gentile intervention, to create a paradigm shift. James Parkes was a man able and willing to make trouble on behalf of a community for whom ‘don't make trouble’ was still a watchword. He had attended a SJC conference as early as 1927, representing the Auxiliary Movement of which he was an employee. In succeeding years he was known to the committee for his work in the International Student Service in Geneva where, even before Hitler became Reichskanzler, Parkes was responding to appeals for help from Jewish students suffering discrimination. In 1933 the Society invited him to a ‘semi-private meeting of the Committee, the Council and any other special persons suggested, on the subject of “How to combat anti-Semitism” ’. Parkes returned permanently to Britain in 1935, settling in the village of Barley near Cambridge. At the same time he settled into his life's work of reconstructing the relationship between Church and Synagogue. Supported financially within the Jewish community, principally by Israel Moses Sieff, he was no longer obliged to seek alternative employment. He joined the committee of the Society at the end of 1937.Footnote ⁵⁰

Parkes's beliefs on the relations between Judaism and Christianity differed radically from those of the majority of his Anglican colleagues – including close friends such as William Temple – and fellow-Christians worldwide. It was not just that he argued that the charge of deicide against the Jews (making them responsible for the crucifixion) was historically, intellectually and theologically mistaken, and that the reiteration of this claim throughout the centuries had made the Church culpable for injustice and atrocities committed against Jews. He went further, perceiving the early split between Church and Synagogue as damaging to the Church itself, cutting it off from the spiritual riches of its origins; he insisted that Christianity had much to learn from Judaism, and should apply itself to doing so. The ‘Old’ Testament had not – as many Christians were taught – been superseded by the ‘New’; Judaism was not the hollow husk of an outworn creed. Nor was the Jewish people's refusal to convert a sign of stubborn wickedness. The many other peoples who had responded to the worldwide Christian mission bore witness to their previous lack of valid religious faith; by contrast, Judaism's continuity bore witness to Judaism's validity, and was a sign of God's will, manifest through human history.Footnote ⁵¹

Parkes was convinced that the situation of Jews in Germany was worsening daily; and he felt the need for his coreligionists to relinquish their perceived obligation to convert the Jews, in order to concentrate on their very present political and physical peril. As he told the Union of Jewish Women, ‘the ordinary Christian, who has got a conscience about the Jew at all, has satisfied his conscience by subscribing to a missionary society. Quite frequently in trying to get people to realise their responsibility to the Jews I have met … “Oh, but I always support Jewish missions”’.Footnote ⁵² Parkes was certainly not prepared to accept Mattuck's fatalism about conversionism within the Church. His experiences working in Europe had left him in no doubt as to the growing political salience of antisemitism, and his theology propelled him towards attacking what he considered its root cause. Aware of currents of social and political antisemitism in Britain, he feared that his own country might degenerate into the barbarism already visible in Germany. He appears to have entered the Society of Jews and Christians with the intention of transforming its work and, if necessary, superseding it entirely, in order to fit Britain for the challenges which he considered imminent.

What were Parkes's objections to the Society as he found it? First and foremost was its failure to recruit the religious leadership of the Orthodox Jewish community – a frustration shared by many in the Society. Although he took Liberal ministers such as Mattuck and Edgar into his confidence, he was well aware of the fact that they presided over a numerically tiny fraction of Anglo-Jewry. Moreover, this minority had alienated some coreligionists by rejecting Zionism, and all of them by abandoning traditional practices and liturgies. As it happened, on both these issues they would have antagonised Parkes's most significant sources of financial support. He himself may also have had more respect for traditional rabbinic scholarship than for the writings emanating from the Jewish progressive movement at this time.Footnote ⁵³ Parkes was certainly not asking the Jewish religion to become more like Christianity, although he would sometimes placate Christian colleagues by saying that he believed that this would indeed happen in God's good time.Footnote ⁵⁴

Parkes made a first effort to establish unofficial contact with the Chief Rabbi in June 1938, and met with no success; by the October he had concluded that if it could be shown ‘that the Society has means of expansion’ there might be some value in renewing the attempt.Footnote ⁵⁵ Early in 1939 he was urging a programme of expansion, and of fundraising for a central headquarters with paid secretarial staff (the Society had hitherto relied on one Christian and one Jewish volunteer for its extensive paperwork). He was asked to form a subcommittee on the practicalities; the project was dropped on the outbreak of war, but Parkes's own ambitions in this area did not come to an end and, indeed, took on added momentum.

