Introduction: Placing the Alien Jew in the British Imagination

Abstract

Eastern European Jews migrating westwards at the fin de siècle elicited a myriad of responses from nations of reception and transit such as Britain. This wide-ranging introduction assesses the historical and discursive arguments for viewing the aliens debate, which emerged out of these responses, through the prism of space. It demonstrates how sites between the Russian Pale of Settlement and London’s East End were subject to different spatial readings, which impacted on how the alien Jew passing through was conceptualised and understood. It also considers how racialised discourse about Jews as, conversely, ambitiously territorialist and yet placeless and nomadic, were also distinctly spatial in character. It establishes that there is a necessity for reviewing scholarship about Britain’s response to, and relationship with, the alien Jew. Whilst racial tropes played a central role, the figure of the alien Jew was, ultimately, a product of the intersections between ‘race’ and an array of preconceptions and anxieties about space, the identity of place, and the idea of ‘the nation’.