It was within the horrifying context of a growing wave of political antisemitism in Europe that the maverick anthropologist Tom Harrison first dispatched a small team of social investigators attached to his Mass Observation organisation to live for a short period in Londonâs East End. Arriving in the winter of 1939 they were tasked with laying the groundwork for a âcomparative Sociology of Jews and Cockneysâ (File Report A12) that could establish, âscientificallyâ, whether there existed any objective reality to the slanderous claims made against Jews by their detractors. By assessing, for instance, the relative consumption of âdirty picture machinesâ by Jews and non-Jews, or the preference of a given social group for gaudy neckties, it might be possible to definitively refute accusations of Jewish lecherousness or a propensity for ostentatious and vulgar personal presentation.
Experiencing first-hand the notoriously insanitary living conditions of a Whitechapel tenement, one anonymous investigator recorded the grim detail of his temporary accommodation. Included in these field notes are a few paragraphs describing the bedtime rituals of a young man who could be viewed through the uncurtained window of an adjacent flat. Prior to hopping into a bed shared with a younger brother the unknowing research participant is seen throwing a combination of punches in a bout of shadow boxing, picking his nose then wiping a finger on his shirt front, and carelessly tossing a pair of shoes across the room. Voyeuristic and invasive, the ethical shortcomings of a methodology reliant on unauthorised surveillance are obviousâa critique that has been levelled at the wider Mass Observation project (Hubble 2005). Yet in recording these unguarded moments, experiences of everyday embodiment in the lives of interwar working class Jews survive. Here is an individual habituated into the forced physical intimacy and lack of privacy that come with structural economic inequality. A final burst of activity before sleep involves a brief rehearsal of the rhythms of the boxing ring; pugilism then being an exceedingly popular sporting activity that commanded an almost cultish devotion amongst proletarian Jews.
For Mass Observation it is clear that the research ends justified the methodological means; the surreptitious monitoring of unguarded citizens was viewed as a crucial technique in producing meaningful knowledge about Britainâs social reality. Oriented to transient moments the shifting moods of the nation would be revealed in informal conversation, aesthetic tastes and the mundane activities of work and leisure. In the writing of history it is never possible to provide a unified and panoptic account of any object of study. All historical narratives are partial, and a shift of perspective brings into view aspects of life not otherwise observable. During the interwar years the spheres of work, religion and organised politics governed much of what constituted the collective rhythms of life and the horizon of what was conceived possible for the mass of working class Jews in Britain. An examination of these contexts can variously shed light on experiences of oppression, shared moral duties, or even how those unable to transcend their individual anonymity might, as a group, become a force of history. What these do not address, however, are the unstructured activities and leisure choices of Jews unencumbered by more pressing obligation. Beyond those few fragments of data left behind by ethnographies such as Mass Observationâs the most ephemeral of those moments are unrecoverable. What does survive are the traces of a scene of shared leisure marked by its status as a commercial enterprise seeking to attract customers, its administration by agencies of the state, and by participant memory.
As in much of the rest of interwar Britain, the cinema occupied a profound cultural centrality in Jewish neighbourhoods as film-going became the nationâs pre-eminent urban leisure activity. By the mid-1930s the western section of the East End âthe mostly densely Jewish portion of the quarterâcould support a dozen cinema theatres; a substantial number for a geography comprising approximately three square miles. In large part the Jewish consumption of film and film culture mirrored that of gentile audiencesâthe same stars were idolised, the same Hollywood productions enjoyed. Yet in an era in which significant pressure was brought to bear on Jews to assimilate culturally, the cinema auditoria of working class Jewish areas stubbornly remained as sites of cultural difference. Not only was a distinctness from the mainstream registered in cinema programmesâYiddish film , Jewish nationalist propaganda and other items of Jewish interest were regularly screenedâbut the material culture and expressive norms of exhibition sites in neighbourhoods such as Londonâs East End, Leedsâ Chapeltown and Cheetham Hill in Manchester signalled the alterity of an ethnically particular audience. This is a vision of the cinema as a âcounter-public â; a space in which participants might, against a background of coercive state and media scrutiny, articulate alternative interpretations of their identities.
In the picture houses of Jewish neighbourhoods pleasure and communal solidarity came together in new and unpredictable forms. Yet the publicness of film impinged on Jewish life beyond the localised geographies of primary Jewish settlement. Film, in its prominence in British society, came to be seen as a vessel through which Jewish communal concerns might be carried to a wider non-Jewish public. As the cinema developed from an exotic sideshow into an institutionalised entertainment it became incorporated into a universal public sphere . This, as I am deploying the term, can be conceptualised as an imagined (though not immaterial) media space preceded by the bourgeois public sphere but increasingly, in interwar Britain, oriented to the mass consumer. Throughout the twentieth century new technologies of mass communication joined the print media in constituting such a space, with film quickly perceived as an important, indeed worryingly influential, site of public opinion formation.
