ST PAUL and St James both warned against gossip. But, in an episode of Why Do We Do That? (Radio 4, last Friday) — “an anthropologist’s guide to the modern world” — Ella Al-Shamahi discovered that, while “a lot of religions and cultures around the world do see gossip negatively,” the academic pendulum is swinging towards seeing it as good. Gossip could play an important part in policing the boundaries of acceptable social norms and warning people about rogues.

The author Kelsey McKinney spoke of rebellion against a “very religious” upbringing — something shared with Al-Shamahi — as the driver of her curiosity about the positive side of gossip. This is one of the most human of activities, after all: one needs language to gossip.

But not all academics are convinced. The anthropologist Dr Nicole Hagen characterises gossip as “informational aggression”, largely engaged in by women, paralleling the physical aggression more typically engaged in by men. Her experiments, conducted in widely varying cultures, find that gossip is not generally used to protect groups against outside threats, but to undermine internal rivals.

Although one might have thought — incorrectly — that it was difficult to make a case for gossip, surely nobody could argue in favour of Auschwitz. That is why it’s difficult to write a critical review of the latest edition of Sunday Worship (Radio 4), even more so as it was the valedictory programme of the veteran producer Philip Billson, a Manchester lay canon, after 40 years at the mixing desk.

Lovingly produced as it was, it left me dissatisfied: it was not an act of Christian worship, nor was it, despite some beautiful liturgical singing by Amos Wittenberg with his silken light baritone, an act of Jewish worship.

Instead, Amos’s father, Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, narrated his family history on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Jonathan’s great-grandfather, Jakob, was the rabbi of Holesov in today’s Czechia. The bourgeois Mitteleuropäisch world of the Wittenbergs, encapsulated by the beautiful new Holesov synagogue built in 1893, disintegrated in a few years. Yakov, his wife, Bettina, and all the extended family, were murdered by the Nazis, because they were Jewish. Familiarity with these horrors should never dissuade us from restating why they happened.

In 1938, Bettina was refused an immigration visa for British Mandatory Palestine, as the quota had been reached. We were invited to draw lessons on refugees for our own time. But we all know that the situation in inter-war Palestine was too complicated for this simple narrative.

The survivors of the cataclysm inflicted on European Jews had to restart in a new psychological landscape. In the week of Donald Trump’s re-inauguration and Axel Rudakubana’s plea of guilty to the Southport murders, this programme was full of BBC progressive assumptions taken as agreed on by all decent people; and yet, much as I dislike the new thought-world now emerging, assumptions are crumbling by the month.