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Sept. 23, 2011
London’s East End has color
Walking tour of Jewish areas reveals interesting and long history.
STEPHEN BURSTIN
Could one of the most bloodthirsty serial murderers have been Jewish? Would it be more accurate to call London’s notorious 19th-century killer Jacob the Ripper and not Jack?
With all his murders taking place in the heart of London’s Jewish Whitechapel district, some police and journalists at the time thought he might well have been Jewish. And many of London’s nervous populace agreed, staging antisemitic riots at the height of the killings. There was even a callous theory that the ghoulish yet medically proficient things the Ripper did to his victims with a knife pointed to him being a shochet, or ritual slaughterer.
The prospect of Jacob the Ripper is one of the stranger examples of what is a truly fascinating history of the Jewish community in London’s East End; a story that is both heartwarming and heartbreaking.
Following the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, at the height of popular dissent, the Russian authorities looked to deflect the mounting disquiet and launched an antisemitic campaign that led to a wave of pogroms.
Between 1881 and 1914, more than three million Jews fled Eastern Europe to escape the pogroms and to seek a better quality of life. The majority went to the United States, many of them staying in London for a few weeks, or even several years, before crossing the Atlantic. Thousands of others eventually left London for Palestine and countries within the British Empire. London became home for more than 150,000 Eastern European immigrants.
This influx of impoverished Jews from far off lands did not go down well with London’s Jewish establishment, who feared a rising antisemitism. The new arrivals looked different, dressed differently, spoke a different language (Yiddish) and, as well as bringing with them their bedding and crockery, also brought their completely different way of life.
In 1885, England’s Chief Rabbi Nathan Marcus Adler issued a plea to Eastern European rabbis telling them of the dire conditions that immigrants would face, with overcrowding and poor health conditions, particularly in London’s East End quarter, already home to the majority of the capital’s existing 50,000-strong Jewish community. In an open letter, the chief rabbi wrote: “There are many in Eastern Europe who believe all the cobblestones of London are precious stones and that it is a place of gold. Woe and alas, it is not so … warn them not to come to Britain.”
But his plea fell on deaf ears and the East End received most of the new arrivals, attracted by the area’s reputation for cheap living and because it was already home to a Jewish population. Many found work in the garment industry sweatshops, notorious for their unhygienic conditions and breeding grounds for tuberculosis, which claimed countless lives.
Rather than join the established synagogues, many immigrants set up small prayer rooms (chevrahs) all over the East End, each invariably attracting for Jews from the same village or town back in Eastern Europe. In a show of nostalgia, they named them after their former homes, one the Sons of Lodz Chevrah, another the Brethren of Konin Chevrah, and so on.
Many chevrahs eventually joined forces to form viable synagogues and, by the 1930s, there were more than 150 in just one square mile of the East End, with some streets hosting several of these small congregations.
The oldest surviving synagogue in England, Bevis Marks, today straddles the border between the East End and the city’s financial district. Founded in 1701, primarily by Dutch Jews whose descendants had fled the Spanish Inquisition, it is Sephardi and, unusually, the original interior is perfectly intact, including the beautiful Renaissance- style aron kodesh.
Bevis Marks boasts several famous sons, most notably the 19th-century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, whose father turned his back on Judasim and converted the family to Christianity when Benjamin was 12. This did not stop an Irish member of Parliament later insulting the young politician’s Jewish roots. Disraeli famously retorted: “Yes, I am a Jew. But while the right honorable gentleman’s ancestors were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the Temple of Solomon.”
Many sites in the East End continue to provide reminders of the rich heritage of the former Jewish community, which at one time made up 95 percent of the local population. There’s the Jewish soup kitchen that served an incredible 5,000 meals a day during the pre-war Depression years and now, paradoxically, its retained ornate fascia provides a frontage to luxury apartments.
Across Commercial Street in revitalized Spitalfields, £1 million ($1.5 million Cdn) homes vie with each other to maintain the best-kept Jewish secrets from unknowing passersby. One was the first purpose-built yet short-lived Yiddish theatre that closed after 17 people were trampled to death when someone maliciously cried, “Fire!” Another Spitalfields home still has the shell of a 19th-century synagogue in the back garden, a testament to Polish immigrants, who built it after pooling their meagre savings for several years.
And, of course, there’s the famous Petticoat Lane street market, still echoing the spiel of Jewish traders who manned 99 percent of the stalls up to the 1950s. Today, the sales patter has a Bengali twang.
Just yards from the lane sits the site of the former Jewish Free School, the biggest elementary school in Europe (some say the world) with 4,250 pupils on its register in 1900. Most were immigrant children speaking only Yiddish and, in a desperate bid to anglicize them, only English was permitted once entering the school gates. It worked, yet, within a generation, the policy also contributed to the demise of Yiddish theatre and newspapers in England.
But JFS did spawn some individuals who later found fame:
Israel Zangwell, the novelist; Selig Brodetsky, the one-time president of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University; and Bud Flanagan, a favorite wartime variety artist. Not so famous, but nonetheless colorful, was diamond billionaire Barney Barnato, who made and lost a fortune in South Africa, and Maurice Cohen, son of a sweatshop tailor, who mysteriously disappeared from the East End only to surface years later as a general in Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist army.
Following the Second World War, the majority of East End Jews gradually made good and moved out to the London suburbs and beyond. Another wave of migrants moved in, this time Bangladeshis, and settled in parts of the East End. Famous Brick Lane, where the air was once thick with the smell of pickled herring and freshly baked bagels, now offers passersby the whiff of curry and donair kebab.
But Mr. Epstein, the sole remaining Jewish trader in Brick Lane, proudly sports a kippah outside his garment shop, as he chats with his Bangladeshi neighbors. And, perhaps, no one has told the owner of the Taj Mahal restaurant that the little item on his doorframe covered in paint is, in fact, a mezuzah.
Stephen Burstin is a journalist and tour guide. He was born in London’s East End, where he now conducts Jewish-themed tours, available through jewishlondonwalkingtours.co.uk.
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