Not Quite Kosher

Abstract

Between 1861 and 1901 the population of London grew from over three million to six and a half million people, overflowing into the newly expanding suburbs made possible by improvements in transport. As early as 1881 administrators were using the term ‘Greater London’ to express the extraordinary nature of the metropolis. The restless, misshapen, bubbling mass of London was something new and contemporaries recognized the fact. Here was the ‘world city’, not only the culmination of city development but also an arena where the events of the world were reproduced in miniature. The First World wealth of the capitalist West End starred disbelievingly at the Third World poverty of the ‘socialist’ East End, and in the East End the revolutionary politics of the European poor played themselves out in a miniature version of the events in France, Prussia and Russia. The Jewish population, defending itself against the iniquities of local anti-Semitic groups and still with its roots (and relatives) in the hated Tsarist police state, was often drawn to the ‘communist’ and anarchist groups that British patriotic parties believed typified the Jewish alien and his or her subversive anti- English nature.