Many of the forces that have been at work among American Jews since the end of World War II have also begun to show themselves in the Jewish community of England. In the first of the two articles following, A. V. Sherman describes the changing patterns of Jewish settlement in London; and in the second, Alan W. Miller finds in the recent republication of Montefiore and Loewe’s A Rabbinic Anthology (Meridian, 961 pp., $7.50) an occasion for commenting on the new religious atmosphere within the community. Mr. Sherman, a frequent contributor to COMMENTARY, is a free-lance journalist. Dr. Miller, a new contributor, the son of a London-born Orthodox rabbi, was educated at Oxford and at Jews’ College in London and is currently minister in the Southwest Essex Reform Synagogue and a lecturer at Leo Baeck College.

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“The East End is not what it used to be”—the theme recurs in almost any conversation on London Jewry and its changing patterns of settlement and behavior. For over half a century the “East End”—to be more exact, the Jewish quarter of the East End—had been the home of most London Jews and the main focus of their communal existence. Now Jewish life is ebbing away from it.

The change is not immediately apparent to the daytime visitor or to the tourists who flock to the Petticoat Lane street-market on Sunday morning. Most shops, stalls, restaurants, clothing manufacturers, and wholesalers are still unmistakably Jewish, and so are many of the passers-by. Hebrew and Yiddish papers, prayer books and talleisim, beiglach and chopped herring—all signs of Jewishness in their own way—abound; notices in Yiddish are pasted up; synagogues, yeshivot, and mikvaot are scattered through the quarter. But when evening comes the factory owners and shopkeepers—and many of their customers too—make their way home to other parts of London; the synagogues remain half empty or derelict. On Shabbos few Jews, and still fewer Jewish families, can be seen making their way to and from synagogue along streets and lanes which twenty or thirty years ago were so tightly thronged with worshipers that the outsider felt ill at ease.

Less immediately evident but even more striking is the decline in religious and communal activity among those Jews who have remained in the East End. The old East Enders used to be the backbone of religious life, Zionism, Yiddish culture, and the friendly societies; they saw themselves as defenders of a citadel on which their outposts elsewhere in London and the provinces leaned. It was taken for granted that visiting Zionists or religious leaders would make their main public appearance at packed meetings in the East End. Now, most of the remaining East Enders are apathetic where Jewish matters are concerned, and largely unaffected by the renaissance of religious, communal, and Zionist interest experienced by middle-class Jewry. The Zionist organizations, the Jewish Workmen’s Circle, the Hasidic sects have given up the East End for lost and have concentrated their efforts elsewhere. These developments stem partly from the community’s growing affluence and acculturation, and partly from demographic and social changes affecting London as a whole. British Jews are steadily becoming more English, though the process still has some way to go.

The largest wave of Jewish immigration into Britain began at the same time as the mass influx into the United States, in the 1880’s, but it ended sooner, owing to the Alien’s Act of 1906. During this quarter century, over a hundred thousand Jewish immigrants from the Pale entered Britain, whose Jewish population in 1880 was about fifty thousand, and the vast majority of these immigrants settled in the Jewish quarter of the East End. The area centered on the two westernmost parishes of the Borough of Stepney—Whitechapel and St. Georges-in-the-East—spilling over into the adjacent areas of Mile End and Bethnal Green. To the south and east lay Dockland, which was and still remains alien and hostile; to the west, the City of London, the country’s financial center; and to the north, densely populated slum and industrial areas, impenetrable to Jewish infiltration. Squeezed between these natural boundaries, the Jewish quarter—filled with decaying 18th- and 19th-century houses and later 19th-century tenement buildings astride the main roads leading out of the City to Dockland, East London’s industrial areas, and to the Essex countryside—reached a high density.

The East End, at its peak, held between 80 and 90 per cent of all of London’s Jews, and it faithfully reproduced East European Jewish life. Whole streets and blocks were inhabited exclusively by Jews, Yiddish was the main language, and the few non-Jews who lived or worked in the area often adopted Jewish ways—even picking up a smattering or more of Yiddish.

