Europe at a Crossroad

Introductory remarks

Would you mind if I stood up? Professor George, beloved friends, thank you for the privilege of just spending time with you in this extraordinary group. There could not be a more important cause right now, because religious freedom, Article 18 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is today more honoured in the breach than in the observance.

You have documented that, and it gets worse and worse. And I simply can't imagine a more important topic or a more distinguished group of people to address it. And I salute your president, Robert George, who is a shining light for all of us, of whatever faith.

And thank you and bless you, and may you and all of you be rewarded by bringing the light of tolerance and mutual respect into the world in this dark moment. 

Friends, we're just coming up to the Jewish festival of Passover, which is the great festival of religious freedom. It's also a lot of hard work, I have to say, because it involves cleaning out a new set of dishes.

It's huge. And I remember, in the 1970s, reading that somebody had noted the phenomenon that the 1960s were the first time when American women went to college in equal numbers to men. And by the 1970s, they found themselves married with children, and there was a best-selling apron which read, “For this, we went to college?”

So I once suggested in a sermon that we might have one especially made for Passover cleaning, which read, “For this, we left Egypt?”

But if I may, just begin with a little rabbinic word, if I may, because we have a very ancient ritual on Passover, the Seder service, where we tell the story, reenact the story, and hand on our memories to our children. And it begins with the most extraordinary thing.

It begins, just before the young ask the questions, the famous questions that start the Seder service. We lift up the matzah, the unleavened bread, and we say, “Ha lach ma'anya di achalu avoteinu b'Mitzrayim.” It's in Aramaic, “This is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate in Egypt. All who are hungry, come and eat.”

And I was puzzled by this. What kind of hospitality is it to say, ‘Come, sit down, have a meal with us, here's your share of affliction’? I mean, what kind of hospitality is that? I was also very puzzled by the fact that at the beginning, we call it the bread of affliction, but at the end, just before the meal, we quote the Bible, which says that the Israelites were leaving Egypt in such a hurry that they weren't able to let the bread rise. So at the beginning, it's the bread of affliction they ate in Egypt, but at the end, it's the bread of freedom that they ate as they were leaving Egypt.

So how to understand these things? And these words stayed with me for a very long time until I read Primo Levi's account of Auschwitz, called “If This is a Man.” And incidentally, that was a very important title. He didn't write “If This is a Jew” because the Holocaust really does not teach us what it is to be a Jew.

It teaches us what it is to be human. 

And it really is about our shared humanity. And he says that the worst time in Auschwitz, believe it or not, were the 10 or 11 days between the Germans leaving and the liberating Russians arriving.

Because whoever could walk were taken by the Nazis on the death marches. So all who were left in the camp, for 10 days in the freezing winter, between January 17th and January 27th, were the sick and the dying. And they had no electricity, no food. Everyone had left. 

And he describes how he, with a friend, was scrabbling in the dirt to see if they could dig up from this frozen ground a potato or a carrot, some root vegetable. And some people in the camp saw them and they'd lit a fire and they said, ‘Come and join us. Come and share our food.’ 

He said that at that moment, we were no longer prisoners. We had become free human beings.

And I suddenly saw that even if what we eat is the bread of affliction, if we are willing to share it with someone else, we have already begun the process of turning affliction into freedom. 

And that is why the work of this group is so important, because it is all of us standing together, in defence of the religious liberty of each of us. And that stands a chance of success.

Whereas if we stand on our own, we stand no chance whatsoever. 

So standing together on this, across party lines, across religious lines, across denominational lines, is incredibly important.

The truth is that things are difficult in Europe and throughout the world.

I have been very, very shocked by what has been happening in Europe. To give you a very simple example, Paris was the intellectual capital of Europe in the end of the 19th century. And it was in the streets of Paris, in 1894, that a highly assimilated German-Austrian journalist from Vienna, who was reporting on the Dreyfus Trial for his newspaper back in Vienna, heard the crowds cry, “Morte aux Juifs,” Death to the Jews.

