Go seeking Jews and ye shall find: Chaim Bermant looks at the chosen people's tendency to claim that all the best are theirs

IS Jeremy Paxman Jewish? If so, who cares?

Well, the Jewish Chronicle does for a start and speculated on it for weeks recently, until the BBC's most entertaining interviewer felt moved to explain that he had a conventional Church of England upbringing, and beyond that he didn't know much about his family background.

It is no handicap to be a Jew these days in Britain, but as we all know there were times well within the living memory of Europe when it was not only a handicap but a lethal hazard and when men, women and children who did not even think of themselves as Jews could be slaughtered for the crime of having a Jewish parent or grandparent.

The process did not begin with Hitler. In medieval Spain Jews were given the choice between apostasy and death, and in 1492 Spanish Jews not prepared to embrace Christianity were expelled.

The irony of it all was that some three centuries later, when the gates of the ghettos were thrown open, thousands of Jews whose forefathers had faced martyrdom for their faith rushed to the baptismal font of their own free will, among them Heinrich Heine, who described his conversion as a ticket to European civilisation.

When Daniel Chwolson, the Jewish orientalist, converted to Christianity about a century ago he was asked if he was a sincere believer, and answered that he believed sincerely that he was better off as a professor at the Imperial University of St Petersburg than as a Hebrew teacher in Shnipeshok.

Such conversions opened doors that would otherwise have been closed. Disraeli, for example, could never have become Prime Minister if he had not been baptised, but such converts were still thought of as Jews by the gentiles around them. To Bismarck, Disraeli was always der alte Jude, the old Jew.

Jews, on the other hand, tended to regard ex-Jews as simple renegades, but where the ex-Jews, or even the sons and grandsons of ex-Jews, were sufficiently famous they would grant them absolution through eminence and claim them as part of the tribe. Hence the Paxman phenomenon. I would ascribe three causes to this tendency.

Small nations like to think they are large in attainment. This is particularly true of the Scots - 'Wha's like us?' - but then they too think they are the God's chosen (and, as a Scottish Jew, I suspect they may be right).

Second, Jews tend to think of God himself as Jewish, and it therefore follows that anyone with a spark of divinity must, to a lesser or greater extent, be likewise Jewish. In the absence of divinity, they will settle for fame.

But most important is the matter of Jewish experience. Where Jews passed through hard times, they drew some comfort from the thought that even if they were oppressed they were still tops - with the corollary that they were probably oppressed because they were tops, and what may have begun as a form of compensation has persisted as a habit of mind. I also suspect that since the Second World War Jews have had a subconscious desire to augment their numbers by every conceivable means - and a few inconceivable ones.

The term 'Seek and ye shall find' was probably invented by a Jew-seeker, and the most celebrated Jew-seeker of this century was the late Cecil Roth, who for many years was Reader in Jewish Studies at Oxford. In 1938 he wrote a book called The Jewish Contribution to Civilisation. Not content with Moses and Samuel, David and Solomon, Isaiah and Jeremiah, Amos and Micah, Spinoza and Einstein, he snatched at great names of any description to show that they were of Jewish origin, and that even where they weren't, they at least had Jewish connections.

Thus, while he did not actually claim that Shakespeare was Jewish, he suggested that he drew inspiration from John Florio, an Italian scholar of Jewish extraction, and that the Jewish lore in Paradise Lost may have owed something to a conversation Milton may have had with a rabbi. He even argued that Columbus could have been Jewish. So you know who to blame for the discovery of America.

When I was on the staff of the Jewish Chronicle about 30 years ago we spent hours winkling out Jewish names from the Honours lists, and when we published them proudly on the front page there would be a spate of letters from Cohens and Levys to protest that they weren't Jews, and from others with names like Willoughby-Creighton to complain they had been overlooked.

When Robert Maxwell became an MP, he was listed in the paper as a Jew, and wrote to protest that he was no such thing (would that it had been true). Clement Freud sent a similar correction when he was listed. What would his grandfather have made of that?

I suspect that the Paxman affair may derive from the belief that the only type of eminence that counts these days is eminence in the media, and that with Esther Rantzen in eclipse there was a need to claim Paxman as an alternative. If it hadn't been Paxman it might have been Trevor MacDonald.

It all reminds me of the man - it could have been Paxman - who had settled himself in the corner of a railway carriage when he found that he was being closely scrutinised by a bearded figure in black sitting opposite. This went on for some time and he finally lost patience and barked: 'What are you staring at?'

'Funny you should ask. I was wondering if maybe you're Jewish?'

'No, I'm not.'

'You sure?'

'Absolutely.'

'What makes you so sure?'

'All right, have it your way. My father was Jewish, my mother was Jewish, I hate pork, I go to synagogue and I'm Jewish. Happy?'

'Funny, you don't look Jewish.'

(Photograph omitted)