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Preface
This book was developed from my doctoral thesis. Both the book and the thesis explore various historical themes that have interested me since my early undergraduate days: identity formation; minority—majority relationships; toleration and persecution; acculturation and integration; and cultural choice.
My particular interest in this period of Anglo-Jewish history and, indeed, the community itself was stimulated when investigating reactions to the mass immigration of Russian Jews to Britain in the late nineteenth century and the subsequent reception of German Jewish refugees in the 1930s. The indigenous British Jewish community treated these immigrants with a mixture of sympathy and brotherly affection on the one hand and cultural resentment and paranoia on the other—an ambivalence that seemed to me to reflect deeper contradictions inherent in the minority’s understanding of their identity and perceived position in British society. Investigating further during a Master’s dissertation, I tentatively traced the roots of this reaction back to the events of Jewish emancipation in Britain—the formal admission of Jews to the status of legally equal citizens—and the idea for a thesis was born.
With my thesis and then this book I wanted to elucidate what happened, and more fundamentally why, during emancipation that so affected modern Jewish identity in this country; as well as comprehending the particular context within which this occurred: the politics, religion, and society of mid/late nineteenth-century Britain. Emancipation, a well-studied subject in relation to many European Jewries, has been overlooked in Britain, and one factor of interest was simply the greater exploration of a time crucial to the formation of modern Anglo-Jewish identity and, also, the modern Jewish community— many of the minority’s central institutions were constructed at this time. A particular thematic interest, which became increasingly central over the course of research, was the fundamental ambiguity of many of the issues involved—the opportunities and dangers that modernity and identity definition presented, often simultaneously, to a minority community, and how this allowed the community, individuals, and outsiders to posit a variety of Anglo-Jewish positions and identities depending upon their circumstances and prejudices.
Although exploring a particular community at a particular time in its history, many of the themes in this book are not peculiar to Anglo-Jewry. Most obviously, they pose a useful comparison with the experiences of other Jewish communities, both in Europe and the United States, as well as those nascent at the time in the British Empire and Commonwealth. More widely, there is potential read across to other immigrant and minority histories, and, in turn, the reaction of British state and society to minorities and multiculturalism —subjects that speak directly to the broader concept of British identity. Indeed, the contemporary debate about modern British identity, and, notably, the scope and potential of its multicultural aspects, to some extent, continues to reflect certain issues outlined in this book.
It might be worth noting at this point that Iam not Jewish. I do this out of no desire to proclaim my identity other than to explain that I have not grown up in any particular Anglo-Jewish milieu nor am affiliated to any particular form of Judaism, which, positively or negatively, might have influenced my understanding of the issues discussed in this book. I have approached this study as a curious and, hopefully, objective researcher, and, as such, I am grateful for the open and friendly reception I have received from the Anglo-Jewish community, particularly its historians and archivists, which has made this possible.
Many people, in fact, have contributed to the completion of this work and require my grateful acknowledgement.
First and foremost is my supervisor, turned advising editor, Dr Lawrence Goldman, who has patiently nurtured the project since its inception. It is in no small part due to his invaluable guidance, suggestions, and encouragement, not to mention his penetrating understanding of historical issues, that my thesis was finished at all, let alone converted into this book.
I am also indebted to a number of people for their valuable academic assistance and encouragement. Dr Abigail Green read major sections of the work when it was still a thesis and offered crucial advice and direction, as well as answering my queries, big and small, regarding Anglo-Jewry. Dr John Davis and Professor David Cesarani, my thesis examiners, were kind enough to recommend the work for publication whilst offering incisive comments on areas for improvement. Professor Cesarani deserves particular thanks, as he provided his extensive knowledge of Anglo-Jewish history to help guide my thinking both at the verybeginning of work on the thesis and after it had been submitted. Professor Bill Rubinstein was kind enough to evaluate the thesis for publication and offer advice on developing the work to this end. Thanks are due to Dr Bob Moore and Dr Timothy Baycroft for shaping and supporting the idea for my thesis when it was nothing but an abstract proposal. I am grateful to Dr Michael Jolles for not only allowing me to reproduce material from his research on Jewish MPs in an appendix, but for providing helpful guidance on facts and details, as well.
I am exceedingly grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, whose funding over three years made this project possible in the first place.
Archivists and librarians at numerous institutions have assisted my research. I would especially like to thank: Professor Chris Woolgar and Ms Karen Roberston at the University of Southampton Library’s Special Collections, who were always very helpful and friendly in the face of my numerous requests; staff at The Rothschild Archive, London, for providing me with valuable help in locating useful items; the staff at the London Metropolitan Archives, British Library and National Archives who provided repeated access to a great quantity of data; and Miss Miriam Rodrigues-Pereira, who was kind enough to work late in order to help me investigate the records of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation. The staff of the Bodleian Library require special mention for their years of patient assistance.
For kindly permitting access to their archives and records I would like to acknowledge and thank: the Anglo-Jewish Association; the Board of Deputies of British Jews; the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; the British Library; the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, the Church’s Ministry among the Jews; Greenwich Heritage Centre; the London Beth Din; London School of Jewish Studies, the the National Trust; the Office of the Chief Rabbinate; the Rothschild Archive, London; Southwark Local History Library; the Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; UCL Library Services, Special Collections; the United Synagogue; the University of Southampton Library; and the West London Synagogue.
I would like to thank the Yale Center for British Art for permission to reproduce the cover image.
Last, but by no means least, I need to acknowledge the invaluable and ever-present support and love of my family, and Fiona—without which this book would not have been possible.