Neither the Society's records nor Parkes's correspondence make it a simple matter to know precisely what he was planning between 1937 and 1942.Footnote ⁵⁶ It is possible that he just kept changing his mind; he would at one point be fuming at the Society's incapacity to challenge antisemitism and at another insisting that it should not attempt to do so.Footnote ⁵⁷ Once esconced on the Society's committee, Parkes contacted both secretaries, Leslie Edgar, and a Christian committee member, the (Methodist) Revd W. W. Simpson, to set up what he constantly referred to as a ‘conspiracy’ concerning the Society.Footnote ⁵⁸ In June 1938 he wrote to Simpson of his hope ‘that then the Society will dissolve itself in the Autumn and reshape, perhaps, as a group interested in religious relations within a larger whole’.Footnote ⁵⁹ However, he undertook in 1939 to look into a programme of expansion for the Society; and as late as January 1942, months after the meetings which were recently celebrated as the fortieth anniversary of the CCJ, Parkes was writing that it was not his intention ‘to set up a separate organisation from the Society’.Footnote ⁶⁰

The Society was, indeed, at this stage extending its activities into the countryside areas of evacuation (including Oxford and Cambridge), and setting up branches as far afield as Glasgow and Doncaster. Early in 1941 ‘subscriptions were coming in daily’.Footnote ⁶¹ Even in the first flush of enthusiasm for the new CCJ, Parkes was admitting that ‘The Society has members; the Council [CCJ] at present has none’ and that ‘interest among non-Jews in the Jewish question is limited, and the Christian membership of the two organisations would almost inevitably be largely identical.’ He was even critical of the fact that ‘no effort has been made by the Council, in its passionate chase of the peerage, to discover the experience of the Society or to find out from it what distinguished people have been of any use in the sphere of its work’.Footnote ⁶² Perhaps it should be borne in mind that from 1938 onwards Parkes had his finger in many pies. With the outbreak of war, he was invited onto a Chatham House committee to formulate peace aims; and he later agreed to chair Sir Richard Acland's Common Wealth party. This may account for the somewhat contradictory and erratic trajectory revealed in the archives.

The Council of Christians and Jews

Nevertheless, however thinly he spread himself, Parkes's most powerful commitment was, undoubtedly, to combat present and future antisemitism in Britain. He was the key figure in blocking the further development of the Society of Jews and Christians, and he was immensely purposeful in supplanting it with a new organisation. That he succeeded was in part because his was a personality which attracted loyal friendship within different communities (notwithstanding his frequently scathing and combative comments on those who disagreed with him, and the extraordinary indiscretion of his personal correspondence). However, his success was, crucially, due to events in Germany between 1933 and 1939.

While Jews, Quaker witnesses against militarism, trade unionists and liberal or left politicians bore the immediate brunt of Nazi oppression, it was not long before institutional Protestantism was targetted. British church leaders saw their German colleagues corralled into an officially approved body, the German Evangelical Church. Dissident ministers, who from May 1934 formed the Confessional Church and the Pastors' Emergency League, were by 1937 suffering arrest and despatch to concentration camps. Among many British clergy publicly condemning Nazi policies, George Bell, bishop of Chichester, long active in ecumenical and international organisations, was a key figure. He not only publicised the plight of colleagues such as Pastor Martin Niemöller, but identified the crisis looming over ‘non-Aryan’ Christians – church members with a Jewish parent or grandparent – whose difficulties were at first overlooked. Alongside the existing Jewish and Quaker organisations for refugees from Nazism and the Christian Council for Refugees, whose Secretary was W. W. Simpson,Footnote ⁶³ Bell established and chaired the Church of England Committee for ‘non-Aryan’ Christian refugees, and encouraged the launching of the Refugee Children's Movement.Footnote ⁶⁴ The multiplication of Jewish and Christian refugee organisations was ultimately seen as a drawback to efficiency; but inevitable overlaps in membership and function had the unintended beneficial consequence of bringing together like-minded Jews and Christians, and creating networks which would further the Society's, and Parkes's, aspirations.

