ABSTRACT
It was nearly seventy years ago that Joseph Jacobs, one of the most eminent historians and one of the finest brains ever produced by British Jewry, delivered before the Jewish Historical Society of England a masterly lecture on ‘The Typical Character of Anglo-Jewish History’. British Jewry does in fact mirror the most significant phases and facets of world Jewish history in general. It is probable, if unproved, that Jews were living in the principal urban centres of these islands in the Roman period. English Jewry constitutes indeed a test-tube for determining the answer to one question of paramount importance: how far a Jewish community can resist assimilation in the modern world under conditions of emancipation. The background of Anglo-Jewry is a world in which the touchstone of Jewishness was at all events a positive attitude towards the Jewish religion.