M.C. London September 2008
Introduction
Emancipation and the Modern Jewish Identity
Jewish identity is an elusive concept. Unique among modern definitions, it resists all historical categories and cannot be fitted into general models. There is a Jewish ‘non-classifiability’.! Standard schemes of nation, race, and creed are insufficient to delineate what Freud termed the ‘innere Identitat’.2 Manifest in the individual consciousness and expressible at a collective or international level, Jewish identity yet remains a conundrum.3 Blending various elements in a multitude of combinations, ‘Jews are a group without a single foundation, a heterogeneous linking of the non-identical.’4 Levels of intensity range across an existential gulf. The diffuse ambivalence of Jewishness embraces a gamut from assimilated and apostatized to separatist and national; either end of this identity continuum having no contiguous characteristics with the other.
A mass of confusion therefore exists regarding self and group definition; what one Jew constitutes as identity is often dissimilar, perhaps even antithetical to another’s construct. The resulting psychological issues often add a further problematic to Jewish identity. Isaiah Berlin talked of the ‘very doubt’ being ‘unbearable’.> Unable to locate themselves, to harmonize their presence, Jews could suffer from cognitive dissonance and might become insecure in their self-understanding. For both the Jew and the non-Jew living beside him this generated what Zygmunt Bauman describes as ‘the great fear of modern life. . . that of undetermination, unclarity, uncertainty—in other words, ambivalence’. Historically this has led to efforts, from both inside and out, at anchoring Jews, at incorporating them within established criteria and providing recognizable boundaries to their ‘boundary-transgressing persona’.? This work examines one such period of formation and change within Jewish identity.
The notion of identity is one of the most ill defined in historians’ terminology. Erik Erikson suggested identity as a category linking the psychological growth of individual persons with the norms of society, but admitted the concept remained ‘a term for something as unfathomable as it is all-pervasive’.8 This book therefore avoids employing a strict understanding of the term. Instead, it takes a broad sweep, regarding identity as a complex and amorphous entity, observable through the interconnected range of characteristics, opinions, and attitudes exhibited by both individuals and groups within the multitude of circumstances that comprise modern society.? Understanding identity to be thus a construct, and often a dynamic one, formed from a mixture of choices embedded within historically contingent circumstances and operating within inherited frameworks, this work analyses the nature of Jewish existence in a particular situation, at a particular time, and under particular conditions, delineating the themes and influences that determined and comprised Jewish definition in Britain during the post-emancipation era, 1858-87.
This historical period is established on one side, rather obviously, by the achievement of Jewish emancipation, and on the other by the holding of the Anglo-Jewish Exhibition. This event, in the same year as Victoria’s jubilee, was both an encomium and, as it would transpire, a eulogy to the emancipatory ideals that had dominated Anglo-Jewish life for the past thirty years but were subtly altering under the impact of mass immigration, rising prejudice, and the concomitant emergence of political Zionism.
These Jewish identity issues were (and are) a product of modernity. For Jews in medieval and early modern Europe, the question of their definition was unproblematic. Centuries of particularity and exclusion had fused Jewish religion, nationality, and ethnicity into a self-sufficient identity. Jews viewed themselves—and were viewed by others—as a distinct and separate people. Links between Jewish and non-Jewish society were primarily instrumental and there was little neutral ideological ground between them to facilitate greater integration.!° Although the ‘dispersal of the Jewish communities throughout the world invariably brought both plain people and intellectuals into relation with most of the historic peoples and their culture’, Talmudic Judaism was able to accommodate itself to a variety of civilizations whilst preserving its historical continuity.!! This Jewish existence was secure and constant, as it had been for generations. The political, economic, and social consequences of European states’ transition to modern forms—the ‘melting of solids’ into ‘liquid modernity’—destroyed this automatic Jewish identification. !2
Under the Enlightenment’s aegis, belief in rationality and human progress, elevating science and philosophy at the expense of religion, transformed European societies over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.!3 Industrialization and urbanization took place as corporate distinctions were abolished; secularization increased as the centrality of religion declined; civil and bourgeois society developed as hierarchies loosened and wealth created new groupings; and more centralized, bureaucratic, and often representative government organized to mediate these other changes.!4 These alterations and their triumphant liberal justifications necessarily included the Jews.!5 “The modern state, especially the democratic state, could be established only after the abolition of the corporate distinctions and by the substitution of the egalitarian for the corporate structure of society.!6 In these circumstances it would have been an ‘outright anachronism’ for new nation states and individualistic societies to allow Jews to remain separate and autonomous.!7 A similar reconstitution was therefore required of them: they had to adapt to modern times. Emancipation was the mechanism by which the transference of Jewish identity occurred. Emancipation removed Jews from their defined position, relocated them within the national collective, and provided access to modern ideas and conditions: legal equality, civil participation, economic freedom, and individuality.!8 Emancipation, as Salo W. Baron termed it, was ‘the great experiment in both general and Jewish history’ .!9
The impact upon Jewish identity was revolutionary. Multiple components previously beyond Jewish boundaries intruded upon their identification and overturned its former existential basis grounded in the enforceability of tradition.2° Jewishness became only a part of Jews’ sense of self.2! It was now to be combined with other components: national, political, socio-economic, and limited increasingly —as Gentile society stipulated—to the religious orbit. Bereft of their former self-validation and now judging themselves by non-Jewish standards, this reduction also made Jews ‘intimately alive’ to others’ opinions of them and, therefore, sensitive to their criticism.2? Emancipation made Jews self-conscious of their (negatively perceived) differences and anomalies, creating what Nietzsche termed a ressentiment-prone situation. This, as developed by Max Scheler, ‘refers to a psychological state resulting from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred (existential envy) and the impossibility of satisfying these feelings’. Ressentiment may occur when a perceived equality exists between the subject and the object of envy, so that in principle they are interchangeable but in reality the inequality that exists precludes the practical achievement of the theoretically existing equality.23 This often results in a ‘transvaluation of values’, whereby the originally supreme values of a group are denigrated and replaced by exterior notions that were formerly unimportant or even negative.?4 Such a condition became widespread among European Jews undergoing emancipation and led in varying degrees to the abandonment of Jewish cultural markers and constituents.2> In such a manner ‘European emancipation presented Jewry with its most serious crisis of definition since the birth of rabbinic Judaism’.2° The entirety of Jewish existence, and, indeed, that very existence itself, was questioned and challenged by the logic of equality. According to P. Birnbaum and I. Katznelson:
As Jews traversed paths to emancipation, their new condition as members of voluntary communities confronted them with choices that functioned as solvents to dissolve pre-emancipation patterns of Jewish solidarity. These options were concerned both with how to try and engage the wider non-Jewish world in all its dimensions, and about how to be Jewish in the circumstances of emancipation; that is, how to define the character of theological Judaism, the social organisation of Jewry, and the qualities of Jewishness as a way of life.?7
Unsure and divided regarding both the viability and desirability of settling these questions in any particular direction, Jews encountered ‘a multiplicity of conflicting forces interacting in unpredictable ways’ as they sought to define themselves.28 Ambivalence became central to modern Jewish existence.