And he realised if that could happen in Paris, then Europe was no longer safe for Jews. The man was called Theodor Herzl, and that was the beginning of secular Zionism. 120 years later, in the summer of 2014, those same cries were heard in the streets of Paris.

And that they should happen within living memory of the Holocaust is quite difficult. That's Paris. Well, the French always go one better than the rest of us.

But you can imagine how shocking it was for us in Britain, when just a few days ago, a very sweet Muslim shopkeeper called Asad Khan sent out a little email to his customers, telling them how privileged he felt as a Muslim to live in a country that granted him and his children freedom. And he wished his Christian customers a happy Easter. 

A Sunni radical picked this up and within hours, had gone round to his shop, stabbed him 30 times, murdered him, stamped on his face.

And two days later, confessed quite openly that he had done so because the shopkeeper, who was an Ahmadiyya Muslim, had, in his words, disrespected Islam. And in justification of his act, he said, “If I hadn't done it, somebody else certainly would have done.” 

Now, that's difficult when you see that happening in Glasgow. And it's quite troubling. 

A young woman counsellor in Britain, just today, it's in today's news, has been removed from the Labour Party for tweeting quite openly that Hitler was the greatest man in history, et cetera, et cetera. This is happening in Britain.

And in Britain, tolerance is simply the default option. Since I've been spending a fair amount of time in New York, I know in New York when it gets cold, it gets really cold. When it gets hot, it gets really hot.

But in England, we do soggy, miserable to a T. And this is not a good environment for being a fanatic. So if you find fanaticism growing in Britain, it is troubling. It is really troubling.

Some years ago, the Archbishop of Canterbury called me in to address the Christian Muslim Forum, which I did. And we had a very interesting conversation with a lot of Muslim leaders from around Britain. Very nice and good people.

And at the end of our conversation, we had a buffet lunch and we took our food and sat where we chose. And a Muslim community leader from Liverpool, undoubtedly the most moderate man in the room, sat next to me and shared with me his concerns. 

He was from Liverpool. Liverpool have - am I speaking a foreign language here or do you know what soccer is? Liverpool, I mean, football clubs in Britain generate enormous passion. Almost in Liverpool, almost a religion. The famous manager of Liverpool Football Club, Bill Shankly, said, “Football isn't a matter of life and death. It's much more important than that.” And Liverpool had been playing a big match in the European Cup. And they happened to have a Jewish-Israeli footballer called Cohen, who scored the winning goal.

And this community leader from Liverpool told me, he said, “I stood up to cheer, it was the winning goal. And my son, who's 16 years old, pulled me down and said, ‘Dad, how can you cheer? He's a Jew’.” And then the community leader turned to me and said, “My son has not yet said, ‘Kill the Jews.’ But I don't know what's going to become of him.”

Now, if parents are powerless in the face of the radicalisation of their children, we're in a difficult situation. We're in a very difficult situation.

I don't know, Robbie, would you like me to quickly go through a little of the argumentation of “Not in God's Name?”

Moderator, Robert: Yes, please. Please, Jonathan. 

Rabbi Sacks: If I can just share with you one small fragment of my argument in “Not in God's Name,” which I wrote out of a dire sense of emergency. I'll share it with you.

And here it is. In one chapter, I think it's chapter three or four, I just note the fact that there were two remarkable manuscript discoveries in the Middle East in the 1940s. One of them very well known. A young shepherd, a Palestinian shepherd, looking after his sheep, idly throws a stone into one of the caves in the Dead Sea and hears the sound of breaking jars. And out of that came the great manuscript discovery we know as the Dead Sea Scrolls. 

We sometimes are less aware of an almost equally remarkable discovery in the same part of the world, not quite the same part of the world, but close, two years earlier, when somebody in the Sinai Desert found, buried a cache of early Christian manuscripts known as the Nag Hammadi Manuscripts. Found in the Sinai Desert in 1945. 

