Jewish leaders have urged the University of Edinburgh to uphold a controversial definition of antisemitism after the institution revealed it was reviewing its support for it.
The university said on Sunday it could unadopt the internationally recognised definition written by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which its critics argue restricts freedom of speech on Israel and Palestine.
The issue came into sharp focus after a review of Edinburgh’s links to transatlantic slavery and empire called on the university to unadopt it and to divest from companies allegedly complicit in Israel’s military action in Gaza and the West Bank.
The Union of Jewish Students and the IHRA said on Monday the definition, described by the IHRA as a “non-legally binding practical tool” to help identify and address antisemitism, was widely supported by British Jews and Jewish students.
Louis Danker, the president of the UJS and a recent Edinburgh graduate, said the proposal was upsetting. The IHRA definition had been consistently and unanimously supported at UJS conferences, he added.
“We remind the academics who authored this review the principle of self-definition applies to all minorities, including Jewish students,” he said. Edinburgh “must ensure that the IHRA definition is protected, and that antisemitism is treated with the same severity as all forms of discrimination”.
The IHRA said more than 40 countries had adopted its definition. “We hope any review is informed by a full understanding of the working definition’s purpose and value in protecting Jewish communities,” a spokesperson said.
Peter Mathieson, the university’s principal, told the Guardian it had begun reviewing its investments in Israel and its stance on the definition before the race review made its recommendations but had not made a final decision on what action to take.
The university’s discussions with Jewish students, staff and national bodies had made clear there “is not a unanimity of view” among British Jews, he said. “It’s not straightforward to say that we should adopt or not adopt that definition, or indeed other definitions, not just of antisemitism but of Islamophobia and [so on].”
Vincent Fean, a trustee of the Britain Palestine Project, and a former consul general to Jerusalem, said the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, published in 2021 by academics specialising in the Holocaust, Jewish and Middle East studies, was a much more useful text than the IHRA’s.
The Jerusalem text distinguished “between legitimate criticism of Israel and hatred of Jews”, he said, and he welcomed proposals by the Edinburgh review for it to set up a new Palestinian research centre to address thehistorical exclusion of Palestinian scholarship.
Activists with the University of Edinburgh’s Justice for Palestine Society and the university’s branch of Kehillah, a group of anti-Zionist Jewish students, also urged Edinburgh to abandon the IHRA definition. It “stifles criticism of Israel by designating such criticism as antisemitism. As stated by Kehillah, this definition silences the plurality of Jewish opinion on Zionism,” they said.
Meanwhile, Fiona McClement, the university’s head of lead for equality, diversity and inclusion, said it would intensify efforts to decolonise its teaching and create a “healthier racial climate on campus”, after the review into its historical links to slavery and racism.
The report found that previous attempts to address longstanding biases and omissions in its curriculum had been patchy, while Edinburgh’s recruitment of staff and students had failed to achieve greater diversity.
The report recommended Edinburgh establish a dedicated centre “for the study of racisms, colonialism and black anti-violence”, with funding to support senior researchers and which should be accessible to the wider community. Mathieson said the university was helping to find funding for the centre.
Other recommendations include a new undergraduate course focused on decolonisation, starting next year, and centralising the overhaul of its curriculum “to generate a more unified and cohesive strategy for implementing change and helping [departments] address their colonial and racial legacies”.
McClement said that although Scotland was less diverse than other parts of the UK “there is no reason why we shouldn’t be working extremely hard to be a place where Black scholars and Black students really want to come and study”.
Figures from 2022-23 show that fewer than 1% of staff and about 2% of students identify as Black, well below the average for the UK’s elite Russell Group universities.
Admitting that changing Edinburgh’s profile “is not happening overnight”, McClement said students “seeing themselves represented in the curriculum” would have a big impact, alongside steps to recruit more black academic staff.
After the review’s publication on Sunday, senior academics at Edinburgh are also pressing for more funding to investigate new evidence it received millions of pounds in funds from transatlantic slavery and the empire that have not yet been traced.
They believe Edinburgh was given far more than the £30m in present day value gifted by former students and donors linked to enslavement and colonisation since the 1790s.
They have identified potential links with the East India Company, the mercantile organisation that first colonised India on behalf of the British monarchy, and with apartheid South Africa and the Middle East in the early 20th century.
They said there was documentary evidence of substantial bequests and gifts from donors known to be involved in enslavement in the university’s accounts that needed detailed investigation.
Dr Simon Buck, one of the lead researchers in Edinburgh’s inquiry, believes the sums he unearthed are a small fraction of the sums “swishing around” in the university’s accounts. “This report should be a starting point; it should be a living project and not something stamped ‘there’s nothing else to see here’,” he said.
Dr Daryl Green, a co-director of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research Collections, who helped the researchers unearth new evidence in its archives, said he would like to hire up to eight archivists to help properly catalogue the documents.
“There’s a huge amount of information in the archive that could be unlocked,” Green said. “We’ve done a good job of being custodians of the documents, but we’ve never had the resources to release it in a meaningful and useful way.”
The university’s decolonisation review identified numerous gaps in its financial records which the researchers did not have enough time to investigate.
Three of its four colleges were unable to provide up-to-date valuations for bequests linked to the review, while 12 bequests from Robert Halliday Gunning, a benefactor whose wealth came largely from Brazilian goldmines using enslaved labour, were now absorbed into combined funds held by the school of medicine.
“You can’t really understand the history of Scotland without understanding the history of imperialism and increasingly the history of Atlantic slavery,” Buck said.