Rarely, if ever, had so many British grandees gathered under the domed roof of the Hampstead Synagogue as on the occasion of Sir Isaiah Berlin's memorial service on a blustery morning in January 1998. The grandees were mostly of a liberal, secular kind, as Berlin had been himself. But this was an Orthodox synagogue. The men were seated separately from the women. There was Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, and there Lord Annan, looking faintly Russian in a black astrakhan coat, and there Lord Carrington, and Lord Gowrie, whose splendid hair resembled a powdered wig, and, as a touch of peculiar grandeur, Lord Menuhin as ‘representative of Her Majesty the Queen’. There they all were, the great and the good, in electric-blue yarmulkes, Garrick Club ties and trilby hats, standing up as the Kaddish was read for a man born in Riga who had always insisted that he was not an Englishman but an Anglophile Jew.

The service was Sir Isaiah's posthumous way of asserting tradition, of paying ceremonial deference to faith and continuity, without which he believed liberalism could not be sustained. Reason is reason, faith is faith, and in Berlin’s mind it made no sense to reconcile the two in some wishy-washy attempt at religious reform. My great-grandfather had worshipped at this synagogue. But it was too late for me to feel unselfconscious there. Whatever sense of ancestral continuity I might have felt, it didn't run through the synagogue, let alone an Orthodox synagogue. On this Anglo-Jewish occasion, I felt neither Anglo nor Jewish.

Lord Annan, that consummate English grandee, recalled his long friendship with Isaiah Berlin. He spoke with tears in his eyes and a dramatic vibrato. The delivery owed something to the style of John Gielgud in the 1950s Old Vic. The sentiments were of that same generation. Lord Annan remembered how, at the beginning of the war, the continuity of Britain itself was in the balance, and the State of Israel still a distant dream. It was a moving speech, because what was being mourned was the passing not just of a great man, but of an idea of England, of Berlin's England.

A synagogue was a good place for such an act of mourning. For the memorial service brought to mind that other synagogue, built in 1700 by a Quaker in the City of London.