It was becoming increasingly clear to prescient observers in Britain that the sufferings of Jews and Christians in Germany were inextricably interconnected. When it was announced that Jewish congregations throughout the Empire would be holding a service of intercession on behalf of their coreligionists on Sunday 17 July 1938, the Christian response was staunchly supportive. Following overtures from representatives of the Jewish Board of Deputies, and from James Parkes, the archbishops of Canterbury and York agreed, in the words of the former, that ‘it would be right that Christian people should join in these intercessions’. The Society appealed to all its affiliates to unite in prayer, even if worshipping separately;Footnote ⁶⁵ indeed, some joint services or meetings were held, including one on the initiative of two Society members, the Revd H. Hammond of Ruckinge in Kent, and Desmond Marks of Streatham Hill.Footnote ⁶⁶

In the same month the Revd Charles E. Raven and the Revd Henry Carter, both active in Society affairs, suggested to a number of bishops, including Bell, that a group of ‘representative Christians’ act jointly with a group of Jews to combat the spread of antisemitism in Britain. Their fear was that if war were averted, and if ‘as we all hope, friendlier relations with Germany are inaugurated, Nazist [sic] ideas might in those altered circumstances be introduced to this country and to America’. Their letter received many favourable replies – and really contained the germ of the concept of the CCJ – but, perhaps owing to the immediate pressures of rescue work, no meetings or organisation resulted at this point.Footnote ⁶⁷ While Parkes was not knocking at an entirely open door – the Church of England having some few apologists for the German governmentFootnote ⁶⁸ – the current of Protestant history was, at last, beginning to support his ministry.

In February 1940 Parkes composed a memorandum entitled ‘A statement on the advantages of regular discussion on Jewish problems between Jewish leaders and representative non-Jewish personalities’.Footnote ⁶⁹ At the same time he was conferring with W. W. Simpson as well as with Mattuck, and corresponding with A. G. Brotman, secretary to the Jewish Board of Deputies.Footnote ⁷⁰ In April the Society learned that a Christian group was being formed, ‘which after discussions would meet with a Jewish group’; subsequently the Society's President would be asked to hold a meeting of prominent Jews and Christians. This would launch a scheme to which the Society would then give practical form.Footnote ⁷¹ In April and May Parkes and the Society were renewing approaches to Bell.Footnote ⁷² However, at this point ‘war conditions’ seem to have intervened, and the issue was revived only in spring 1941.Footnote ⁷³ The series of private lunch meetings which followed produced one very strong conclusion: as Mattuck reported to the Society in mid-October, ‘there is a general feeling that the absence of Dr Hertz at a representative gathering of Jews and Christians has a killing effect on any good results being achieved’. Acknowledging the immovable object, Mattuck stated his willingness ‘to accept a new Committee along parallel lines to the existing one’.Footnote ⁷⁴ In other words, the Society itself could never attain Parkes's objective of recruiting the Orthodox leadership, and the initiative had to be ceded to others.

A flurry of diplomacy followed: Parkes, Simpson and Carter approached William Temple (in a few months to be elevated to the see of Canterbury); and an overture to the Chief Rabbi was successful. On 19 November 1941 a lunch was arranged at Grosvenor House for, amongst others, Archbishop Temple, Bishop Mathew representing Cardinal Hinsley, Israel Mattuck, Sir Robert Waley Cohen, Dr Salis Daiches of Edinburgh, the Chief Rabbi, who was provisioned with a basket of fresh fruit (no mean treat in wartime) and A. G. Brotman who received a hard-boiled egg.Footnote ⁷⁵ However, even if co-operation with the head of the established Church was more acceptable than partnership with Liberal Judaism, Chief Rabbi Hertz was not eager to embrace the new organisation. Amongst other sources of difficulty, early plans to foster joint activities among youth organisations and to discuss the content of Sunday school teaching aroused suspicion on both sides. In June 1942 Hertz resigned from the Council with the words ‘there are things I fear worse than pogroms’.Footnote ⁷⁶

In what might be seen as a mirror image of intransigence, Temple – who had for some time been a member of the advisory council of the Society – had on his accession to the primacy become patron of the Church Mission to the Jews. He resisted Parkes's entreaties to decline this position. Two months before Hertz decided to resign, Temple told Parkes that he could not interpret his ‘interest in promoting Christian-Jewish friendship as in any way precluding an equal interest in attempting to convert Jews, because that does appear to me to be a Christian obligation; and if I had to choose it would take precedence of the other’.Footnote ⁷⁷ In 1939 he had joined others in condemning the German Evangelical Church assertion that Christianity was the opposite of Judaism in these termsFootnote ⁷⁸: ‘the gospel of Jesus Christ is the fulfilment of the Jewish Hope. The Christian Church owes it, therefore, to the Jewish people to proclaim to it the fulfilment of the promises which have been made to it. And it rejoices in maintaining fellowship with those of the Jewish race who have accepted that gospel’.

