Hear, Oh Israel

It comes as no surprise to me that the British-Israelite Fellowship that meets on Durham’s North Road has links to the BNP. There have been more than rumours about that for years, which is why I have never indulged my idle curiosity and taken myself along to the Shakespeare Hall on a Saturday afternoon.

But the British-Israelite position is not in itself any more preposterous than the belief that the Ashkenazim, the Sephardim, the Ethiopian Jews and the rest are all one ethnic group, some members of which have presumably just been out in the sun longer than others.

Nor is it any more preposterous than the assumption that, simply because they speak Arabic and most of them are Muslims, the present non-Jewish inhabitants of the Levant are purely and simply the descendants of Arab, Muslim conquerors.

In fact, there is of course at least as much Israelite blood in the average Levantine Arab, and indeed probably a great deal more, than in the average Jew. Jews, like Palestinians and like “Anglo-Saxons”, are a thoroughly mongrel lot.

Not that it really matters. Identifying with Israel, like identifying with Greece or Rome, is about behaviour, not blood. Specifically, it is about adherence to the only true continuation of any of those three, namely the recapitulation of all of them in Jesus Christ and His Church.