During the interwar period, though no exact statistics are available, Jews are estimated to have constituted a third of the inhabitants of the Borough of Stepney. Many of its schools were recognized as “Jewish” for purposes of religious instruction, school holidays, and choice of teachers. Public notices were pasted up by the Borough Council in Yiddish and English, and the public libraries stocked Yiddish books and newspapers. It is worth noting that these libraries played an important role in the life of the community, for the drive toward self-improvement was very strong. Most Jewish parents took for granted that it was up to them to see that their children would have a better chance in life than they had, just as most non-Jews in the East End took for granted the belief that their children would simply follow their footsteps. The proportion of Jewish children who obtained secondary and higher education was immeasurably higher than the national average. Few did their “homework” at home; most of them congregated in the reference rooms of the Borough library, where every inch of floor space was crammed with tables and chairs, and a two-shift system had to be introduced before examinations.

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Until the Second World War, poverty was an inseparable characteristic of East End life. A large number of the inhabitants worked in “Jewish trades”—tailoring, cabinet-making, hairdressing, taxi-driving, and retail—where wages were low and unemployment was endemic. Apart from a few thousand Council flats built under slum-clearance schemes, new housing was rare and overcrowding remained the rule. And, until the Second World War, the permanence of Jewish settlement in the East End was never questioned. True, families which could afford it did move northward, leapfrogging the slum areas that intervened to occupy large family houses vacated by their former owners as the residential map of London kept changing. But most families continued to work in the East End; their social life was oriented toward Whitechapel, and the loss from “emigration” was largely offset by natural increase and by the trickle of Jews from Eastern Europe who managed to find their way into the country through one means or another. Although Yiddish was being replaced by “Jewish-English,” it died slowly, and the Yiddishists still were able to draw ample spiritual sustenance from both Eastern Europe and the United States.

The war changed everything. Large areas of Stepney were flattened by bombing, and many families were evacuated to small towns in the Home Counties of Southern England. The wartime and postwar changes alike also brought full employment and the opportunity to make money. The Welfare State meant greater purchasing power for the working class, and this in turn vastly increased opportunities in the production, wholesaling, and retailing of consumers’ goods—fields in which the Jews had already established themselves. (Today there are comparatively few Jewish industrial workers under the age of fifty. Cypriots, Maltese, and other immigrants staff the needle trades, while cabinet-making has moved away from the center of London and into large factories.)

At the same time, bomb devastation gave the London County Council its chance to re-plan the central areas. Thus, Stepney’s total population is now down from its pre-war figure of nearly a quarter of a million to less than a hundred thousand. Three- and four-room Council flats have risen on the ruins left by the Luftwaffe, and over two-thirds of Stepney is due for demolition and rebuilding. Together, full employment and planning have changed the Borough’s whole mode of life.

Prosperity, for one thing, appears to have had its effect on Jewish utopianism and Gentile roughhousing alike. Zionism and Communism, two of the popular expressions of Jewish political commitment between the wars, have lost much of their attraction: Zionism has become a form of middle-class philanthropy and status competition, while Communism is discredited. At the same time the pre-war English and Irish proletariat, numbers of whom formerly sought solace in drinking, fighting, and gambling, have also been changed by their new affluence. In the municipal housing estates, which now give shelter to about a third of the Borough’s population—and about the same proportion of its Jewish inhabitants—two families out of five have a car, an average higher than that for Britain as a whole. Apart from the homes of one or two Jewish families with intellectual pretensions, every flat has television. A family living in a low-rent Council flat with two, three, or even four of its members at work, is now well into the middle-income brackets, and this change has begun to affect the families’ consumption and behavior patterns, lessening the difference—and the tensions—between Gentile and Jew. The East End Gentile has developed middle-class tastes as a result of his increased income, while the Jew had already acquired the tastes before the income.

