Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Charity, Community and Religion, 1830-1880

Alysa Levene

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350102200
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book examines Jewish communities in Britain in an era of immense social, economic and religious change: from the acceleration of industrialisation to the end of the first phase of large-scale Jewish immigration from Europe. Using the 1851 census alongside extensive charity and community records, Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain tests the impact of migration, new types of working and changes in patterns of worship on the family and community life of seven of the fastest-growing industrial towns in Britain. Communal life for the Jews living there (over a third of whom had been born overseas) was a constantly shifting balance between the generation of wealth and respectability, and the risks of inundation by poor newcomers. But while earlier studies have used this balance as a backdrop for the story of individual Jewish communities, this book highlights the interactions between the people who made them up. At the core of the book is the question of what membership of the 'imagined community' of global Jewry meant: how it helped those who belonged to it, how it affected where they lived and who they lived with, the jobs that they did and the wealth or charity that they had access to. By stitching together patterns of residence, charity and worship, Alysa Levene is here able to reveal that religious and cultural bonds had vital functions both for making ends meet and for the formation of identity in a period of rapid demographic, religious and cultural change.

1

Introduction

This book is a socio-economic history of the Jews in nineteenth-century industrial Britain. Its key concern is how far we can accurately use the word ‘community’ to describe this small minority in British society, bound together by the fellowship of shared religion and culture but in other ways very diverse. It examines how urban provincial Jews arranged themselves in households and neighbourhoods, how they responded to local work opportunities, and how they managed their own welfare needs, all amid the rush of social, economic and cultural change that accompanied industrialization. In doing so, it introduces a new perspective on the nature of community and religious life in a period of great social and economic transformation.

‘Community’ is a word that is easy to throw around and hard to pin down. In its broadest sense it refers to people with shared characteristics. If we drill down deeper into the literature we find that these bonds are usually positive in nature, offering traits like security, identity and solidarity.¹ For sociologists, ‘community’ refers to a form of social organization which is usually spatially bounded; for anthropologists shared culture is a more important feature; while political scientists look for political structures – often in contrast with national governance.² For historians, as Calhoun notes, the term is often used ‘rather loosely’ to refer to ‘a geographically or administratively bounded population, or to a set or variety of social relations’, often with a sense of nostalgic recall for a past time of shared identity and communal obligations.³ While not overtly considering the theoretical boundaries of ‘community’, Wrightson and Levine refer to life in the early modern village of Terling, Essex in much these terms, as ‘a constellation of institutions focusing [residents’] interaction, … a network of ties between kin, friends, and neighbors’ which together produce a ‘special claim on their loyalties, a special place in their sense of personal identity’.⁴ This is also, broadly speaking, the nature of the nineteenth-century working-class ‘community’, short on economic resources but rich on shared social and support networks evoked by scholars like Davin, though here the sense of shared and bounded space is also important.⁵ Steve King’s studies of eighteenth-century Yorkshire townships, meanwhile, point out that communities have less tangible borders too, such that while some are ‘in’, others are by definition ‘out’.⁶ These boundaries may be readily apparent to outsiders, in the form of shared nationality, religion or club membership. In other cases the borders are much fuzzier, allowing people to decide for themselves whether they – or others – belong or not. Communities are also very flexible in scale, ranging from a small, geographically bounded locale where everyone knows each other by name, to one of its most famous forms, the ‘imagined’ community coined by Benedict Anderson, where members might never meet, but know, nonetheless, that they share a common bond.⁷ Furthermore, community allegiances can shift over time, and a person may be a member of several communities at once, either overlapping or completely distinct.⁸

Ties between community members are also variable in nature, ranging from horizontal ones among peers – as in Anderson’s Preston, which we will explore in further detail below – or vertical, between those of different social status, as Wrightson and Levine emphasized as part of their analysis of Terling. In a religious community they are likely both, where shared faith is overlaid with a social hierarchy consisting of leadership, patronage and charity. Studies of the ‘Jewish community’ tend, while not engaging overtly with these issues, to assume that a key characteristic of a bounded community is leadership; hence ‘community leaders’, who shape and patrol its boundaries. On the other hand, religious bonds form a classic case of an ‘imagined community’, where common ties are transpatial.⁹ One of the key concerns of this book is to examine how the transpatial community of British Jewry interacted with specific geographical settings.

