Rabbi Mirvis doesn’t speak for me, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong about Jeremy Corbyn

We Jews, begging pardon for the racial stereotyping, are a disputatious people.

You may know the tale of the orthodox Jewish fella shipwrecked for a dozen years on a desert island, when a royal navy frigate spots him waving frantically from the beach. The captain disembarks, and asks about the ramshackle building the guy has lovingly constructed from palm-tree branches. “That’s the synagogue.”

“I see. But Mr Goldstein, and forgive the curiosity, what’s that virtually identical building over there?”

“The other synagogue,” he explains. “That’s the one I won’t go to.”

The St John’s Wood orthodox synagogue of Ephraim Mirvis, the chief rabbi, who has lobbed in his electoral hand grenade, is the one I won’t go to. The last time I did – to honour a grandfather who was a member there for half a century – Mirvis’s predecessor Jonathan Sacks sermonised, in my view, so callously about a recent Israeli atrocity perpetrated on Palestinians that I left feeling nauseous.

From what I have seen, Rabbi Mirvis appears no less tribally supportive of recent and current Israeli regimes. If this native of South Africa has ever uttered a word of criticism about Benjamin Netanyahu’s apartheid state, apologies for missing it. Given that in a previous job he represented Israeli government interests in Ireland, sorry seems to be the unlikeliest word.

Rabbi Mirvis, although routinely described as “the leader of all British Jews”, doesn’t speak for me. He appears to speak for those who conflate any criticism of Israeli governments (some of which is of course a fig leaf for hatred of Jewish people) with antisemitism. He may be a wise and holy man, but like his more ostentatiously intellectual predecessor Lord Sacks, he is also a political partisan.

Yet that doesn’t make him wrong about Jeremy Corbyn. Not entirely.

We have been having this discussion so regularly, for so long, that it was inevitable it would flare up to dominate another news cycle now, with the reduction of a deeply complex and difficult matter to cheap sloganising. It won’t do Labour too much damage on 12 December, because there isn’t much damage left to be done. The harm was self-inflicted several years ago, when Corbyn refused to snuff it out it by immediately kicking Ken Livingstone out of the party when he cited Hitler as a proto-Zionist.

Whether that claim had a germ of historical accuracy, which is debatable, racism isn’t always about provable fact. Part of what makes it such a troublesome plague to identify and eradicate is that so often it is a question of tone. As that old US Supreme Court justice almost said of pornography, you can’t always tell what it is, but you know it when you see it.

Personally, I do not see it in Corbyn. But he failed to see it, in my opinion, thanks to wilful blindness, in others. Worse still, he failed to act swiftly and decisively even when he did.

Effectively, he enabled one form of the racism he reminds us he has spent his life fighting. He handed the more corrupt elements of the Tory-colluding press a gift that has yet to cease giving. He committed what may be soon be confirmed as partycide by gross negligence.

He drastically undermined the perception of his fitness for office less because of hateful prejudice than managerial incompetence. He dithered and faffed and puffed and prevaricated until the oxygen of indolence enabled a tiny camp fire he could have stamped out with one kick to grow into an inferno.

Mirvis writes in The Times that the antisemitism that terrorised Jewish MPs, and drove Luciana Berger into the embrace of the Liberal Democrats, was “sanctioned from the very top”. I believe that by omission, it was.

One could make some obvious rebuttals to the Mirvis critique. “It is not my place to tell any person how they should vote,” he writes when plainly he is doing just that. You might ask him why he has nothing to say about the rampant Islamophobia in the party he implicitly advises Jews to support, as led by a man whose racist sentiments about black and Muslim people are not merely a matter of record, but recorded in his own words.

Yet Mirvis speaks solely for Jews, and in this case for for a large majority of the approximately 300,000 in Britain, whether they belong to the orthodox, reform and liberal branches, or whether all three are types of synagogue to which they will not go.

For what it’s worth, I believe the fears he represents are exaggerated, and sometimes hysterical. Jews have no sound cause for the remotest concern about a Corbyn government. But not for a moment do I doubt their sincerity.

Barring a late shift in momentum more dramatic than the modest narrowing of the polls, we are heading for a generational tragedy on Thursday fortnight. A party that appears to me institutionally racist on an incomparably larger scale than Labour is poised to win a majority. When Mirvis concludes his article, “The very soul of our nation is at stake”, he is right – if not exactly in the way he intends.

A chief rabbi isn’t the spiritual leader of British Jews, however. He is a lobbyist on their behalf. As such, however blinkered his intervention, Mirvis is doing his job. The sadness is that Corbyn has failed to do his.