With such an impact emancipation has become a dominant theme in modern Jewish history. The tempestuous transition from tradition to modernity has been the leitmotif of modern Jewish life, according to Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.?° Whilst central, however, emancipation’s effect upon European Jews has been far from uniform. The removal of legal impediments to Jews’ participation and their subsequent internal and external transformations were not a unitary or singular experience. Emancipation was a ‘multi-layered process’ with a ‘plurality of passages’.3° It occurred in different states at different times and under a variety of conditions, all of which conduced to individualize the Jewish route to modernity in each of its national contexts. Appreciating these differences, several methodological commonalities are apparent and have led to ‘types’ of emancipation being identified by historians. Two basic categories exist: the revolutionary and the reformist or tutelary. The originator and paradigm of the revolutionary approach was France, where in 1791, under the influence of /iberté, égalité et fraternité, Jews were automatically granted all the rights of French citizens.3! Successful revolutionary and Napoleonic armies then disseminated this procedure across significant areas of Western Europe: Dutch Jewry, for instance, was accorded full equality under French rule in 1796.32 Emancipation in Germany, on the other hand, already uneven and partial due to the fragmentary nature of its various polities, is often cited as exemplifying the tutelary method. Protracted in application, this approach witnessed incremental advances in Jewish rights, with the possibility of occasional reverses, based upon a contractual, quid pro quo arrangement requiring concomitant Jewish assimilation.33 Werner Mosse has suggested four broad. stages in German Jews’ ‘tortuous and thorny path’ to emancipation: 1781-1815, where initial debate accompanied an attempted pan-German solution through the Congress of Vienna; followed by 1815-47, which witnessed retrograde measures and a retreat from equality; this was briefly succeeded in 1848—9 by another failed effort at general emancipation; and the final phase 1849—71 of gradual advance eventually completed by unification.
These two generalized categories are obvious simplifications of a complex process and their applications were far from straightforward or exclusive. Under Napoleon the French employed reformist tactics, withdrawing certain Jewish rights to encourage greater integration, whereas many German states first implemented emancipatory measures in response to French victories or following their own revolutions of 1848. Some historians also caution that this dualistic conception is centred upon Western Europe and therefore chronologically limited to its periodization of approximately 1770-1870. Eastern Europe, where the Jewish and non-Jewish adaptation to modernity was considerably different and often much later—Jews in the Russian Empire gained few rights before being emancipated after the February 1917 revolution and, consequently, non-traditional forms of Jewishness were more limited—is often excluded from analyses of emancipation, despite containing the vast majority of European Jews.5> This has prompted David Sorkin to develop a more comprehensive formula incorporating the whole continent and a much wider timeframe. Beginning in 1654 when Amsterdam Jews gained rights as burghers and concluding with the 1919 signing of the minority rights treaty, Sorkin’s assessment highlights four overlapping but not necessarily sequential gradations of status through which Jewish communities might pass en route to full emancipation.3° This appreciation, recognizing different types of equality yet locating them all within a generalized movement, adds a necessary subtlety to the study of Jewish equality. It is certainly useful in the British context, which began a century before Central Europe’s and contained many singular features, as will be discussed further in Chapter 1.37
The manifold circumstances of emancipation elicited a corresponding multiplicity of Jewish reactions. Jews were far from passive recipients of modernity and their responses to the possibilities of equality determined to a great extent the future contours of Jewish existence in that state. In France, for example, in the civilly conscious atmosphere of the Revolution, Jews explicitly bargained with the state to reduce their separation and promote inclusion, whereas in Russia, downtrodden and unable to initiate dialogue in a closed society, Jews increasingly turned to radical and revolutionary solutions.3® In respect to such responses, it is not so much the Western experience but more specifically that of German Jewry that has been advanced as paradigmatic. Formulating the most intellectually sophisticated of European Jewish adaptations, German Jews did develop several seminal movements. Modern interpretations of Judaism from the neo-Orthodoxy of Sampson Raphael Hirsch to the ultra-Reform of Samuel Holdheim, alongside scholarly movements examining Jewishness, such as Wissenschaft des Judentums, were born in Germany and would go on to alter Jewish identity around the world.3? More crucially, the revolutionary thinking underpinning these new definitions had first been articulated in Berlin. In 1783 Moses Mendelssohn sparked the