Another feature of writing about ‘community’ in the early modern period is the impact of urbanization and the rise of the nation state. These were the conditions that made Anderson’s imagined national community possible; they also produced the equally famous shift identified by Ferdinand Tönnies, from the interpersonal and emotional ties that made up the traditional Gemeinschaft community, to the formal ones of the modern Gesellschaft.¹⁰ Social and economic historians have also identified a weakening of traditional community bonds with the mass urbanization that accompanied the Industrial Revolution: what Calhoun has called a change from ‘the predictable and well-understood nexus of community life to the large-scale and uncertain affairs of political society’.¹¹ Geographic mobility, often for employment, thus (it was proposed) left people unsupported by traditional kin and community networks, living instead in more fragmented domestic units with less oversight of moral behaviour, and more dependent on the collectivity in the form of charities, the state Poor Law and official authorities.¹²

Many of these models of the impact of political and economic change on family and community life were quickly debunked. Comparative and long-range demographic studies, for instance, pointed out that nuclear families predated industrialization in Britain – and that elsewhere, extended family forms were not inconsistent with industry.¹³ Michael Anderson’s famous 1971 study of Preston – an industrial town in the north-west of England – was an early example. Drawing on demographic and social evidence and taking a sociological perspective, he highlighted the continued importance of family ties in an industrial town, albeit overlaid with a strong sense of instrumentality which he suggests arose partly from a breakdown in older systems of inheritance and network formation.¹⁴ Nonetheless, family remained one of the key ports of call when people fell on hard times: as one survey has summarized, ‘[a]s the Industrial Revolution instigated new life-cycle risks and intensified existing ones, it seems likely that dense and functional family and kinship groups were one of the few effective defences which individuals could deploy’.¹⁵

Despite these qualifications, then, even the most recent studies acknowledge a qualitative change in social relations and personal behaviour which went hand in hand with both industrialization and urbanization. Emma Griffin has suggested, for example, that the reliable and comfortable wages afforded by industrial occupations had a liberating impact on decisions about marriage, work and living arrangements.¹⁶ Furthermore, many of the most reassuring aspects of community (including religion) were portable, and chain migration meant that newcomers often joined family members, or people from the same place of origin, so establishing a new sense of shared fellowship.¹⁷ The urban environment also brought new community identities based on religious affiliation, political and club membership, leisure activities or cultural groups. These could help to preserve familiar values and identities, or forge novel ones which provided an equivalent sense of belonging and support. It is probably, therefore, a mistake to see industrial conditions as sundering one type of community tie and replacing it with something inferior; we should instead interrogate the nature of community life in industrial settings anew, taking in emotional, linguistic, cultural and transactional market-based bonds.

One of the key aspects of Jewish ‘community’ ties is that they did indeed operate at several different levels. The first and least tangible were the ‘imagined’ bonds which went with shared religious, ethnic and social heritage. The evidence presented in this book suggests that in a very important and useful sense, Jews felt part of a shared Covenant with God, which brought common practices, a duty of care for one another and a sensitivity to their reputation as a body. However, at a more micro level there were many communities within British Jewry. For one thing, immigration meant that British Jewry included a very diverse set of people. From southern Spain to eastern Russia, the Jews living in Britain by the middle of the nineteenth century spoke a variety of languages, had different prior experiences of persecution and restriction (and thus urban life and choice of occupation and marriage), displayed different attitudes to their religion and to their host society, and varied from more or less destitute to fantastically wealthy. Some of these differences were more formal, particularly those between Ashkenazi Jews (from Eastern and Central Europe) and Sephardi Jews (from Southern Europe and northern Africa). These distinctions were principally cultural, based on different styles of worship and vernacular languages, but they were accompanied by very different reasons for settling in Britain.¹⁸ There was also a strong core of Jews from both groups by the middle of the nineteenth century who had been British for generations and who were highly anglicized. These differences produced subcommunities within British Jewry as a whole, and also, no doubt, different priorities for life in Britain and attitudes to the utility, comfort or practice of religion. By the mid-nineteenth century, as we will see, new identities started to emerge with the growth of communities in the industrial towns.

