“We are not only English Jews—we are Jewish Englishmen”

Front matter

“We are not only

English Jews— we are Jewish Englishmen”

The Making of an Anglo-Jewish Identity, 1840-1880

Chapter Four. Anglo-Jewry on the Move: Demographic, Political, Social, and Economic Change

Chapter Five. London Jews and Education: On Becoming English and Remaining Jewish— By Class and Design

Conclusion. The Making of an Anglo-Jewish Identity, 1840-1880

Appendix 1. Sampling of Charities and Charitable Institutions Advertising or Soliciting Subscribers in the Jewish Chronicle, 1841-1859

Appendix 2. Sampling of Charitable Institutions, Friendly Societies, and So Forth, 1874 xviii

170 178 198

Tables

Table 4.1 Summary of Occupations for Likely Jewish Surnames—extracted from W. Kelley’s The Post Office London Directory, 1841 122

Table 4.1a Sample of Jewish Surnames in W. Kelley's The Post Office London Directory, 1841, Commercial Directory Section 123

Table 4.2 Dispersion of London Jewry—as Indicated by Formation of Congregations beyond the City and East End 124-6

AJA BD

BG

CR

JC

JE

JFS LMA TJHSE VI WLSBJ

Abbreviations Used in Citations

Anglo Jewish Archives, Southampton

Board of Deputies of British Jews

Board of Guardians for the Relief of the Jewish Poor Office of the Chief Rabbi

Jewish Chronicle

Jewish Encyclopedia (1906)

Jews’ Free School

London Metropolitan Archives

Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England Voice of Jacob

West London Synagogue of British Jews

Glossary of Terms

Ascamah (pl. Ascamot)

Ashkenazi (pl. Ashkenazim)

Baal Bayit (pl. Baale Batim)

Goy (pl. Goyim)

Hakham

Halakhah

Haskalah Heder (pl. Hadarim)

Herem

Kashrut

Kehilah (pl. Kehilot)

e bylaw, regulation of a Sephardi (q.v.) synagogue.

e German Polish religious rite or custom, also Jews of central and eastern European origin who follow this rite.

e “householder” (lit.), full member of an Ashkenazi synagogue.

e gentile, frequently used in a derogatory manner.

e rabbi and head of the Sephardi (q.v.) congregations in England.

e “the path” (lit.), the corpus of Jewish law, also a particular area of Jewish law.

e the European Jewish Enlightenment.

e “room” (lit.), traditional Jewish elementary school.

e religious ban or excommunication.

e dietary laws governing which foods are fit for Jewish consumption, and how to prepare such foods.

e “community” or “assembly” (lit.), traditional European Jewish community, also generic term for any Jewish community or congregation.

xii

Glossary of Terms

Mahamad

Maskil (pl. maskilim) Sephardi (pl. Sephardim)

Shehitah

Shohet (pl. Shohetim)

Takanah (pl. Takanot)

Toshavim

Yeshivah (pl. Yeshivot)

Zedakah e governing body/executive committee of Bevis Marks, Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue of London.

e proponent of the Haskalah (q.v.).

e Spanish and Portuguese Jewish rite or custom, also Jews from Iberia (and subsequently North Africa and areas of the Middle East) who follow this rite.

e kosher slaughter, i.e., slaughter conducted according to the laws of kashrut (q.v.).

e a kosher slaughterer, one who observes the rules of shehitah (q.v.).

e bylaw, regulation of an Ashkenazi (q.v.) synagogue or kehilah (q.v.).

e “residents” (lit.), seat holders in an Ashkenazi (q.v.) synagogue.

e “sitting” (lit.), traditional Jewish school of higher learning. Exclusively male.

e “righteousness” (lit.), Jewish charity, and the laws governing the giving of alms.

