Routledge Revivals: Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity (1989)

Volume II: Minorities and Outsiders

Raphael Samuel, Raphael Samuel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315450506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

First published in 1989, this is the second of three volumes exploring the changing notions of patriotism in British life from the thirteenth century to the late twentieth century and constitutes an attempt to come to terms with the power of the national idea through a historically informed critique.

This volume examines how national identity has competed with alternative, more personal forms of belonging — such as Roman Catholicism, Judaism and Nonconformism — as well looking at femininity in relation to the state. Contemporary British society's capacity to create outsiders is discussed and the introductory essay shows how this may shape our misunderstanding of earlier phases of national development.

Minorities

15

Jews in London, 1880–1914

DAVID FELDMAN

I

In what sense and to what extent was it possible for Jews and Jewish immigrants to become English in the late Victorian and Edwardian years? In this essay I examine the problem of anglicisation in its most obviously ideological aspect: the ways in which immigrants adjusted and were enjoined to adjust politically and culturally to English conditions. There was a profusion of articles, pamphlets and speeches prescribing different alignments of Jewish and English, immigrant and native identities in this period. It is these diverse projections of the Jewish future in England, their expression and partial realisation in conflicting institutions that will be at the centre of my discussion.

Over the last two decades the history of the Jewish minority in England, and particularly the history of Jewish immigration from eastern Europe, has received an increasing amount of attention from historians. One stimulus to this minor renaissance has been the increased number and diversity of immigrants and ethnic minorities in postwar Britain. As these groups have been perceived in relation to problems of social policy and political practice it is not surprising that some have turned to the study of historical precedents.¹

In consequence the history of Jewish immigrants has sometimes been presented as a model which other, more recent, newcomers might follow profitably. This view draws upon the celebratory and modernisationist perspectives dominating mainstream Anglo-Jewish historiography. The celebration is twofold. British society is applauded as having been tolerant and accommodating of its Jewish minority. At the same time, the established Jewish community is congratulated for having aided east European immigrants in adjusting to the exigencies of life in Britain.² It is in Gartner’s The Jewish Immigrant in England that the immigrants’ history is most clearly presented as one of their entry to the modern world. In this interpretation, their origins in the small towns and villages of Lithuania, Poland and the Ukraine were bounded by a ‘traditional way of life’ and their ‘enlightenment’ in England was ‘simply … an inevitable consequence of migration to a western country’. The immigrants’ own efforts, in contrast, are seen to have been aimed largely at preserving the habits of life in eastern Europe.³

In this interpretation, relations of power are not considered to have been central to the processes of cultural transformation; rather, the experience of Jewish immigrants is rendered as a history of socialisation and adaptation. As in other areas of social history, in the historiography of Jewish immigration models of ‘socialisation’ have been challenged by historians who see instead the action of ‘social control’.⁴ This re-interpretation has been allied to a marxian analysis that places class interest and class conflict as the central organising principles of the Jewish past in England. Accordingly, the immigrants’ anglicisation is seen to have been an expression of a successful programme of bourgeois social control; one in which the Anglo-Jewish elite played a central role. Writing about Manchester, for example, Bill Williams has argued that the immigrants’ anglicisation ‘served most of all the class ambitions of the Jewish bourgeoisie’.⁵

Following their emergence in other areas of enquiry, concepts such as ‘modernisation’ and ‘social control’ have been brought to bear upon the history of Jews in England. In this essay the emphasis will be upon their shortcomings in explaining the process of anglicisation among Jewish immigrants. It may be that the attempt to provide an alternative perspective has implications for our understanding of cultural change more widely. In another respect too, this is a history whose interest extends beyong the study of the Jewish minority. Jews and immigrants were two groups against which the nature and limits of national identity were tested and contested between 1865 and 1914, and as such they can illumine its history from a perspective which is both pertinent and unfamiliar.

