Jewish Representations, Literary Criticism and History

Abstract

If Anglo-Jewish history has been marginalized, as Todd Endelman, David Feldman, David Katz, and other historians have protested, Jewish representations and Anglo-Jewish literature have been marginal as well, for many of the same reasons.1 Even the relatively small number of Jews in Britain distracts one from perceiving that around 1800, “London was a major center of urban Jewish life” and that “more Jews lived in London than in any other city” except Amsterdam.2 After the wave of East European immigration in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, London’s Jewish community numbered almost two hundred thousand, where it still remains. The historical experience of Jews in Britain, however, has been instructively meaningful in numerous ways: how the Protestant majority treated one of its minorities from the Jew Bill of 1753 to the Aliens Act of 1905 with a mixture of tolerance and intolerance, in one of the West’s earliest attempts to deal with a multicultural reality; how Protestant millenarianism led to philosemitism’s various constructions of what Jews were and how they should behave; how Jews became part of the British Empire’s involvement in the Middle East; how the Hebrew Bible and the Hebrew language became central in the Protestant attempt to achieve theological coherence in relation to modernity; how Jewish bankers provided essential support to the British state; and how someone like Benjamin Disraeli became one of Britain’s most important prime ministers; and, finally, how from the eighteenth century the mass of ordinary Jews—pedlars, artisans, shopkeepers, factory workers—experienced modernity with its pleasures and perplexities. The historical literature on the British Jews is now too substantial both in terms of its quantity and quality to ignore.