Acknowledgements

This volume originated several years ago when I was casting about for a dissertation topic. My advisor, Dr. John Naylor, knowing (although somewhat puzzled by) my enjoyment of social history readily acceded to my desire to explore topics that combined my twin interests in British and Jewish history. Thus, my first acknowledgement must be to him for his patience, guidance, understanding, and gentle prodding.

My committee members, Professors Naylor, Georg Iggers (zl), and Norman (Norrie) Baker gave generously of their time, advice, and insight. I am genuinely grateful for their collective support and assistance. Georg listened patiently as I outlined the original project and worked through my ideas. He and his wife, Wilma, served as my sounding boards and shared their ideas as this work took shape. They enthusiastically discussed their own multicultural and cross-national identities, sharing their perspectives as Jews, immigrants, and citizens of the world. They continued to be staunch supporters as I began my career as an historian. Norrie Baker shared his views on Anglo-American relations, history, culture, and genealogy. On rare occasions, he even inserted a comment or two about sport and sport history.

I would also like to thank Dr. Michael Berkowitz of University College London who willingly gave of his time to a stranger, providing advice, guidance, and support for this project when it was most needed.

My research in England was made possible by a Plesur grant from the Department of History at the University at Buffalo. The department also generously provided an ABD grant for my initial topic exploration. While in England, I received assistance from the librarians and archivists at the Tower Hamlets Local History Archive, the London Metropolitan Archives, and the Anglo-Jewish Archives at the University of Southampton, as well as from Dalia Tracz of the Jewish Studies Library at University College London. I would especially like to thank Ezra Kahn, librarian at the London xiv

Acknowledgements

College of Jewish Studies, for sharing his knowledge of Anglo-Jewish sources and his suggestions regarding material, and Charles Tucker, archivist of the chief rabbi’s office, for his insights and anecdotes relating to the extensive material under his purview.

My time in England was tremendously enriched by the warmth and kindness of Ralph and Muriel (zl) Emanuel, who were my surrogate family while I was in London. My friends Archie Kalyana, Rajiv Guha, Kay Ullmann, and Alvaro Nascimento also really brightened my days there.

In the United States, my fellow graduate students were warm, supportive, funny, cynical, argumentative, and, on rare occasions, impressively profane in their observations. In particular, I appreciate the laughter, encouragement, and friendship of Fred Dotolo and Jeannette Jones-Vazansky. I am also grateful to Dr. Elisa Narin van Court of Colby College who shared her passion for Anglo-Jewish history and her quirky sense of humor over the course of a year spent as visiting faculty. Elisa may be a poet and English scholar by training, but in her heart, I know her to be an inventive and committed historian.

In Dallas, Mary Pat Higgins and Steve Waldman of the Dallas Holocaust Museum/Center for Education and Tolerance, soon to be the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, supported and encouraged me while I prepared this manuscript for publication.

Appreciation is also due to the two anonymous outside readers whose close, meticulous reading of this work, as well as suggestions and thoughtful comments, helped me to clarify sections of the manuscript and to strengthen my arguments.

My parents have been part of this project from its beginning. I thank them for their love, encouragement, and patience over the years. I also thank my sister Tova for her many suggestions, keen editorial eye, and willingness to discuss Anglo-Jewry, and modern Jewish history more generally, though I know these are far from her favorite historical topics.

Finally, I thank my husband, Eldad, for his love, warmth, good humor, willingness to hear me out, and unwavering support as he has shared me with a very rewarding and demanding job and nevertheless encouraged me to find the time to complete this book. It is to him that this book is dedicated.

