16 research outputs found
Book Review
No full textThis is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Jewish Culture and History on 02/09/2014, available online: doi 10.1080/1462169X.2014.953830A book review of the edited collection, ‘The Jew’ in late-Victorian and Edwardian culture: between the East End and East Africa, edited by Nadia Valman and Eitan Bar-Yosef
Moving 'out' to be 'in': the suburbanization of London Jewry, 1900-1939
Get PDFThis article has been accepted for publication and will appear in a revised form, subsequent to peer review and/or editorial input by Cambridge University Press, in Urban History published by Cambridge University Press. Copyright 2022.Between 1900 and 1939, Jewish Londoners departed the East End for the suburbs. Relocation, however, was not always the result of individual agency. Many Jews became the object of institutional strategies to coerce and persuade them to disperse away from inner-city areas. Simultaneous to this was the emergence of a dominant pro-suburban rhetoric within and beyond Jewish cultural circles, which aimed to raise aspirations towards middle-class lifestyles. This striking suburban ‘urge’ amongst London Jewry, managed by the community's elite institutions and leaders, was far more than a phenomenon running parallel to wider British society. As this article argues, it was a decisive response to an insidious culture of intolerance and antisemitism
Bridging the Gap between 'War' and 'Peace': The Case of Belgian Refugees in Britain
Get PDFBritain’s ‘hospitality’ towards 250,000 Belgian refugees now warrants a mention in most histories of the First World War. Yet the refugees’ rapid repatriation by the British state continues to be treated as little more than a bookend to their story, whilst the trauma of return and the challenges of reintegration for those who fled has been all but ignored. This chapter seeks to correct these oversights by exposing the contradictions of a state-sponsored repatriation scheme; presented as the final act of a ‘generous’ and ‘liberal’ nation but, in reality, one which served the British government’s own interests. Such a mercenary approach to repatriation curtailed state concern for the conditions facing returning Belgians as their nation emerged from four years of war into a fragile ‘peace’
Belgian Refugees in Cheshire: 'Place' and the Invisibility of the Displaced
Get PDFThis is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Immigrants and Minorities on 24-10-18, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/02619288.2018.1536880The First World War centenary has invigorated research into the Belgian refugee presence, especially at the local level. However, as this article argues, the responses which Belgians elicited locally, as well as the ‘quality’ and longevity of the memory culture surrounding them, was intimately tethered to ideas about and experiences of ‘place’ during the war and after. Exiled Belgians were almost uniquely positioned to communicate the totality of war as well as stand as silent representatives of the trauma of displacement. Yet this case study of the North West county of Cheshire demonstrates how wartime tragedy with regional consequences, as well as a preoccupation with combatant internees and casualties, eclipsed the everyday reality and the post-war memory of the Belgians
Stigmatizing Space: Jewish East London at the Fin de Siecle
No full textThis is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge/CRC Press in Arrival Neighbourhoods: Migration and Urban Space in European Cities, 1870 - 2020 on 01/12/2023, available online on publication.London’s East End – a quarter buttressing the city’s docklands – has long been a place of arrival for migrants both domestic and foreign. Characterised in the 19th century by dense housing, tenement blocks, large factories, and low-grade workshops, it was also an area subject to pervasive stigmatisation by on-lookers. It was a stigmatisation which drew upon the area’s reputation as a ‘notorious’ slum quarter and a ‘hotbed’ for crime, complicated by its established status as a reception centre for ‘foreigners’.
The large-scale arrival and settlement of Jews from Eastern Europe after 1880 cemented but also extended and diversified such narratives. The rhetoric of the ‘slum’ was now codified with a new, distinctly antisemitic way of describing and degenerating space. The East End slum quarter became ‘the ghetto’, textile factories became ‘sweatshops’, and the East End itself was imaginatively transformed to become ‘little Jerusalem’. Journalists, philanthropists, politicians, novelists, flaneurs and voyeurs all contributed to this spatial lexicon. So too did members of the established Jewish community in Britain both internalise and regurgitate such language as a means to distinguish themselves from their ‘alien’ brethren.