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Whereas the total population of Stepney has fallen to less than half of its pre-war level, the proportion of Jews, as compared with the mid-1930’s, now equals less than a quarter. In areas which once teemed with children and youngsters, one sees only aged people, while across the street a family of West Indians is moving in. An old lady told me aggresively in near-English: “When we first came here, you did not need any State of Israel; the East End itself was a Yiddishe shtot. Then, a Jew could live like a Jew; now there are shwartze and Irish, and the Jews are like goyim too.” No exact statistics are available on Jewish population distribution, but the general consensus among specialists is that there are now between twenty-and twenty-five thousand Jews in the East End, most of them in Stepney: about a tenth of all the Jews in Greater London.¹

They are, as I have said, nearly all old-time inhabitants, and one can divide them into a few main categories. First, the aging people left behind by the ebb tide, who go on living in their tenements and basements. Their married sons and daughters have moved off to North or North West London, but the old people stay put—sometimes because there is no room for them in the new Council flat or suburban house, or because the daughter-in-law does not keep kashrut, but quite often because they prefer their old way of life in the East End to a semi-Anglicized suburban existence.

Then there are the inhabitants of East End who live in the well-built roomy blocks of flats put up by the London County Council. Nearly 9,000 of these flats house between a quarter and a third of the Borough’s inhabitants, and a rough check based on names, appearances, and the mezuzot on the doors suggests that between a third and a half of the Council-house dwellers in the formerly “Jewish areas” are Jews. These Council-house dwellers are a privileged group. They pay the equivalent of three to five dollars a week, including municipal taxes, for a comfortable three- or four-room flat with kitchen and bathroom—only a fraction of prevailing non-Council rents, or of necessary mortgage payments if they were to buy a house of their own. Many families who could well afford to buy such a house or pay the prevailing economic rent, prefer to live for years in overcrowded slum dwellings in order to await their turn for a Council flat, and few families ever leave a Council flat unless they have moved up into a really high-income bracket. Because these dwellings are allocated on the basis of a point system which takes into account length of residence in the Borough, a family leaving the East End could not hope to move into subsidized municipal housing elsewhere, so such Council tenants most often stay put.

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Still another group of Jewish East Enders is made up of shopkeepers who prefer to live near their businesses; this is particularly the case with grocers, bakers, tobacconists, and similar enterprises which traditionally open quite early in the morning and stay open till late at night. A fourth category would include those last remaining Jews working as wage earners in tailoring and the furniture trades, together with the peddlers, lesser luftmenschen, casual workers, hospital cases, court cases, gamblers, drunkards. Some in this group are reconciled to living out their days in the East End and will even assert rather defensively that they are proud of having stayed, and have no time for the “snobs” elsewhere; but most feel that residence in Stepney carries the stigma of failure, and still hope to be “next year, please God, in Stamford Hill” (North London). Finally, there are a number of newcomers: Indian Jews who find themselves squeezed out by Nehru’s nationalization of industry and commerce, Jews from Aden, Persian refugees from Egypt, Middle Eastern Jews with British passports who tried their luck in Israel but found it uncongenial, and also a trickle of survivors from Poland and Rumania who managed to find their way to Britain. (Although the “temporary shelter” still exists in the East End, an increasing number of immigrants make their way directly to North or North West London where the majority of their communities are well-established.)

This drop in the number of inhabitants—Jewish and non-Jewish—is not peculiar to Stepney: most of the Central London Boroughs have experienced a similar decline and indeed encouraged it. Slum clearance, the provision of parks and open spaces, and the expansion of manufacturing industries have led to the resettlement of former inhabitants in the outer suburbs and in new towns beyond London’s “green belt” of parkland. The exodus of the Jews from Stepney, therefore, has not been followed by any particularly large influx of still newer immigrants, as would have happened a couple of decades ago (and still does happen with moving groups in other parts of London). But there is nonetheless some movement into the Jewish quarter from further south and east. Colored folk—many of them Stepney-born—and Indians are most noticeable, although Cypriots and Maltese and the East End Irish, who provide a large proportion of the dock laborers in the area, also move into dwellings as Jews continue to vacate them.