Introduction

English Jews confronted the same dilemma faced by all Jews who moved away from strictly traditional Judaism and community—how to reconcile modern individualism with the requirements of a tradition and community based religion. More specifically, English Jews had to decide how to blend aspects of their religion, culture, and ethnicity with elements from the surrounding society into a workable modern Jewish identity. That is, Jews had to make communal and individual choices regarding what to keep, what to discard, and what to add to create a sustainable, functional, and adaptable (when necessary) nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish identity. How did one become English without ceasing to be Jewish? Such a process defined the meaning of the former and redefined their understanding of the latter. This work focuses on 1840-1880, a period marked at its beginning by two events, both of which involved the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the public, quasi-official face of the established London Jewish community. In 1840, a small but significant, and ultimately public, rift occurred in the London Anglo-Jewish establishment that led to the founding of the West London Synagogue of British Jews, England’s first Reform synagogue. The Board of Deputies subsequently refused to recognize the new synagogue, founded by dissenting members of the London Jewish establishment, blocking the West London Synagogue’s members from full participation in the Anglo-Jewish community. That same year, the Board of Deputies, in its first public national and international involvement, pursued relief efforts in support of non-British Jews. In this instance, the board acted on behalf of the Jews of Damascus. Actions included a meeting between Sir Moses Montefiore, president of the board, and Foreign Secretary Palmerston, as well as mass public meetings in London and elsewhere. Ultimately, the board supported Montefiore as he undertook a mission to Damascus to work for the liberation of that community’s falsely accused and imprisoned xvi

Introduction

Jews.’ In the former instance, a public challenge was made to the authority of the Board of Deputies and the chief rabbi’s office, and in the latter, the Anglo-Jewish community made an open appeal to the British government and to the English public. Both events demonstrated an evolving, albeit not universal, level of Jewish communal comfort regarding their status as Anglo-Jews—that is, as Englishmen who happened to be of the Jewish religious persuasion. As shall be discussed throughout this volume, their evolving identity was not always straightforward and uncomplicated, involving a meshing of elements of Englishness and Jewishness.

The period under consideration here ends at the close of 1880, immediately before the start of the mass influx of eastern European Jews fleeing worsening Russian oppression in the wake of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and deteriorating economic conditions in Russia and Austria- Hungary. This influx increased the number of Jews in England more than fourfold between 1881 and 1914, changed the composition of Anglo-Jewry from primarily native- to foreign-born, swelled the ranks of the poor, upset the English tone of the religious and institutional infrastructure that Anglo- Jewry had developed between 1840 and 1880, and unsettled the Anglo- Jewish sensibilities many in the community had developed and adopted.

Over the course of these forty years, 1840-1880, a mature, increasingly comfortable, native-born Jewish community emerged and developed in London. The multifaceted growth and change in communal institutional and religious structures and habits, as well as the community’s increasing familiarity and comfort with the larger English society, contributed to the formation of an Anglo-Jewish communal identity. The various developments that occurred during these years and the concomitant emergence of an Anglo-Jewish communal identity comprise the subjects of the sections that follow.

Discussion begins in chapter one with a general historical summary of events and developments that led to the emergence of the post-readmission

1 The “Damascus Affair” involved a charge of blood libel. The Jews of Damascus were accused of murdering an Italian monk, one Father Tomas, allegedly to use his blood for Passover rituals. Under torture, some of the incarcerated Damascene Jews “confessed” their involvement to the Muslim authorities. The affair attracted considerable European attention. Several continental governments (most notably that of France) and newspapers supported the Muslim authorities and local Christians in their charges and “investigations.” Montefiore’s mission was successful as he won the release of those imprisoned Jews still alive by the time of his arrival. For details see Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,’ Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See also Ronald Florence, Blood Libel: The Damascus Affair of 1840 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004).

Introduction

Jewish community in England. I also provide a critical review and discussion of the existing literature on nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish history, noting areas that remain to be studied, and explaining where the present work fits in the field.

Chapter two explores difficulties surrounding the central and eastern European Jewish encounters with modernity, as well as the varieties of Jewish responses to these encounters. This is followed by a discussion of the particular communal elements in England that consolidated their authority over the Jewish community between 1840 and 1880; some of the challenges mounted to these authorities; and the relation between these institutions, events, and the emergence of a mid-century Anglo-Jewish communal identity.