Now these two sets of manuscripts are different in many ways. The Dead Sea Scrolls are Jewish texts, the Nag Hammadi Manuscripts are Christian texts. There's several centuries between them. The Dead Sea Scrolls are between the first and third centuries BCE.

The Nag Hammadi Manuscripts date from the fourth century CE. But they're interesting in one respect. The Nag Hammadi Manuscripts are Coptic translations of texts originally written in Greek, including nine gospels, the text of which had not been available earlier. They're known as the Gnostic Gospels. 

What is striking is that although these were Jews and these were Christians and there were centuries between them, both of them had something unusual about them, because Judaism and Christianity are both monotheisms. But the Dead Sea Scrolls sectarians and the Nag Hammadi Christians, both groups were dualists.

That is, they believe that there are two forces operative in the universe, not just one. As well as the goodly and godly force for good, there's also a force for evil - Satan, the Devil, Antichrist, Lucifer, Prince of Darkness, name it, Mastema, name it what you will. Famously, the Dead Sea sectarians spoke about the coming clash between the children of light and the children of darkness.

The Nag Hammadi Christians believed that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament were completely separate deities. The God of the Old Testament was the one who created the universe. That's why it's so terrible.

The God of the New Testament is God who will save us from this world and from the physical pains and injustices. 

And it is very fascinating to ask, how is it that a monotheism gives rise to a dualism? I mean, we know the sources of dualism were not there at all. They came from some form of Zoroastrianism on the one hand and some form of Greek mystery cults on the other.

So they're not native to Judaism and Christianity and those sects remain just sects. They never had major impact. But what is it that forces a monotheist to become a dualist? 

And I suggest the answer is when those groups experience more cognitive dissonance than they can bear.

When the world that is unfolding out there is simply so unlike the world that should be evolving out there, because our sacred texts say so and because we followed all the instructions. 

So how was it, the Dead Sea sectarians wanted to know in essence, that the victory of the Hasmoneans over the Seleucid Greeks did not lead to the restoration of the glory of the Temple, but indeed the Hasmoneans just got thoroughly Hellenized themselves, and that is when a group of priests left Jerusalem and established their sect. 

So history didn't pan out the way the Book said it was going to do and obviously the Christians believed that the crucifixion, the death and the resurrection of Jesus was going to change the world.The world wasn't changing, therefore the real message of Christianity must not be a monotheist worldly one, but another worldly one, and so on. 

When there is too much cognitive dissonance, you resolve it by becoming a dualist.

The rabbis took the most powerful text in the whole of the Hebrew Bible, which is a verse in Isaiah which says, “Yotzer or uvoray choshech,” God forms light and creates darkness. “Yotzer shalom uvoray ra,” He makes peace and creates evil. So good and evil both come from God. We took that sentence, changed the last word to make it just slightly less jarring and put it as the first sentence of every morning's communal prayer. We still say that prayer every single morning. 

So when it is impossible to say this evil comes from God as punishment for what we've done because nothing we've done deserves punishment like that, you begin to think that there must be an evil force at work in the universe. And that's when monotheists become dualists.

Why is this important? I think it's terribly, terribly important. Because when monotheists become dualists, a switch is flipped that changes the entire evolution of a civilisation. 

Everything changes.

Why? Because when bad things happen to a group, it can ask one of two questions. And the entire future of the group will depend on which of those two questions it asks. It can ask, what did we do wrong? Or it can ask, who did this to us? 

If you're a monotheist, you ask, what did we do wrong? And that takes you in the direction of remorse, repentance, atonement.

But if you ask, who did this to us? Then you move in another direction altogether. Now, only very rarely does this become dangerous. The Dead Sea sectarians and the Nag Hammadi sectarians were not active. They weren't dangerous. They waited for God to deal with it. But under certain conditions, this can become very dangerous.

And I want to explain why. We know, from the last 20 years of work on evolutionary psychology, on what is called the evolution of cooperation, and on neuroscientific studies, that natural to human beings is what the late James Q. Wilson called “the moral sense.” We have an instinctive moral sense.