II

Colonies of Jewish immigrants from Russia, Poland, Galicia and Roumania gathered in several English cities between 1870 and 1914. Above all they congregated in the East End of London. Between 1871 and 1911 the Russian and Russian Polish population in London, a modest indicator of the Jewish immigrant presence, grew from 5,000 to 63,000. Throughout this period about 80 per cent of these immigrants were concentrated in an expanding Jewish East End. In fact, the Jewish population of the district was much larger than the number of immigrants alone. In part this was due to an earlier Jewish settlement, but it was also a reflection of the rapid rate of natural increase among the immigrants. In 1903 it was estimated that between 45–50 per cent of the population of St George’s in the East and Whitechapel was Jewish.⁶ To many English observers the immigrants’ English-born children dramatised the need for an effective programme of anglicisation.

Jewish immigrants to London entered a city containing an established Jewish population. In 1880 this numbered over 40,000 and comprised two-thirds of all Jews in England. The leaders of Anglo-Jewry sought to exercise the predominant influence over the immigrants’ anglicisation. As others have noted, this elite was abidingly anxious to present a favourable image of Jews to gentile society.⁷ In consequence the nature of their interaction with the state and society was central to their responses to Jewish immigration.

The institutions of London Jewry were reformed in the mid-nineteenth century in ways that highlight the pattern of the communal elite’s social and political integration within the majority society. In 1859 the distribution of poor relief was reorganised, along lines later adopted by the Charity Organisation Society, by the newly-established Jewish Board of Guardians (JBG). Of equal significance was the consolidation of the Jewish Board of Deputies’ (JBD) role as mediator between the state and organised Jewry. In this respect the Marriage Registration Act of 1836 was a landmark. The Act recognised the JBD as the power competent to record marriages and to ensure they were correctly performed ‘according to the usages of the Jews’.⁸ These institutions and others were dominated by a ‘cousinhood’ of leading families.⁹ At the summit, prominence in Jewish affairs was accompanied by recognition in the majority society – in business, philanthropy and, increasingly, politics. In short, Jewish immigrants entered a city in which there was an established structure of communal authority and a leadership that sought to mediate Jewish integration with the state and to shape their image within public discourse.

English Jews did not welcome immigration from eastern Europe. Indeed some of the greatest efforts of Anglo-Jewish institutions were spent in preventing migrants from settling in Britain. This policy reflected the fears of the capital’s propertied classes in general for the effects of immigration upon the labour and housing markets of the East End.¹⁰ Yet there were also particular problems confronting English Jews as a result of the influx. These stemmed from the uncertain integration of English Jewry within the polity and the nation.

The Parliamentary Oaths Act of 1866 allowed Jews to sit in Parliament upon terms of equality with other Englishmen. However, the acquisition of virtual political equality by Jews failed to kill the Jewish Question; their place within the nation remained problematic and subject to debate. As with other groups, the admission of Jews to the political nation was conditional upon them conforming to ideals of citizenship and respectability. It depended upon the abandonment of those signs of Jewish particularism which might offend these ideals; signs of national separateness above all.¹¹ Religious toleration thus developed alongside demands for other sorts of conformity.

Jewish emancipation was an expression of a view of the political nation that was in one obvious sense more inclusive. In this, Jewish emancipation contributed to the forces undermining its own stability. The demands for conformity with the nation now reached beyond the former inability of professing Jews to take a Christian oath, on which ground they had been excluded from being members of parliament and from other offices, and touched more widely upon their capacity to identify with the texture and traditions of national life. It was this which George Eliot noted in 1879. Reflecting upon the rise of anti-Jewish attitudes, she sympathised with those who were apprehensive at ‘what must follow from the predominance of wealth acquiring immigrants, whose appreciation of our political and social life must often be as approximate or fatally erroneous as their delivery of our language’.¹² Eliot wrote in the early part of a period during which ceremonial practices multiplied, the cult of the monarchy being only the most promiscuous.¹³ One effect of these formal affirmations of national identity was a growing pressure upon groups – such as Jews – whose feeling for the nation was held in question to demonstrate their loyalty. It followed that Jewish approval of Disraeli’s belligerent support for Turkey against Russia between 1876–8, if it was given or imputed from particularly Jewish motives (on account of financial investments and the better treatment of their co-religionists under Turkish rule), could be seen to be incompatible with their obligations as citizens. Indeed, Gladstone believed the Prime Minister’s ‘Jewish feeling’ was the key to his policy, and T. P. O’Connor accused Disraeli of subverting national policy to Jewish ends.¹⁴