This new identity was manifest in the development of an Anglo-Jewish charitable hybrid that combined aspects of traditional Jewish zedakah with English charitable and philanthropic practice. Chapter three traces these developments and examines whether there was a connection between Anglo-Jewish charitable giving, organizational change, and social control.

Demographic changes in the composition of Anglo-Jewry, as well as the significance of political, social, and occupational developments, are the focus of chapter four. Selections from the debates surrounding the question of Jewish acceptance in the English political nation are discussed in this section as part of the larger process of communal identity formation.

The final chapter discusses the development of class-specific Anglo- Jewish educational institutions and instructional arrangements for both children and adults. Communal decisions regarding the appropriate amount of religious education at each class level are discussed as well. Anglo-Jews are shown, through their educational choices, to have largely adopted the general society’s emphasis on practicality rather than intellectual achievement, considering a university education neither necessary nor even particularly useful in achieving financial and social advancement in England.

xvii

Note on Sources

In the latter two-thirds of this work I make extensive use of advertising material culled from the Anglo-Jewish press. This usage is significant, as this material has previously been considered only in passing by historians of nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewry. These advertisements provide considerable insight into communal and individual aspirations by affording a window into the period and by allowing the historian to trace the effects the encounter with English life had on resident Jews over time, including changes in Jewish education, developments in charitable giving, and the evolution of social expectations. Where it appears, I retain Hebrew wording in the ads so the reader may observe its continued use and importance for the Jews of England as a symbol of connectedness to Jewish community, tradition, religion, and culture.

Much of the existing Anglo-Jewish archival material is institutional in nature. It encompasses material from the chief rabbi’s office and court, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and the Board of Guardians for the Relief of the Jewish Poor (Jewish Board of Guardians). Also covered are various synagogal records that include membership and contributions, as well as registers of births, circumcisions, marriages, and deaths/burials. Other institutional records cover the United Synagogue, charities, and charitable institutions including orphanages and free schools. Material can also be found in the Jewish newspapers, Voice of Jacob, the Jewish Chronicle, and the Jewish Record, and in London-based Victorian newspapers and journals, such as The Times and the Illustrated London News. Archival holdings of the correspondence and papers of communal grandees such as Moses Montefiore, Sir Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, various members of the Rothschild family, and others are also available. Some nineteenth-century Anglo- Jewish prayer books, religious commentary, and synagogal addresses still exist. Also available to the researcher are the novels of Victorian Jewish

Note on Sources authors, principally, although not exclusively, written by women.' Some demographic material is available, much of it collected by the Office of the Chief Rabbi, and by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. The English census of 1851, the only one to pose questions relating to religious attendance, contains information on both church and synagogue attendance. Additional information relating to Jewish occupations, business locations, and the growth of London’s Jewish population, can be gleaned from tracing Jewish surnames (not a completely scientific approach) in postal and commercial directories issued between 1840 and 1880.

Unfortunately, middle-class and working-class memoirs, correspondence, and the thousand and one other tangible items from the lives of members of the Victorian Jewish community for the period 1840-1880, do not appear to exist any longer, certainly not in any form accessible to the historian. This complicates the task of social historians of Anglo-Jewry as it forces them to rely upon existing institutional and print records, from which they must attempt to retrieve aspects of the lives of the people about whom they wish to write.

1 These include Grace Aguilar, Amy Levy, and the Moss sisters, Celia and Marion. The Moss sisters also ran private schools in London for many years (see below, chapter five, London Jews and Education, section on private education). For more general information on these and other Victorian Jewish woman authors, see Nadia Valman, “Writers in Victorian England,” The Jewish Women’ Archive, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/ writers-in-victorian-england.

xix

Chapter One Jewish Life in England after Readmission

Historiographical Review: Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Jewish History

Before providing a brief overview of Jewish history in England prior to roughly the middle third of the nineteenth century, and before commencing a discussion of the emergence and development of a distinct hybrid Anglo-Jewish communal identity between 1840 and 1880, it is appropriate to review the existing literature on nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewry.

