Between 1880 and 1939, a quarter of a million European Jews settled in England. Tananbaum explores the differing ways in which the existing Anglo-Jewish communities, local government and education and welfare organizations sought to socialize these new arrivals, focusing on the experiences of working-class women and children.

How successful were the East European Jewish immigrants in London compared with the vast majority that went to New York? This critical question - one that lies at the heart of debates on Jewish modernity, ethnic and racial assimilation, and the impact of culture on entrepreneurship - is assessed systematically for the first time in this volume. Using new evidence of Jewish immigration, mobility and assimilation, Andrew Godley shows that despite similar backgrounds and opportunities, the Jews in London were far less entrepreneurial and those in New York. As the Jewish immigrants assimilated either American or British cultural values, those in New York moved en masse into self-employment, while those in London opted to remain as workers. Godley then reinterprets the broad thrust of British twentieth century economic history, emphasising how these long-standing anti-entrepreneurial and highly conservative craft cultural values among the English working classes acted as a drag on innovation, hampering industrial relations, investment and growth.

This book offers an entirely new contribution to the history of multiculturalism in Britain, 1880-1940. It shows how friendship and co-operation between Christian and Jewish women changed lives and, as the Second World War approached, actually saved them. The networks and relationships explored include the thousand-plus women from every district in Manchester who combined to send a letter of sympathy to the Frenchwoman at the heart of the Dreyfus Affair; the religious leagues for women’s suffrage who initiated the first interfaith campaigning movement in British history; the collaborations, often problematic, on refugee relief in the 1930s; the close ties between the founder of Liberal Judaism in Britain, and the wife of the leader of the Labour Party, between the wealthy leader of the Zionist women’s movement and a passionate socialist woman MP. A great variety of sources are thoughtfully interrogated, and concluding remarks address some of the social concerns of the present century.

This collection examines various aspects of Jewish migration within, from and to eastern Europe between 1880 and the present. It focuses on not only the wide variety of factors that often influenced the fateful decision to immigrate, but also the personal experience of migration and the critical role of individuals in larger historical processes. Including contributions by historians and social scientists alongside first-person memoirs, the book analyses the historical experiences of Jewish immigrants, the impact of anti-Jewish violence and government policies on the history of Jewish migration, the reception of Jewish immigrants in a variety of centres in America, Europe and Israel, and the personal dilemmas of those individuals who debated whether or not to embark on their own path of migration. By looking at the phenomenon of Jewish migration from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and in a range of different settings, the contributions to this volume challenge and complicate many widely-held assumptions regarding Jewish migration in modern times. In particular, the chapters in this volume raise critical questions regarding the place of anti-Jewish violence in the history of Jewish migration as well as the chronological periodization and general direction of Jewish migration over the past 150 years. The volume also compares the experiences of Jewish immigrants to those of immigrants from other ethnic or religious communities. As such, this collection will be of much interest to not only scholars of Jewish history, but also researchers in the fields of migration studies, as well as those using personal histories as historical sources. This book was originally published as a special issue of East European Jewish Affairs.

Between 1880 and 1939, a quarter of a million European Jews settled in England. Tananbaum explores the differing ways in which the existing Anglo-Jewish communities, local government and education and welfare organizations sought to socialize these new arrivals, focusing on the experiences of working-class women and children.

Moving beyond the (now somewhat tired) debates about secularization as paradigm, theory, or master narrative, Periodizing Secularization focuses upon the empirical evidence for secularization, viewed in its descriptive sense as the waning social influence of religion, in Britain. Particular emphasis is attached to the two key performance indicators of religious allegiance and churchgoing, each subsuming several sub-indicators, between 1880 and 1945, including the first substantive account of secularization during the fin de siècle. A wide range of primary sources is deployed, many of them relatively or entirely unknown, and with due regard to their methodological and interpretative challenges. On the back of them, a cross-cutting statistical measure of 'active church adherence' is devised, which clearly shows how secularization has been a reality and a gradual, not revolutionary, process. The most likely causes of secularization were an incremental demise of a Sabbatarian culture (coupled with the associated emergence of new leisure opportunities and transport links) and of religious socialization (in the church, at home, and in the school). The analysis is also extended backwards, to include a summary of developments during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and laterally, to incorporate a preliminary evaluation of a six-dimensional model of 'diffusive religion', demonstrating that these alternative performance indicators have hitherto failed to prove that secularization has not occurred. The book is designed as a prequel to the author's previous volumes on the chronology of British secularization - Britain's Last Religious Revival? (2015) and Secularization in the Long 1960s (2017). Together, they offer a holistic picture of religious transformation in Britain during the key secularizing century of 1880-1980.

Minority populations are often regarded as being ‘hard to reach’ and evading state expectations of health protection. This ethnographic and archival study analyses how devout Jews in Britain negotiate healthcare services to preserve the reproduction of culture and continuity. This book demonstrates how the transformative and transgressive possibilities of technology reveal multiple pursuits of protection between this religious minority and the state. Making Bodies Kosher advances theoretical perspectives of immunity, and sits at the intersection of medical anthropology, social history and the study of religions.

Contented housewives, glamorous women, jive-mad teenagers – all are common figures in popular perceptions of 1950s Britain. But what more did it mean to be a girl or woman in the fifties? And what are the implications of this history for understanding post-war Britain? Women in Fifties Britain explores the lived experience of girls and women, and the way in which their story has been told. Crossing boundaries – disciplinary, conceptual and thematic – and drawing creatively on new and established sources, it extends and enriches the terrain of women’s history. Diverse groups of women come into view, including farmer’s wives, university-educated women, activist housewives, working mothers, Jewish refugees, girls ‘at risk’ and private secretaries. Revealing that their private, public and professional lives were central to reshaping society, the collection engages with the legacy of World War II, and with questions about the distinctiveness of the 1950s. Embracing emotion, labour, gender, class, race, sociability, sexuality and much more, the authors offer penetrating exploration of established and new categories of historical analysis. Placing the politics of gender at the heart of Britain’s reconstruction, this engaging and important collection re-visions 1950s Britain and the women that made it. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s History Review.

This 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.

The exodus of refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1930s has received far more attention from historians, social scientists, and demographers than many other migrations and persecutions in Europe. However, as a result of the overwhelming attention that has been given to the Holocaust within the historiography of Europe and the Second World War, the issues surrounding the flight of people from Nazi Germany prior to 1939 have been seen as Vorgeschichte (pre-history), implicating the Western European democracies and the United States as bystanders only in the impending tragedy. Based on a comparative analysis of national case studies, this volume deals with the challenges that the pre-1939 movement of refugees from Germany and Austria posed to the immigration controls in the countries of interwar Europe. Although Europe takes center-stage, this volume also looks beyond, to the Middle East, Asia and America. This global perspective outlines the constraints under which European policy makers (and the refugees) had to make decisions. By also considering the social implications of policies that became increasingly protectionist and nationalistic, and bringing into focus the similarities and differences between European liberal states in admitting the refugees, it offers an important contribution to the wider field of research on political and administrative practices.