The Impact of Education: Anglicization of Jewish East Enders Begins with Schooling

By the time of the mass migration, Britain had established universal and compulsory education, a crucial component in the rapid transformation of immigrant culture. ¹ Schooling tells us a great deal about the cultural and social expectations Britons had for Jews – as immigrants and as members of the working class. ² By virtue of their course of study, educators socialized girls for roles that differed from that of their parents and their male contemporaries. Victorian ideals, such as decorum, modesty and domesticity for girls and manliness, athleticism and character-formation for boys, suffused educational and vocational programmes. ³ Drawing on school inspectors’ reports, records from the UJW and contemporary press, this chapter demonstrates how diverse educational opportunities – formal and informal, secular and religious – moulded generations of Jewish youth – and to some extent, their parents. ⁴