In 1905, the Anglo-Indian writer, performer and social investigator, Olive Christian Malvery, took the readers of Pearson’s Magazine on a journey. 1 Setting out from London—the city that she had called home since arriving from the Punjab in 1900—Malvery traversed the shores of the western Mediterranean, skirted the fringes of the Russian Empire and picked her way from port to port as the Baltic met the North Sea, before returning to the thronging streets of East London. 2 She was in pursuit of—amongst others—the ‘alien Jew’; a ‘type’ of ‘foreigner’ who, in 1905, owing to a considerable upsurge in violence and persecution against them in Central and Eastern Europe, made up approximately a third of all immigrants entering Britain. 3 Malvery had already begun preliminary investigations in London, the site of the largest immigrant settlements, taking up employment in various ‘sweating shops’ which, as she explained, had given her ‘some intimate knowledge of these “strangers within our gates”’. Yet the alien ‘at home’ was an altogether different prospect. ‘I determined to study the species; au naturel as it were’, Malvery declared by way of an opening to her two-part series on ‘The Alien Question’. She departed shortly thereafter for the continent. That ‘question’, generated in large part by the growing alien Jewish presence, had burdened successive British governments across the fin de siècle as they fought to balance the liberal ‘tradition’ of freedom of entry with the growing clamouring for permanent legislation to restrict the entry of foreign nationals. However, it was the matter at the debate’s heart, as Malvery’s enquiries showed, which had captured the British cultural imagination. Who was the ‘alien Jew’? What ‘undesirable’ characteristics did they possess and how, when and, more particularly, where had they come to acquire them?
Assuming the guise of the anthropologist, Malvery set out to plot the suspected traits of the alien ‘species’ by mapping their homes inside the Russian Pale of Settlement. From there she followed the well-trodden land routes traversing the European continent to ports on its northern fringes, and finally to Britain; according to Malvery, this was the migrants’ ‘promised land’. This meandering tour was part journey of discovery, part geopolitical odyssey, enabling Malvery to chart an escalating series of charges against alien Jews as she and they moved from place to place. In imagining life inside the Russian Pale, Malvery painted the Jewish home as a ‘hovel’, its conditions ‘squalid’ and its inhabitants impoverished and emaciated. 4 By the time Malvery picked up the migrant route as it snaked its way through Europe to inspection stations outside Berlin and at the German ports, Jews had become rootless ‘wanderers’, stuck between places, but also diseased and resolutely dirty, for whom, so she claimed, ‘cleanliness is unwholesome, and washing a dangerous adventure’. 5 Once they had set their sights upon Britain, the alien Jews’ metamorphosis into a ‘dangerous’ parasite and territorialist was complete. Arrival in Britain saw these Jews strategizing to live ‘on charity’ and seizing opportunities to appropriate house after house, street after street of the East London district that they now made their home. 6
Malvery’s decision to study the alien Jew in situ was hardly unique. As this volume demonstrates, her articles for Pearson’s Magazine were but modest examples of a far larger body of cultural, ideological and political outputs generated in Britain during the peak years of Eastern European migration between 1881 to 1905 that examined the spaces and environments of the alien Jew. These commentaries strove to organise the migrating Jew into a series of environmentally specific tropes—persecuted and placeless Russian subject; dirty and diseased traveller; the conspiratorial Jew bedding down in the ‘heart’ of Britain’s Empire. Conflicting as these typologies were, to many Britons they made sense. Jews were both conspiratorial and yet persecuted, nomadic and territorialist. The broad paradoxes inherent within what Bryan Cheyette has helpfully termed ‘semitic discourse’—that is, the spectrum of rhetoric concerned with the figure of ‘the Jew’—accommodated such incongruity. 7 Hence, one East London newspaper saw no contradiction in offering seemingly competing views of ‘foreign Jews’ as ‘swarms’ who had ‘invaded’ the East End, and yet ‘pilgrims in a strange land’. 8 Whilst, however, the racial dimensions of discourse about the alien Jew has been repeatedly dissected within histories of this migration to Britain, the spatial characteristics of that same discourse have been treated in a far more inconsistent or incomplete way. 9 This volume looks to correct this oversight, arguing that responses to the alien Jew were determined according to ideas and anxieties about space and place as much as they were shaped by preconceived notions of ‘race’. Indeed, this volume demonstrates that it is through identifying the intersections between discourse about ‘race’ and discourses about space which can most fully elucidate many Britons’ preoccupation with the figure of the alien Jew.
