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.

Between 1880 and 1939, a quarter of a million European Jews settled in England. Tananbaum explores the differing ways in which the existing Anglo-Jewish communities, local government and education and welfare organizations sought to socialize these new arrivals, focusing on the experiences of working-class women and children.

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

This includes the evolution of the Hebrew religion as a projective response to the inner conflicts produced by the human family; the sociopsychological development of the Israelite kingdoms in Canaan; the fascinating duality of Jewish life in the "Diaspora"; and the emotional ties of the Jews to their idealized motherland from the Babylonian exile to modern political Zionism.

Moving beyond the (now somewhat tired) debates about secularization as paradigm, theory, or master narrative, Periodizing Secularization focuses upon the empirical evidence for secularization, viewed in its descriptive sense as the waning social influence of religion, in Britain. Particular emphasis is attached to the two key performance indicators of religious allegiance and churchgoing, each subsuming several sub-indicators, between 1880 and 1945, including the first substantive account of secularization during the fin de siècle. A wide range of primary sources is deployed, many of them relatively or entirely unknown, and with due regard to their methodological and interpretative challenges. On the back of them, a cross-cutting statistical measure of 'active church adherence' is devised, which clearly shows how secularization has been a reality and a gradual, not revolutionary, process. The most likely causes of secularization were an incremental demise of a Sabbatarian culture (coupled with the associated emergence of new leisure opportunities and transport links) and of religious socialization (in the church, at home, and in the school). The analysis is also extended backwards, to include a summary of developments during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and laterally, to incorporate a preliminary evaluation of a six-dimensional model of 'diffusive religion', demonstrating that these alternative performance indicators have hitherto failed to prove that secularization has not occurred. The book is designed as a prequel to the author's previous volumes on the chronology of British secularization - Britain's Last Religious Revival? (2015) and Secularization in the Long 1960s (2017). Together, they offer a holistic picture of religious transformation in Britain during the key secularizing century of 1880-1980.

First Published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

'In the contemporary British context, ‘heritage’ is a highly politicized and contentious term', Tony Kusher writes in his introduction to this edited collection of essays on the subject of Jewish heritage, thus setting the tone for a book as much interested in the preservation as it is the understanding of this culture. This book provides a more theoretical framework for the pursuit of Jewish historiography and heritage preservation in Britain. The essays collected here look both to the past and to the future, discussing the nature of the Jewish heritage that has already been produced and looking toward possibilities of future development. Kushner has collected a wide range of subjects from social history to architecture to the question of Jewish women. This book will be of interest to students of social history and ethnic studies, particularly Jewish history in London and Manchester. It will be also of some use to those interested in architecture.