Mendelssohn: 'When the Nazis realised he was Jewish'

Tonight, BBC 4 is showing a documentary made by Sheila Hayman, a niece by descent of Felix Mendelssohn, a devout Christian who was born Jewish. The Nazis banned his music of course, including the rather wonderful compositions for Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. As the programme reports, this is how he was described in the Nazis' Dictionary of Jews in Music: 'This has shown us that a Jew with such a rich and specific talent has not managed even once to find any kind of depth, heart or soul in any of the art with which he’s being associated.’ The programme will be on the BBC iPlayer for a week and will be repeated around the time of the Proms.

Mendelssohn began publishing music aged 10 and wrote his first opera at 12. He was a genius. Sheila takes up the story:

'I've always known about being a Mendelssohn, but I've never understood the weird sense of not belonging that seems to pervade the family. Now it turns out to be all about religion.'

Her father and his cousins experienced the same issues with identity as children in Nazi Germany and, because they won't be around much longer, Sheila, a documentary maker, decided to put their stories 'on record'.

Her father, Walter, describes how he was as a child in Cologne made aware of the growing climate of hatred towards the Jewish people by slogans and graffiti, but at first did not realise how it would affect him. 'So it, it dawned us gradually that the Jews were really dreadful people, but only slowly that in some sense I was one of them.' This led him on a religious journey from his Lutheran faith through Anglicanism, Quakerism and Islam.

Felix Mendelssohn shared this quest.

And as Sheila points out, A Midsummer Night's Dream, the story that fascinated the composer, is all about shifting identities.

The story begins with Felix's grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn. As a boy he walked 100 miles barefoot to Berlin to seek his fortune, and once there learned German at a time when few Jewish poeple were prepared to do so. He became famous, and his revolutionary idea which set society alight then was that Jews and Christians could live peacefully alongside each other.

The debate it sparked, as Sheila Hayman reports, is this one:

Is Jewishness a religion, or is it something you are born into? Are you still Jewish if you don't believe? And what difference does it make? In the composer's day, Jews had few civil rights. When Felix Mendelssohn was seven, he was baptised a Lutheran.

To find out the rest of the story, watch the programme.

But this is a debate that even now, has still not gone away. Witness the judgement yesterday in the case of the Jewish Free School, reported by Nicola Woolcock for The Times with a commentary by myself.

The decision in favour of the Progressive mother, a convert, rested on whether Judaism was a race or a religion. A person can be Jewish by descent through the mother's line, or by conversion. But only Orthodox conversions are recognised by the Chief Rabbi's Beth Din, and JFS is an Orthodox school. As the judgement says, one of the evils that successive Race Relations Acts have been directed against is anti-Semitism. 'None of the parties to these proceedings wants or can afford to put up a case which would result in discrimination against Jews not being discrimination on racial grounds.' In other words, the JFS was discriminating racially against the child by refusing to accept him or his mother as Jewish because the lack of a recognised matrilineal descent.

You can read the school's response on its website and read the judgement itself in full here.

To explore the issues further, I also recommend A Midsummer Night's Dream currently being performed at Regent's Park open air theatre.

Irene Lancaster has published a fascinating follow-up blog to this debate.

Follow this blog and/or its author on Twitter.

Comments

[Elizabeth Tasse (nee Mendelson)]

I am a descendent of Felix, my dad looked like him. My granddad changed spelling during the war. I would love to hear from Sheila Hayman

[j]

"What J says is inaccurate and unfair. Jews have been extremely hesitant in coming forward to use the laws against discrimination, something I was told three or four years ago by a black employee of the CRE in Manchester. He couldn't understand why the Jewish community did not make more use of the laws that are there to protect them."

No, it is entirely true that this is how the law was made. You may have had one conversation but I have given many years of my life to working for equality in major institutions, incuding equality for Jewish people, and have been directly involved with the work of the Equalities Commission and the making of law and policy.

And there is no suggestion that the Jewish community is abusing their rights- I said "rightly" in describing how the laws are now being used to meet the various legal cases.

As for not giving my name, I refer you to Kate's response recently on this. Internet bullying is one reason.
I was most concerned to be both accurate and fair. I am sorry you think otherwise.

[Dr. Irene Lancaster]

What J says is inaccurate and unfair. Jews have been extremely hesitant in coming forward to use the laws against discrimination, something I was told three or four years ago by a black employee of the CRE in Manchester. He couldn't understand why the Jewish community did not make more use of the laws that are there to protect them.

Why doesn't J give us his or her full name?

Incidentally, a leading member of the Anglican community has written to me saying that the controversy surrounding the right of Jewish religious schools to define themselves is as absurd as if a Church School were to be accused of discrimination for defining themselves as Trinitarian.

In other words, he feels that the Jewish community should have the right to their own self-definition of their religion, as do all other religions in this country.

[j]

"Is it not the case that in English law the Jews are regarded as an ethnic minority (together with Sikhs) in order to combat antisemitism?"

My understanding is that originally there were laws preventing discrimination on grounds of gender, race and disability. It was quite a lot later (2001 I think) that European law introduced employment regulations, and later service provision regulations, covering age, religion or belief, and sexual orientation.

In the time before protection was available to all faiths, the jewish community lobbied for that protection. The law was (I think) actually changed to cover them by using the ethnic origin law, pending a more general law that would cover faith.

Now we have laws on faith, but there are nothing like as powerful as the older laws on ethnic origin (they have a completely different source) so quite rightly the jewish community uses whichever law best fits the circumstances of the legal case they want to bring.

[Dr. Irene Lancaster]

Is it not the case that in English law the Jews are regarded as an ethnic minority (together with Sikhs) in order to combat antisemitism?

Judaism is not a faith like Christianity, in that one can be an atheist and still be Jewish.

However, it is not a race either. The closest definition of what being Jewish is is probably that we are a 'people' - 'the people of Israel'. That is, we are the descendants of Jacob, who became know as 'Israel', after his struggle with the angel.

The Jewish people are a broad church, but faith and religion in the sense understood in this country are only part of the equation, not all of it.

[Bartholomew]

A famous incident in a novel:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Mendelssohn-Is-on-the-Roof/Jiri-Weil/e/9780810116863

"On the roof of Prague's concert hall, Julius Schlesinger, aspiring SS officer, is charged with the removal of the statue of the Jew Mendelssohn--but which one is he? Remembering his course on "racial science," Schlesinger instructs his men to pull down the statue with the biggest nose. Only as the statue topples does he recognize the face of Richard Wagner. This is just the beginning in Weil's novel, which traces the transformation of ordinary liveds in Nazi-occupied Prague."

[Edward I]

"Those who are not of Jewish racial or ethnic origins are less likely to be regarded as Jewish according to Jewish law and therefore less likely to be admitted to JFS.”
The Approved Judgement

Seems very similar to the Nazi rules about who is to be considered an Aryan.

But the nub of the issue is clearly the existence of faith schools and allowing them to pick and choose who may or may not be allowed to enter based upon religious foibles instead of academic achievement. This type of religious nitpicking is a result of having faith schools.
Education MUST be secular.
Keep the religion at home.