Migration was a common feature of life in Britain generally, but it was heavily promoted by the opportunities presented by rapid urbanization.¹⁹ Employment was one of the most common reasons for movement, but people also relocated for marriage, or simply to down-/upsize domestic arrangements in response to changed personal economic circumstances.²⁰ Jews, like their compatriots, moved for these reasons too, often over relatively short distances, and often to join friends and family. Any of these moves also brought potential isolation though: Steve King’s work on migrants to the West Yorkshire township of Calverley suggests that incomers could suffer from long-lasting marginalization, to the extent of creating penalties in infant mortality and welfare.²¹ However, Jews were far more likely than other Britons to have had the yet more dislocating experience of an international move, to escape persecution and restriction, or to seek economic betterment and business contacts. Petra Laidlaw has calculated that a fifth of the Jews in Britain in 1851 had made at least one long-distance international move in their lives so far.²² This brought an added and outwardly obvious dimension of ‘otherness’ to large parts of the Jewish community, especially the newer waves from Poland and Russia, who looked and sounded notably ‘foreign’. Even within their own religious community, they were treated with wariness because they were a potential threat to the respectable image of established British Jewry.²³

Nineteenth-century British Jewry thus contained a notable proportion of new and often very ‘othered’ migrants, living in settings to which – as we will see over the course of this book – they were frequently poorly adapted because of their prior experiences of work and urban life. The way in which they were perceived in British society and popular culture by the period we are concerned with – the 1830s to the end of the 1870s – was ambivalent. While scholars point out that the introduction of an (ultimately unsuccessful) parliamentary bill to provide full civil liberties for British-born Jews in 1830 was not accompanied by the same sort of popular disturbance that accompanied the abortive ‘Jew Bill’ of 1753, Jews were still subject to the hangovers of long-held negative stereotypes about their religious and moral qualities, supported by a firm belief in their intrinsic separateness.²⁴ That said, they largely escaped the mass marginalization and prejudice which has been identified for that most studied of British minorities: the Irish (or, indeed, Jewish populations in parts of Continental Europe). They also benefited from the influence of Enlightenment-era tolerance – at least until the ‘Eastern Crisis’ of the mid-1870s, when Disraeli’s support of the Muslim Turks over the Christian Bulgarians once again raised fears about malign Jewish influence within Britain.²⁵ In our period, the Jews were, however, a far smaller minority in British society than the Irish, and did not dominate neighbourhoods in the same way. They were not particularly political and nor were they singled out for their antisocial behaviour; in fact, Jews were often commented to be very family-oriented and abstemious when it came to drink.²⁶ Finally, their clerics were far less visible within the wider community (partly because they were much smaller in number), which was another way in which the Irish as a whole were ‘othered’. Even when the huge upswing in Jewish immigration of the 1880s did start to attract greater opprobrium, critics were more likely than in earlier decades to cite the conditions under which the Jews had been forced to live in their countries of origin as an explanation for their supposed lack of hygiene and willingness to live and work in poor surroundings.²⁷ While both the Jews and the Irish thus remained targets for a bundle of fears and stereotypes of long standing, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century the Jews were living quietly enough that attitudes were, generally speaking, somewhere along a spectrum of accepting and apathetic. The poverty migration of the famine years, meanwhile, had turned the Catholic Irish – especially in towns like Liverpool where they settled in large numbers and dominated particular neighbourhoods – into a more evident and noisy threat.²⁸

The nature of community ties and reactions to ‘outsiders’ in the industrial period is thus a central debate for this study. It also engages with a second important strand of research, which is the impact of industrialization, broadly defined, on religious practice. Scholars have suggested that new, competing forms of urban leisure, scientific discoveries which challenged the primacy of religion, and long hours of work, all combined to jolt people out of long-held patterns of church-going and religious feeling.²⁹ It certainly worried contemporaries, and especially Anglicans, who were sufficiently disturbed to commission a one-off Census of Worship in 1851 – the results of which did not allay their fears.³⁰ It showed that the manufacturing towns (already a focus for concerns about moral behaviour) had the lowest levels of church-going in the country: fewer than one in ten people went to a place of worship on census day in Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield and Newcastle, and Anglican churches were the worst affected.³¹ Many historians have criticized the emphasis placed on formal attendance in the religious decline narrat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents 
• List of figures
• List of maps
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• Part I: Household and community among Jews in industrial Britain
• Part II: Charity and communal networks
• Part III: Conclusion
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index
• Imprint