This photo does not show a shop window in Berlin, Leipzig or Treuchtlingen after the night of November 9, 1938, but was taken in Liverpool in August 1947.

Few people remember it, but in the summer of 1947, a terrible heat wave swept across Europe, not quite as intense as that of 2003, but spread over a substantially longer period.

But it’s not the only event that’s been almost completely forgotten about this summer, or, when it’s mentioned again, we are presented with a rather suspicious introduction, already heard elsewhere, every time it comes to excuse or exonerate the same old “international community”, in this case, that’s what we get:

In 1947 a washed-out summer had followed a harsh winter, and Britain was in the grip of recession as it struggled to restart its economy after the Second World War. On the August bank holiday weekend, the weather in Manchester had turned hot and stuffy. Trade in the shops was poor, rationing was in full swing and many workers had opted to stay in the city for the long weekend.

The only original aspect of this introduction is to add a meteorological touch to explain anti-Semitism. Only then, having skewed our reading, do we begin to broach the subject:

In cinema queues and on street corners, one topic dominated the conversation: the murder of two British army sergeants by Irgun paramilitaries in Mandate Palestine. The Irgun was one of several Zionist groups fighting a guerrilla war to force British troops out of the territory and establish the state of Israel. It had kidnapped the two sergeants in retaliation for death sentences passed on three of its own fighters. The three men were executed by British forces on 29 July, and two days later the bodies of the soldiers were discovered amid the trees of a eucalyptus grove near Netanya. They had been hanged and the ground beneath them booby-trapped with a landmine.

As the front page of this newspaper shows, it’s not the far right that’s turning up the heat against a backdrop of economic crisis and rationing. Also noteworthy on the right is the reference to the heatwave and drought in Europe.

It was just one incident of many in a vicious conflict. Militants had bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem a year previously, and even set off small bombs in London. But the “sergeants affair”, as it came to be known, caused public outrage in mainland Britain.

On 1 August, a Friday, the Daily Express reported the story on its front page, prominently displaying a photograph of the bodies which, it promised its readers, would be a “picture that will shock the world”. British Jewish leaders condemned the killings, but more lurid details followed in the next day’s papers. That weekend, as Walter Lever, a working-class Jewish resident of Manchester recalled, “There was nothing to do but walk the streets . . . discussing the newspaper,” the story of the hanged sergeants “taking precedence over the week’s murders and rapes”.

There were already signs that a backlash was imminent. In Birkenhead, near Liverpool, slaughterhouse workers had refused to process any more meat for Jewish consumption until the attacks on British soldiers in Palestine stopped. Around Merseyside, the anger was starting to spill on to the streets as crowds of angry young men gathered in Jewish areas.

On Sunday afternoon the trouble reached Manchester. Small groups of men began breaking the windows of shops in Cheetham Hill, an area just north of the city centre which had been home to a Jewish community since the early 19th century. The pubs closed early that day because there was a shortage of beer, and by the evening the mob’s numbers had swelled to several hundred. Most were on foot but others drove through the area, throwing bricks from moving cars.

Soon the streets were covered in broken glass and stones and the crowd moved on to bigger targets, tearing down the canopy of the Great Synagogue on Cheetham Hill Road and surrounding a Jewish wedding party at the Assembly Hall. They shouted abuse at the terrified guests until one in the morning.

The next day, Lever said, “Cheetham Hill Road looked much as it had looked seven years before, when the German bombers had pounded the city for 12 hours. All premises belonging to Jews for the length of a mile down the street had gaping windows and the pavements were littered with glass.”

By the end of the bank holiday weekend, anti-Jewish riots had also taken place in Glasgow and Liverpool. There were minor disturbances, too, in Bristol, Hull, London and Warrington, as well as scores of attacks on Jewish property across the country. A solicitor in Liverpool and a Glasgow shopkeeper were beaten up. Nobody was killed, but this was the most widespread anti-Jewish violence the UK had ever seen. In Salford, the day after a crowd of several thousand had thrown stones at shop windows, signs appeared that read: “Hold your fire. These premises are British.”

Arsonists in West Derby set fire to a wooden synagogue; workers at Canada Dock in Liverpool returned from the holidays to find “Death to all Jews” painted above the entrance. And in Eccles, a former sergeant major named John Regan was fined £15 for telling a crowd of 700: “Hitler was right. Exterminate every Jew – every man, woman and child. What are you afraid of? There’s only a handful of police.”

As for the events in Palestine in 1947, some might argue that a people oppressed on a land from which it has been robbed has a legitimate right to resort to armed struggle, including terrorism, to oust the colonial power, but more likely, nothing will be uttered, I guess it would be deemed more suitable to forget this period altogether and avoid unfortunate parallels with the present situation in the region. (Yet, the startling Bristol Mirror headline Jewish terrorists urge total war on Britain could be seen as still relevant today – only, adding the US).

To conclude, the outbreak of simultaneous unrest in several British cities in 1947 shows that it’s not necessary for the political regime in power to organize, instigate or condone it. Clearly, Clement Attlee’s government had nothing to do with it, but on the contrary, it also shows that the direct responsibility of the National Socialist hierarchy at the highest level is not automatically evident in the Kristallnacht of 1938 either. It has to be proven.

Editor’s note: The 1947 riots are well known among British nationalists. This is a 2015 article by Francis Carr Begbie: