London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City

by Gray, Drew D.

  The East End was to experience overt anti-Semitism in the period between the twentieth century's two world wars in the rise of the British Union of Fascists and the subsequent anti-Fascist demonstration at Cable Street. The sense of difference felt by immigrants and their descendants is evident in the recollections of one participant, on his way to the confrontation with Mosley's Blackshirts:47

  You pass a Blackshirt selling the Fascist rag. He sees your Jewish face, and shouts, `Read all about the alien menace: You clench your teeth and breathe hard. And, you mustn't touch him, you mustn't even say anything, for that would be causing a breach of the peace.'

  The Jew as `alien' was a theme that ran through the nineteenth century as thousands of European Jews arrived in the capital fleeing persecution at the hands of the Russian tsars. In 1887 the arrest of Israel Lipski for the murder of Mrs Angel of Batty Street, Whitechapel, (herself a Jew) did little to overcome gentile prejudices. Miriam Angel was poisoned, having nitric acid poured down her throat, and Lipski - who lodged with Miriam and her husband - was discovered hiding under her bed. Lipski had also ingested some of the poison, allegedly to make it appear that he too was a victim of an unknown killer. Although Lipski's motive could only be hinted at (did he intend to perform some `outrage upon this young woman, or commit a robbery'?), the Old Bailey jury were directed to ignore this minor detail.49 The 22-year-old Lipski protested his innocence but was convicted and sentenced to death by Justice Stephen, a verdict that had to be explained to him by the court's interpreter as he spoke little English. Lipski eventually confessed to the murder of Miriam Angel but this in itself does not confirm his guilt: two other Jews had been implicated in the murder and Lipski was clearly a man struggling with life as he indicated in his final testament at Newgate gaol.50 Israel Lipski's name entered the lexicon of negative terms with which to describe Jews, as one witness in the Ripper case was later able to testify.

  The Lipski case merely placed another marker on the timeline of antiSemitism in Britain. In 1886 Arnold White had published his Problems of a Great City in which he set out his arguments for restricting the number of poor Jewish immigrants coming to Britain.'' White also suggested that a tax on foreign immigrants was not unreasonable, with the money raised being used to help others emigrate. While the rhetoric was reasoned and pragmatic, the underlying tone was clearly anti-alien and racist." In the same year a correspondent to the Pall Mall Gazette warned that there was a `Judenhetze [active anti-Semitism] brewing in East London' as a result of the thousands of Jews `of the lowest type' that had `planted themselves chiefly at the East End within the past three years, and have a greater responsibility for the distress which prevails there probably than all other causes put together' The writer declared that foreign Jews `of no nationality whatever are becoming a pest and a menace to the poor native-born Eastender. They oust him out of all decent habitation and greatly lower the standard of living, as well as the general moral This view was echoed in a series of reports that the Gazette ran under the heading `How they live' A needlewoman on the east side of Commercial Road told the paper that, `Foreigners take the work at lower prices than we can accept. If we refuse a garment a foreigner will take 3d less, taking the whole cutting' Another woman, whose husband was a bootmaker, when asked what he earned when in full-time work replied that she `had almost forgotten what that meant'; `It was the Jews and Germans that cut the work down'. At number 32 a widow complained that, `The Jews make the prices so bad. They take a lot of work at cheap prices and let it out to "sweaters" in their employ. It is the Jew who gets the benefit. Since Christians have often worked from morning to the next morning'.54 The paper even found a local Jewish tailor - one who called himself an Englishman because his father had `been a Londoner before him' - who blamed his current predicament on the influx of foreigners:

  The foreigner is working the English right out. Foreigners beat us by making their entire families of [sic] stitch from daybreak till night, and if a foreigner earns is he puts 2d out of it. They are the ruin of the tailoring trade ... How would I remedy that? I think it is the free trade. Every man should stay in his native country. Why should Englishmen be driven to emigrate to make room for foreigners?"