Haskalah with his publication Jerusalem or on Religious Power and Judaism, the first attempt to reconcile Judaism and rationality, and thereby justify a modern and Jewish existence.4° Jacob Katz claims, “‘Mendelssohn’s contribution became of decisive importance; due to him Jewish aspirations to have access to non-Jewish society were not simply displayed in practice, as in England, but carried out under the cover of intellectual vindication.’4! The German example was undoubtedly the most cerebrally impressive of transitions but, as Katz himself admits, other Jews, notably the English, did not require such theoretical assistance. Operating under different conditions Anglo-Jewry pursued a very different transforming effort, gradually absorbing aspects of modernity from their more open environment and eschewing the cognitive effort German Jewry utilized. Moreover, as Todd Endelman has emphasized, socio-economic disparities within the same national setting could lead to radically divergent experiences: Jews “did not enter the modern world like a well-disciplined army. ..The dual processes of acculturation and integration were acted out in countless thousands of private acts and encounters, mostly but not entirely unrecorded and unobserved, far from the limelight of public discussion.’42 No single model of Jewish transition could be relevant to all European Jews considering such national and individual particularities. Most historians now accept that the German Jewish tradition cannot be viewed as typical of Jewish adaptation elsewhere.4> This national uniqueness has become a further divisive factor within modern Jewish identity. Traditionally, Jewish definition was universal and transnational, but as a consequence of emancipation it became context bound and state specific. It is in regard to the British situation that this work seeks to analyse and outline the nature of one such form of Jewish identity.
II
‘Jewish emancipation in England was by no means precocious.’44 Equality came to the Jews of Britain in a piecemeal fashion. The process lacked an overtly tutelary logic but was certainly characterized by gradual reform over a period of nearly thirty years: 1830—58. In 1833 the first Jew was admitted to the bar; 1835 saw Jews gain the vote; in 1837 the University of London dispensed with religious qualifications concerning degrees (Oxford and Cambridge were to do the same in 1854 and 1856, respectively); and in 1845 all municipal offices were opened to the minority.45 The final right to be conceded was the symbolically significant ability of professing Jews to sit in Parliament.46 From the first Jewish Relief Bill of 1830, this took some thirteen legislative attempts to enact; all save the first and last passed the Commons only to be rejected by the Lords. There were mitigating factors excusing this delay: in the early 1830s parliamentary reform dominated the agenda; in the late 1840s Chartism at home and revolutions abroad decreased receptivity to change; and the 1850 reinstallation of the Catholic hierarchy heightened religious tensions—to name a few.47 There was little British Jews could do to advance the process. In comparison to many European countries, inured to written constitutions, and where progress was viewed through legalistic reforms, Jews in Britain, faced with the Anglo-Saxon tradition of unwritten laws, relied as much upon the ‘precedents set by life’ as ‘gradual enactments’ of legislation.48 Anglo-Jews had long been allowed to participate in Britain’s civically construed nationalism. Quietly pursuing the extensive social and economic opportunities already available to them, Anglo-Jews sought to demonstrate their integration in a manner practically designed to include them in English cultural thought, which remained determinedly universalistic and monogenetic.*?
This adaptation, and Anglo-Jewish emancipation in general, has not received due historiographical consideration. Few works, most of which are now rather aged, have addressed the subject directly. The two most substantial are M. Salbstein, The Emancipation of the Jews in Britain: The Question of the Admission of the Jews to Parliament, 1828-1860 and A. Gilam, The Emancipation of the Jews in England, 1830—- 1860.59 The former concentrates upon parliamentary debates and political action, while the later pays closer attention to the Jewish side; both usefully detail the proceedings and underline the major issues of emancipation in England. However, both now appear unsophisticated in light of more recent historiography, which provides a more critical and analytical appraisal of Anglo-Jewry. Geoffrey Alderman’s article ‘English Jews or Jews of the English Persuasion? Reflections on the Emancipation of Anglo-Jewry’ is the most recent work to directly address the topic in this new vein.>! Locating emancipation within the surrounding Jewish and Gentile contexts, it reveals the complex interplay of issues propelling and retarding the process, as well as highlighting the long-term implications these had upon the Jewish community. These conclusions were preceded by several articles of Israel Finestein’s that first took note of internal Anglo-Jewish differences concerning equality; as well as U. Henriques’s “The Jewish Emancipation Controversy in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, which assessed the campaign through vicissitudes of non-Jewish opinion.>?
