Nadene Goldfoot
I can't get it out of my mind of a recent find of so many anti-Semites in Scotland! There hasn't been any large number of Jews living there as they have been in London, England. What was going on?
Scotland is a small country of 5.454 million as of 2019, with less than Israel. Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a 96-mile border with England to the southeast. In 1878, despite opposition, a Roman Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy was restored to the country, and Catholicism became a significant denomination within Scotland. There are an estimated 75,000 Muslims in Scotland (about 1.4% of the population), and significant but smaller Jewish, Hindu and Sikh communities, especially in Glasgow.
JBS TV had shown the findings of an interviewer in one of their pubs, and in the conversation with those there, discovered they were all against Jews, and especially the Israelis. The interviewer moved about and spoke with people in many other places and kept getting the same results. It was most depressing!
They were all believers that Jews had flown in and taken over Palestine-a country with a government and all, snatched it away from the Palestinians, leaving them without homes. They were all pro-Palestinian and anti-Israelis. They had no idea of the real facts and showed no inkling of wanting to learn. They backed the Palestinians and that was that, like a preferred soccer team.
My thought was, how could they be believing such misconscrewed history in this day and age and there it was. They had more trust in anti-Israel propaganda, most likely from al Jazeera or places like that, and nothing in their past school days. Since England had kicked out Jews for 365 years anyway from 1290 to 1655 as it was, due to Papal orders, this propaganda was being built on anti-Semitism besides. The interviewer was appalled and saddened by his discovery.
Jews were not in Scotland in medieval days as there is little evidence of any living there in that period. But, Jewish merchants were to be found in Edinburgh and Glasgow by the 17th century when the ban was lifted. In the 18th centuries, some Jews studied medicine at Scottish universities. There are indications of a Jewish community in Edinburgh in 1780, but it was properly organized only in 1816, one following in Glasgow in 1823.
The large increase in the number of antisemitic incidents in Scotland during the third quarter of 2014 following the war in Gaza came as an unwelcome shock, not only to the Jewish Community, but to civil society at large. During August 2014 alone, SCoJeC received more than 25 reports relating to at least 12 separate antisemitic incidents, almost as many as in the whole of 2013, and Police Scotland advised us that they had received reports of threatening phone calls and e-mails, graffiti on synagogues, and two cases of incitement to break the criminal law. In addition, many people told us that they now felt uncomfortable, anxious, and in some cases even afraid, going about their day-to-day activities as Jewish people in Scotland. Although these absolute numbers may not seem high, the most recent Scottish Government figures reveal that, when the size of the different faith communities is taken into account, Judaism is almost 8 times, and Islam 3 times as likely as Christianity to be the victim of religious hatred. In order to gauge how typical were the expressions of anxiety, insecurity, and alienation that we had reported, the Community Safety Unit of the Scottish Government provided SCoJeC with funding to carry out a follow-up inquiry into how the experience of Jewish people in Scotland had changed during the three years since our original study.
The Russian Jewish immigration of the early 1900s resulted in the growth of the 1823 community, which is the 4th in size in Great Britain. Edinburgh, on the other hand, has only 600. There were also smaller communities in Aberdeen and Dundee. The Jewish population in 1990 was 12,000. According to the 2011 census, 5,887 Jews lived in Scotland; a decline of 8.7% from the 2001 census. The total population of Scotland at the time was 5,313,600, making Scottish Jews 0.1% of the population.
Research
JBS TV =9/11/22 on Youtube; my bad, I was so appalled I wasn't prepared to take notes on exact program this was on. The interviewer was a heavy-set man, I remember that much. I think it was on Shahar Azari's program.
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
Facts About Israel by Division of Information, Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Jerusalem, p. 32
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Scotland
https://www.scojec.org/resources/files/bjis.pdf
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