ABSTRACT
Perhaps two-thirds of present-day British Jewry can trace their origin to lands which now form part of the Soviet Union and which, 80 years ago, belonged to the Empire of the Tsars. On the eve of the First World War, the Anglo-Russian Jewish connection did not appear so obscure as it might today. In 1914 about half of the c.300,000 strong Jewish community in Britain were recent immigrants from Russia. In the period from 1881 to 1914 waves of refugees, escaping persecution and economic pressure in the Pale of Settlement, home to the largest concentration of Jews in the world, fled west. While never rivalling the Lower East Side of New York City, the East End of London provided inhospitable sanctuary for 100,000 Russian Jews. Many Jews in Britain, then, stood in a special relationship to Russia. For indigenous Anglo-Jewry, the fate of a fellow diaspora community could no longer be a distant concern. Mass immigration brought ‘Russia’ to their doorstep and brought about an ultimate, irrevocable transformation in the character of British Jewry. For immigrant Jews, political interest in Russia was not merely academic; it was underpinned by sentimental attachment to the heim and, in many cases, by close family ties.