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The effects of postwar England’s affluence have manifested themselves in the East End in some surprising ways. For instance, although crime—particularly violence, hooliganism, and drunkenness—has been on the increase in Britain for the past decade, it has been declining in Stepney.

“When I first came down to the East End after the war, the old hands used to tell me about streets where its police had to walk in pairs, if they went down there at all. Now it’s as quiet as you like.” The police sergeant on duty at what was once one of London’s toughest stations, who told me this, was quite free from nostalgia for the old days. “Once you saw the streets full of drunks almost every night—you could find dozens lying on the pavements; now you see much less of it, although people have more money than ever before.” In other words, better housing, television, car ownership, installment plans, and the general spread of middle-class standards seem to be leaving their mark. Prostitution, for which Stepney was notorious, is still widespread, but it is carried on mainly for clients from outside the Borough. Few of the girls are Londoners—most of them drift in from Wales or the north of England and hang around the cafes, where the pimps, mostly Maltese, Cypriots, and Nigerians, find them. Sailors, long-distance truck drivers, and South Londoners on a spree, provide the greater part of the clientele—for the prostitutes, as well as for the drinking clubs and gambling houses—and, according to the police, these outsiders cause most of the brawls.

A few years ago the prostitutes moved up from Dockland into the Jewish quarter, and things became so bad that mothers refused to allow their teen-age daughters out in the evening, for fear of their being accosted by pimps and potential clients. Complaints by social workers in this area were largely instrumental in initiating the recent legislation banning streetwalkers which finally came into effect last year. (The girls have since gone underground, i.e., they hang about their clubs and cafes, or wait at the end of a telephone.)

As might be expected, crime among the remaining Jews in the East End is also extremely low; Jews have generally remained immune from England’s postwar crime wave. Yet from the turn of the century to the 1930’s, the Jews in East End did contribute a fair amount of its delinquency—though considerably less than the Irish, Italian, Maltese, and other immigrant communities. Jews were distressingly prominent in the gambling and protection rackets, as well as in burglary. Now the Jewish “reform schools” are empty or turned over to the authorities for use by others, and Jewish juvenile delinquents (or prostitutes) are a rarity. The Jewish charitable organizations, welfare societies, clubs, and settlements which once played such a characteristic role in East End life, are slowly adjusting to these changed circumstances. Charitable and welfare work proper is confined largely to the upkeep of homes for the aged, the widows, and orphans, and to helping refugees from Oriental countries who in any case usually land on their feet quickly enough thanks to full employment. The funds and energies which were once directed to aiding the ragged, hungry refugees from East European countries are now channeled mainly to Israel.

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The old clubs and settlements originally organized by middle-class Anglo-Jewry for the purpose of assisting in the upbringing of young East Enders have thus changed beyond recognition. In the early days they were apt to be barn-like affairs in permanent disrepair, with rickety furniture and old billiard tables, and always desperately short of funds to meet their current expenses and leave something over for the occasional day’s excursion to the open country. But the settlements were staffed by devoted volunteer workers and filled with lively, noisy children and youths. Today they have more money than they know what to do with. For example, the “old boys” of the Brady Street Club are estimated to be worth several million pounds, and the club can have literally any sum of money it wants for the asking. It is now housed in a magnificent new building, all neon lights and formica, with fittings and facilities which would do justice to a West End club; it has a trained staff and a generous budget—but it lacks the life it used to have.

