Out of the ghetto? Jewish East London

Following a series of pogroms in the Russian Pale of Settlement from 1881 onwards, and the consequent loss of security concerning both life and livelihoods (whether directly or indirectly shaped by the ongoing reduction in circumstances for an already impoverished population), a large influx of refugee Jewish immigrants started to arrive in London and other major English ports.²⁹ Some were en route to the Americas while others remained in England. The consequence was that the Jewish population of major English cities grew rapidly in the latter two decades of the nineteenth century, with London’s swelling to around 135,000.

The map of Jewish East London (Figure 5.9) appeared in The Jew in London, published in 1901 in response to widespread concern aboutthe incoming migration of the preceding decade and a half. The book, produced under the auspices of Toynbee Hall, contained two essays: one by Charles Russell, who wrote as an outsider; the other by Harry Samuel Lewis, a member of the Jewish community.³⁰

Numerous Jewish organisations had by this point been set up by the established Jewish community to provide charitable support, but also with the aim of integrating the arrivals socially and economically into the existing population (partly out of pure charitable instinct, but also to avert anti-Semitic responses). Despite this aid, the problems of high-density settlement included crises concerning unsanitary conditions and overcrowding alongside rent inflation. Jerry White describes how ‘it was said that rents in the Jewish quarter had nearly doubled – at a time when wage rates were rising only slowly’.³¹ Immigrant living conditions were frequently worse than those of the other inhabitants of the poverty areas, but this did not help the impression that the newcomers were the cause of a general deterioration in living conditions in the area. Booth states that, putting aside the generally bad conditions in some areas of the East End of London, the Jewish quarter was distinctive in featuring ‘overcrowding in all its forms, whether in the close packing of human beings within four walls, or in the filling up of every available building space with dwellings and workshops. . .’. Housing density was higher in this area than anywhere else in the East End.³² The book’s writing, reasonably measured (for its time), recommends that instead of restricting immigration the focus of legislation should be on remedying the worst evils: the ‘sweating system’, which could be deterred by encouraging larger factories; and domestic overcrowding, which could be mitigated by encouraging dispersal farther afield, to cheaper accommodation. It also argues that English-born Jews should join local clubs and show that they were willing to join in with the ‘great nation’ to which they now belonged.³³

The map of Jewish East London was drawn up by George Arkell, one of Booth’s investigators. Arkell obtained data from the London School Board as well as Tower Hamlets and Hackney’s school visitors. As in the Booth study itself, Arkell used the visitors’ schedules, which contained information on all families with children of school age (that is, under 14). Data on every street in the area provided information on which families were Jewish and which were non-Jewish, identifying Jewish families by name, the school attended and whether Jewish holidays were observed. As in the Booth study, the School Board Visitors’ data were extrapolated, with the assumption that in any given street the proportion of Jewish and non-Jewish families without children under 14 would match that for families with school-age children. The map was then coloured up, with the street as the unit except in cases of very long streets, which were instead dealt with in sections (see key to map in Figure 5.10).³⁴

Close study of the map reveals that in fact there was widespread intermingling of Jewish and other residents on the streets of the area, with most streets in the middling range of mixing. The pattern of settlement is reflected in the book’s map notes, which give a hint at how the street’s spatial configuration interacts with the way in which incoming migrants had settled in the area over time:

The gradual spread of the Jews . . . has followed . . . the path of least resistance. From Whitechapel the flow has moved along the great highways, especially Whitechapel Road and Commercial Road, and into the streets immediately off these thoroughfares. In streets not directly connected with the main roads, and not readily reached, the influx has been slow and is comparatively recent. In some long streets directly connected with a main road, a distinct difference may be noted between the near and remote ends of the street. . . The same tendency to spread along the main thoroughfares is seen in the outlying portions. . .³⁵

Historical evidence indicates as well that in addition to work, it was the availability of cheap housing that made the East End attractive to impoverished incomers. However, this was not the only factor in the spatial distribution of Jewish immigrants. As we saw in Chapter 3, ‘the poor were not a homogeneous class’.³⁶ The fact that some streets were more accessible than others was not unknown to the incomers to the area. While the newest arrivals had no choice but to lodge in whatever cheap and inaccessible accommodation was available, those that managed to improve their economic situation, although this might take years, made the most of the spatial logic of the area to move into the streets with greater accessibility and, concomitantly, a greater intermingling of Jewish and non-Jewish people.³⁷

Opportunities for spatial integration were of benefit to the economic activities of the incoming migrants. Indeed, there were Jewish traders who regularly travelled beyond the reaches of the East End. Booth describes, in one of many examples, the area around Chalton Street, situated perpendicular to the busy thoroughfare of the Euston Road: ‘Jews come from Whitechapel, selling draperies for the most part’ at a daily market, which was busiest on the Friday (the eve of the Jewish Sabbath).³⁸

Even at the finest scale, small shifts in the street geometry can interrelate with the social situation: this can be seen in Figure 5.11, which zooms in on the same area as featured on the 1898–9 Booth map and the Jewish East London map in Figure 5.12. The corresponding area is described in the following passage from Booth’s police interview notebooks:

