Putting London Jewish Intellectuals in their Place

Abstract

The extensive cultural histories of Newark's Jewish intellectuals have made much of the ethnic and spatial dimension in their formation as individuals and as a group. Over the same time span that New York Jews threw up a galaxy of creative figures, from the 1920s to the 1950s, London witnessed the emergence of a stunning concentration of Jewish intellectuals. Many came from London's East End which performed a similar function to New York's Jewish immigrant districts. Yet cultural historians have not delineated a prototypical London Jewish intellectual and there is little cultural history of Jewish intellectuals in London. This article is a tentative attempt at a sociological analysis of London Jewish intellectuals investigating the relationship between place, ethnicity and memory in the emergence of a distinctive intellectual cadre.