The state of emancipation historiography regrettably reflects the general paucity of serious historical research upon the Anglo-Jewish community. Although the situation has greatly improved in the last couple of decades, both British and Jewish historians have tended to overlook the minority. In the British case Todd Endelman finds a ‘benign neglect’ that treats Jews superficially, as either victims or exemplars of other British themes—anti-alienism or the rise of finance capital, for instance—whilst ignoring their specific existence.>3 This ‘breathtaking omission’ he ascribes to the structural obstacle of the Jews’ identity, which eludes easy definition ‘and thus cannot be fitted comfortably into the standard categories of British historical writing’.54 C. Richmond suggests that such classificatory difficulties are often compounded by British historians’ conscious or unconscious desire to minimize the presence of minorities that may cast a poor light upon the general British situation, and thereby detract from the portrayal of a tolerant and progressive British culture.>>
Similar reservations have contrived to exclude Anglo-Jewry from the attention of Jewish scholars. Once again, the British community does not fit the pattern. Comparatively undramatic, Anglo-Jewish history witnessed an absence of violence and turmoil that prevents the use of a familiar framework of analysis: the Jews as a persecuted minority.>° A corresponding lack of internal communal disturbance, and hence the dramatic cultural or intellectual innovation that tended to occasion this, has led historians who examine Jewish modernization in terms of the creation of new ideologies to also marginalize AngloJewry.5” Even the possibility that British Jews, with their relatively untroubled integration and one of the longest undisturbed Jewish experiences of modern times, may represent a paradigm, or at least an interesting case study, of Jewish toleration and successful Diaspora life has not elicited historical attention. The East European school of Jewish history, pessimistic regarding modernity’s impact upon the Jews and believing that Jewishness survived best in the less-affected communities of the East, has little sympathy for this perspective. This school, with its emphasis upon the Jewish people’s cultural and political autonomy, attained the status of a ‘great orthodoxy’ after the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel, and long shifted Jewish historical interests away from the Anglo-Jewish condition.%8 On isolated occasions, such as the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate in Palestine, British and general Jewish history have intersected and thrust Anglo-Jewry into the limelight.5? However, for most Jewish historians the importance of such events lies more in their British context, the role of the power in the region and its attitudes towards Jewish settlement, as opposed to the actions of the community that coincidentally happened to be involved. All of these reasons have combined to make Anglo-Jewry something of the black sheep of European Jewish historiography.
Anglo-Jewish history developed from this background of dual neglect by its two constituent parts. Aware of its presumed exceptionalism and proud of its staid experiences, communal historians adopted a celebratory and triumphalist outlook. Tapping into contemporary conceptions of British cultural success and superiority, early Anglo-Jewish historiography presented a narrative of the community that was highly Whiggish.©° Appreciating the high degree of toleration the minority enjoyed in Britain, this history was founded upon an attitude described as ‘meliorism’: a central belief in the continuously positive evolution of Anglo-Jewish life, steadily assisted by the unique liberalism of Britain.©! Two interrelated themes dominated this writing. There was an assimilatory aim demonstrating the duration of Jews’ settlement in Britain and their contribution to the host society, and an apologetic tendency that sanitized, usually by ignoring, discordant or insalubrious elements of Jewish existence.©? The product was a one-sided portrait emphasizing the harmony of Englishness and Jewishness by lauding the establishment of charities or the success of financial dynasties, whilst ignoring many realities of Jewish life, such as criminality, immigration, or anti-Semitism.® The other salient feature of this Anglo-Jewish writing was its unprofessionalism. The vast bulk of research was undertaken by amateurs, usually communal dignitaries or functionaries and often associated with the Jewish Historical Society of England.®* This compounded the above problems, as, lacking suitable training and rather filio-pietistic in attitude, these amateur historians approached the subject with ‘uncritical admiration’.®>
For decades the sole exponent of professional Anglo-Jewish study was the Oxford historian Cecil Roth, who was University Reader in PostBiblical Jewish Studies. Unfortunately, Roth represented the apogee of Anglo-Jewish historical Whiggishness. Writing during the ‘blackest era of Jewish history’, Roth explicitly called for communal history to be used in defence of the Jewish image, in ‘vindication of the Jew as an Englishman’.°® Consequently, his research continued Anglo-Jews’ partisan presentations focusing upon integration, success, and toleration. His A History of the Jews in England, written in 1941, ends its analysis in 1858 with the achievement of emancipation— implying that afterwards Jews ceased to have a separate history and thus required no specific study.°7 The following eighty years, some of the most turbulent and important in Anglo-Jewry’s existence, are surveyed in a mere four pages, most of which are spent eulogizing English society before terminating with a paragraph encapsulating the hagiographic conceptions of such historiography:
In this happy land they have attained a measure of freedom (and thereby of collaboration) which has been the case in scarcely any other. That this has been possible is due in no slight measure to the process of Anglo-Jewish history —a gradual acceptance based on common sense rather than on doctrine, consolidating itself slowly but surely, and never outstripping public opinion. Hence it has been possible for the English Jews to exemplify how men can enter a society by methods other than descent, and to absorb traditions which are not those of their physical ancestors.°8
This tradition dominated the minority’s historiography until the 1970s. A slackening had slowly occurred throughout the 1960s, sparked by Lloyd Gartner’s seminal work The Jewish Immigrant in England 1870-1914, which brought American familiarity with intra-Jewish pluralism to bear upon the stifled British scene, but it was not until the late 1970s that transformations in British society facilitated its overthrow and the opening of Anglo-Jewish study.® A notable stimulus was the occurrence of mass immigration to Britain and the subsequent creation of a multi-ethnic society. Promoting interest in minority—majority relations and, more specifically, social and political policy regarding immigrant communities, this prompted an interest in historical precedents.7° In tandem the contemporaneous revolution in historical thinking—legitimizing social history and a raft of more targeted thematic subjects: socialism, feminism, regionalism—was conducive to exploring diversity, neglected narratives, and contentious issues.7! These phenomena filtered into Anglo-Jewish study and facilitated the investigation of previously taboo areas: as, for instance, in W. Fishman’s East End Jewish Radicals, 1875—1914.72 Over the 1980s and 1990s, with more, younger, and increasingly professional attention, Anglo-Jewish studies has developed a more respectable historiography, engaged with all aspects of its experience, offering a variety of interpretational schools, and possessing areas of controversy.
