The Bhutto degree
Sir: As Professor Trevor-Roper has now repeated in print remarks for which we were previously dependent on reporters, some comment is now possible.
As it happens, I voted on the same
side as he did in the Bhutto debate. It did not occur to me to scrutinise my colleagues in the division lobby racially (I was more interested in their politics), but I gather that I was not the only Jew
to vote as 1 did, and the original statement "only one Jew voted for us" has been tacitly abandoned. No numerical estimate has been offered of the number of Jews who voted on the other side. I can hardly think that there can
have been more than twenty by any conceivable ,definition, and they will scarcely have played a decisive role in the vote of 239 to 183. The names which have been mentioned to me are pretty well all distinguished by their total lack of interest in any Jewish matter; one is notoriously a Jesuit.
Professor Trevor-Roper is evidently
puzzled by the response to what he intended as an innocent sociological observation. As I have known him for twenty years, I accept absolutely that it was so intended, but I cannot understand why he is puzzled. Two points seem to be relevant. Firstly, it seems clear that he is operating with a definition of a Jew which must be pretty close to that of the Nuremberg Laws. Secondly, past history has made it inevitable that his remarks would be taken as indicating that he thought that there was a conscious 'Jewish' line on the matter. Considerations of this kind lie near the root of the more pernicious 'forms of anti-semitism. For the first time in my forty-seven years, nearly thirty of them spent in Oxford, I find myself wondering whether something I
• say is going to be assessed by other people as possibly influenced by my Jewishness, and I find this extremely unpleasant. This is certainly no less undesirable a state of affairs than any attributed by Professor Trevor-Roper to the woolliness of the academic left.
D. M. Lewis Christ Church, Oxford
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