The Rise Of Provincial Jewry

The history of Jews in cosmopolitan maritime trading centres is a field of research that is reshaping our understanding of how Jews entered the modern world. These studies show that the utility of Jewish merchants in an era of European expansion was vital to their acculturation and assimilation.

An authoritative and comprehensive history of the Jews of Britain over the last century and a half, this book examines the social structure and economic base of Jewish communities in Victorian England and traces the struggle for emancipation.

First Published in 1989 London Jewry and London Politics 1889-1986 is a study of the relationship between the London Jewish community, the London County Council, and the Greater London Council. Geoffrey Alderman draws on a wealth of primary and secondary material to illuminate a dialogue that began, a hundred years ago, in a mood of great optimism and co-operation, but which ended, in the early 1980s, in a welter of insults and antagonisms. Alderman adopts a chronological approach, looking first at the Jewish involvement in London government prior to the establishment of the London County Council in 1889. He then analyses the contribution made by London Jewry to the periods of progressive control and conservative rule. With the arrival of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe the nature of the Jewish electorate underwent considerable change and Alderman describes how the government exploited prejudice against the Jewish community causing LCC to adopt blatantly antisemitic policies. The Labour victory of 1934 was in part due to the Jewish vote, but the period of Labour rule was a disappointment and an anticlimax. This illuminating account of hundred years is an essential read for scholars and researchers of British history.

In Todd Endelman's spare and elegant narrative, the history of British Jewry in the modern period is characterized by a curious mixture of prominence and inconspicuousness. British Jews have been central to the unfolding of key political events of the modern period, especially the establishment of the State of Israel, but inconspicuous in shaping the character and outlook of modern Jewry. Their story, less dramatic perhaps than that of other Jewish communities, is no less deserving of this comprehensive and finely balanced analytical account. Even though Jews were never completely absent from Britain after the expulsion of 1290, it was not until the mid- seventeenth century that a permanent community took root. Endelman devotes chapters to the resettlement; to the integration and acculturation that took place, more intensively than in other European states, during the eighteenth century; to the remarkable economic transformation of Anglo-Jewry between 1800 and 1870; to the tide of immigration from Eastern Europe between 1870 and 1914 and the emergence of unprecedented hostility to Jews; to the effects of World War I and the turbulent events up to and including the Holocaust; and to the contradictory currents propelling Jewish life in Britain from 1948 to the end of the twentieth century. We discover not only the many ways in which the Anglo-Jewish experience was unique but also what it had in common with those of other Western Jewish communities.

Demonstrating that the reaction of the Anglo-Jewish community to modern Jewish nationalism was far more complex than conventionally thought, Stuart A. Cohen argues that the conflict between Zionists and anti-Zionists, although often stated in strictly ideological terms, was also an aspect of a larger contest for community control. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.