ABSTRACT
The Jewish community the immigrants joined placed tremendous emphasis on family life, and had strong ethnic and religious ties and a high marriage rate. The sources are more abundant for analyzing the parenting role of the Jewish community; what it sought to inculcate, as well as which methods of mothering it hoped would filter back to foreign-born mothers. Biological mothers provided the most typical and extensive mothering; these women bore and raised their children, and taught their daughters, in particular, a wide range of practical skills and values. Many of the native-born, English Jews engaged in communal mothering concluded that their coreligionists required various forms of educational and charitable assistance, and they generally found a receptive audience when visiting the immigrant women. Along with their communal counterparts, these mothers taught a generation of daughters about their domestic duties, about the values of education, about devotion to family, and about appropriate behavior for newcomers to England.