We know, through Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma and all this stuff, that every single group that wants to survive as a group has to operate a code called reciprocal altruism. If you act well to me, I will act well to you. 

And we know the neuroscience of this as well, which is that we have something that they call nowadays mirror neurons. And mirror neurons are the things that make us wince when we see somebody else in pain.

So we have, coming at us from two different directions, something called the moral sense, which makes it very hard for us to be really vicious, cruel, mean, or murderous towards our fellow human beings. There is such a thing as a moral sense. And we now know exactly how it evolved and how it affected the architecture of the brain. 

In other words, for real terror of the kind that we've been seeing around the world to emerge, something has to happen to disable the moral sense. 

I mean, there were terrorists who killed how many? 16, 20. I've forgotten the final number of holidaymakers on the Ivory Coast just a week or two ago. One of them was a five-year-old boy who, on his knees, was begging for his life. How do you actually shoot between the eyes a five-year-old boy begging for his life just because he's a Christian? You have to disable the moral sense.

And I want to explain to you how dualism does this. It does it in three ways, and they're very powerful. 

Number one, it dehumanises my opponents.

They are children of darkness. My side are the children of light. We are good. They are bad. And there's no light and shade in this. We are completely good. They are completely bad. And therefore, they are no longer truly human. 

The Hutus in Rwanda called the Tutsis in Yenzi “cockroaches.”

The Germans called the Jews “vermin,” “lice,” “cancer,” “a gangrenous limb.” Once you dehumanise your opponent, you disable the faculty that I've called the mirror neurons. Those people aren't human.

Therefore, you don't feel empathy or sympathy. Their pain does not bring you pain. 

Number two, the second you ask who did this to us instead of what did I do wrong, you have defined yourself as a victim.

If you are the victim, you have henceforth been liberated. You have abdicated all moral responsibility. 

I didn't do this. They did it to me, and I'm just responding to what they did to me. 

So you disable empathy and you disable responsibility. And those two switches switch off the moral sense.

But what is worst of all, is that the young people who become jihadists or suicide bombers or violent Christians attacking Muslims in Nigeria or Hindu nationalists doing likewise or even Buddhists in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, what you do is by portraying your people as the victim of somebody else's evil, you then enlist the highest form of altruism in the young people who say, ‘I must rise to the defence of my people.’

And the worse the act is, the holier it is, because ‘I'm doing this to protect God from the enemies of God and my people from the enemies of my people.’ 

And I had to coin a new phrase in the book to define this, and I call it “altruistic evil.”

Evil committed for the highest of motives. 

When you dehumanise, when you define yourself as a victim, and when you engage in altruistic evil, the entire infrastructure that keeps us from harming other human beings is disabled, and you can commit evil without remorse. This, to my mind, is very dangerous.

And I believe, ultimately, there's only one solution, and that solution is called monotheism. 

Why? Because the universe of polytheism sees the world full of powerful and contending forces, whereas monotheism takes all those forces and brings them together in one personality, the God of Abraham. And that transforms the human personality. 

And it was Jack Miles, a Jesuit, who made the very, very powerful point that that is the difference between Greek myth and Western drama, between Oedipus and Hamlet.

Oedipus is fighting a whole set of forces, already announced before his birth by the Delphic Oracle, and the more he, Oedipus, and his father, Laius, act to avoid the prophecies coming true, the more they make them come true. So Oedipus is fighting something outside himself which is bigger than himself. 

Whereas Hamlet, all the forces operating on Hamlet are inside his head, where the “native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er by the pale cast of thought.” The second we move from the question, ‘Who did this to me?’, the dualist question, to the monotheist question, ‘What did I do wrong?’ Then we move to that logic of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that says the real battlefield is the one in here.

The real heroism is not to conquer your enemies but to conquer the lesser angels of your nature. And when that happens, you generate a struggle in the mind which allows you to make peace in the world. 