Temple's biographer, John Kent, comments acerbically: ‘fundamentally the Jews survived in order to be converted. Either on Christian or Nazi principles, Jews as Jews ought to disappear’.Footnote ⁷⁹ The Society's history makes the charge difficult to refute. Certainly, those Christians pioneering the new relationship between the faiths felt themselves to be in the minority. As late as 1947 W. W. Simpson was attempting to recruit the Church Mission to the Jews to the CCJ which, he claimed, had never proposed ‘either to oppose missionary activity or to place any sort of condition in this respect on members of the Council in connection with any activities with which they may be engaged outside those specifically connected with the Council’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Many years later he recalled the difficulty of negotiating ‘between Jewish friends who feared that the organization was merely a veiled form of proselytizing and Christian friends who were afraid it was not!’Footnote ⁸¹ It is not easy, post-Holocaust, to accept Hertz's statement on pogroms, just as it was hard, at the time, for non-Jewish relief agencies to understand the Orthodox Jewish insistence that child refugees from Germany and Austria should not be sent to Christian homes.Footnote ⁸² But cultural annihilation at the hands of the well-intentioned could, on this evidence, be perceived as a distinct and continuing possibility.Footnote ⁸³

It could, at least, be said that the priorities of the two religious leaders were well matched. Hertz was finally persuaded to rejoin the CCJ, writing to Temple in July 1942: ‘I am indeed happy that your Grace shares my unalterable opposition to transforming the Council into a Society for Spiritual Intermarriage.’Footnote ⁸⁴ The Christian primate had succeeded where Liberal coreligionists could not. The CCJ was formally launched at the end of September 1942, with the Jewish Chronicle warning its readers ‘against impatient clamour for concrete results’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Clearly, an organisation with the leader of the established Church and the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Synagogues of the Empire at its head, together with the Moderators of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and of the Free Church Federal Council, would immediately possess a national scope of action which had been unavailable to the Society of Jews and Christians. Its launch was reported nationally on the BBC, and with the Methodist W. W. Simpson as its enthusiastic and peripatetic organising secretary, it was empowered to encourage the growth of local branches. Parkes's wider ambitions for influence over peace aims did not materialise; however, the CCJ made strenuous attempts, with some modest success, to influence government policy towards refugees in the early stages of the war, and to bring home to government, parliament and public the horrors being inflicted on the Jews thereafter.Footnote ⁸⁶

Whether the local branches formed, during the war or subsequently, had any material effect in diminishing antisemitism it is impossible to say. They were in many cases built, as the official historian records, on the basis of pre-existing ‘friendship groups’, including some encouraged and inspired by the Society. Development was, as might be expected, uneven. The first local CCJ group to be formally established was in Birmingham, in spring 1943; but four years later ‘No attempt had been made to recruit a large membership’. Cardiff, by contrast, had by 1947 a full-time organising secretary and 480 members. Meanwhile, Nottingham took twenty years to respond to Simpson's overtures, and was not, apparently, unique in this. Activities varied from branch to branch; in wartime Newcastle the Jewish members of the local group advised against concentrating openly on combating antisemitism. Instead, ‘the emphasis had been on building up those habits of mind which … will make anti-Jewish feeling impossible’.Footnote ⁸⁷ This had, of course, been very much the long-term policy of the Society.

‘Hidden from history’

In January 1948 the Society renamed itself the London Society of Jews and Christians, henceforth acknowledging the CCJ as Britain's only national interfaith institution. William Temple had served on the advisory council as archbishop both of York and Canterbury, but Geoffrey Fisher, his successor in the primacy in 1945, declined to do so, and the connection was definitively broken.Footnote ⁸⁸ It is almost always referred to as the London Society by those few authors who have mentioned it in print – even Dean Matthews, who was its president from 1937 onwards, and remained in post when the Society was re-named, fails to give it the original name in his memoirs. This accidental or deliberate blurring of its identity is only one reason why the Society's history is so little known, and perhaps not the most important.

