British Jewry is served by numerous ancient institutions. The Bevis Marks synagogue in east London was built in 1701. The Jewish Free School opened in 1732. The Board of Deputies of British Jews was established in 1760. Of all our communal bodies, the one with the greatest reach is surely the Jewish Chronicle. Dating back to 1841 and said to be the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle last week announced its liquidation, to widespread sadness in the community and beyond.
According to its statement, the weekly newspaper ‘will not be able to survive the impact of the current coronavirus epidemic in its current form’. In truth, its problems predate the pandemic. Last summer the paper needed a cash injection to offset the threat of closure. It seemed like the paper’s future was guaranteed after about 20 individuals, families and charitable trusts made donations to the newspaper’s parent charitable entity, the Kessler Foundation. These philanthropists remained anonymous, not least to preserve the JC’s editorial independence. But they could not reverse the industry-wide decline. (The printing presses of the Independent, once one of the UK’s big-four national broadsheets, closed in 2016. And last week the 60-year-old Canadian Jewish News published its final edition.)
In February the JC announced plans to merge with the smaller Jewish News, ‘to secure the financial future of both newspapers and transform into a modern print, digital and events brand’. It was never going to be enough to augment the JC’s circulation of 20,000, down from 33,000 ten years earlier. A former senior editor blames ‘a failure to appeal sufficiently to women, to the boomer generation in the nineties and early noughties, plus the impact of online news’.
Low readership figures disguise the JC’s significance. Nothing has buoyed mainstream anglo-Jewry like the JC, the News of the Jews or The Chronic, as it has variously been nicknamed. In communal matters its authority is unquestioned. What time does Shabbat go out? Check the JC. Is this celebrity Jewish? Only if it says so in the JC. Is our rabbi trying to get away with something? Call the JC.
On the other hand, the community’s schisms are also articulated in criticisms of the JC, to the extent that it must have been doing something right. ‘The JC hates us’, an eminent Liberal Judaism rabbi once informed me. ‘Why don’t they publicize our women’s-division luncheon at the Savoy?’, used to be a common complaint among Joint Israel Appeal fundraisers. ‘They are anti-Zionist’, moan local Likudniks when an editorial is uncomplimentary about Prime Minister Netanyahu.
The Jewish Chronicle came of age in the 1960s as the editor William Frankel ‘turned a parochial, dull recorder of Jewish life in Britain – guaranteed to bore anyone not intimately connected with the events being covered – into a vibrant, often highly controversial newspaper’, in the words of popular broadcaster Michael Freedland. It was Frankel who discovered the modern-day Sholem Aleichem that was Chaim Bermant. Nobody wrote a funnier, wiser weekly column; the magnificent beard and twinkling eyes of Bermant’s picture byline expressed the face of Judaism itself. If the lugubrious literary editor, sitting amid piles of books and papers at the top of a narrow stairwell in dingy east London offices resembled a scene out of Dickens, the ongoing broigas that invariably – reputedly – erupted at Friday’s editorial meetings evoked the spirit of shtetlach.
After its offices relocated to the predominantly Jewish suburb of Golders Green, the paper’s long-suffering editor Stephen Pollard turned his attentions to the serious matter of Jeremy Corbyn. Not only did Pollard play a leading role in uniting the community against the prospect of a Corbynite government, he also helped convince the country at large, such is the measure of the JC’s reputation and influence.
In The Spectator last week, Stephen Daisley wrote: ‘The past five years in particular have been among the JC’s finest. No publication had kept a closer eye on Jeremy Corbyn’s career and the cranks he had associated with for decades. The JC knew what Corbyn was and was the first to warn about him. It understood what his elevation to the top of British politics would mean for British Jews and the country at large. A tiny Jewish newspaper with none of the resources of the major dailies was first on the scene and for a long time did most of the running on what turned out to be the biggest political story in decades: the descent of the Labour Party into institutional antisemitism… It’s an open question whether Corbyn might be prime minister today without the fearless journalism of the Jewish Chronicle.’
The Kessler Foundation is ‘actively working to secure a future for the Jewish Chronicle after the liquidation’, leaving Britain’s Jews to hope for good news. Surely even in such straitened times, the community has the means to rescue our most venerable institution.