  The Parliamentary Select Committee investigating emigration and immigration in 1888 was warned by one witness that if the `present situation' (of Polish Jews working in `sweated' workshops) continued, `the ready made clothing trade of the whole of the principal towns will be in the hands of foreigners''

  The negative images of Jews and the latent anti-Semitism that occasionally rose to the surface in a usually tolerant area for immigrants were a product particularly of the large-scale immigration of the late nineteenth century. Jews had, of course, been coming to London in large numbers throughout the century to join communities that had been established in East London for even longer than the Huguenots. It is hard to be precise about the actual numbers of Jews in London in the late nineteenth century. The Jewish Year Book estimated that there were just over 100,000 Jews in Britain in 1891. The census data for 1871 suggests that there were 100,638 aliens from Russia, the Russian Pale or Rumania in England and Wales, rising to 247,758 by 1901.57 But this tells us relatively little about the numbers of Polish and Russian Jews that came to England, many of whom were using London as a temporary staging post on their route to the `promised land' (or goldene medina) of the United States of America .51 One author claims that 120,000 migrated to England in the years, from 1870 to 1914; another suggests that between April 1881 and June 1882 nearly a quarter of a million left Eastern Europe for America and Great Britain.59 Charles Booth calculated that in East London itself there were around 45,000 Jews but, as William Fishman notes, this may have been `an overestimate'. Of these, by far the majority (28,790 according to Booth) were crowded into the streets of Whitechapel.60

  There were cultural and, to some extent, religious differences between the immigrants of the middle and late nineteenth centuries (although these were often overlooked or not noticed by indigenous Londoners and other contemporary observers like Booth).61 In the 1860s and 1870s most migrants were arriving from Germany and the Netherlands. In the last decades of the century the travellers were coming further, from Eastern Europe. Spitalfields was home to an established community of Dutch Jews, who had successfully merged with the local population to the extent that they were `often indistinguishable from their Gentile Cockney neighbours"' Alongside were immigrants from Germany that had arrived from mid-century and who were defined by their industriousness and ambition. Into this melting pot came the so-called `poor' Jews from the Russian empire, principally Poles. These newcomers created echoes of the communities they had left behind with their own forms of synagogue, dress, language and working practices.

  The immigrants had mixed fortunes before and after they reached London but shared similar motivations. In 1869 famine in north-eastern Russia resulted in large numbers of Jews being expelled from the border areas. This was followed by systematic persecution of Jewish communities and the dismantling of their own internal economic system, throwing thousands into poverty. In 1875 and 1876 enforced conscription into the Tsar's armed forces prompted many thousands of Jews to leave. In March 1881 Jews were wrongly accused of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II (one Jewish woman had a minor role in the terrorist cell - Narodnaya Volya - that had carried out the killing) prompting pogroms in many Russian towns and cities. This served to persuade still more Jews that their only hope of a peaceful life involved abandoning their homes and communities.63 As one emigrant explained:

  To take myself for an example, I did not leave my native country because I was expelled for political or religious reasons; but nearly every day brought me news of fresh expulsions, or new ukases63 against the people of my race, and I was asking myself, Where is this going to stop? Whose turn will be next? And I decided to leave the country where I could get neither justice nor mercy. I certainly have not come to live in English fogs for the mere pleasure of it. My case
is typical of most Jewish

  What awaited them in London was a mixed reception. True, London contained lots of fellow congregationalists and while few gentiles spoke the Russian or Polish language most London Jews conversed in a range of tongues, including Yiddish. Immigrants could make themselves understood and they could find kosher food and places to practice their faith. But this aside, the welcome they received was far from all embracing. Native workers were wary of large numbers of semi-skilled craftsmen and labourers flooding the market with cheap labour and deflating wages. Established Anglo-Jewry attempted to dissuade others from joining them in London, warning of the overcrowded housing conditions, hard work for little gain and poor opportunities for prosperity. England would tolerate their religion, it would not persecute them as a race, but neither would it provide them with a good living and comfortable surroundings.

  While the Jewish community of the East End had escaped from direct persecution, on ethnic and religious grounds they were often the victims of exploitation and prejudice in their new home. This appears to have been the result of their cultural differences and concerns that they would take the jobs of indigenous workers. The cry of `Britons first' was commonly heard in the depressed economy of the 1880s. One of the key issues was language: Superintendent Mulvaney of Leman Street Police Station suggested that Scotland Yard might help fund a small group of police officers in learning Yiddish since the local Russian and Polish Jews were frequently putting out bills and `circulars in this language' and the `police know nothing of their purport unless the translator is employed to translate them' 66 The language problem had even made taking the census difficult in 1881 as the superintendent of statistics at the General Register Office told a select committee in 1888.67 Even between Eastern European Jews language could sometimes be a barrier, or at least serve to distinguish Poles from Russians. The inability of many foreign Jews to speak English forced them to work for those Jewish employers, English born or immigrant, who could understand them. Language was not the only coefficient here: Jewish employers would not force or expect their workers to turn up on Saturdays and so break the Sabbath. As one Christian observer noted in 1867:

  It is almost impossible for a Jew to be bound apprentice to a master who is not of the same persuasion; being interdicted from partaking of his food, from working part of every Friday and the whole of every Saturday throughout the year, besides the festivals and periods of mourning, when no Jew can work. This loss of time no Christian master can afford, so there is no possibility of acquiring a trade or of being employed at day-work more than four days and a half per week. No Jews can be employed in Christian factories, shipyards, engine works, or

  Jewish immigrants were different because of their faith and religious practices and to a very large extent they were unable to integrate completely with the indigenous community as a result. The ghettos that so many observers deplored were themselves the product of this seemingly irresolvable situation. The new arrivals or `greeners' were faced with what Fishman describes as a life of `grinding poverty and unremitting labour"' They found themselves unwelcome in a labour market that was already swamped by foreign workers and deflated by competition from abroad and elsewhere in Britain. The vulnerability of immigrants exposed them to unscrupulous exploitation by their own co-religionists. Jewish workshop owners wilfully broke legislation designed to protect workers' conditions and paid workers at well-below standard rates secure in the knowledge that desperate immigrants were unlikely to complain to the authorities. The Lancet commented that,

  The employer is master of the situation and can impose any condition. The unfortunate worker greedily accepts starvation wages, and even assists his employer to defy the Factory Act, the Sanitary Act and other laws instituted to protect him, fearing that, by availing himself of our legislature, he may lose the little he is able to earn.70

  The answer for many was either repatriation or integration (or, for some evangelist Christians, conversion). Integration was favoured by the established Jewish community who, like the Huguenots that had preceded them, had gone to great lengths to blend in with their English neighbours. The mantra chimes with that levelled at the Muslim communities of Britain in the twenty-first century: learn the language, adopt Western dress and embrace popular culture, leave your own culture indoors. The alternative was ostracism, abuse and perhaps violence. Violence towards East End Jews was not uncommon - especially at the height of the Ripper crisis when `foreigners' were the principal targets of popular anger towards the murders. Some of the anti-Semitic protectionism was more overt than Arnold White's moderate rhetoric. Margaret Harkness' heroine in her novel In Darkest London rails against the practice of employing Jewish labour: `I never take on a foreigner. It's bad enough for us English and I won't make it worse by giving work to a Jewess"'

  In defence of Harkness she was not always critical of the immigrant Jew and several papers and periodicals, notably Commonweal, were quick to present an alternative view. Harkness was impressed by the depth of faith among London Jews and by their sense of community - both perhaps qualities that she saw as lacking within the indigenous working-class population. Others driven by a socialist critique of the economic system recognized that foreign immigrants were merely being used as pawns and scapegoats in hard economic times. On 7 May 1888 an article in the Pall Mall Gazette entitled the `Invasion of England' attacked the immigration of foreign Jews arguing that `charity should begin at home' and bemoaning the fact that England had become a haven for the flotsam and jetsam of Europe. Andrew Scheur writing in Commonweal responded by noting that `Jew-baiting' was a `last attempt to bind the native workers against the real causes of their misery'. The world should be divided not between Jew and Gentile but between `the exploiter and the

  One of the most rational responses to anti-alien sentiments in the press and elsewhere was printed in the Gazette soon after the dire warning about Judenhetze we noted earlier. The minister of the New West End Synagogue wrote a carefully worded defence of his co-religionists in the East beginning his piece by exposing the paucity of the anti-alienists' argument:

  It is marvellous to see with what avidity and with what confidence people jump at any explanation which throws the blame for their misfortunes upon the foreigner. France would not have been beaten in her great struggle had it not been for Prussian spies who lined the Boulevards, packed the hotels, lurked in every Government office, and hovered around every regiment; and the East-end of London would not have been suffering from any distress to-day if it had not been for the influx of foreign Jewish refugees ...