Sir Basil Henriques, who has been associated with the Bernhard Baron Settlement—the best known of all welfare centers in the East End—for the past fifty years, recalls the changes which have taken place in the settlement’s work and clientele during that time. Sir Basil, a member of a prominent Sephardic family, came down to the East End before the First World War and achieved considerable recognition as magistrate in the Juvenile Court, and as a voluntary social worker. At that time, the term “East End” was still synonymous with grinding poverty, unemployment, and insecurity, and seemed to harbor unplumbed moral dangers for its inhabitants: a constant threat to the status and prestige of the old-established Anglo-Jewish community, who came to be outnumbered by their “uncouth” alien co-religionists by more than two to one. All that the settlement could do to help seemed like a drop in the ocean. Through the years, however, the immigrants and their children have become pillars of the community—indeed they supplied much of the financial aid to “displaced persons” in the 40’s, and to the State of Israel in the 50’s. The problems of those Jews who remain in the East End now no longer differ much from the problems of the average Londoner: how to adjust to the wider society whose pitfalls are only now gradually becoming apparent.

Sir Basil is convinced that the East End will soon lose its last remaining Jews. He points out that those families who have remained have lost none of the Jewish ambition to see their children better off than they themselves were; Jewish children in the East End still outstrip their school fellows. Large numbers of them, Sir Basil feels, will continue to win their way to Grammar school at the eleven-plus examination which divides the academic “elite” from those destined for manual work or a trade of one sort or another. From Grammar school they will win scholarships to University, and so goodbye to the East End. Even those who fail to make their way to Grammar school will not be content to remain wage earners for very long, but will set up in business on their own, helped, if they are lucky, by relatives or fellow Jews; and these people also will probably be living in the suburbs in another decade.

Sir Basil lays much emphasis on the role played in the general social rise of the Jews by their religiously sanctified family life. The “Jewish Friday Night” is the key, he believes, to the whole thing: if that were to go, he asks, who knows what would remain?

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While there have, indeed, been many dire prophecies of the imminent dissolution of Anglo-Jewry, particularly by those who identify Jewishness with unrelenting Orthodoxy and Pale of Settlement Yiddishkeit, the Jewish community has proved itself able to survive prosperity and an increasing measure of Anglicization. As the Jews leave the East End they are not dispersed among the Londoners, but form new colonies.

The first of these colonies outside of the East End is that of Jewish North London, in Hackney, Stoke Newington, and Tottenham. Unlike the poky, crowded, crumbling houses of the East End, the buildings in North London were the better kind of Victorian and Edwardian houses, with large rooms in a good state of repair, whose former inhabitants began to move farther afield with the spreading use of the motor car. The influx of Jews led many more middle-class non-Jews to leave the area so that it came to be inhabited predominantly by Jews; and until the Second World War, Jewish North London remained largely a cultural offshoot of the East End. Now it has become a stronghold of Jewish traditional culture. The Hasidim, the ultra-Orthodox, with their shtiblach, yeshivot, mikvaot, and communal institutions are concentrated in the Lordship Park district on the westernmost part of Jewish North London, whose postal designation is No. 16. (As a result, “No. 16” is now used as a common expression for extreme Orthodoxy, just as “Whitechapel” once signified the un-Anglicized or the “vulgar.”) The Oriental Jewish communities, too, have their centers in North London. The Persian and Bokharan Jews, mostly carpet dealers, are the longest established; a large community of Iraqi Jews who had migrated to India a couple of generations back has also established itself, and has been followed by an influx of Adenis and Egyptians, whose numbers have largely been swollen by Jews from other Moslem countries who were fortunate enough to have acquired British citizenship. The Jewish day school movement has one of its main strongholds here, and so have the Zionist youth movements, though adults are less Zionist or Israel-conscious than their more prosperous counterparts in North West London.

Somewhat before the Second World War, it became obvious that North London had turned into a staging camp for Jews on the way from the East End to middle-class North West London. Until the 1920’s and early 1930’s, Stamford Hill, one of the pleasanter parts of Jewish North London, had considerable prestige in Jewish circles, and represented the fruits of a lifetime’s endeavor. As it became an all-Jewish area, though, its prestige fell—a process hastened by the largescale building of Council flats to re-house working-class families displaced by slumclearance schemes elsewhere—and more prosperous Jewish inhabitants began to drift off to newly built or comparatively new areas in North West London: Golders’ Green (colloquially known as Goldberg’s Green), Hendon, Brondsbury, Cricklewood, and, even farther out, Edgware and Finchley. Gradually this trend acquired momentum as the vacuum created in North London drew in Africans, Indians, or poorer Jews from the East End.