According to Habermas (1989) the ideal of a political public sphere oriented to rational-critical debate faded with the rise of industrial society and the welfare state. By the end of the nineteenth century powerful business interests had begun to corrosively retool communications media for political advantage and commercial gain, while the delineation between public and private blurred as the state increasingly intervened in civil society. In spite of Habermasâ account of the disintegration of the public sphere , Charles Taylor (2004) argues a common deliberative space remains fundamental to a definitive conceptualisation of the Western social order in modernity. Indebted to Andersonâs (1983) account of the nation as an imagined community Taylor elaborates the public sphere as a plurality of dispersed sites of discussion which are understood to comprise a single great exchange. Inhabiting the same social imaginary as the majority population of gentile British citizens, Jews looked to representation in the universal public sphere as a form of participation in a wider collective entity. Depending on context this might be conceived as entry into the nation, or even as an integral feature of international modernity.
Cinema and British-Jewish Historiography
During the years between the conclusion of World War II and the present day, the historical study of Britainâs Jews has evolved dramatically. While few individuals beyond Cecil Roth were committed to a serious exploration of the topic at the beginning of that period, a host of major historians are now understood to have established international reputations through an examination of the British-Jewish experience. Wide-ranging comprehensive studies include landmark volumes by Lipman (1954), Alderman (1998) and Endelman (2002), though narrower accounts of specific aspects of British-Jewish life have been notable both in their quantity and plurality. Although far too numerous to list in any exhaustive manner here, it can be recalled that key areas of social life such as social integration (Feldman 1994), politics (Fishman 1975; Cohen 1982) and antisemitism (Kushner 1989; Julius 2010) have all received sustained attention; while topics as diverse as the Jewish youth movement (Kaddish 1995), the character of individual local communities (Black 1994; Williams 2008) and the Jewish press (Cesarani 1994) have been the subject of book length studies by experts in the field.
One area that has, however, received less attention is the sphere of culture. Significant research into British-Jewish cultural output and consumption has been undertaken, though a notable majority focuses on elite literary forms rather than popular culture (Abrams 2012). Given the seriousness with which popular culture has been approached in the social sciences and humanities since the âcultural turnâ, as well as the influence of the âhistory from belowâ movement on key individuals in British-Jewish historiography (Kushner and Ewence 2010), the reasons for such a lacuna are not immediately obvious. Whatever the explanation film in particular has, until recently, suffered from a near total lack of consideration. Given the prominence of cinema-going in interwar leisure lives this represents a significant blind spot in assessing the cultural preferences and social behaviours of ordinary British Jews during those years.
It is equally true that if Jewish Studies has failed to take cinema seriously, then, for the most part, Film Studies has ignored British Jews. For sure, Jews involved in the business of cinema have not lacked the attention of biographers, but overwhelmingly these lives are not considered within the context of a British-Jewish communal existence. Individuals such as Oscar Deutsch or Isidore Ostrer were defined by their Jewishness, yet no account exists tracing their specifically Jewish trajectories into the industry or their public perception as Jews. Moreover, from Lowâs (1950) foundational project until the present, discussions of a historic national film culture in Britain have a continued to elide the disproportionate contribution of Jews to virtually all arms of the industry. In regard to the interwar years Napper (2009), for instance, has recently argued for an understanding of cinema as implicated in the creation of a common national culture. Yet while his highly illuminating account remains an essential guide to the period, the tensions generated by contemporary perceptions of a Jewish, and thus alien, participation in British film production pass without comment.
In recognition of such absences in the historical record some recent scholarship has sought to address a British-Jewish production and consumption of popular culture (e.g. Abrams 2016). Film during the interwar period has not been ignored, with a significant focus brought to key areas, particularly production. Gough-Yates (1992) groundbreaking work was for many years a scholarly anomaly, though has now been has been followed up by Marshall (2010), Hochscherf (2011), and Bergfelder and Cargnelli, eds. ( 2012) in their examinations of Jewish Ă©migrĂ© production personnel during the 1930s; as well as by Spicerâs (2012) research into Jewish entrepreneurship in production, distribution and exhibition. Less attention has been brought to bear on performers, though Berkowitz (2016) has examined Bud Flanagan and the âCrazy Gangâ troupe as a form of Jewish comedy. Toffell (2009, 2011) has considered British-Jewish spectatorship and audiences.
The substantive object of study of this current volume is the meaning of film and cinema-going to working class and petit-bourgeois Jews living in the urban centres of interwar Britain. This will consider the material context of interwar British-Jewish film viewing, as well as British-Jewish perceptions of a national publicâs reception of filmic material containing representations of Jews. More than simply an exercise in historical completism, this narrative seeks to reveal the extent to which ordinary Jewish individuals experienced an active participation in, and alienation from, the national family, as well as the manner in which transnational affiliations between Jews in Britain, Europe and the USA were facilitated in the everyday. That British society is now ineluctably multicultural is taken as a given by all bar a fantasist fringe. To understand how ethnic di...