Introduction

This book explores the lives of Jewish immigrants to Britain, with a particular focus on women and children who settled in London. As home to the majority of Britain’s Jews, London functioned, often to the dismay of Jews outside the metropolis, as the religious and political centre of Anglo-Jewry. In the 1880s, when the pace of Eastern European Jewish immigration quickened, immigrants entered a country with a history of many fewer restrictions than continental Europe. ¹ Britons, unlike continental Europeans, tended not ‘to mobilize public opinion against Jews as the bearers of modernity’ and overall, Victorians expressed more anti-Catholicism than anti-Semitism. ² The pre-existing Anglo-Jewish community boasted a comprehensive range of philanthropic services, many of which served women and children. Cultural interaction and exchange between newcomers and natives shaped three generations of Eastern European Jews. These factors contributed to a very rapid process of acculturation – one that differed from virtually every other Western Jewish community. ³