That is a theological response to what is happening today to all the great religions in the world.

They are all somewhere in the world among the victims, and they are all somewhere in the world among the perpetrators. 

So it's important for each of us to recognise, and my book is mainly about these dark tendencies in Judaism, because I'm not going to speak as a Jew about Christian, Islamic, or any other theology, but I've tried to give an analysis of what it is to wrestle with the dangerous forces in your own faith. 

And I've been terribly moved that the most enthusiastic readers of the book have been Muslims, followed by Christians. Jews, well, you know, we all know better than to try to persuade Jews. But I mean, so there it is. 

Now, finally, to return to the actual topic of today, what can civil society do? The answer is it can do a great deal.

I made my work as Chief Rabbi over 22 years, I made that absolutely central to my work. So, for instance, the BBC used to ask me each year before our Jewish New Year to do a television programme as a message to the nation. On many of those occasions, I took the opportunity of making that television programme to show the most beautiful faces of the Muslim community in Britain.

So, for instance, in 2002, you may remember there was an American journalist called Daniel Pearl, who was murdered in Karachi. Well, so I took the Pakistani High Commissioner, Akbar Ahmed, and Daniel Pearl's father, Judea, and they came together and they became friends. And I filmed them, this extraordinary friendship that had built up between them, and I took them into a Muslim school and into a Jewish school.

We filmed the whole thing. It's incredibly moving. Judea Pearl said something very simple and incredibly powerful.

He said, “Hate killed my son, so I'm going to spend the rest of my life fighting hate.”

It was that simple. It was beautiful.

Another year, I took the cameras to an Orthodox Jewish day school under my aegis in Birmingham, which must be quite unusual because there are not many Orthodox Jewish day schools where the majority of pupils are Muslim. It's unusual. It was a big school. The Jewish community had numerically declined. So 80% of the kids were of other faiths, mainly Muslim, but also Sikh and Hindu and some Chinese. 

It was nice to see, to show on British television, a Muslim parent saying, “We moved to this part of Birmingham especially so we could send our kids to a Jewish school.”

And I sat with the kids for a day and we filmed this, just learning the Israel-Palestinian peace song, which we taught them to sing in Hebrew and Arabic and English. And it really moved people. They're panning across these five, six-year-olds singing about peace together.

We tried to do this in lots and lots of ways. In general, we tried, as religious leaders in Britain, behind the scenes, to really work at these good intercommunal relations, and they really happened. Britain became, I think, pretty much a model of good practise.

And the end result was that we realised we had to be there for others if we wanted others to be there for us.

So when antisemitism began for the first time to appear on British university campuses, I called in the leaders of the Jewish Student Association and I said, ‘You're going to be facing a lot of antisemitism for the next while.’ And they have for 14 years without interruption.

I said, ‘I'm going to ask you to do something unusual. Yes, we'll fight antisemitism and I will be there standing alongside you, but I want you to lead the fight against Islamophobia.’

You know, if you are hurting because people hate you, then stand in solidarity with other people who are also facing prejudice.

Out of that emerged something called the Coexistence Trust, Jews and Muslims fighting antisemitism and Islamophobia, together. And we know that we need support from governments, but we also know there are certain things governments can't do, that only we can do, by extending the hand of friendship across the boundaries between faiths. And that is an enormously unifying force, wherever it's done.

So I commend you yet again, say there is huge work for civil society to do. To say that for the first time in history, we recognise that all the faiths are at risk. And maybe for the first time in history, all the faiths can stand together, recognising our shared humanity under the sovereignty of God. Thank you very much indeed.

Robert: Well, thank you, Lord Sacks. Before we have a little conversation up here, I want to mention a couple of other very special people in attendance. I mentioned my Commission colleagues who will be participating in our event today, Commissioner Rosenthal, Commissioner Lantos-Swett, and Commissioner Zogby.

