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

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

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.

Annotation A history of Jews in American that is informed by the constant process of negotiation undertaken by ordinary Jews in their communities who wanted at one and the same time to be good Jews and full Americans.

The Guide, a detailed one-volume reference work with alphabetically ordered entries, is a bio-bibliography of Yiddish culture in Britain, emphasising Jewish life lived-in-Yiddish and based largely on Yiddish sources. It views Yiddish culture in Britain as a small but vital segment of Ashkenazic life showing its lifelines from the Continent and to the New World. It documents the multiple relations which this culture has had with its surroundings, Jewish and non-Jewish. Wholly in English, it includes biographical, bibliographical, historical, linguistic, theatrical and other kinds of information, much of it unavailable elsewhere.

This volume presents a comprehensive study of the urban topography of Anglo-Jewry in the period before the mass immigration of 1881. The book brings together the evidence for the physical presence of at least 80% of the Jewish community. London and thirty-five provincial cities and towns are discussed.