‘Hidden from history’ has entered the lexicon by way of a landmark feminist publication of the 1970s.Footnote ⁸⁹ Those writing the institutional history of religion in Britain acknowledge that the official hierarchies of Jewish and Christian congregations up to World War II and beyond were overwhelmingly masculine. The very few counter-examples in Nonconformist Churches, and in Lily Montagu's role within British and international Progressive Judaism, are exceptions which prove the rule. By contrast, much of the most active and continuous membership of the Society, on both sides of the religious divide, was female. It is unlikely that the prominence of women in the Society's affairs – even women of the standing of the civil servant Clara Collet and of Miriam Moses, the first female representative on the Jewish Board of Deputies and, in 1931, the first female mayor of Stepney – would have increased its prestige among contemporaries. Nor has it, so far, aroused the interest of mainstream historians of Anglo-Jewry and the Churches in Britain. The role of women in the Society might not have struck James Parkes as anything to boast about in retrospect, and the CCJ's highest councils were more masculine in composition than those of their predecessor.

As for the principal male activists in the Society, these were not, for the most part, prominent in the media of the day. Claude Montefiore, the biggest name fielded by Liberal Judaism, acted only occasionally as the public face of the Society; Dean Matthews was not publicity-hungry; the advisory council met only once a year, though it responded to requests for letters to the press on various occasions. By comparison, the World Congress of Faiths from 1936 attracted considerable press coverage and the support of many notables in Britain and its eastern Empire, possibly because it resonated with concerns about imperial coherence, and certainly because it benefited from the leadership of Sir Francis Younghusband. Already well known as a soldier, diplomat, traveller and author, he trumpeted it from the rooftops. The World Congress was an intellectually nebulous organisation the concrete achievements of which are impossible to establish, but it has won its place in the historiography of the interfaith movement – or, at the very least, both it, and Younghusband, may be found on the world wide web.

It is fair at this point to ask how far the Society deserves to be remembered. Its successes were modest, and its deficiencies, though not all of its own making, were clear enough at the time. But failures can be historically revealing. The Society's mishaps remind us of the persistent residue of conversionism within British Christianity in the first half of the twentieth century, and require us to consider its implications. It is clear that even where clergy and flocks were not personally active in missions to the Jews, the default position was that Judaism was an obsolete survival whose days were numbered. Nevertheless, Jews on either side of the Orthodox/Liberal divide persisted in believing that the nobility of their religious faith and traditions could garner the respect and approbation of the host society, and show how much the minority and majority had in common. They hoped that their demonstration of spiritual integrity could cancel out the negative perceptions of poor and uneducated Eastern European Jews which were widespread in the interwar period, and accusations of chicanery and black marketeering which hung over Anglo-Jewry long after World War II. But this was to imagine that religious difference was, at that time and place, no barrier to social parity. What they ignored was that religion itself was a key marker of inequality in a country with an established Church under the head of state; and that Christianity did not respect Judaism as its spiritual equal. They grasped (as some of today's historians do not) the importance of religion in Britain in this period; but they failed, or were unwilling, to see that this very fact placed them at a permanent cultural disadvantage. They had fallen, perhaps, into the trap of mistaking the problem for the solution.

Inasmuch as the CCJ succeeded at all, it did so because it was a Christian, not a Jewish initiative. Inasmuch as James Parkes succeeded in changing the terms of the debate between Jew and Christian, it was because he was a minister of the established Church. Neither Parkes nor the CCJ could have taken the initiative if the Nazi persecution of the German Protestant Churches and ‘non-Aryan’ Christians had not become shockingly visible. The story of Jewish-Christian relations is no simple narrative of historical progress towards mutual acceptance; extraordinary events and an extraordinary individual were required to effect change. It may be added that Parkes himself combined his radically original respect for Judaism with a more commonplace condescension towards many of its adherents. In his personal correspondence with non-Jews, expressions such as ‘I find my poor dear Jews to be the most trying children in the world’ are constantly at the tip of his pen. Even he thought it primarily a Jewish responsibility to become less objectionable to Gentiles; and he considered himself, with little evident justification, more competent to pronounce on peace aims and Palestine than any spokesman for the community. Parkes's archive provides evidence for his limited respect for Liberal Judaism as a project, and for some of his female colleagues; he may subsequently have been reluctant to admit his mixed motives in joining the Society of Jews and Christians, and to admit that someone else had been first in the field. Certainly his published memoirs demonstrate his decision to bury the Society, not to praise it. That the Society did not ever challenge the decision reminds us that history is written by the victors.