Also with us is Commissioner Thomas Reece, Father Thomas Reece, who is here. And we're delighted to have our friend and ex-officio member of our Commission, Ambassador-at-Large for Religious Freedom, David Saperstein, who's here with us today. 

Jonathan, looking at the situation in Europe in particular, what do we know about the worst elements? And I know there are many different categories and descriptions, but what do we know about the worst elements when it comes to actual violence against victims, be they Muslim victims or be they Jewish victims, or victims who are victimised because of some other faith? Are they very devout members of their own faiths? Do they tend to be disaffected people who are not particularly religious or particularly devout? I would imagine, for example, the skinhead element or the neo-Nazi element would not - but correct me if I'm wrong - be religiously affiliated or certainly not religiously devout.

What more do we know? I'm told, for example, by my friend Jennifer Bryson, who studied some of this - especially Islamist radicalism - that in many cases, the worst perpetrators of acts of violence, ostensibly in the name of Islam, are not actually religiously devout Muslims at all. Rather, they're often young men who do very un-Islamic things - smoke marijuana, they're involved in pornography heavily, and so forth. What do we know about these perpetrators? 

Rabbi Sacks: The first thing is we have to say what we don't know, because by now we know there's no psychological profile of a suicide bomber.

There's no way of scanning lots of people's records and saying that one will and that one will. There is no psychological profile. 

But in the case of Europe as a whole, they tend to be certainly people who are lost souls. They may have been radicalised in prison. In Britain, many of them have been radicalised in prison, so they are criminals with a criminal record. But in general, these are not people who know a great deal about Islam.

They may know no more than they picked up from the Internet and from a summer at a madrasa in Pakistan. So these are not the most religious. 

The problem is, though, that there are radicalising elements among the Imams in Britain.

There are preachers of hate. But the real radicalisation takes place not on the basis of religious texts, but a sense of ‘Who am I?’ a need to belong. 

I've tried to explain to people this. It's really tough for them to understand. When my late father came to Britain as a refugee from Poland, there was something to integrate into. Everyone knew what it was to be English.

The kids who came from Nazi Germany on Kindertransport, they used to describe how, for instance, the first meal they had in the non-Jewish home that had adopted them in England, and they hadn't eaten for a long time, so they were greedily eating up all the food. And one of them said to me, and my adoptive mother said to me, “In England, it's rude to eat all the food. You leave something on the plate.”

On the one hand, she was starving, but on the other hand, somebody was saying, ‘Guys, we want you to belong, so learn the rules.’ Today there aren't any rules of belonging. You know, I used to say that a whole generation of Jews had written on their tombstone ‘A proud Englishman and a proud Jew.’

Now I can tell you today what it is to be a proud Jew. I can't tell you what it is to be a proud Englishman. That is a problem.

And it was in 1897 that a great sociologist called Emil Durkheim published a book called “Suicide,” in which he said that where there is anomie, where there is the lack of a shared moral code in a society, the rate of suicide will rise. Now he never saw that that analysis might apply to today's suicide bomber, but it's the same principle. There is anomie out there.

And for anyone from a traditional background, you can't make yourself at home in a country where there is no ‘at home,’ where there's no code of ‘at-homeness,’ where everything is up to the individual, where there's no sexual ethos, there's no principle of modesty or obligation. 

So I try and explain to the government and to my fellow religious leaders, don't put all the blame on the radicals. We are at fault in not giving people principles to internalise.

And the former head of the Race Relations Commission, Trevor Phillips, will someday this week be presenting a programme on British television on the non-integration of the Muslims in Britain. And he will say, you know, we have to actually set out the rules much more clearly. 

So by and large these are people who hadn't been deeply devout, who don't know much about Islam. One of them notoriously carried with him a copy on his way to his mission, a copy of “Islam for Dummies.” And these are people who are really, you know, individuals searching for some cause and some group to identify with and to sacrifice their lives for. 