  Far from ousting the native dwellers from their homes the Jews of the East End were living in appalling overcrowded conditions. As for their so-called loose morals ...

  any one who will take the trouble to compare the criminal returns in so far as they can be referred to Jews and Gentiles, will see with whom the proportionate advantage lies; while as regards the purity, sobriety, affectionateness, and mutual helpfulness of their family life, Jews have not so much to learn from but a great deal to teach their Gentile neighbours.73

  So the picture that emerges is that of a diverse Jewish community that was in many ways at odds with the environment it found itself in. Immigrants from Eastern Europe had travelled to Britain in the hope of finding passage to the United States, the real goal of European Jewry. Many settled in London because they were unable to journey further; others stayed because they had close kinships in the capital; some found work and prospered. Immigrants were set apart by their language and culture, their religion and dress. These barriers to integration would have applied to some extent to the Huguenot incomers in the seventeenth century but they had largely thrown off these cultural differences and had assimilated with the indigenous population of London's East End. This was also true of Dutch and German Jews that had arrived in Spitalfields and Whitechapel in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

  The antagonism that many migrant Jews experienced was a product of two separate b
ut related factors. To the local working classes, those born and bred in the East End, the arrival of tens of thousands of poor immigrants represented a threat to their jobs and any antipathy they felt towards foreigners is understandable; the 1880s were tough economically and unemployment was increasing. But we need to ask whether the migrants were indeed threatening local jobs and livelihoods and whether this was the primary reason for anti-Semitism in the area. Most Jews found work, if they found it at all, in sweated workshops run by other Jews. They moved into houses already owned or at least occupied by Jews, they bought and sold goods in the Jewish street markets of Brick Lane and Middlesex Street. If they were unfortunate enough to be unable to find work then in the first instance they turned to the local Jewish community for help - not their gentile neighbours. Jewish charities and the Jewish Board of Guardians undertook to assist their co-religionists with relief and sometimes the money to travel on to America. Only when these avenues had been exhausted did the poorest of the immigrants seek help from the parish - they had as little love for the workhouse as did their English-born neighbours. Indeed William Vallance, the generally unsympathetic (unsympathetic to the poor, that is) clerk of the Whitechapel Guardians, reported that very few Jews resorted to the `house' in his area; he was informed that only a 'dozen Jews have been admitted to the wards [in] nearly 17 years, and it is certainly more than twelve months since the last Jew was admitted' 74

  If the antagonism felt by some Londoners and the angst and anger expressed in the press could not then be entirely explained by genuine concerns about the impact of foreign Jews on the economy of the East End, what other reasons underlay it? Unfortunately these can only really be understood in the context of widespread anti-Semitism in England and elsewhere in the late nineteenth century. Earlier in the century Britain had displayed a `grudging tolerance' towards Jews but the waves of immigration from the East created a climate where toleration was in short measure. By 1901 Jews were being blamed for the war in South Africa and Arnold White was able to declare that it was a 'growing rule by foreign Jews that is being set up. The best forms of our national life are in jeopardy' 15 The Jew, the foreign Jew at least, was a clear representation of the `other' in Victorian society - this was how he had been depicted throughout the century from Fagin to the Jew of York in Ivanhoe. When the suggestion was made that the Whitechapel murderer might be a local Jewish tradesman, John Piser (or `Leather Apron' as he was known), it sparked violence and demonstrations on the streets. When the police discovered the writing on the wall in Goulston Street in the wake of the `double event, Sir Charles Warren ordered its removal for fear that the East End might experience a pogrom of its own. As the author of the letter to the Gazette in February 1886 had pointed out, when times are hard it is much easier to find a scapegoat without one's community than within it.