The emergence of ideological anti-semitism in the late 1870s in a form that presented Jews as unassimilable to the nation, fundamentally upon grounds of race, can thus be seen as one edge of a more general tendency. It was not merely a new formulation of an ‘ancient hatred’, as historians and some contemporaries perceived; it was also an attempt to define the nation in terms so exclusive that Jews were not seen as merely unpatriotic Englishmen but not as Englishmen at all.¹⁵ It was in the writings of Goldwin Smith that criticism of the Jews’ conduct over the Eastern Question was most clearly developed into a critique of Jewish emancipation. ‘Judaism, like the whole circle of primitive religion of which it is a survival, is a religion of race’, Smith argued.¹⁶ This backwardness was predicated upon the emergence of a higher, more rational, more universal religion – Christianity. ‘The affinity of Judaism is not to non-conformity but to caste’, he concluded; an inexorable barrier to the development of patriotism.¹⁷

These arguments did not go unanswered by leading Jews, but their response to the stresses of emancipation was to insist ever more firmly upon the correctness of its premises. Articles written by them yielded a stark reassertion of the religious definition of the Jewish community and the firm relegation of any national aspects of Jewish tradition to an antique past. Far from yearning for their ancient homeland, English Jews were presented as second to none in patriotic feeling for the empire.¹⁸ At the same time, Jewish writers sought to refute the suggestion that ‘the essential doctrines of the Jewish religion are tribal and stand consequently in direct opposition to the religious and political tendencies of modern civilization’.¹⁹ The departure from tribalism was the achievement of Judaism, it was claimed. In recognising the existence of one ‘God’ for all humanity, Judaism had been the great dynamic agent of modern civilisation and foundation of both Christianity and Islam.²⁰

Yet it was also recognised there were other tendencies in the Jewish past and that Jewish life had emerged from insularity in recent times only. Claude Montefiore indicated as much when he explained that for the purpose of his essay, ‘Is Judaism a tribal religion?’, Judaism was to be defined as ‘the religion of educated Jews in the civilized countries at the present time’.²¹ The conception of modern Judaism constructed at the same time another traditional Judaism from which Anglo-Jewry was said to have long since evolved. However, the immigrants, as Russian Jews, came from an empire seen not to have moved towards either liberalism or rational religion, and inevitably they inhabited this ‘other’ Judaism. The point was made clear each time the Jewish East End was referred to as ‘the ghetto’, for whether the term was intended as a pejorative or sentimental one, the ghetto represented a form of social life that was assuredly pre-modern.²²

The vigorous and partly defensive identification of English Jews with patriotism and progress left them vulnerable to the effects of Jewish immigration from empires seen to be underdeveloped politically and intellectually. In this light it becomes apparent that the apprehension of Anglo-Jewry in the face of Jewish immigration was not simply a matter of class interest. It not only reflected the niche occupied by the leaders of London Jewry among the propertied classes of the capital but also the difficulties and pressures they experienced after emancipation in aligning patriotism and Jewishness.

III

To Jewish and non-Jewish observers alike the streets of Whitechapel appeared as a piece of eastern Europe thrown down in the capital of the world’s largest empire. ‘The feeling is of being in a foreign town’, wrote Charles Booth’s co-worker George Duckworth.²³ Leonty Soloweitschik richly described the impression of difference which suffused the Jewi...