A consideration of Britain’s own geopolitical apprehensions across the time period covered by this book can go some way towards accounting for why rhetoric emanating from that national context in particular exhibited both racial and spatial forms. In the heady days of high imperialism, this volume contends, as an insidious disquiet about Britain’s own place in the world began to creep into the body politic, paradoxical characterisations about migrating Jew fed off and fed into national anxieties about diminishing territorial power. As Lord Rosebery lamented in 1899, the ‘ambitions’ and rivalries of other ‘great empires of the world’ had caused Britain to shrink to not more than ‘a little island […] so lonely in these northern seas, viewed with so much jealousy, and with such hostility’. 10 His opposite number, the anxious imperialist Lord Salisbury, saw things in more starkly territorial terms, predicting Britain’s downfall at the hands of ‘living nations’, who ‘will gradually encroach on the territory of the dying’. 11 Attempts to ‘place’ the displaced alien Jew were not mere expressions of antisemitic sentiment—although they often certainly borrowed from established tropes. This volume establishes, rather, that the figure of the alien Jew frequently became a conduit for Britain’s own territorial anxieties.
Of course, events on the continent helped to root these anxieties in a more tangible reality. Alien Jews arrived in Britain against a backdrop of discussions concerning diaspora Jewry’s ambitions for acquiring ‘space’. Early ‘solutions’ to the plight of Eastern European Jewry, offered by the German-Jewish philanthropist Baron de Hirsch, had experimented with the idea of transforming Jews into colonists by transporting them to settle agricultural lands in Argentina. 12 So too had some Russian-Jews taken it upon themselves to advocate for Jewish sovereignty over lands away from ‘blighted’ Europe. 13 More significant still were the frequent visits of Theodor Herzl to Britain across the turn of the century until his death in 1904. These visits brought considerable publicity to the Zionist cause, making the ‘Jewish question’ not merely a problem in the abstract but one, Herzl claimed, generated ‘even in those highly civilized’ nations. As Herzl had remarked in his 1895 manifesto, Der Judenstaat, ‘The Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers. Where it does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations’. 14 This phenomenon, Herzl would go on to tell the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration in 1902, had, with the arrival of Eastern European Jewry, found its way into Britain, bringing with it the ‘seeds of Anti-Semitism’. It was predictable, Herzl remarked, that those seeds had grown in Britain into widespread clamouring for restrictive anti-alien legislation. 15
Whilst representations of the alien Jew in Britain were shaped not only by national, but also transnational and imperial forces, the ultimate domestic ‘solution’ offered to the myriad of ‘problems’ associated with arriving immigrants was a legislative one. Between 1881 until the passage of the Aliens Act in 1905, parliament returned repeatedly to the premise that tightening Britain’s borders against ‘undesirables’ would at least stymie, if not completely resolve the ‘alien problem’. 16 This was the end-game for many anti-alienists, or the unpalatable prospect against which their opponents riled. Passed just a matter of months after Olive Malvery’s return to London, the debates that the act’s possible passage spawned also furnished social commentators like her with a clear agenda and an influential mandate. Malvery claimed to have no irons in the fire in the heated political wrangling at Westminster over the proposed bill. She herself, as a colonial subject, was an ‘outsider’, although one who openly professed her loyalties to Britain. 17 Yet the hostile charges that she laid at the door of the alien Jew, gleaned during her travels, showed little sympathy for fellow outsiders, instead reinforcing the bill’s central tenets. The act that eventually emerged prohibited the entry of immigrants, classified as ‘undesirables’, if they were found to be in chronic need, suffering from disease, or known to be a criminal. For the first time, immigration officers were to be posted to every port where an ‘immigrant ship’ was landed to carry out an inspection of all steerage passengers. The act also enabled the Home Secretary—Liberal Herbert Gladstone at the time of its enactment—to expel any alien who had been ‘in receipt’ of ‘parochial relief’, been found ‘wandering without ostensible means’ or who had ‘been living under insanitary conditions’. 18
This book offers a decisive reframing of contemporary responses to Eastern European Jewish migration by positioning the triangular relationship between discourses about the alien Jew, about alien ‘space’ and about the Aliens Act at its conceptual heart. It argues that the sharpening of debate in Britain over the well-being of the nation and the wider empire made the literal and figurative ‘placing’ of the alien Jew an evermore common and evermore tense undertaking—for a variety of individuals, for a multiplicity of reasons. As Malvery’s interventions show, it was a rhetorical strategy adopted by citizens and subjects who identified with Britain and the aliens debate in a myriad of complex ways. For the 60,000 or so Jews who made up the established community in Britain, for example, breaking the alien Jew free from negative spatial associations was a critical endeavour for those desperate to, as Asher Myers, the Jewish Chronicle’s editor concluded, ‘render [Jewish immigrants] English in feeling and conduct’. 19 ...