Endelman has identified three themes in particular that, irrespective of topic or period, have been explored by this more critical research to reveal ignored features of the British Jewish experience: first, emphasis upon intra-communal conflict over the old consensualist model; second, reassessment of the nature and extent of British anti-Semitism; and third, in light of these, demonstration of the erosion of Jewish identity and interests.73 In the first strand, the cohesiveness of Anglo-Jewry has been challenged by examination of various forms of internal stratification and division. Most recently contention has been centred upon the community’s reception of Jewish immigrants, particularly those from Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century. The division is between those who follow the ‘minor orthodoxy’ of Gartner that ethno-cultural bonds linked different Jews together despite minor differences and the conflict-exaggerating class analysis of historians such as Joseph Buckman, who adopts Marxist criteria to stress communal tensions.74 Since the 1990s a more sophisticated trend recognizing the intersecting importance of both ethnicity and class to both Jewish solidarity and division has developed in the works of Bill Williams and David Feldman.’> British anti-Semitism, studiously ignored by older historiography, had not provoked much interest from more general historians either.7° Regarded as marginal, the long history of anti-Semitism in Britain had been surprisingly underestimated until recently.”7 Since the 1990s historians such as Williams, Feldman, Tony Kushner, David Cesarani, and Bryan Cheyette, often working with new evidence, have shifted the conceptual framework to highlight the extent of anti-Semitism in Britain.78 Dispensing with the comparative analysis that facilitates the downplaying of English hostility, these historians have relocated prejudice within the British national context, revealing a distinctive form of hostility: ‘the anti-Semitism of tolerance’. The toll this took upon the community forms the third theme of recent study. The above historians, to whom should be added Geoffrey Alderman, have identified a “disabling compulsion among Jews to justify their emancipation and demonstrate that they were worthy British subjects’.7? This, enforced by Britain’s liberal yet homogeneous culture, they argue, coerced Anglo-Jewry into transcending their own cultural differences, to abnegate many aspects of Jewishness in an effort to conform to Britishness.8°
The current of recent historical work has not, of course, flowed constantly in this direction of critical enquiry. So pervasive was the original tradition that its influence can still be detected in recent research. The works of Vivian Lipman, Roth’s heir, continued it most obviously, but more scholarly and forceful arguments in favour of an optimistic assessment have been advanced by William Rubinstein.8! Rubinstein feels there is a need to defend Roth’s basic premisses, and his work offers a history remarkably free of anti-Semitism and admiring of British inclusiveness.®? ‘Coinciding with the apogee of Victorian liberalism, the status of the Jews in England seemed to provide living evidence of the doctrine of progress and a mood of optimism.’§3 Although Rubenstein’ s portrayal of a ‘benign sonderweg’ shifts the argument back too far in the other direction, it is a useful corrective to complete acceptance of the critical historiography.84
Other historians have also sought to qualify the recent trend; they appreciate that its discoveries have been of immense value but cannot, any more than the older tendency, be taken as the full picture. Endelman observes also that whilst contextualization is valuable, the comparative is still a useful historical instrument concerning anti-Semitism and, as such, it demonstrates Britain as an unusually benevolent environment. The antagonism that existed should not, he feels, detract from the more remarkable examples of toleration and even support for Jewish particularity—in the form of legislative exemption or statutory backing for communal bodies; especially as the basic societal integration of Jews was never questioned.8> Abigail Green in her work on the Jewish philanthropist and celebrity Sir Moses Montefiore warns against simplifying the Jew—Gentile relationship, noting that in a period, the late 1870s— 1880s, when historians such as Feldman have traced the rise of mainstream anti-Jewish feeling, Montefiore’s public popularity paradoxically peaked, even though he represented (increasingly) an overtly Jewish figure.8° Feldman himself admits: ‘It is clear that the ambition of modern states to purge themselves of ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural diversity has been grossly overestimated.’8”? Thus, while the critical perspective remains strong, historiography has been moving towards a compromise. The work of Todd Endelman perhaps best encapsulates this balance.88 Concentrated upon the less illustrious and less studied aspects of the community— the lower classes, criminals, and apostates—his research offers full opportunity to discover the manifold communal divisions, as well as the counteracting factors solidifying Jewry. The Anglo-Jewish experience is seen to be heterogeneous; a myriad of paths to modernity discernible, where some Jews encounter prejudice and some do not, where some relinquish their associations and some do not.8?
This blending of critical, realistic, and exceptional components, based around the varieties of Jewish existence, currently provides the most sophisticated level of Anglo-Jewish historiography. This book follows in this vein. Investigating the ‘constellation of interdependent factors’—intellectual, social, religious, political, and to a lesser extent economic— that formed British Jewry’s world, it examines both centrifugal and centripetal factors operating upon Jewish identity.” It engages with all three of the recent historiographical trends: although Jewish immigrants do not feature greatly due to periodization, discussion of dissolving or cementing issues within the community is prominent; while it does not set out to assess levels of anti-Semitism, the ability and nature of Jews’ access to and treatment by British society are crucial aspects; and the ramifications upon Jewish identity are at the centre of this study. Conceptions of Anglo-Jewry’s congenial situation and the effect of unique toleration upon their acculturation, such as were more popular in older writing, will also be assessed throughout.
