The Prequel – Before Economics

Like Louis Herman, my lifetime friend the philosopher, I was brought up in a Jewish home but this time in England rather than South Africa. Unusually we lived in a small town where we were almost the only Jewish family. We used to go to Synagogue in London staying at my grandmother’s just three times a year in the autumn for Jewish New Year and the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur). Unlike Louis I was not a member of any Jewish youth movement- there were no opportunities in our town. Although we didn’t discuss this at home, I later discovered that my father was a member of Beitar the right-wing Zionist movement when he was in his 20s, whereas my mother was on the fringes of Habonim, the socialist Zionist movement that was so important in Louis’s life.

Much later I discovered that my mother’s family had spent more than a year in Israel in the mid 1930s when she was about fifteen.  She attended the famous school, the Tel Aviv gymnasium.  My grandfather was a timber entrepreneur. His warehouse in Jaffa was burnt down. The insurance company refused to pay out, saying it was excluded as an act of war.  My aunt, my mother’s younger sister, told me when in her 80s that my grandfather later discovered that it wasn’t the Arabs who set fire to the warehouse but a rival Jewish timber firm. Anyway, that was the end of his Zionist dream and the family returned to London.

I discovered the miracle of the rebirth of the Jewish homeland, after the tragedy (indeed the ashes) of the Holocaust, at the age of 12 when I read the novel Exodus by Leon Uris. I was excited and proud to be associated with this tremendous drama. I remember doing a project at school on Israel to the puzzlement and slight disapproval of my teacher at a London private boarding school.

When I got to Cambridge University to read engineering, almost the first thing I did was to join the Israel society at the “freshers’ fair” where all the university societies were on show. At the age of 19, at the end of my first year, I finally made it to Israel on a three-week Jewish students’ tour.  I loved it.  More important I felt this visceral sense of belonging to an exciting country, just 20 years old, with people from all over the world who had being Jewish in common. I felt at home in a way that I had never felt as a Jew in England.

We were hospitably received in a Bedouin tent, with tea being served, but I was too young to realise the token nature of the event.  At that time, 1969, it was just two years after the six-day war. The country was still in a victory mood having defeated the enormously larger and more populous surrounding Arab countries. Unusually, a Palestinian Arab from the prominent Nashashibi family befriended my girlfriend and me one evening in Jerusalem and invited us to his home. I was a little nervous and politely declined.

Yasser Arafat had just been appointed chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation which had been set up in 1964 by a group of Arab countries. It was the beginning of Palestine as a national liberation movement, something of which at the time I was completely unaware.

I remember vividly telephoning my father and saying that I wanted to move to Israel. He said rather predictably that I should first finish not only my degree but my professional qualification in accountancy.

When I returned to Cambridge for the autumn term, the beginning of my second year, I turned up at a free modern Hebrew class being given by a young Israeli woman. There were only five people in the class amongst whom were Louis and his girlfriend. That was, in the words of Humphrey Bogart in the film Casablanca, “the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

Like Louis, I was also drawn to the big questions. Reflecting on this more than fifty years later I see it as a profound expression of authentic Jewish culture. The name Israel, which Jacob was given after his night dreaming and then wrestling with the angel, means he who struggles with God. One can loosely, but fairly, interpret this as the struggle to understand what it means to live a good life.  That means not accepting the conventional path but instead seeing life as a quest for right actions and for wisdom. Jewish culture, from Abraham onwards, is about real, deeply flawed people, and one of doubt and argument, including with God, not about choosing and obeying a dogma¹

At the end of my second year rather than continue with engineering I decided to follow Louis’s example and switch to History and Philosophy of Science, which he had just completed after two years’ medicine. We had talked extensively about the course, about the excitement of studying the history of ideas and the philosophy of science. During the year I read “The Challenge of World Poverty” by Nobel Memorial Laureate Gunnar Myrdal. I knew that at that time Israel was very active in transferring useful and innovative know-how, especially in agriculture, to African countries. Being both impossibly idealistic and a fervent Zionist I decided that I would spend my life contributing from Israel to the solutions of the biggest problems facing humanity. This was an expression of ‘tikkun olam’, repair of the world, a central idea in Judaism.

That’s when I realised I needed to study economics.