Abstract
This chapter examines some spaces of learning in inner London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These informal settings were brought into being by immigrant Jews to foster dialogue and exchange. The figure of the organic intellectual is, I will argue, an appropriate description of the role of the men and women who inhabited these spaces. The spaces they created enabled a proletarian pedagogical culture through which emerged a counterculture of modernity. The contemporary relevance of this historical case lies in its anticipation of features typical of the global city today: the dense web of interactions through within mobile, complex diverse populations.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The concept of a culture of translation has been used, for example, by the Portuguese historian and translator Luís Filipe Barreto (1996) in relation to the cosmopolitan colony Macau; by Croatian writer Andrea Zlatar (2001) in relation to the antinationalist counterculture in the Balkans; by Maria Rosa Menocal (2002) about medieval Andalusia, a ‘culture of translation, [and therefore] perforce a culture of tolerance’ (p. 197); and by the Islamist and culinary scholar Sami Zubaida (e.g. 2002), who has used the term to describe the interstitial cosmopolitan worlds of the Ottoman empire, which he argues still survive in some crevices of the Islamic world. See also the work of Anthony Pym (e.g. 1992) and Bhabha (1994, pp. 18–28) on ‘the space of translation’.
- 2.
Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra was translated by Rudolf Rocker as Azoy hot geredt tsarathustra in 1904. The pillars of the community was translated as Di shtitsen fun der gezelshaft, 1906, and The lady from the sea translated as Di froy fun yam by S. Dobrik. When we dead awaken was translated as Ven mir toyte ervakhen by Rocker’s close collaborator Abraham Frumkin with an introduction by Rocker, both in 1908. Frumkin translated Slaves of love as Shklafn fun liebe, published in 1904 with a second edition in 1906, and Mysteries as Misteryen in 1911. Hamsun was highly regarded in the Yiddish-reading world until his support for Quisling’s Nazi puppet government in Norway during World War II. His reputation was partly due to Rocker and Frumkin. Nobel Prize winning Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer later described him as ‘the father of modern literature’.
- 3.
I am thinking here of Braidotti’s (2010) work on ‘nomadology’, and particularly of much of the work on diaspora and exile from the literary disciplines, such as Rapport (1995), or many of the contributions to collections such as the 1993 double issue of Yale French Studies on ‘Post/colonial conditions: Exiles, migrations, and nomadisms’, or Barkan and Shelton (1998) or Broe and Ingram (1989). See criticisms by Mitchell (1997), Anthias (1998) and Lavie and Swedenburg (1996).
- 4.
According to Hansen (1993, p. xxxvi), the discourse of ‘counter-public’ and ‘proletarian public sphere’ cannot be equated with the discourse of ‘community’ (the dominant discourse within black, gay, Jewish and other ‘identity’ politics). The counter-public is a radical, new, modern form of solidarity, grounded in collective experience of marginalisation and expropriation, not in (real or fictive) kinship, affection, loyalty, nostalgia, love and in-group status.
References
Anthias, F. (1998). Evaluating ‘diaspora’: Beyond ethnicity? Sociology, 32(3), 557–580.
Avrich, P. (1980). The modern school movement: Anarchism and education in the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Barkan, E., & Shelton, M. (Eds.). (1998). Borders, exiles, diasporas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Barnett, M. (1934). Reminiscences of division I. The Circle, 1(6).
Barreto, L. F. (1996). Macau: A multicultural centre. Macau Magazine, 1996, 28–43.
Benhabib, S. (1996). The reluctant modernism of Hannah Arendt. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. London: Routledge.
Black, E. C. (1988). The social politics of Anglo-Jewry 1880–1920. Oxford: Blackwell.
Braidotti, R. (2010). Nomadology and subjectivity: Deleuze, Guattari and critical disability studies. In G. Roets & R. Braidotti (Eds.), Disability and social theory: New developments and directions (pp. 161–178). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Broe, M. L., & Ingram, A. (Eds.). (1989). Women’s writing in exile. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Cardwell, J. T. (1988). Come dungeons dark: The life and times of Guy Aldred, Glasgow anarchist. Ayrshire: Luath Press.
Cohen, A. L. (1959). Arbeiter ring Verein: The story of division three. In Workers’ Circle (Ed.), The Circle Golden Jubilee 1909–1959. London: Workers’ Circle.
Disch, L. J. (1994). Hannah Arendt and the limits of philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Fishman, W. J. (1975). East end Jewish radicals. London: Duckworth.
Fraser, N. (1986). Toward a discourse ethic of solidarity. Praxis International, 5(4), 425–429.
Gilroy, P. (1992). The black Atlantic. London: Verso.
Gilroy, P. (2000). Between camps: Race, identity and nationalism at the end of the colour line. London: Allen Lane.
Glanz-Leyeless, A. (1969). My literary memories (trans. J. Leftwich). In J. Leftwich (Ed.), The way we think (Vol. II). London: Thomas Yoseloff.
Goldman, E. (1931). Living my life. New York: Alfred Knopf.
