One of the most striking features of the drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office, which reflected the real life experience of the victimised sub-postmasters, was the insistence from the Post Office helpline that each of them was alone in their predicament with the Horizon software. To be alone is not a sin or a crime, but it introduces fault if you are the only one not to make a system work.

The sense of being alone is psychologically oppressive and weakening but being outnumbered is something all minorities live with, by definition.

Television news showed a demo in Trafalgar Square marking a hundred days that Israeli hostages have been in Hamas captivity. Jewish News reported it thus: ‘Thousands flock to Trafalgar Square, united by one cry: Bring them home now.’ As with our march against antisemitism – which was larger, estimated at more than 100,000 – the atmosphere was sombre and although this was publicised as ‘Stand With Israel’, there was nothing martial about any aspect of the gathering. The Chief Rabbi quoted Psalm 121, ‘I lift up my eyes to the hills,’ and there were speeches from family members of the kidnapped.

On Twitter, photos of the rally taken from the air were mocked by anti Zionists who denied that thousands had gathered, indeed, insisted that there were fewer than a hundred. I was there and know this is nonsense but perhaps they know it too; they just like to insist that our numbers are so few that we are virtually alone.

The popularity of ‘Everyone hates you,’ or ‘So many countries expelled you,’ as a message sent to Jewish people on Twitter shows the impulse to isolate a notional enemy or a potential trouble maker. ‘The whole world knows…’ is also a popular phrase. Sometimes this progresses to ‘You’re lying and you know it,‘ which advances the view that the solitary interlocutor is not only alone but shares in the knowledge of ‘the whole world’, to their detriment. Isolate the person and then negate their reality.

I am often told by sympathetic, thoughtful and determined non Jewish allies that we Jews are not alone at all, and they will not allow us to be on our own. I believe it and am indescribably grateful for it.

It is nearly forty years since I saw Claude Lanzmann’s nine hour film Shoah, which comprised interviews with survivors as well as some nazi perpetrators, alongside footage of the camps. One interview stayed with me more than any other. A man spoke of hiding in the sewer when the ghetto was liquidated. Those hiding alongside him were somehow discovered; they were shot dead and he was on his own. He said, ‘I thought I was the last Jew in the world.’

I remember this when it seems that we are few and isolated; how I had imagined his loneliness, even while knowing with the hindsight of the late twentieth century that we would, as Eylon Levy put it in his speech in Trafalgar Square, rise from the ashes and live.