London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City (14 page)

One of the most rational responses to anti-alien sentiments in the press and elsewhere was printed in the Gazette soon after the dire warning about Judenhetze we noted earlier. The minister of the New West End Synagogue wrote a carefully worded defence of his co-religionists in the East beginning his piece by exposing the paucity of the anti-alienists' argument:

It is marvellous to see with what avidity and with what confidence people jump at any explanation which throws the blame for their misfortunes upon the foreigner. France would not have been beaten in her great struggle had it not been for Prussian spies who lined the Boulevards, packed the hotels, lurked in every Government office, and hovered around every regiment; and the East-end of London would not have been suffering from any distress to-day if it had not been for the influx of foreign Jewish refugees ...

Far from ousting the native dwellers from their homes the Jews of the East End were living in appalling overcrowded conditions. As for their so-called loose morals ...

any one who will take the trouble to compare the criminal returns in so far as they can be referred to Jews and Gentiles, will see with whom the proportionate advantage lies; while as regards the purity, sobriety, affectionateness, and mutual helpfulness of their family life, Jews have not so much to learn from but a great deal to teach their Gentile neighbours.73

So the picture that emerges is that of a diverse Jewish community that was in many ways at odds with the environment it found itself in. Immigrants from Eastern Europe had travelled to Britain in the hope of finding passage to the United States, the real goal of European Jewry. Many settled in London because they were unable to journey further; others stayed because they had close kinships in the capital; some found work and prospered. Immigrants were set apart by their language and culture, their religion and dress. These barriers to integration would have applied to some extent to the Huguenot incomers in the seventeenth century but they had largely thrown off these cultural differences and had assimilated with the indigenous population of London's East End. This was also true of Dutch and German Jews that had arrived in Spitalfields and Whitechapel in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The antagonism that many migrant Jews experienced was a product of two separate but related factors. To the local working classes, those born and bred in the East End, the arrival of tens of thousands of poor immigrants represented a threat to their jobs and any antipathy they felt towards foreigners is understandable; the 1880s were tough economically and unemployment was increasing. But we need to ask whether the migrants were indeed threatening local jobs and livelihoods and whether this was the primary reason for anti-Semitism in the area. Most Jews found work, if they found it at all, in sweated workshops run by other Jews. They moved into houses already owned or at least occupied by Jews, they bought and sold goods in the Jewish street markets of Brick Lane and Middlesex Street. If they were unfortunate enough to be unable to find work then in the first instance they turned to the local Jewish community for help - not their gentile neighbours. Jewish charities and the Jewish Board of Guardians undertook to assist their co-religionists with relief and sometimes the money to travel on to America. Only when these avenues had been exhausted did the poorest of the immigrants seek help from the parish - they had as little love for the workhouse as did their English-born neighbours. Indeed William Vallance, the generally unsympathetic (unsympathetic to the poor, that is) clerk of the Whitechapel Guardians, reported that very few Jews resorted to the `house' in his area; he was informed that only a 'dozen Jews have been admitted to the wards [in] nearly 17 years, and it is certainly more than twelve months since the last Jew was admitted' 74

If the antagonism felt by some Londoners and the angst and anger expressed in the press could not then be entirely explained by genuine concerns about the impact of foreign Jews on the economy of the East End, what other reasons underlay it? Unfortunately these can only really be understood in the context of widespread anti-Semitism in England and elsewhere in the late nineteenth century. Earlier in the century Britain had displayed a `grudging tolerance' towards Jews but the waves of immigration from the East created a climate where toleration was in short measure. By 1901 Jews were being blamed for the war in South Africa and Arnold White was able to declare that it was a 'growing rule by foreign Jews that is being set up. The best forms of our national life are in jeopardy' 15 The Jew, the foreign Jew at least, was a clear representation of the `other' in Victorian society - this was how he had been depicted throughout the century from Fagin to the Jew of York in Ivanhoe. When the suggestion was made that the Whitechapel murderer might be a local Jewish tradesman, John Piser (or `Leather Apron' as he was known), it sparked violence and demonstrations on the streets. When the police discovered the writing on the wall in Goulston Street in the wake of the `double event, Sir Charles Warren ordered its removal for fear that the East End might experience a pogrom of its own. As the author of the letter to the Gazette in February 1886 had pointed out, when times are hard it is much easier to find a scapegoat without one's community than within it.