Several excellent surveys of Anglo-Jewish political history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been written, including those by Geoffrey Alderman, Eugene Black, and David Feldman.’ These are of interest for their reflections on changes taking place in Jewish internal communal politics, voting habits, emancipation, and interactions with the British political system. Those authors who range beyond 1880 also bring a discussion of immigration and changing demographics into the mix. Regardless of particular focus, these historians are practitioners of the newer non-Whiggish approach to the writing of Anglo-Jewish history, pursuing their craft, as Geoffrey Alderman has put it in Controversy and Crisis, by telling the story “warts and all”?

1 Geoffrey Alderman, Modern British Jewry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Geoffrey Alderman, London Jewry and London Politics, 1889-1986 (London: Routledge, 1989); Geoffrey Alderman, The Jewish Community in British Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); Eugene C. Black, The Social Politics of Anglo-Jewry, 1880-1920 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840-1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

2 Geoffrey Alderman, Controversy and Crisis: Studies in the History of the Jews in Modern Britain (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2008), 54.

“We are not only English Jews—we are Jewish Englishmen”

Of this group, David Feldman’s Englishmen and Jews is of particular interest, as he deals with the development of British national identity and the effect that the Jewish presence in England had on the emerging popular and elite sense of nationhood. Feldman believes that the debates surrounding the legal and political status of Jews in England (that is, the debates surrounding Jewish integration into the British nation) both “revealed and, in part, shaped conceptions of the nation.” He further notes that the debate over Jewish emancipation was “about the nature of English national identity’? While Feldman explores Jewish collective identity, as does my own work, his focus, unlike mine, is directed primarily outward to politics and to the community's interactions with the state.

Some scholars have turned their attentions, more narrowly, to the communal and external political and social contexts of Anglo-Jewish political emancipation, as well as its success or failure in meeting with Jewish expectations of social and political acceptance into the wider English society. For historians, Abraham Gilam’s The Emancipation of the Jews in England is probably the more useful of the two monograph-length treatments that exist on the topic.* The degree to which historians have devoted themselves to the study of political emancipation might seem somewhat curious, as it was not important to much of the community at the time, and its passage directly affected only the uppermost echelons of Anglo-Jewry. However, its importance looms larger when considered in light of contemporary parliamentary debates over the putative “Christian nature” of the English constitution.’ Thus, emancipation should be interpreted as one measure of elite English acceptance of Jews as part of the English body-politic—that is, as a temporary or partial answer to the “Jewish question.”

3 Feldman, Englishmen and Jews, 13, 47.

4 Abraham Gilam, The Emancipation of the Jews in England, 1830-1860 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1982); M. C. N. Salbstein, The Emancipation of the Jews in Britain: The Question of the Admission of the Jews to Parliament, 1828-1860 (London: Associated University Presses, 1982). See also Israel Finestein, “Jewish Emancipationists in Victorian England: Self-Imposed Limits to Assimilation” in Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); H. R. Q. Henriques, “The Jewish Emancipation Controversy in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Past and Present, no. 40 (July 1968); V. D. Lipman, “The Age of Emancipation, 1815-1880, in Three Centuries of Anglo-Jewish History: A Volume of Essays, ed. V. D. Lipman (Cambridge: Jewish Historical Society of England, 1961); Israel Finestein, “Anglo-Jewish Opinion during the Struggle for Emancipation, 1828-1858” TJHSE 20 (1959-61).

5 See chapter four below for more on the substance of these debates.

Literary analysis has also been used to address the “Jewish question” in England; changes in the meaning and uses of the stereotyping of Jews; and English perceptions of the Jew as a racial, religious, and later, ethnic “other, particularly in Figures of Conversion by Michael Ragussis and in the work of Bryan Cheyette.® In a slightly different vein, Linda Gertner Zatlin, in The Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Jewish Novel, has done an interesting analysis of various nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish novelists and their responses to challenges affecting Victorian Jewry, including antisemitism, Christian conversionary efforts, and retention of Jewish identity in the face of assimilationist pressure.’

