Michael Moritz, a British-American investor who is one of the wealthiest citizens of the U.K., said it was now “an uncomfortable place for Jews” and that he was applying for German citizenship as a form of “insurance policy.”
Moritz, a billionaire venture capitalist who made a fortune by placing early bets on companies such as Google and PayPal, said this in an interview aired Tuesday on the BBC about his newly published memoir titled “Ausländer: One Family’s Story of Escape and Exile,” Ausländer being German for foreigner, about his family’s treatment by the Nazis in Germany.
“Antisemitism is always in the air” in the U.K. he said. He was applying to become a German citizen as an “insurance policy,” Moritz, 71, said.
Germany, he said, is “the one place in Europe where what happened [nearly] 100 years ago forms a very central part of the educational system, so you have generations that have been reared with that as part of their consciousness.” That doesn’t “prevent dreadful things happening in the future,” he said, “but it gives me some mild form of reassurance.”
He also said that the U.K. was less business-friendly than the U.S. or China, and that AI could be “deeply disruptive” for white-collar workers.
Due to antisemitism, there are “kids in north-west London who no longer wear their school blazers” to avoid being identified as attending Jewish schools, Moritz noted. “It’s all these anecdotes that strike home more than anything else,” he said, adding he has relatives in Manchester, where a jihadist killed two people at a synagogue on Yom Kippur last year.
Antisemitism has surged in both the U.K. and in Germany in recent years, with an all-time high of antisemitic incidents recorded in Britain in 2025 (3,700 cases) and 8,627 cases in Germany in 2024.