In October 1888, amidst all the panic surrounding the murders, Sir Samuel Montagu MP was prompted to write an open letter to the press in which he refuted the allegations made against the local Jewish community and the suggestion that one of them could be the murderer.

In Jewish history there are frequent records that, when epidemics have occurred, or murders have taken place, false accusations have been made against the Jews, inciting the ignorant and criminal class to acts of violence. In this enlightened country, with an educated working class, no such fear need be entertained; but why recall the red spectre of bygone ages, when religious persecution was a matter of course, whichever Christian creed was in power? Few have greater experience than I of the Jews of this and of other countries, and I am able to state with confidence that no similar class of human beings is as free from acts of violence as the Jews of Europe and America. It has generally been admitted that the murderer had considerable practical knowledge of anatomy, and I do not believe that there exists such an individual among the Jews of East London. If the `handwriting on the wall' was done by the monster himself, can there be any doubt of his intention to throw the pursuers on the wrong track, while showing hostility to the Jews in the vicinity?76

For the Jews the problem would seem to be that across the nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries they have been an easy target for scapegoating.

In Britain, however, we have had other targets for our prejudices and jokes and in the East End another long established community also suffered from poverty, deprivation and lack of work in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. These were the Irish, the internal (and perhaps eternal) migrants of the British Isles. The story of Irish immigration to England is a long one. The Irish in London outnumbered the Jews but did not stand out in the way that the `dark-bearded men in Russian-Polish dress' did, they were citizens of the United Kingdom rather than incoming foreigners." This did not mean that they passed unnoticed of course, or that they were afforded much more of a welcome than those arriving from Eastern Europe. The Irish had been coming to London for centuries and had been the target of abuse, disparaging comments and jokes for all of that time. Much of this was founded on religious prejudice and intolerance. To observers such as Charles Booth `neither the Irish nor their [Catholic] faith had much to commend them'." The Irish were often poor and so in addition to their Roman ways they were seen as a drain on the poor rates and frequently fell foul of the settlement laws as parish officers attempted to see them `passed' out of their responsibility.

After 1815 Irish immigration had increased significantly as more and more Irishmen and women made the relatively short journey across the Irish Sea to look for work in the growing towns and cities of Britain. By 1851, 500,000 Irish had settled in England and Wales; during the famine years of the late 1840s thousands of desperate families arrived each month. This nineteenth-century song illustrates the motivation of those who chose to leave Ireland for the chance of a better life in Victorian London:

`The Irishman's Ramble to London'79

The early Irish settlers in London had gathered around St Giles and Holborn in Elizabethan times, outside of the old City where they had no licence to trade, and then began to colonize Whitechapel in the eighteenth century. As the nineteenth century brought yet more migrants the Irish concentrated in the poorer workingclass areas north and south of the river Thames, in places that `provided both a demand for unskilled labour and a supply of relatively cheap housing'. East London was predominantly Irish in the middle of the nineteenth century.R° This situation only began to change as the last decades of the century approached: the Irish communities of St Giles had been displaced by the destruction of the infamous rookery, to lay out the broad promenade of Oxford Street and similarly the building of the railways (much of which was carried out with an Irish labour force) drove many more from their old homes.R" Wherever they moved, however, the Irish recreated their communities; like the Jews from Eastern Europe the London Irish retained their cultural differences, their customs, religion and language. The Irish lodging housekeepers in the East End regularly `met the Cork steamer to offer new arrivals a bed' for example."

The London Irish also lived in some of the worst conditions of all London's inhabitants, drawing the criticism and condemnation of many of those worthy Victorian philanthropists and social reformers that visited the alleys and courts of the city. Chapter 5 will deal with the social problems associated with housing conditions in London in the 1880s but it is worth reflecting on the views of one visitor to an Irish slum at mid-century:

Rookeries are bad, but what are they to Irish rookeries? In some cases these courts are choked up with every kind of filth; their approaches wind round by the worst kind of slaughter-houses ... they are crowded with pigs, with fowls, and with dogs; they are strewn with oyster shells and fish refuse ... their drainage lies in pools wherever it may by thrown'.83