Gramsci, G. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks (Q. Hoare & G. Nowell Smith, Ed. & Trans.). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Cambridge: Polity.
Hansen, M. (1993). Foreword. In O. Negt & A. Kluge (Eds.), Public sphere and experience (pp. ix–xli). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hymes, D. H. (1996). Ethnography, linguistics, narrative inequality. London: Taylor & Francis.
Jacobs, J. (1978). Out of the ghetto. London: Janet Simon.
Kahn-Harris, K., & Gidley, B. (2010). Turbulent times: The British Jewish community today. London: Bloomsbury.
Keith, M. (2005). After the cosmopolitan? Multicultural cities and the future of racism. London/New York: Routledge.
Krasner, W. (1959). I remember. In Worker’s Circle (Ed.), The Circle Golden Jubilee 1909–1959. London: Workers’ Circle. (originally in The Circle, February 1934).
Lavie, S., & Swedenburg, T. (1996). Introduction: Displacement, diaspora and geographies of identity. In S. Lavie & T. Swedenburg (Eds.), Displacement, diaspora and geographies of identity (pp. 1–26). Durham: Duke University Press.
Leftwich, J. (1911–1912). Diary 1911–12. Unpublished, Tower Hamlets Local History Library TH/L.5766/100LEF.
Leftwich, J. (1956). Introduction. In R. Rocker (Ed.), The London years (pp. 1–39). London: Robert Anscombe.
Leftwich, J. (1987). Rudolf Rocker: Mentor of the Jewish anarchists. Jewish Quarterly, 34(2), 30–33. (Originally in Jewish Quarterly, 1(2) (1953) as ‘Rudolf Rocker at Eighty’).
Lichtenstein, R. (1999). Rodinsky’s Whitechapel. London: Artangel.
Menocal, M. (2002). The ornament of the world: How Muslims, Christians and Jews created a culture of tolerance in medieval Spain. Boston: Little, Brown.
Mindel, M. (1959). The story of division I. In Workers’ Circle, The Circle Golden Jubilee 1909–1959. London: Workers’ Circle.
Mitchell, K. (1997). Different diasporas and the hype of hybridity. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 15(5), 533–553.
Negt, O., & Kluge, A. (1993). Public sphere and experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Podolsky, E. W. (1959). The cultural activities. In Workers’ Circle (Ed.), The Circle Golden Jubilee 1909–1959. London: Workers’ Circle.
Pym, A. (1992). Translation and text transfer: An essay on the principles of intercultural communication. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Rapport, N. (1995). Migrant selves and stereotypes: Personal context in a postmodern world. In N. Thrift & S. Pile (Eds.), Mapping the subject: Geographies of cultural transformation (pp. 267–282). London: Routledge.
Rocker, R. (1942). Kropotkin and the Jewish labor movement in England. In F. Oppenheimer et al. (Eds.), Centennial expressions on Peter Kropotkin 1842–1942 by pertinent thinkers. New York: Rocker Publications Committee.
Rocker, R. (1956). The London years (J. Leftwich, Trans.). London: Robert Anscombe for the Rudolf Rocker Book Committee.
Rocker, F. (1998). The east end years: A Stepney childhood. London: Freedom Books.
Rosenberg, A. (1994). Jewish friendly societies. In D. Englander (Ed.), A documentary history of Jewish immigrants in Britain 1840–1920 (pp. 75–76). Leicester: Leicester University Press. (originally in Jewish Chronicle, 8 September 1905).
Simey, T. S., & Simey, M. B. (1960). Charles Booth: Social scientist. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sivanandan, A. (2001). Poverty is the new black. Race and Class, 43(1), 1–5.
Walkowitz, J. R. (1992). City of dreadful delight. London: Virago.
White, J. (1980). Rothschild buildings. London: Routledge.
Williams, B. (1985). Anti-Semitism of tolerance: Middle-class Manchester and the Jews, 1879–1900. In A. J. Kidd & K. W. Roberts (Eds.), City, class and culture: Studies of social policy and cultural production in Victorian Manchester (pp. 74–102). Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Williams, B. (1990). ‘East’ and ‘West’: Class and community in Manchester Jewry, 1850–1914. In D. Cesarani (Ed.), The making of modern Anglo-Jewry (pp. 15–33). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Workers’ Circle. (1959). The Circle Golden Jubilee 1909–1959. London: Workers’ Circle.
Zlatar, A. (2001). Culture in Croatia during the transition period. Vienna: Eurozine.
Zubaida, S. (2002). Middle eastern experiences of cosmopolitanism. In S. Vertovec & R. Cohen (Eds.), Conceiving cosmopolitanism: Theory, context and practice (pp. 32–41). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gidley, B. (2018). Spaces of Informal Learning and Cultures of Translation and Marginality in London’s Jewish East End. In: Nichols, S., Dobson, S. (eds) Learning Cities. Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education, vol 8. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8100-2_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8100-2_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-10-8098-2
Online ISBN: 978-981-10-8100-2
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)