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Dec. 9, 2011
Discovering home in Judaism
Susan Greenfield talks about being “a non-Jewish Jew.”
KATHARINE HAMER
Baroness Susan Greenfield, member of the British House of Lords, leading neuroscientist and recipient of 28 honorary degrees, recounted how her maternal grandmother reacted to the news of her parents’ marriage.
“She said, ‘I’m going to kill myself,’” mused the University of Oxford professor, who was speaking at Maidenhead Synagogue, west of London, Nov. 20, on the subject of being “a non-Jewish Jew.”
Dramatic as her grandmother’s reaction may sound, in the 1950s, it was not an uncommon response for the families of mixed-faith couples. Greenfield’s father, an electrician whose family had immigrated to London’s East End from an Austro-Hungarian shtetl, first clapped eyes on her mother, a chorus girl, during a wartime theatre performance. Greenfield’s Jewish family was horrified at the prospective match.
“My paternal grandfather had died by then,” Greenfield explained, “and my paternal grandmother had married the cantor of the shul, and she was very Orthodox. So, it’s farcical, really, when you think about this situation of the cantor of the shul keeping a very fierce Shabbes, and this chorus girl coming in with bows in her hair, lighting up a cigarette and chatting away about ‘Jewish food’ – which was mainly coleslaw.”
It was the beginning of a somewhat confused, if very liberal, upbringing for Greenfield, a specialist in Alzheimer and Parkinson disease, whose most recent book is You and Me: The Neuroscience of Identity.
“I was born being told I was half-Jewish and half-Christian,” she recalled, “and, to a little kid, what does that mean? I thought, ‘Well, which half of me?’ I also was brought up with my two grandmothers not speaking to each other. This wasn’t because they had met each other and didn’t like each other – no – it was because one was Jewish, one was Christian. Both were equally antagonistic. I grew up, therefore, not knowing what Jewish meant or Christian meant. I just knew that these were two things that somehow didn’t go together; that somehow they couldn’t meet.”
A vocal proponent of cross-cultural understanding later in life, Greenfield was sent to school wearing both a Star of David and a cross (the fashionable thing for small girls at the time) around her neck. She regularly spent time with her Jewish family (her uncle had married a Jewish woman and had two children of his own), but played Mary in the school Nativity play. She said she always noticed the differences between the two strands of her heritage.
“I also noticed a difference culturally, which is very interesting, between the Jewish family and the Christian family, in that the Jewish side of the family, my dad’s side, we had these sort of tribal gatherings every month or so, headed up by my grandmother and my fully Jewish cousins. The whole ambience was one of the school reports being passed round: ‘You only got an A- for needlework, what’s gone wrong?’ It was an atmosphere – and, again, I think this is a Jewish thing – of total support and care. When I got into a very swanky school, my parents were horrified to see the uniform list that came, with all the things you needed coming to hundreds of pounds, which my father couldn’t pay for. My uncle paid for that straight away, and that was just assumed. It wasn’t a loan or anything – that was just what we did.
“I remember, even when I was 11, being aware of the difference between perhaps how an English Christian family would be and the Jewish family [who] would just pick up the tab and everyone looks after everyone else. That gave me a feeling of belonging and a tribal identity in a way that my charming but somewhat fragmented and distant English, Christian side of the family did not deliver.”
Greenfield spent the year between graduating from high school and starting university on a trip to Israel. She learned basic Hebrew working with children on a kibbutz near Nahariya, and humility from a stint caring for elderly Holocaust survivors. Like many people of Jewish heritage, she said she felt that coming to Israel was “like coming home. People looked like me – because normally I’m told I’m kind of manic and noisy, and everyone was like that, and they all looked the same, and I felt really as though I was back, somehow; culturally back, even though I’d been brought up not just not being religious, but being told it was mumbo jumbo by my dad. But at the same time, he was very proud of being Jewish.”
That visit began what she called her “love affair with Israel.” She has since worked extensively with scientific colleagues there and, indeed, throughout the Middle East. She is on the board of the Israeli-British Business Council, is a governor of the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot and a trustee of the Alexandrian Library in Egypt. She visited Saudi Arabia at the behest of the King Faisal Foundation – and discovered huge similarities between Arabic and Jewish cultures.
“The people are very similar,” she said. “They’re lively, passionate, fun, warm, kind. I even saw the similarity between Hebrew and Arabic. And I felt, these [people] are not enemy, alien – these are people who are, in many ways, similar to us. I have to say that I was treated with kindness and respect and warmth, and it was a very interesting experience. If we have that attitude prevailing in the Middle East more, then surely that has to be a good thing.”
Greenfield connected Israel and her profession. “I think it’s about time scientists came in from the cold,” she said, “Because we are neutral, we are bringing the possibility of wealth creation, and this is what in Israel has done brilliantly; what Jews do fantastically – not just the science itself, but also on the commercialization of the science and the spinning out of companies, which is very much needed nowadays in terms of getting countries back on their feet.”
In 2002, a column Greenfield wrote for the Times newspaper, which poured scorn on the then-boycott of Israeli universities by British academics, led to her being given an honorary degree by Hebrew University.
“I was horrified that people I knew had signed this petition,” she said. “One can’t unpack just how stupid this was in every regard. This was a lose-lose situation, in that the Palestinian people didn’t benefit at all. [Ariel] Sharon, who was the prime minister at the time, wouldn’t have given a stuff whether [Hebrew University professors] were invited to give a talk. Moreover, it’s not as if scientists have a handle on politics. I said to people at the time, ‘Look, if I was boycotted because we’d invaded Iraq....’ It’s as silly and as strange as that. And also, it is so against the ethos of academia, of learning, and it means, indirectly, that lives might suffer, medical advances might slow down, and it makes scientists, above all, look spiteful and petty-minded.
“What has always annoyed me is when people criticize Israel ... you have to go there to realize what it feels like to be surrounded by people who are hostile to you.”
Greenfield has always, she said, felt accepted in Israel and by the London Jewish community as a whole, although, she conceded, “I’ve had some people, including non-Jews, tell me I’m not Jewish because my mother’s not Jewish. They say this dismissively and very proudly, as if I didn’t know this.”
She described herself as being only midway through her life’s journey, part of which has involved considering her spiritual place in the world.
“I can’t say that I’ve found all the answers in Judaism and I’m going to convert,” she said. “But what did come home to me, at my dad’s funeral when they played Hatikvah, it really did make me feel that, in one sense, that was home.”
Former Jewish Independent editor Katharine Hamer is currently based in London. Her website is literaryparamedic.com.
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