Missionaries and Jews in Soho: ‘Strangers within Our Gates’

Abstract

This article draws on historical evidence about everyday life and social practices in Soho to reconstruct the extent and mode of religious conflict in a neighbourhood which historians have traditionally viewed as an area of relative religious tolerance. It focuses on a weekly children's prayer meeting conducted by Methodist missionaries in the summer of 1900 at the epicentre of the Soho Jewish community. For the Jews the meeting was an intrusion but nonetheless epitomised the tacit negotiations that distilled into what Gerry Black calls an ‘absence of disharmony’ between Soho Jews and their neighbours. More generally, the encounter exemplifies British Jews' daily confrontations with the dense network of Christian practices and institutions of their adopted homeland. While historians have documented many episodes of anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish violence in London, Jews' experience of daily life also involved a less visible, less dramatic and more chronic tension, one that the study of everyday practices brings into relief. At the same time, the prayer meeting is a reminder that members of national religious and philanthropic organisations like the Methodist mission were active participants in the daily lives of the districts where they were situated; their staffs could be held to neighbourhood rules of courtesy and mutual aid. Thus, the article maps the conflicts, negotiations and compromises between different ethnicities and religions that were played out in the spaces and routines of everyday life.