After Crumpsall, is anywhere in Britain safe for us Jews now?

I take the attack on a Manchester synagogue where I’ve fasted on Yom Kippur personally, writes the novelist Howard Jacobson: it’s an assault on my person and my culture, and as pure an expression of Jew-hatred as Jew-hatred gets

Crumpsall, of all places. The name means a crooked piece of land beside a river. The river is the River Irk. It seemed a peaceful suburb when I was growing up there in the Fifties, gentiles and Jews living harmoniously together. The Jewish community comprised second and third-generation refugees from the pogroms in Lithuania and Poland.

Safety was our first concern. We’d been thrown out of too many places to face being thrown out of another. We didn’t lose our tempers, whatever was said to us. Just occasionally, we were irked. Now, on Yom Kippur, the quietest, most sacred and most prayerful of Jewish holy days, a terrorist has struck a synagogue, where two died and three more were wounded, before being shot dead by the police himself.

In Crumpsall! Crumpsall – far enough out of Manchester for you to fancy you can smell the Pennines. But here’s a thought: is anywhere safe for Jews right now?

After the 7 October massacre, Jews were told it had nothing to do with them as Jews. Its target was settler colonialism – otherwise known as Zionism. Jews would do well, we were told, to stop “weaponising” antisemitism, which was nothing but a self-pitying concoction, a cynical ruse to forestall all criticism of Israel.

Those Jews who thought they heard the cry “Kill the Jews” reverberating around the world after the massacre were either lying or hallucinating. Why would anyone cry “Kill the Jews” when so many had been killed already? It is a question that has disturbed my dreams ever since.

Can we agree now, I wonder, without having to exercise too much caution in the matter of weaponising antisemitism, that an attack on a synagogue in Crumpsall, so far from Gaza, so innocent of colonial ambition, is as pure an expression of Jew-hatred as Jew-hatred gets?

I take it personally, anyway. I feel it is an assault on my person and my culture. I walked to this synagogue with my father, carrying the embroidered bag for my prayer shawl, which my grandmother had given me. I fasted here on Yom Kippur. I saw friends get married here. I was barmitzvah’d here. I was not much of a Jew, but what there was I celebrated in Heaton Park shul, now and for all time desecrated by mindless violence.

Jews have been expecting something like this to happen since 7 October, though not on this crooked piece of land beside a river, but since it has, there is no limit to one’s imagining where it will happen next.

Everyone who isn’t an ardent friend of the Palestinian cause is an enemy to it. Whoever rises to accept a prize in front of an audience – actors, footballers, opera singers of whatever faith – must demonstrate their worthiness for the award by denouncing not only those who express a different opinion, but whoever expresses no opinion at all. Like-mindedness wins prizes.

If you are silent on Gaza, you are complicit, says Gary Lineker. The complicity argument paints us all with blood. It means no one is innocent. And who could be less innocent than the Jews, who have form when it comes to killing children, keeping themselves to themselves and seeking world domination?

Language kills. It’s a matter of debate just how virulently anti-Jewish the demonstrations are that have broken the quiet of every weekend in almost every city in the country for the last two years. Yes, Jews are insulted, but not all the time and not by everybody. There are even some Jews on the marches, we are told, as though the presence of one licenses the libelling of all the others.

What is not open to debate is the consequence of this unremitting, unanimous defamation. And while I see that unanimity is not an offence against which the police can bring charges, defamation is. Left to express itself freely, as it has been, defamation is emboldened to grow more extreme and violent. What we say often enough we believe to be true.

Let someone easily enraged breathe in the swirling, delusive toxics of unswerving agreement, even here by the still waters of the River Irk, and there can be no assurance that he won’t lose whatever’s left of his reason when he thinks of those he has every week heard described as murderers daring to pray for the salvation of their souls.

Howard Jacobson is a Booker Prize-winning novelist and writer