With this approach, this book applies current historiographical understandings to a previously neglected era of Anglo-Jewish history: the immediate post-emancipation decades, 1858—87. Sandwiched between the more dramatic episodes of emancipation and the commencement of mass Jewish immigration, these years have often been overlooked by earlier historians, who used to consider them perhaps ‘the most benign period of Jewish life in Britain’.?! More recent historiography focusing upon the period 1870—1945 has touched upon the era, but its research has been confined primarily to features related to the Eastern European newcomers, and as such has not explored the time in depth or as a unit in itself. Yet as Cesarani has noted it was in these crucial decades that the issues and problems appearing from the 1880s onwards were formed and initially expressed.9? Both he and Endelman have consequently called for greater study of the period and its impact upon Jewish existence.
Emancipation was not a panacea to Jewish questions but an enabler, providing Jews with the opportunity to participate equally.°4 Postemancipation, the discussions about Jewish identity had to be realized in practice. The time was therefore one of the most formative in Anglo-Jewish history. Questions regarding Jews remained unsettled. The hyphenated Anglo-Jewish identity was being tested for the first time in this period, against the background of an expectant yet far from static British environment. Although less dramatic than some episodes, the decisions and events of these three decades were vitally important in determining the future of Anglo-Jewish existence. This work sets out to examine the Anglo-Jewish subculture of this time: to investigate their inter-faith and inter-ethnic dialogue with English state and society; to discover the identity boundaries created by and imposed upon them; and to analyse how Jews reconciled being a particular minority in a universalist world. Using the overarching framework of identity it seeks to delineate the impact emancipation had upon the nature of Jewish existence in Britain. In doing so, it explores questions of minority—majority relationships, acculturation, integration, subculture formation, and identity development within the British and Jewish context; as well as empirically illuminating the events of a neglected period.
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In the discussion which follows, these themes are focused on the AngloJewish elite—the leadership of the community. These Jews were a tight-knit and readily identifiable group, nicknamed the “Cousinhood’ by Chaim Bermant on account of their blood and financial interrelations, who dominated the formal and informal running of the community for most of the nineteenth century.2> They were at the forefront of Anglo-Jewry’s transition to modernity; publicly negotiating the terms of Jewish life, they pioneered trends of acculturation and provide the researcher with the most articulate example of Jewish identity. The group, small and self-perpetuating, directed all communal institutions and so also set the internal agenda for Jewish existence, as well as being able to determine the outward image presented. Investigating their attitudes and actions in the post-emancipation age therefore becomes crucial to understanding Anglo-Jewish identity and its interaction with non-Jewish environments. This has been undertaken, however, with the knowledge that no culture or community possesses a unitary identity. Inhabiting many different political, class, generational, or cultural contexts, functioning as individuals as well as group members, no single formulation could sufficiently contain all British Jews.?° This work mentions a variety of Jewish groups—women, religious dissidents, working-class Jews, and provincials—not generally found among the elite leadership in an effort to more completely demonstrate AngloJewish existence and as both contrast and support to the main focus. Immigrant Jews, in particular, especially those from Eastern Europe, would have diverged significantly from the pattern of the acculturated elite. Chapter 5 examines some of the differences these immigrants wrought upon the identity of the British community.
It has likewise been necessary to establish geographical limits to this work. This work, like much other historiography, centres overwhelmingly upon London and its Jewish residents. During the nineteenth century between one-half to two-thirds of all British Jews lived in the capital, and important Jewish persons and institutions were correspondingly concentrated there. Whilst provincial communities encountered different conditions and the London experience cannot be taken as representative, it was easily the most important example, and most contemporary debate regarding Jews was inevitably aimed at the Jews of London.9” Considering location it is also essential for the historian of Anglo-Jewry to keep in mind the minority’s context, the so-called ‘horizontal dimensions’ of modern Jewish history.?8 By the mid-nineteenth century, ‘Jews were so successfully integrated into so many areas of English life that to speak of the autonomous history of Victorian Anglo-Jewry is meaningless.’9? Close attention is paid, therefore, to the complexities of the British situation within which Jews lived and operated. In doing so, as historians such as Feldman have demonstrated, the Anglo-Jewish experience can reveal new angles upon various aspects of British history.!°° This book attempts to modestly contribute to areas of British history that interact with the Jewish experience: such as, for instance, state and society’s toleration of minorities, British culture’s receptivity to deviant patterns, and levels of anti-Semitism.
A five-chapter structure has been adopted to accomplish these tasks. It comprises two smaller, parenthetical chapters, 1 and 5, and three interlinked but sociologically variant case studies. Chapter 1 is designed to offer background to the period, surveying historical knowledge of Anglo-Jewry’s resettlement and their campaign to achieve emancipation. It establishes emancipation as a ‘symbolic point of departure’ for English Jews, not necessarily a hard-and-fast historical discontinuity but a milestone inaugurating a new phase, and thereby sets up the following analysis.!°! The subsequent three chapters examine the impact of emancipation upon the community through a series of case studies, each of which employs original research to detail a different strand of the community’s leadership. Chapter 2 investigates Jewish Members of Parliament. These individuals exercised the privilege that had come to represent Jewish equality and did so in the most British of environments, where their responsibilities to the community were ambiguous. Jewish MPs were at the forefront of realizing equality; their political decisions at party, local, national, and international level had wide repercussions upon Anglo-Jewry’s identity and its perception by others. Chapter 3’s focus is upon internal communal government, in particular the activities and operation of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. This quasidemocratic, quasi-oligarchic institution claimed sole responsibility for representing British Jews to the outside world, whilst also seeking to maintain a coherent group governed by a certain pattern of Jewish existence. Its success and failure in these endeavours reveal much about both the desired identity of a section of the Jewish elite and their ability to attain this persona; whilst the body’s (and its opponents’) considerable interaction with the British state discloses much about the polity’s opinion of the minority. The subject of Chapter 4 is broader in scope, dealing with a more amorphous group of issues connected to Jewry’s socio-cultural life. The main thrust is on the nature of the community’s religiosity and how this fundamentally Jewish sphere adapted to Englishness. Sections deriving from this address the community’s educational structure and the related issues of cultural achievement and language use, so as to examine the importance placed upon the transmission of Jewish tradition. The final chapter, 5, returns to the smaller, less empirical format. Examining alterations to the community’s social and economic status during the 1880s, addressing the problem of escalating Jewish immigration and the perception of changes in their British environment, the chapter analyses the burgeoning of the community’s historical consciousness to demonstrate the closure of this period of Anglo-Jewish experience.
