Jewish Religious Conditions



Jewish Religious Conditions

Introduction

The Jews of the readmission, the majority of whom were Sephardim (those who followed the tradition of the Jews of Spain and Portugal), settled at the eastern edge of London, an area renowned as the first point of settlement for immigrants to the capital.

During the first half of the twentieth century there was little change in the spatial distribution of Britain's Jews, though a pattern of concentration in the major provincial cities at the expense of the market towns and ports was discernible. At the same time, the seeds of regional and national demographic reorganization were being sown as the more affluent members of Jewish communities in London and the provinces began to move to the suburbs, that new phenomenon of the 1920s and 1930s. In inner London, the outward movement of Jews from the East End was precipitated by the introduction of harsh anti-alien restrictions in the London County Council (LCC) immediately after World War I. In reaction to residual wartime xenophobia and to the Russian Revolution (which led some to believe that all Jews were “Bolshies”), unnaturalized Jewish immigrants (aliens) were targeted by the LCC, which refused to rent homes to aliens, provide jobs for aliens, or provide scholarships for aliens or their children, a policy not rescinded until 1929. For those who were able, it was the galvanizing factor in their movement out of the ghetto.

The next set of immigrant arrivals, German Jewish refugees in the 1930s, avoided the East End. They chose, where possible, to settle to the northwest of the capital in and around Hampstead and Golders Green, which provoked both criticism and anti-Semitism. It was the half century following the end of World War II in which the biggest geographic changes took place, however. By 1995, 72 percent of Britain's Jews were living in the London area (Schmool and Cohen 1998, 5). This concentration of Jews in London took place at the expense of cities such as Liverpool, Leeds, and Manchester, which, in common with other provincial towns and cities, had seen their Jewish communities shrink. By the close of the twentieth century, British Jewry was primarily suburban-based.

Religious Structure

The earliest Jewish immigrants to England followed an Orthodox style of worship in either the Sephardi or Ashkenazi ritual and liturgy, with affiliation and practice determined by ancestral roots. In 1840, when the established synagogues refused to introduce change or open a synagogue closer to the West End of London, where the anglicized and socially mobile now lived, a group of affluent and assimilated Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews broke away and established their own “Reform” synagogue. The synagogue they founded was called, for very specific reasons, the West London Synagogue of British Jews. It was a firm pronouncement that its members were Englishmen of the Mosaic persuasion. In 1856 and 1881, Reform synagogues were opened in Manchester and Bradford.

The arrivals from Eastern Europe, used to the more personal and vibrant forms of service and practice, found none of the existing groups ...