Anglo-Jewry since 1066

Place, locality and memory

Tony Kushner

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847796974
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Anglo-Jewry since 1066: Place, locality and memory is a study of the history and memory of Anglo-Jewry from medieval times to the present and is the first to explore the construction of identities, both Jewish and non-Jewish, in relation to the concept of place. The introductory chapters provide a theoretical overview focusing on the nature of local studies then moves into a chronological frame, starting with medieval Winchester, moving to early modern Portsmouth and then chapters covering the evolution of Anglo-Jewry from emancipation to the twentieth century. Emphasis is placed on the impact on identities resulting from the complex relationship between migration (including transmigration) and settlement of minority groups. Drawing upon a wide range of approaches, including history, cultural and literary studies, geography, Jewish and ethnic and racial studies, Kushner uses extensive sources including novels, poems, art, travel literature, autobiographical writing, official documentation, newspapers and census data.
This book will appeal to scholars interested in Jewish studies and British history

1
Placing the ‘local’

Introduction

In 1920, the philosopher, John Dewey, contrasted perspectives of the United States as an entity from the outside with that presented by an American small-town newspaper:

Then one gets a momentary shock. One is brought back to earth. And the earth is just what it used to be. It is a loose collection of houses, of streets, of neighborhoods, villages, farms, towns. Each of these has an intense consciousness of what is going on within itself in the way of fires, burglaries, murders, family jars, weddings, and banquets to esteemed fellow citizens, and a languid drooping interest in the rest of the spacious land.

Was this inward-looking journalistic vision of the world not very provincial, asked Dewey, to which he responded, ‘No, not at all. Just local, just human, just at home, just where they live.’¹ Dewey was convinced after the First World War and the growing movement in the United States for ‘Americanization’ that ‘We are discovering that the locality is the only universal. Even the suns and stars have their own times as well as their own places.’² Some fifty years later, the poet William Stafford came to the same conclusion: ‘All events and experiences are local, somewhere. And all human enhancements of events and experiences – all the arts – are regional in the sense that they derive from immediate relation to felt life.’ It was such immediacy, suggested Stafford, that distinguished art, and ‘paradoxically the more local the feeling in art, the more people can share it; for that vivid encounter with the stuff of the world is our common ground’.³

Dewey and Stafford were convinced that only by intense engagement with the local – whether living in, passing through or simply by thinking of places – could communication between different peoples become universal. Such commitment to and faith in the ‘local’ contrasts with the dominant associations of the concept as parochial, insular, and, ultimately, narrow-minded. At very best in such thinking, the ‘local’ acts as a retreat and a defence or refuge from the rest of the world. W. G. Hoskins, the founder of the ‘Leicester school’ of English local history, answering why there was a growth in interest in his subject after 1945, suggested that it

may be that with the growing complexity of life, and the growth in size of every organisation with which we have to deal nowadays, not to mention the fact that so much of the past is visibly perishing before our eyes, more and more people have been led to take an interest in a particular place and to find out all about it.

Anticipating that such an interest might be labelled ‘escapism’, Hoskins rejected the charge and added that ‘the fact is that we are not born internationalists and there comes a time when the complexity and size of modern politics leaves us cold’. In contrast to the perspective offered by Dewey and Stafford, Hoskins had no universal vision for identifying with the ‘local’: ‘We belong to a particular place and the bigger and more incomprehensible the modern world grows the more will people turn to study something of which they can grasp the scale and in which they can find a personal and individual meaning.’⁴ Hoskins, as Christopher Parker suggests, ‘portrayed local historians in a distinctly romantic and nostalgic way, mapping their villages or their country towns in the shortening days of autumn, studying in county parsonages, writing in humble school exercise books and so on’. As Parker concludes, in spite of Hoskins’s denial, ‘one has to say this looks very escapist’.⁵

Hoskins devoted only four pages of his Local History in England (1959 and 1972) to the ‘mobility of population’, although he did acknowledge that one of the most deeply held but ‘false ideas about English social history is that the majority of our population were rooted to the soil in one place until quite recent times’.⁶ Even then the emphasis was placed on internal migration rather than the world beyond the nation state represented by the presence of immigrants. Rather than diversity, it was the continuity of families and customs that dominated the work of the first academic local historians in Britain after the Second World War. Rejecting the bias of earlier antiquarian studies with their focus on the manorial system, the task of these new ‘professional’ historians was to locate and document the existence of local communities. While the leaders of the ‘Leicester school’ reflected, indeed agonised, on what constituted the geographical scale and definition of the ‘local’, they failed to problematise the idea and manifestation of ‘community’. In his inaugural lecture at Leicester in 1970, for example, Alan Everitt returned to the questions raised by his predecessors, W. G. Hoskins and H. P. Finberg: what was local history, and how should it be approached? To Everitt,

It means in the first place that … we should study the whole local community, and not merely a single class or industry or section of it. Secondly, it means that we study the structure of the local community, as an organism, so to speak, with a more or less distinct and continuous life of its own.⁷

To the ‘Leicester school’, formalised in the late 1940s, the existence of community was taken for granted. ‘Community’ was natural like the specific landscape around it which was so intricately connected to the making of local uniqueness. There is, however benign the intention, a volkisch potential in the pursuit of what Hoskins called the revealing of ‘a true society of men, women, and children, gathered together in one place’.⁸ As Felix Driver and Raphael Samuel warned in 1995, ‘The idea that places have fixed identities or personalities, the product of continuous and inward-looking histories stretching back for generations, is a fantasy which might in some circumstances be comforting; in others, as in what is left of the former Yugoslavia, it is patently disastrous.’⁹

