Conclusion

Historians often emphasize very rapid socio-economic mobility among Jewish immigrants. David Feldman challenges the notion that every Jew was ‘a Rothschild bursting to get out’, arguing that it is a ‘teleological bias’ to assume that the post-1945 Jewish socio-economic pattern is part of a continuous trend that began in the early days of migration. ¹ Overall, from 1880 to the Second World War, the movement into the professional classes is striking, but census data and interviews suggest that this movement occurred during the interwar years and beyond. Thus, by 1935, World Jewry argued the time had come to replace images of the ‘stunted, pallid Jew of the ghetto’ with ‘the reality of the young East-Ender of today … whose love of sport and exercise is as ardent as that of the Englishman with generations of sporting tradition as a background’. ²