Making and Remaking the Jewish East End: Space, Language and Time

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While British attitudes to immigration from the Victorian period onwards have increasingly come under scrutiny, the experience of immigrant minorities remains under-researched. Our project focuses on one instructive case study: the history of Jewish immigrants to east London, their children and grandchildren. Around 150,000 Jews migrated to Britain in the late Victorian period, the majority settling in east London. Their story has largely been written from sources produced by the leaders of the established Anglo-Jewish community, who regarded immigrant Jews as profoundly different from them - poor, pious and politically radical - and who had little understanding of the East End environment where Jewish immigrants settled. However, this perspective has limited our understanding of Jewish culture and social change in modern London.Our project seeks instead to attend to the voices of working-class and lower middle-class East End Jews. Crucially, this entails study of the Yiddish language culture of Jewish immigrants, which flourished in east London in the early twentieth century and subsequently became a formative influence on Jewish culture after World War II. The project will analyse a body of rarely used sources in Yiddish and English-language popular culture, drawing on literature, periodicals, theatre, songs, and oral history recordings. Contesting the still dominant view of Yiddish-speaking immigrants as pliable subjects moulded by philanthropy and schooling, our study will examine the forms of agency and creativity they exerted in the process of acculturation. Instead of assuming that Jewish immigrant culture in the East End was inward- and backward-looking, we will approach it as a mobile, hybrid and transnational phenomenon. For immigrants and their children, we contend, the East End was experienced not as a ghetto but through relationships to other social and cultural spaces: to the West End Jewish world but also to European or north American centres of Jewish culture, to Cockney London and to other immigrant communities. We will explore how this diasporic hybridity was enacted in immigrant culture, including London Yiddish - a dynamic language that absorbed and adapted words, ideas and literary forms from eastern Europe to the East End. In the postwar period, the Jewish East End continued to be remade. As Jews migrated to suburbs, it became a temporal as well as a spatial marker. We will examine how, in novels, memoirs and oral histories, looking back to the East End, and the Yiddish culture in which many Jews were raised, produced new understandings of the present. The research will be undertaken by two leading academics in the field of British Jewish studies from the disciplines of History and English, and a postdoctoral researcher experienced in Yiddish-language text and performance. Academic outputs will include articles, conference papers, an anthology of translated Yiddish literature and the digitization and transcription of oral history recordings. Impact activities will take place with partner institutions in north and east London and include public lectures, a rehearsed reading of London Yiddish drama, a guided walk in London's East End and a short film. A sound installation and creative workshops will involve contemporary East Enders with local oral history and reflection on east London's hybrid cultures in the past and present.The project's multi-dimensional approach to the history of Jewish immigration, acculturation and integration will speak to the history of other immigrant populations in Britain. As part of our impact programme we will bring together comparative perspectives from east London community history organisations and other historians of immigration, whose expertise will help shape our research. Documenting the multi-relational character of immigrant cultures in the past will, we believe, generate a more complex and empathetic understanding of immigrant cultures in the present.