Historians have looked for English equivalents to the European Jewish Enlightenment. In Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key, David Ruderman indicates he believes that a small distinctly English Haskalah movement existed, developing separately from the Enlightenment purveyed by Mendelssohn and Continental thought. The difficulty with Ruderman’s position is that he does not demonstrate that the work of the men he discusses (including David Levi, Samuel Falk, Abraham Van Oven, Abraham ben Naphtali Tang, and a few others) had any significant impact on Jewish religious and intellectual developments in England. Without such proof, these men do not rise beyond the level of believing and highly knowledgeable Jews who engaged with English Christian intellectuals on various subjects of interest. Cecil Roth, in his essay “The Haskalah in England,’ writes mostly of the same men as Ruderman and he, too, fails to prove that they had any general effect on English Jewry. Interestingly, in The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer, Michael Galchinsky claims to have located a female Anglo-Jewish enlightenment in the “polemics... prefaces . . . and especially . . . romances set in the Jewish home” of a handful of Victorian Jewish novelists. He dubs Grace Aguilar, Marion Hartog (née Moss), Celia Moss, and others, “the unacknowledged Mendelssohns of England.” Certainly, these authors added the flavor of Jewish ethnicity to the light sentimental Victorian romances of the era. However, Galchinsky, like the

6 Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Bryan Cheyette, “Neither Black nor White: The Figure of “The Jew in Imperial British Literature,” in The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, ed. Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995); Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of “The Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Olivier Cohen-Steiner, “Jews and Jewesses in Victorian Fiction: From Religious Stereotype to Ethnic Hazard,” Patterns of Prejudice 21, no. 2 (1987): 25-34.

7 Linda Gertner Zatlin, The Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Jewish Novel, no. 295 of Twayne’s English Authors Series (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981).

“We are not only English Jews—we are Jewish Englishmen”

others, fails to prove these women had a specific impact on the views or activities of their coreligionists.§

Efforts to find an English Haskalah are of significance as they tie into a larger debate among European Jewish historians (I include Anglo-Jewish historians in this category) over the centrality and importance of German and eastern European Jewish responses to modernity. The clearest exposition of the Germanocentric view that these experiences form the archetype for Jewish responses to modernity appears in the works of the late Jacob Katz, such as Toward Modernity, Out of the Ghetto, and Tradition and Crisis? Katz contends that consciously intellectual and ideological responses to modernity such as those posited by Moses Mendelssohn, among others, were significant because they could be exported, adapted, and applied to all areas in which European Jews resided. In other words, the portability and effect of certain ideas were crucial to the formation of modern Jewish identity. By stressing the importance of the Haskalah, Katz necessarily de-emphasizes the significance of the development of Anglo-Jewry, which neither experienced its own Haskalah nor was much affected by that which originated in Germany and spread eastward. Katz believes that the Anglo-Jewish approach to modernity, driven in large part by circumstances and unconscious responses, is much less important to achieving an understanding of European Jewish responses to modernity. He writes that “[f]actual, nonreflective accommodation, as exemplified by the English experience, is by nature locale-bound.””® As such, it does not add much to our understanding of the Jewish modernization experience on the Continent.

The views of Todd Endelman (and others such as W. D. Rubinstein) are markedly different from those of Katz. In “The Englishness of Jewish Modernity in England,” Endelman implicitly argues for Anglo-Jewish

8 David B. Ruderman, Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry’s Construction of Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); quotation from Michael Galchinsky, The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer: Romance and Reform in Victorian England (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 132- 33; Cecil Roth, “The Haskalah in England, in Essays Presented to Chief Rabbi Israel Brodie on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. H. J. Zimmels, J. Rabbinowitz, and I. Finestein (London: Soncino Press, 1967).