Robert: What are you wrestling in within the Jewish community when it comes to bad attitudes toward Muslims generally? The tendency to blame everybody, blame the group for the bad acts of the bad actors? 

Rabbi Sacks: You know, I think we all fall into the victim mentality when given the chance.

And when, you know, after the Holocaust, Jews fell into that victim mentality. But the people who never fell into that victim mentality were the Holocaust survivors. They never gave rise to that thing at all.

These were the people who stood up for Muslims being persecuted in Bosnia and Kosovo. They are the people who shared their platform on Holocaust Memorial Day with the victims of Rwanda. 

So I was able - I mean, if you read my books, a lot of them are arguments against the victim mentality within Judaism. A whole slew of them. And I would always take exactly the opposite approach. 

We are not going to blame anyone else.

We are going to work out our own problems ourselves. And then we are going to go out and stand in solidarity with others. 

And the fact that I was able to do this quite a lot, in using the Holocaust survivors as a role model, became very powerful. And we did then enlist all our rabbis, as well as all our young lay leaders, to become absolute and dedicated activists to good communal relations between Jews and Christians, Jews and Muslims, Jews and Sikhs and Hindus and the rest.

Robert: I mentioned those worrying figures about the emigration from France of so many French Jews in just the past few years. Is there something similar happening in Britain or is the situation at least a little better there? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, a lot of the French Jews are coming to Britain, so they think it's better. I am absolutely determined that we don't leave Britain, that we stand and fight, because as I have said many, many times, if it's not safe to be a Jew on the streets of Europe, then it's not safe to be a European on the streets of Europe. Full stop. 

No one can stand aside from this struggle and no one should run away from it. So I think Britain is a much more benign atmosphere.

But I can't necessarily say that for every country in Europe. Eight years ago, in May 2007, I went privately - I share this with you - I went privately to see together the three leaders of Europe, Angela Merkel, Head of the European Commission, the Hans, what's his name, Barosso, Manuel Barosso, Head of the EU, and Hans-Gert Pottinger, the Head of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, and I said to them, today the Jews of Europe are asking, ‘Is there a future for Jews in Europe?’ And this should concern you, the leaders of Europe. So that was eight years ago.

And unfortunately, the trajectory that's unfolded in Paris, in Brussels, and so on, is not a good one. So I think Britain is the exception here, because Jews today are leaving France, they're leaving Holland, they're leaving Denmark, Norway, Sweden, they're leaving Belgium, and, you know, the future of the other communities remains unclear. There are Jews in Germany, there are Jews in Italy, there are Jews in Spain.

So I don't know what, but I do see something very frightening happening there. 

Robert: How much of the problem between Jews and Muslims has to do with the passions aroused by the Israel-Palestine question, and how much is something else? 

Rabbi Sacks: Quite a lot of it is due to the Israel-Palestinian thing, because you can measure when levels are high and when they're low, and the high levels of antisemitic attacks always occur in conjunction with some particular moment of tension in the Middle East, in Israel, Palestine. So a lot of it is bound up with that.

And I keep saying to the Muslim community, ‘Guys, instead of importing a message of conflict from the Middle East to Britain, let's export a message of coexistence from Britain to the Middle East.’ And I have to say they don't disagree. I mean, the leadership of the Muslim community understands that this is what we should do.

Robert: We followed on our commission with great interest the recent meeting in Marrakesh, in which Muslims from many different traditions and cultures, Muslim leaders, gathered to discuss the question of how to protect the rights of non-Muslims in predominantly Muslim societies. Is that something that you yourself followed? Have you seen the declaration coming out of Marrakesh? 

Rabbi Sacks: Yeah, it was a very important declaration. 

Robert: What do you make of it? 

Rabbi Sacks: I don't know what I make of it, but in general, I believe that religious leadership can do so much more than it has been empowered to do.

So for instance, in 2001, the then Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan and I persuaded George Carey, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, to convene a group of Jews, Muslims, and Christians from the Middle East, and that was called the Alexandria Process. And he did it, and he did it brilliantly. This was George Carey.