This chapter explores the emergence and evolution of this linguistic landscape within cultural discourse of the period, arguing that it was the pre-existing identity of the East End itself as a place apart which allowed this vocabulary to form
Placing the ‘other’ in our midst: immigrant Jews, gender and the British imperial imagination
No full textThis thesis traces cultural and socio-political responses to the alien Jew in Britain through the prism of genre, space and time. Beginning with the reports of persecution of Jews in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century, it examines how representations of these foreign Jews changed and developed as sympathy for their plight turned to anxiety at the prospect of their arrival in Britain. It shows how a Semitic discourse evolved alongside, and in response to, wider debates about the state of the self, nation and empire at the fin de siècle, arguing that the vocabulary and mentality of imperialism was a crucial tool for deciphering the nature of Jewish „difference?. However, this thesis also enables fresh perspectives by considering the gender and spatial dynamics of Semitic representations in Britain during and beyond the period of mass immigration, from the end of the nineteenth century until the beginning of the twenty first. This extended view of the Jewish 'other', which follows the 'typical' Jewish migrant journey from the shtetl of Eastern Europe to the North London suburb of the present-day, considers how Jewish spatial and cultural practices have been interpreted and articulated by the British and the British-Jewish onlooker.The thesis' opening section, divided into three chapters, adopts an original approach to the aliens question by exploring how perspectives on the alien Jew were shaped and expressed within different mediums, or 'genres' at the fin de siècle. Through an assessment of newspapers, political debates, and fiction, this section offers a comparative analysis of how the particular dynamics and agendas of each of these genres operated to produce different textual and visual images of 'the Jew'. Building upon Bryan Cheyette's seminal work in relation to fiction, each of these chapters demonstrates not only the inherently ambivalent nature of Semitic representations but also reveal that, crucially, gender was an important moderator of Jewish „difference?. This reading extends into the second section which, across four chapters, explores how gender functioned in conjunction with space to construct ideas in Britain about alien Jews as they traversed time and space from shtetl to suburb. Beginning with the point of departure, the opening chapter of the section reviews the long tradition of representing Eastern Europe by „the West?, arguing that this tradition laid the foundation for a paradoxical view of the Jew in Eastern Europe as both territorialized and territorializing. This perceived struggle for spatial ownership amongst Jews also featured in narratives of the migrant journey – the topic of the second chapter. That perception generated the notion that migrating Jews were staging an alien invasion of Britain. Thus the prolonged fascination with London's Jewish 'ghetto' and its interior – 'alien' territory par excellence – provides the focus for the third chapter which, in turn, lays the foundation for the final chapter?s exploration of the replacement of the urban with the suburban as the alien Jew's 'territory' of choice
Memories of Suburbia: Autobiographical Fiction and Minority Narratives
No full textHistorians have recently begun to engage with fiction as a compelling and elucidative historical source. Novels deemed to engender autobiographical qualities have garnered particular attention for their presumed historical ‘authenticity’, yet memory work encoded within their narratives has rarely been considered. This chapter explores how memory functions within and through the conceptualisation of place within The Buddha of Suburbia (1990); White Teeth (2000) and Disobedience (2006). Bound up in apparently familiar images of London’s peripheries are individual remembrances of the past which intersect with and problematise collective memories of suburbia, and complicate the relationship between history, memory, fiction and identity
'Hands across the tea': Renegotiating Jewish Identity and Belonging in Post-war Britain
No full textIn contemporary Britain, Jewish identity – what it means to be ‘Jewish’, how it is to be enacted and performed, and indeed the parameters and environments of Jewish life itself – have become more elastic. This chapter suggests that these changes can, in part, be understood as a consequence of Jewish suburbanisation across the twentieth century. As strangers became neighbours, the intimacies facilitated by spatial proximity and a shared investment in ‘place’ altered notions of ‘Jewishness’ and ‘Britishness’ in turn. However, as an examination of the period 1945-1966 suggests, the inter-play between and melding of minority and majority identity was rarely straight-forward
Clandestine Migrant Journeys to Britain
No full textThe Aliens Act of 1905 was the culmination of decades of anxiety about migrants – some of whom attempted to reach Britain by clandestine means
The Alien Jew in the British Imagination, 1881-1905: Space, Mobility and Territoriality
No full textThis book explores how fin de siècle Britain and Britons displaced spatially-charged apprehensions about imperial decline, urban decay and unpoliced borders onto Jews from Eastern Europe migrating westwards. The myriad of representations of the ‘alien Jew’ that emerged were the product of, but also a catalyst for, a decisive moment in Britain’s legal history: the fight for the 1905 Aliens Act. Drawing upon a richly diverse collection of social and political commentary, including fiction, political testimony, ethnography, travel writing, journalism and cartography, this volume traces the shifting rhetoric around alien Jews as they journeyed from the Russian Pale of Settlement to London’s East End. By employing a unique and innovative reading of both the aliens debate and racialized discourse concerned with ‘the Jew’, Hannah Ewence demonstrates that ideas about ‘space’ and 'place’ critically informed how migrants were viewed; an argument which remains valid in today’s world