9 See Jacob Katz, introduction to Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model, ed. Jacob Katz (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1987). See also more generally Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770- 1870 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998); Jacob Katz, “Leaving the Ghetto,” Commentary 101, no. 2 (February 1996); Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages, trans. Bernard Dov Cooperman (New York: NYU Press, 1993).

10 Katz, introduction to Toward Modernity, 3.

exceptionalism, although, interestingly, he does not seem to argue for English exceptionalism.'' Endelman believes the Anglo-Jewish path to modernity can be attributed to a number of factors, including the following: English religious diversity; the absence of Jews in England from 1290 to 1656; muted upper class hostility to commerce and banking (two of the principal professions of the Jewish upper and upper-middle classes); a philosemitic strain within English Protestantism; a growing empire marked by the conquest of external “others” (meaning that before 1881, Anglo-Jews, while not Anglo-Saxon Protestants, were also not really thought of as foreigners); a measure of social acceptance that preceded political emancipation; and a political arena that, once opened, did not require alteration of Jewish worship practices.” All these factors certainly ensured that Jewish life in England after readmission was consistently more comfortable than Jewish life on the Continent. Nevertheless, Jews in England still faced dilemmas regarding individual and communal Jewish identity brought on by modernity. The fact that a society is generally more accepting does not negate the need to arrive at an understanding of one’s communal or individual place and role within that place. Additionally, the fundamentally Christian, and, more generally, religious nature of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England forced the Jews who settled there to wrestle with the nature of their own Jewishness and connection to religion and community, if only to decide whether to remain as Jews or to convert and disappear into the surrounding society.”

Endelman seems to imply that the exceptionalism he perceives should in turn lessen the intense focus and emphasis many scholars place on German/central European Jewry, their histories, and responses to modernity. The work of Jacob Katz is illustrative of this Germanocentric approach. Katz is correct in his contention that elements of German Jewry in the

11 See particularly Todd M. Endelman, “The Englishness of Jewish Modernity in England,” in Toward Modernity, 225-46; and Todd M. Endelman, “Writing English Jewish History,’ Albion 27, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 633-36. See also W. D. Rubinstein, “English-Speaking Jewry as a Field of Study in Modern Jewish History,’ in A History of the Jews in the English-Speaking World: Great Britain (London: Macmillan Press, 1996), 1-35. Rubinstein expounds “a view of modern Jewish history which regards the movement of the Jewish people to the English-speaking countries as one of the most central events of Jewish history in modern times” (1).

12 See Endelman, “The Englishness of Jewish Modernity,’ 225-46.

13 On Anglo-Jewish conversion see Todd M. Endelman, Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History, 1656-1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). On European and American Jewish conversion and radical assimilation in the modern era, more generally, see Todd M. Endelman, Leaving the Jewish Fold: Conversion and Radical Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

“We are not only English Jews—we are Jewish Englishmen”

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were ideologically driven and as such “created” ideas that were exportable and adaptable throughout European Jewry. The fact that these ideas had little resonance with Anglo-Jewry in no way negates their importance—particularly in light of their effect in both eastern Europe and America." It strikes me that neither Endelman’s nor Katz’s approach is entirely satisfactory. Rather, a middle ground must be found that accommodates both conscious and unconscious Jewish responses to modernity. I argue vigorously for studying Anglo-Jewish history and identity formation as part of a wider program of understanding Jewry and its responses to modern conditions, in all its forms. Insofar as Jews in England (who eventually constitute Anglo-Jewry) had Continental origins, an understanding of post-medieval Continental developments, as outlined by Katz, is needed. Although ultimately the community, as it develops in nineteenth-century England, does so without direct reference to its European roots, they are still in evidence in the early religious and cultural practices the Jews bring with them to England after readmission. To approach the subject in any other fashion is to act as if Anglo-Jewry developed in a vacuum with no antecedents.