Rethinking Margin and Center in Anglo-Jewish Literature

If Anglo-Jewish history has been marginalized, as Todd Endelman, David Feldman, David S. Katz, and other historians have protested, Anglo-Jewish literature has been marginal as well, for many of the same reasons. ¹ British Jews and their writing become diminished in importance by ignoring Jewish difference, slighting anti-Semitism. highlighting and making representative exceptional episodes of Jewish victimization or success, and assuming an overall Anglo-Jewish exceptionalism unrelated to Jewish experiences elsewhere. Even the relatively small number of Jews in Britain, while objectively marginalizing, 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 200,000, 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 millennialism led to philo-Semitism'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; how someone like Benjamin Disraeli became one of Britain's most important prime ministers: and especially how. from the eighteenth century, the mass of ordinary Jews—peddlers, artisans, shopkeepers, and factory workers—experienced modernity with its pleasures and perplexities. The historical literature on the British Jews is now too substantial, in terms of both its quantity and quality, to ignore.