Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Charity, Community and Religion, 1830-1880

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Description

This book examines Jewish communities in Britain in an era of immense social, economic and religious change: from the acceleration of industrialisation to the end of the first phase of large-scale Jewish immigration from Europe. Using the 1851 census alongside extensive charity and community records, Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain tests the impact of migration, new types of working and changes in patterns of worship on the family and community life of seven of the fastest-growing industrial towns in Britain. Communal life for the Jews living there (over a third of whom had been born overseas) was a constantly shifting balance between the generation of wealth and respectability, and the risks of inundation by poor newcomers. But while earlier studies have used this balance as a backdrop for the story of individual Jewish communities, this book highlights the interactions between the people who made them up. At the core of the book is the question of what membership of the imagined community of global Jewry meant: how it helped those who belonged to it, how it affected where they lived and who they lived with, the jobs that they did and the wealth or charity that they had access to. By stitching together patterns of residence, charity and worship, Alysa Levene is here able to reveal that religious and cultural bonds had vital functions both for making ends meet and for the formation of identity in a period of rapid demographic, religious and cultural change.

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Alysa Levene's meticulous social and economic reconstruction of the lives of Jews living in Britain's provincial cities in the mid-Victorian period is a pioneering contribution to Anglo-Jewish history in particular and a thoughtful exploration of what membership in a community means more generally. It illuminates a question that still preoccupies us today: how religious and cultural bonds shape identity in a time of rapid change. * Todd M. Endelman Professor Emeritus of History and Judaic Studies University of Michigan, USA *

Author Bio

Alysa Levene is Reader in History at Oxford Brookes University, UK. She is the author of The Childhood of the Poor: Welfare in Eighteenth-Century London (2012), From Cradle to Grave: Municipal Medicine in Interwar England and Wales (2011; with M. Powell, J. Stewart and B. Taylor) and Childcare, Health and Mortality at the London Foundling Hospital, 1741-1800 (2007).