ABSTRACT
I frequently ask myself: what would a Jewish history of Europe be like? Sitting in the Botanical Gardens at Oxford one summer’s day recently I pondered what such a history of England would consist of. What would it say about this beautiful place for example: its honey-coloured stone walls, the goldfish among the water-lilies, the immaculate lawns? Beyond the green water of the Isis, on which a punt was being indolently poled along, a cricket match was in progress: middle-aged men in garishly-coloured caps trundled after the ball on Magdalen School field. A slow bowler (rarest of sights) was hit for six, and the silence was scarcely broken by that particularly English sound of summer: random applause from pavilion and deck-chairs. This side of the river a family of foreign tourists (Spanish? Italian? Greek?) watched uncomprehendingly. Over the trees Magdalen College tower rose (as one might say) timelessly, while Merton College clock struck the quarter-hour: it was 4.15 and I was due to take tea in Magdalen cloister. Here, as any Englishman was bound to think, was Grantchester. I was thinking that. I was also thinking that here until 1290 had been the cemetery of the Jewish community of Oxford, and (more over) that the cemetery had occupied the other side of the road as well as this until 1231, when the pious Henry III granted it as a
building site to the hospital of St John the Baptist, which itself gave way to Magdalen College in the fifteenth century.1
