The first book to examine the response of the British Jewish community to the destruction of the European Jewish community during World War II. The author charts the response of Jews and their organisations to the unfolding tragedy of Europe's Jews raising controversial questions about the Anglo-Jewish community's priorities and organisation.

How did British Jewry respond to the Holocaust, how prominent was the Holocaust on the communal agenda, and what does this response tell us about the values, politics, fears, and identity of the Anglo-Jewish community? This book studies the priorities of that community, and thereby seeks to analyse the attitudes and philosophies which informed actions. It paints a picture of Anglo-Jewish life and its reactions to a wide range of matters in the external, non-Jewish world. For this paperback, the author has added a new Introduction summarizing research in the field since the book’s first appearance.

Whitehall and the Jews is the most comprehensive study to date of the British response to the plight of European Jewry under Nazism. It contains the definitive account of immigration controls on the admission of refugee Jews, and reveals the doubts and dissent that lay behind British policy. British self-interest consistently limited humanitarian aid to Jews. Refuge was severely restricted during the Holocaust, and little attempt made to save lives, although individual intervention did prompt some admissions on a purely humanitarian basis. After the war, the British government delayed announcing whether refugees would obtain permanent residence, reflecting the government's aim of avoiding long-term responsibility for large numbers of homeless Jews. The balance of state self-interest against humanitarian concern in refugee policy is an abiding theme of Whitehall and the Jews, one of the most important contributions to the understanding of the Holocaust and Britain yet published.

Intended for use in Holocaust education. Surveys the British involvement with the Jewish people during the Nazi period. Notes that the British government had to respond to Nazi policy, and that there were both opponents to and sympathizers with the Nazis within British society. Relates that thousands of Jews sought and found refuge in Britain. Britain fought Nazi Germany for six years, liberated Nazi camps and thus saved thousands of Jews from death. It helped with the rehabilitation of many Holocaust survivors. During the Nazi period Britain held the stewardship of Palestine, which could have been used as a refuge for Jews fleeing Nazism. Dwells, also, on reactions of British Jewry to the Holocaust. Includes photographs.

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.

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.

A history of the Jewish community in Britain, including resettlement, integration, acculturation, economic transformation and immigration.