Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Charity, Community and Religion, 1830-1880, by Alysa Levene

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Charity, Community and Religion, 1830–1880 by Alysa Levene Lindsay Katzir (bio) Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Charity, Community and Religion, 1830–1880, by Alysa Levene; pp. vi + 248. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020, $108.00, $35.95 paper, $28.76 ebook. Scholarly interest in the Jews of Victorian Britain has been steadily increasing in recent decades. Since the 1970s historians such as Geoffrey Alderman, David Feldman, Todd M. Endelman, and Vivian D. Lipman, among several others, have been telling remarkable and invaluable tales of Victorian Britain’s Sephardi and Ashkenazi communities. Their research has largely focused on patterns of assimilation and acculturation, especially among the upper classes, and has mostly centered on Victorian London, which is understandable given that London has always been home to the majority of Britain’s Jews. But Alysa Levene’s recent monograph, Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Charity, Community and Religion, 1830–1880, makes a compelling case for the centrality of provincial Jews to Anglo-Jewish history. [End Page 700] Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain expands upon studies like Bill Williams’s The Making of Manchester Jewry, 1740–1875 (1976), Nikos Kokosalakis’s Ethnic Identity and Religion: Tradition and Change in Liverpool Jewry (1982), and Ben Braber’s Jews in Glasgow, 1879– 1939 (2007) by looking at seven different industrial cities, making it the first monograph to research provincial Jewry so expansively. It is a socioeconomic history of the Jews of industrial Britain, and thus it revolves around the Jewish populations of Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Glasgow, and Hull. In it, Levene examines maps, statistics, census data, and communal records to understand social, geographical, and transpatial notions of community among provincial Jews. In particular, Levene uses the 1851 Religious Census, a survey of all identifiable houses of worship, including Nonconformist, Catholic, and Jewish, to assess communal bonds in a period of rapid migration and assimilation. In this evaluation of provincial Jewish communities, Levene challenges a prevailing view of industrialism: that it severed cherished family ties and replaced them with mere communities of circumstance. Her research centers on evidence of postindustrial kinship, including household arrangements, residence patterns, employment histories, and religious practices, rather than the endeavors of official communal leadership. While previous scholarship has especially focused on the histories of communal leadership, those facts were less relevant to the daily lives of average provincial Jews. Levene makes several other suggestions for further research, including a renewed focus on the mid-nineteenth century, as opposed to limiting inquiry to the early and late nineteenth centuries, both of which have received much more attention from scholars. Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain explores the mid-century as a period of growth in industrial towns and the Anglo-Jewish population, generally, as well as a time of meticulous recordkeeping by these communities. Those records remain largely unstudied. Levene makes extensive use of the Anglo-Jewish Database (AJDB), a digital archive based upon the 1851 census that also includes information on the Jews of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Calling the AJDB an underutilized resource, Levene encourages other scholars to make use of its data, an invaluable resource for Anglo-Jewish studies. In order to draw conclusions about communities that may have included gentiles living among Jews, Levene works from the same broad definition of Jewishness as the AJDB, defining a Jew as “anyone who was, or may be assumed to have been, Jewish by either birth, conversion or cultural affiliation, whether or not they retained that identity later in life” (14). Levene’s definition is especially appropriate to the mid-century, which saw an increase in intermarriages. Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain is divided into two parts. Chapters 2 through 4 focus on households, residence patterns, and finances. Chapter 2 deals with the household and family structures of provincial Jews. In it, Levene uses tables to share data, showing statistics such as numbers of Jewish households in each city, kinds of households (that is, the composition of families), and the presence of lodgers. In addition to data sets, Levene also provides anecdotal evidence of specific families. Levene concludes that Jewish kinship ties extended beyond financial convenience and instead revolved around feelings of...