Now North West London itself is increasingly gripped by what seems to be the iron law of Jewish settlement. Middleclass non-Jews have been leaving in growing numbers, thus turning many districts into completely Jewish areas and beginning the process once again—and so more and more Jewish families are moving out of North West London and into other districts. By now the residents of Jewish North West London have achieved the levels of income and social standing that in non-Jewish society establishes one as a churchgoer, and among these Jews there has in fact been a noticeable return to the synagogue after the falling away which characterized the life of latter-day East End and of large sections of North London. While theirs is not a very intense Judaism—whether Reform or Orthodox, it appears to involve little feeling and even less learning—it nevertheless gives the community a certain cohesion. (In Jewish conversation, “Golders Green,” used adjectively, has acquired a pejorative sense, and suggests—depending on the individual critic’s values—vulgar purseproudness, ostentation, or lack of “Jewish feeling.” What the criticism of Golders Green really implies, I think, is that its Jews have lost some of the positive qualities they brought to the East End from their shtetlach and have yet not become English. Although there is a grain of truth in this notion, the East End was always less idyllic than retrospective idealizations would have it.)

Of course, there are islands of strict Orthodoxy even in the bourgeois North West, but they are the exception. Zionism is also extensively supported; indeed the area is the mainstay of Zionist balls, dinners, and other functions. Jewish day schools are well attended. At the same time, North West London has been strengthened by the accession of the greater part of the Central European immigrants of the 30’s, whose precarious income levels were compensated for by higher cultural attainments and a truly Germanic self-confidence that even Hitler could not shake. Their background and attitudes have speeded up the assimilation of English middle-class culture—though the process has still not entirely closed the gap between Jews and non-Jews inside the same income bracket.

From North West London the movement outward occurs in several different streams. Many Jews have come to settle in the West End of London, in Baker Street and Mayfair, two of London’s most expensive residential areas; others are established around Regent’s Park. Still others have moved into non-Jewish districts in North West London (thereby eventually Judaizing them) or have drifted into “Metroland,” the belt of countryside to the north and west of London which is neither town nor country. By now even most Jewish organizations are regrouped in Central London: the Chief Rabbi and his court; the Board of Deputies (which wrangles over communal affairs and passes resolutions on foreign policy questions that few delegates understand); the Board of Guardians (which looks after whatever poor it can find); the Board of Schechita (whose doings would deserve a separate article); and the Jewish library and museum. The Federation of Synagogues, which represents the less Anglicized Jews, still maintains its offices in the East End, but owing to its failure in gaining younger members in North and North West London, its main function has increasingly become that of a burial society. But the Jewish press has found its way to Fleet Street: both the old-established Jewish Chronicle, the leading community weekly, and the Jewish Observer, published by the Zionist Organization, write for the middle- and lower-middle class Jew in the North and North West, and barely notice the Jew within the East End. The Yiddish daily, the Yiddishe Zeit, held out in the East End until 1950, when rising costs and declining readership forced it to close down. It is said that its founder and editor (as well as manager, news editor, editorial writer, etc.), the late Morris Myer, used to stand at the door of his office in the Whitechapel Road, and as each funeral procession passed, would call out to his printer in the cellar: “Print one less today.” This could serve as an epitaph for the passing of the Jewish East End.

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¹ Any social research on Jews in Britain is hindered by the complete absence of official statistics. The authorities have scrupulously avoided collating data on, or according to, religious affiliation, in order to avoid any semblance of discrimination. Stepney Borough Council's chief administrator told me with considerable pride that he and his colleagues never distinguished between Jews and Gentiles, or black and white. Democratic, but hard on the sociologist.