Each main chapter contains specific historiographical information and mention of archival holdings relevant to it, but it is germane to briefly mention those sources that are of general importance to this study and that have been employed throughout. There are four main types of evidence that have been utilized across this work: newspapers and journals; institutional archives; individual records; and miscellaneous publications. The single most important source for the nineteenthcentury historian of Anglo-Jewry, if it is possible to identify one, is the Jewish Chronicle newspaper. The oldest, most continually published Jewish newspaper in the world, and since its inception in the 1840s the most widely read in Britain, it is, as Cesarani has documented, ‘almost impossible to understand the emergence of a modern Jewish identity in Britain without appreciating the paper’s contribution’.!°? Carrying verbatim reports on the proceedings of communal bodies, allowing impartial debates in its correspondence columns, interpreting the general and wider Jewish world to English Jews through its features, and employing editorials that acted as the “community’s monitor’, the paper had a semi-official status as the communal mouthpiece. !°3 Other Anglo-Jewish newspapers, operating at different times and catering to different levels, are used to supplement this coverage.!°4 A variety of British journals, in particular that staple of propertied opinion The Times, are also employed to gain non-Jewish perspectives on events.
Anglo-Jewry is also well served in regard to institutional records, many central organizations having preserved considerable quantities of data.1°5 The information contained within these holdings is often far from perfect but the researcher is able to quite accurately reconstruct the activities of a range of Anglo-Jewish organizations. Less plentiful are individual records: private memoirs, journals, and correspondence do not exist in great numbers. In comparison to their continental brethren British Jews were ‘strikingly reticent about recording their experiences’.!°6 Nevertheless, some material exists in sufficient quantity to make crucial contributions to the study of the minority. Correspondence collections such as those of Moses Montefiore, the Rothschilds, or Chief Rabbis Nathan and Hermann Adler are particularly useful, containing the private opinions of central actors over a long period upon a vast range of Jewish and British affairs. There is also considerable scope for obtaining information on Anglo-Jewry from the more numerous private collections of non-Jews who were involved with the community. The last category of sources, publications, is less useful to this book—Anglo-Jews were not prolific writers or critics—but contributes particularly to several areas. Any evaluation of British Jews’ religion, for instance, needs to be cognizant of the many sermons that were published to edify and admonish the community.
After emancipation Anglo-Jewry was a remarkably integrated and acculturated minority within late nineteenth-century Britain. This book’s three case studies all demonstrate that, upon varying levels and across a range of topics, cooperation and interaction between Jews, both individually and communally, and their surroundings—whether parliamentary, municipal, educational, or social—occurred easily and regularly. Upon many issues there appears a mutuality of ideas between English Jew and Gentile, an understanding that culminated in the complementary conception both held of their providentially inspired place within the world. This made Jews’ minority existence comparatively easy and demonstrates the significant toleration and inclusiveness of British state and society, which was even receptive to assisting the perpetuation of certain levels of Jewish particularity. Anglo-Jews appreciated their beneficent situation and, sharing many of its ideals, acculturated easily. The largely voluntary Anglicization of Jewish identity in Britain is a major theme of this work.
However, this book also highlights the friction and dissonance apparent within Anglo-Jewry’s dual identity and between the community and its host society. For all their potential consonance, the uptake of English attitudes and opinions frequently entailed loss and modification of traditional Jewish ones. This occasioned a significant decline in various aspects of the community’s Jewishness, such as Diasporic connections, Hebrew culture, and religious commitment. Post-emancipation, there were, this study illustrates, numerous restrictions operating upon British Jews’ self-expression. Also, it concludes that the success of Anglo-Jewish integration was distinctly limited. The community could not convince others (or itself) that it was just another nonconformist grouping, as pro-emancipationists had asserted, and Jews were still viewed in certain circumstances as foreign and otherwise not British. Anglo-Jewish identity was not correlative with any other contemporary formation. This created the potential for isolating clashes between ‘mainstream’ British and particular Jewish views, and would ensure the continuation of a level of anti-Jewish prejudice in the period.
Anglo-Jewry’s emancipation had not solved the contradictions inherent to their dual definition. The community suffered from the ambivalence that characterized most other Jewries’ modern existence. The ambiguity of Anglo-Jewish life is an essential theme within this analysis: in regard both to its more usually noticed negative aspects, as well as its less appreciated positive ramifications. It was this ambiguity, this work asserts, which was advantageously used by the community, exploiting the space available in Britain and keeping their position fluid, to pursue an Anglo-Jewish existence that often satisfied many requirements of their combined identity, even if its lack of structure provided slender support in times of crisis. Exploring these elements this book outlines how and in what capacity a unique version of Jewish identity was formed in Britain during the post-emancipation era.
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