At a popular cultural level, the correlation between the ‘local’ and exclusionary prejudice and reaction has been parodied acutely by the League of Gentlemen in radio, television, film and print. Set in the fictional Peak District village of Royston Vasey, the grotesque creations in this darkest of comedies include Tubbs, who helps, along with her husband, to run the ‘local shop for local people’. They kidnap, sexually abuse, murder and then burn any ‘strangers’ who stumble across their premises, giving menace to the village’s seemingly innocent tourist slogan, ‘Once discovered, never forgotten’. The outside world is utterly alien to Royston Vasey, but its danger is represented within through the presence of dangerous ‘others’ such as Herr Lipp, the paedophile German; Papa Lazarou, an Italian version of ‘Black Peter’ (a demonic representation of the black man)¹⁰ who steals men ‘to be his wife’ through his ‘Pandemonium Carnival’; and, finally, more covert references throughout their work to Jewish blood libel/cannibalism as exemplified by Hilary Briss, the village’s family butcher with his ‘special’ [i.e. human] meat.¹¹

It is no doubt easier within the liberal, if superficial, commitment in the twenty-first century to the concept of the ‘global village’ to highlight the backward looking and discriminatory tendencies of the ‘local’, rather than to imagine its universal potential. Thus those involved in local studies have ‘generally been regarded by the world at large with a certain well-meaning condescension, not unmingled with a little kindly amusement’, especially within the historical profession.¹² Returning to Royston Vasey, the semi-literate Tubbs’s parochialism is manifested in a local pride and imagination that takes ‘Leicester school’ ideas and praxis to their logical absurdity: ‘I am keen on local history, and one day hope to write a book about it. You can learn a lot of things about people by what they throw away … beautifl things I Haf collected from the moors about local Things about local people who are Local.’¹³ The warped, monstrous and introverted local Weltanschauung of Tubbs, albeit in less concentrated form, is not purely a postmodern comic invention, as will become apparent throughout this study. It is especially manifested in Chapter 3 and the anthropological exploration of Jewish ritual murder narratives in medieval England and their later legacies. Nevertheless, Anglo-Jewry since 1066 will include examples that put into practice the universalist aspirations of the local as envisioned by John Dewey and William Stafford. This book will thus both reflect on the nature of local studies and explore the key question raised by Driver and Samuel of whether it is ‘possible to maintain a sense of the uniqueness of localities, and the singularity of our attachments to them, without falling prey to introverted (and ultimately exclusionary) visions of the essence or spirit of places?’¹⁴

The ‘local’ and minority studies

In a study of ‘discourses in local history’, George and Yanina Sheeran point out how class and gender analyses, and more recent work on black history, through specific English urban case studies have undermined the concept of ‘community’ as put forward by the ‘Leicester school’.¹⁵ Research revealing the existence of class conflict, sex inequality and racism has attempted to undermine the myth of consensus and harmony at the level of the local. Yet within the specific historiography of ‘ethnic and racial studies’, while prejudice, discrimination and violence have not been ignored, an equal if not greater energy has been expended on showing the sheer presence of minorities in specific localities. The desire to reveal rootedness and longevity has at least partly been inspired to counter the assumptions of ‘ethnic’ homogeneity in Britain, a national mythology, which aside from associations made with ‘untypical’ areas such as the East End of London and ‘Tiger Bay’ in Cardiff, is even more pronounced in imagining the local. To highlight further the exceptionality of the East End and ‘Tiger Bay’, both have been portrayed and perceived through their inhabitants as morally dangerous and essentially other, ‘a race apart’ representing the results of degeneration. Less menacingly, but no less fancifully with regard to their everyday normality, they have been pictured and experienced as exotic and enticing islands of cosmopolitanism in more mundane seas of sameness.¹⁶ Chapter 8 of this book, on the street between the docks and the town in Southampton known as ‘The Ditches’, will show such processes at work in a less nationally notorious, but equally revealing, case study as will an earlier example of the ‘sailortown’ district of Portsmouth, explored in Chapter 4.

Against the dominant trend of ignoring past and present diversity (or the sub-theme of presenting it as a freak show or theme park and, therefore, essentially alien), two extended photographic essays – Black Londoners 1880–1990 (1998) and Asian Leicester (2002) – illustrate neatly the desire to integrate minority history into local history.¹⁷ They are typical of a genre of historical literature in Britain which emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century. This new writing revealed a growing consciousness of the black experience and melded populist and academic approaches in work intended, with an explicit pedagogic purpose, to reach a wide audience. It would empower local minority communities by providing evidence of their ‘roots of the future’¹⁸ and serve an educational purpose in the cause of anti-racism and multi-culturalism.

In Black Londoners, Susan Okokon states that her aim was ‘to remind readers of the contribution of Black Londoners to the twentieth century, as we embark upon the twe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 Placing the ‘local’
• 2 Wessex tales/Yiddisher spiels
• 3 Winchester: constructing the city of memories
• 4 Point of contestation: Jews in Portsmouth during the long eighteenth century
• 5 Jewish emancipation and after: locality, brotherhood and the nature of tolerance
• 6 Settlement and migration from the 1850s to 1914
• 7 Historicising the invisible: transmigrancy, memory and local identities
• 8 Memory at the margins, matter out of place: hidden narratives of Jewish settlement and movement in the inter-war years
• Conclusion
• Index