JEWS YOUR PARTNERS
Barbara Arnie! finds
herself with a difficult problem of etiquette
IT WAS so kind of Taki, The Spectator's `High life' columnist, to invite me to his grand ball at the Savoy last week, held to `celebrate the collapse of communism', as the invitation put it.
The evening had an air of anticipation which was heightened by Taki's greeting. `I've seated you at a challenging table,' Taki told me. Is that a euphemism, I wondered, and for what? By 10.15 p.m. we were tucking into our Charlotte de Brochet au Safran.
One table over, I noticed that Imran Khan, through masterful choreography, was managing to keep in touch with every attractive woman at the party. Now, he was chatting over his shoulder to a woman at our table. That left the chap seated on my right without a conversational partner. He turned to me.
R. was engaged to a girl named K. After a brief discussion of his good fortune in finding a smashing fiancee, he looked at me warmly, eyes misted with the effects of champagne and began a new line of small talk. 'Nigel Lawson,' he said, 'now there was a Chancellor. He had that Jewish nose for it. Understood what we needed.'
Although this remark had me slightly worried, I felt there was no need immedi- ately to draw attention to my own origins. This, after all, was a night in which all of us, Jew and Gentile alike, were ecumenically sharing the joy of the col- lapse of communism. The conversation continued. 'The difficulty with Jews,' R. continued, 'is that you get Gerald Ronson and Michael Milken and Ernest Saunders and all that sort.' He looked at my name, elegantly scrawled on a card next to my dessert spoon. `Ah, clearly a Jewish name,' he said, meaning to be humorous, making the same error my employers had in Canada many years ago when, unfamiliar with the Sephardic origins of my surname, they took me for a French-Canadian. R. returned to the matter at hand: 'Why are Jews like that?' he asked. The question turned out to be rhetorical. R. had an answer that was something to do, if I understood him correctly, with the essen- tial nature of our community.
This is the point, one feels, where steps ought to be taken, if only at a social level. A leaf out of the book of Sir Isaiah Berlin, perhaps, who advises that the courageous thing to do would be to exclaim enthusias- tically, 'This is most interesting. I am a Jew myself. Please, continue with the discus- sion and give me all your thoughts on this `Got it! Mrs Rochester, Jane Eyre.' intriguing matter.' Sir Isaiah also balances this view with the reminder that many distinguished Jews have lacked such cour- age. He cites the behaviour of Moses, who upon meeting his very non-Hebrew future father-in-law at a village well, responds to the question, 'Who are you?' with the rather namby-pamby reply, 'I am from Egypt.' This sort of cowardly behaviour, explains Sir Isaiah, accounts in part for the reason God never let Moses see the prom- ised land. Moses and I had this cowardice in common.
What is the etiquette, I wondered later on. Ought R. to have been dunked in my coulis au fruits de passion? Although the conversation depressed me, it didn't make me angry. I don't find it illegitimate for one group to have an opinion about the charac- teristics of another group. Group charac- teristics never turn out to be accurate when applied to individuals but they may be statistically accurate in terms of the group as a whole. Sometimes these views raise rather interesting and valid questions. Jews, after all, have all sorts of strong views about Gentile society such as the way they deal with their families (meanly), alcohol (copiously) and their emotions (anal retentive).
Erroneous opinions on the Jews are no more illegitimate than any other erroneous opinion. One crosses the line only when you believe that the opinion you hold of another group entitles you to injure or restrict them in some way, such as denying them access to certain professions or pas- sing laws to curtail their civil liberties.
All the same, I felt it in order to make certain tactical decisions in case the situa- tion ever arose again at a party. One possibility, of course, is to never attend dinner parties with anyone other than my co-ethnics. This way I could be certain that I did not belong to any minority and should I encounter any strange person, I would be very kind to him.
My own view is that such steps are unnecessary. The spunky and stylish way for the opinionated to handle the matter, surely, is to say: 'I am about to make a series of anti-Semitic remarks. Are you Jewish by any chance?' I would respect such an approach. This could be expanded to include anti-Catholic or anti-Muslim statements. The only exception would be if one's dinner partner were black in which case the question would be unnecessary. One could launch directly into analysing the African characteristics of a black neigh- bour without fear of being accused of cowardice.
Ultimately, I suppose, if, like me, you belong to one of these borderline ethnic groups and insist on going to mixed dinner parties, the decent thing to do is to make one's ethnicity quite unmistakable. This is polite and will prevent anyone being led into an embarrassing situation, even though in extreme circumstances it may require putting on a false nose.
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