It was a beautiful thing. Muslims, Jews, and Christians really wrestled together and came out with a significantly enhanced mutual understanding. What sunk it was that in the end, it never meshed with any political process.

It was never recognised as a kind of track-two diplomacy. So they came out with these wonderful resolutions, but they never got anywhere, and that's how you guarantee that the next effort will be much harder. 

Now, I have to tell you, a recent report just came out on the Oslo peace process between 1993 and 2000, and it came out with the conclusion that every aspect of relationships between Israelis and Palestinians was looked at except one, the religious dimension.

How are you going to create peace in the Middle East between Jews, Muslims, and Christians without confronting the religious dimension? 

I, as long as Tony Blair was Prime Minister, his press officer, Alistair Campbell, would never let him talk about his religious beliefs. So after he was Prime Minister... 

Robert: He famously said, “We don't do God.”

Rabbi Sacks:  We don't do God, exactly. So after he was Prime Minister, once he resigned or retired, I said to him, “You can now do God.” And I did the... For BBC television, I did the first interview with Tony Blair when he was no longer prime minister. And he spoke very eloquently, among other things, of how his own religious beliefs and his own religious situation at that time, a Protestant married to a Catholic. He's since converted to Catholicism. But at that time, how his own religious situation helped him on the Northern Ireland peace process. And he said, ‘What was different for me, between me and the other people who tried bringing peace to Northern Ireland, is they saw religion as the problem. I saw it as part of the solution.’ 

Robert: What do you attribute that attitude that would factor out of all things religion? Is it just the general lack of understanding of religion among secular elites?

Rabbi Sacks: Huge. I mean, they really don't like religion very much.

There's a very distinguished philosopher in New York who once very honestly wrote, “I hope God doesn't exist.”

Robert: I'll say the name, it was Thomas Nagel. 

Rabbi Sacks: Anyway, so, you know, there is a very strong secularism that affects British television, for instance, not so much British radio. And it's kind of been eased out of the newspapers. And that's terrible, because religion is playing an ever greater part in people's lives. The 21st century is going to be more religious than the 20th century was.

And you can't keep behaving as if it didn't exist, which the French policy of laïcité actually does. You know, kind of, you can't talk about it. 

Robert: Since we're on laïcité, how seriously are you concerned? What level of concern should we have about some of the matters that I mentioned in my opening remarks? The prohibitions of halal and kosher slaughter, the prohibitions on infant male circumcision, the prohibitions on the wearing of the headscarf by Muslim women or small jewellery items concerning having the Star of David or the cross in French or Belgian public institutions? 

Rabbi Sacks: Well, many of these things originated in France, not all of them. And you can see what happened in France. I mean, it achieved nothing. It just made France an obvious target for terrorist attack.

I mean, you don't deal with religious difference by trying to impose it top-down by government fiat. I mean, that is an absolute... It had to fail as a policy. 

Robert: Before our time is exhausted, I'd like you to say a word about the situation in Eastern Europe. We've spoken mostly about the Western European countries. They have their particular problems. What is your perception of the situation, especially with the migration crisis and so forth, of the situation in the East European and former Soviet countries? 

Rabbi Sacks: Oddly enough and ironically enough, in a situation where for 70 years Jews were not able to practise Judaism in public - indeed religion was simply forced underground - today there is less antisemitism in those FSU countries than in most of the countries of Central and Western Europe.

I mean, antisemitism has become really, really serious in countries like Hungary, for instance. Poland is not a great place to be. But in the former FSU countries, for the most part, there's been a revitalisation of Jewish life, and the lay and religious leaders of those countries tell me that antisemitism is at a low ebb compared to the rest of Europe.

Robert: What about hostility to Muslims?

Rabbi Sacks: I mean, in Russia there is significant... You know, I mean, there really is significant hostility, but I don't have direct communication with East European Muslim leaders. 

Final remarks and continuation of programme, without Rabbi Sacks