West along Brushfield Street, north up Gun Street very rough. Mixture of dwelling houses and factories. Three storey and attic houses. A Jewish common lodging at the north-west end. Where the Jew thieves congregate. It is called “the poor Jews home” [sic] on the board outside. South of Brushfield Street Gun Lane is rougher than the north end. Street narrow. Loft across from wall to wall. Old boots and mess in street. 4.5 storied houses, a lodging house at south east end. Dilapidated looking: ticket-of-leave men living here. . . But “it is not a street particularly noted for prostitutes!” At the north end is Fort Street. Fairly well to do. Pink rather than purple of map: “Jew middlemen live here”. . . Steward Street 4 storied. Windows dirty but pink - in map purple. Duke Street has houses on east side. The west side is all factories and warehouses. Character dark blue to light blue. In map purple. “The coster flower & fruit sellers in Liverpool Street come from here!” Inhabitants are a mixture of Jews and Irish. South into Artillery Lane. Three storied synagogue on west side. Dwelling houses on east side only. Purple to pink. West along Artillery Passage all Jews. Rather narrow passage with shops on either side. Pink as map. On the north side of it is a passage leading to Artillery Lane called Artillery Court not coloured on map, ragged children, fish curers, rough, dark blue. East along Artillery Lane past the Roman Catholic dormitory at the corner of Bell Lane. The hour was only 1PM but there was already a crowd of 30 men and 2 women waiting to be taken in, though the doors do not open till 4. French [the policeman] said there were a set of scoundrels but they did not look as if they belonged to the worst class, all fairly clothed, one or two old cripples.³⁹

The notebook extract details how Artillery Passage is lined with shops and is relatively prosperous (indeed it is of the same character today). It is likely that it benefits from connecting directly to Bishopsgate, the main artery – an ancient road – that runs north–south immediately to the west of the district. The notebook description also shows that, while the different class and religious groups might be separated at the residential scale (in the back streets), once in the busy main roads they were not only ‘co-present’ – the basic ingredient of community – but also had the potential for social interaction with the host society, at the very least through trade and industry, but also through a network of social interdependence and support, with a large number of communal charitable and religious organisations set around the area.

The map of Jewish East London is in fact a reminder to read maps with caution. On the face of it, the map is a neutral record of the statistical picture of Jewish immigrant settlement at the time, showing this population’s spread along the main roads and the streets adjacent to these, with certain areas remaining completely empty of the newcomers. Yet, the choice of the colder colour, blue, to denote streets with a majority presence, in contrast with red for streets where Jewish inhabitation was in a minority, gives the impression that the Jewish presence in the area was much greater – and much more problematic – than it was in reality. The map also excluded pockets of Jewish settlement in the more prosperous districts of Dalston and Hackney. Nevertheless, the map stands as an important record of the heart of Jewish working-class settlement in London at this point in time.

In contrast, the Booth police interview notebooks attest to the intermingling in the same street of Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants, the latter in reality largely Irish, many of them children of migrants from a previous generation. There is other historical evidence for mixing across the classes and indeed across supposed ethnic and spatial divisions, where work for members of the Irish community was found more easily amongst the Jewish new immigrants than from the community at large.⁴⁰ In effect, as Bronwen Walter has written, the lives of the two communities ‘intersected at three nested scales – the household, the street and the wider sector of the East End’.⁴¹

It should be noted though that other sources report on tensions between the communities: ‘in those districts on the edge of the foreign quarter, where street supremacy had not been settled, resistance to Jewish encroachment was most intense . . . [and] led to the formation of Jewish exclusion zones’.⁴² However, whether it was the case that people moved to seek amenable neighbours or for the simple reason of cost, there may equally be instances, here as elsewhere, where immigrants chose to cluster for cultural or religious reasons.

Strong rules against intermarriage have historically created clusters of Jewish settlement beyond the initial stages of migration, and south-east Asian immigrants to the UK have upheld similar rules in order to maintain cultural cohesion and occasionally to avoid contact with ‘what they see as a prejudiced host society’.⁴³ The need for a group to have a sufficient presence to maintain its religious institutions frequently explains immigrant communities’ remaining in an area beyond the first stages of settlement. Russell and Lewis found this to be the case in Jewish East London, where individuals seemed ‘often to remain in the district, out of regard to the feelings of their parents, who are perhaps dependent on them for support’,⁴⁴ or because of the presence of Jewish institutions, especially synagogues, in the district.

The synagogues were one of the prominent land uses in the area. They tended to be located on secondary streets, not facing the main public streets, but taking advantage of local routes used by the community. Indeed, in a study where over a hundred Jewish institutions were plotted on a map of the area, it was found that other than the synagogues, all other Jewish community institutions, including clubs, schools, theatres, soup kitchens and colleges, were located on streets which were spatially integrated in relation to the local street network. Of these, the streets with educational institutions and streets with more than one institution type had average local integration values which were significantly higher than the average for the whole area.

More recent analysis compared the visibility of synagogues and churches in a section of the East End at the turn of the twentieth century.⁴⁵ One of the cases studied was Chevrah Shass Synagogue, an image of which can be seen in Figure 5.13. If we look at its location on the section of the Goad Plan in Figure 5.14 (where it is marked as ‘Old Montague Street Synagogue’), we see that although its entrance was visible to the street, the synagogue itself was almost entirely hidden from view, tucked away at the end of a passageway between two shops and behind factory stores. It was one of 14 synagogues within a small area of Whitechapel. Overall the study found that the Jewish inhabitants of the district had a variety of prayer spaces, ranging from ad hoc prayers that took place in workshops through more formalised (typically back-yard) buildings to a cohort of synagogues that were conversions from chapels, with only a couple of purpose-built structures. The analysis found that while most of the synagogues were either completely hidden, or only visible to their immediate surroundings, the two most visible synagogues were situated on streets serving the more longstanding Jewish residents of Whitechapel.⁴⁶

At the same time, Jewish communal institutions were placed in prime positions within the principal streets local to the neighbourhood, leaving the most outward-looking economic activities to take place on those streets that could best benefit from London’s natural flows of movement. The study concluded that the incomers were able to take advantage of the fine-grain street system of London’s East End to construct several complementary networks – economic, social and cultural – to sustain their community during their first stages of acculturation into wider society.