(Author: David Saks, Vol. 68, No. 3, Chanukah 2013)
At the beginning of the last century, the proportion of world Jewry whose home language was English was little more than 5%. Perhaps half of the total would have been living on the European mainland, mainly in territories under the regime of Tzarist Russia – today’s independent states of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and Ukraine, as well as in Russia proper. Another sizable percentage were living in Muslim-majority – largely Arab-speaking – territories, in North Africa and the Middle East. The Anglophone Jewish communities, as is the case today, were found in the US, Canada, the UK, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, but their numbers were comparatively very small in 1900.
A century later, the situation had changed dramatically. Out of an estimated world Jewish population of 14 million, the proportion living in English-speaking countries is now a little under 50% of the total and over 80% of the Diaspora. This includes 5.4 million in the US, 315 000 in Canada, 260 000 in the UK, 100 000 in Australia, 72 000 in South Africa and 7000 in New Zealand.
The reasons for this extraordinary shift are not hard to identify. In the course of the 20th Century, some three-quarters of mainland European Jewry were annihilated in the Holocaust, persecution in the wake of Israel’s establishment saw an almost whole-sale Jewish exodus from Jews in Arab and Muslim countries and the majority of Jews in the Former Soviet Union, after being subjected to decades of anti-Jewish discrimination that had significantly reduced their numbers, emigrated after 1990.
There was, however, another reason for the huge increase of the English-speaking Jewish population – both proportionately and in terms of actual numbers – and this was the great influx of Jewish immigration into Anglophone countries from the late 19th Century onward. Of these, only a minority came from Britain proper, but the process of Jewish emigration from England and other parts of the UK had in fact begun several centuries before at the very dawn of British colonial expansion. These immigrants, while numerically far inferior to the later Jewish influxes from Eastern and Central Europe, were nevertheless the pioneers of Jewish community life in the US and the Dominions of Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand and did much to pave the way for future Jewish settlement on a larger scale.
The story of Jewish emigration from Britain, one that has to date received surprisingly little scholarly attention, is the subject of The Jewish Emigrant from Britain, 1700-2000, a volume of essays edited by Dr Gabriel Sivan and published under the auspices of the Israel Branch of the Jewish Historical Society of England (JHSE). Sivan is a long-serving chairman of both the JHSE’s Israel Branch and of the World Jewish Bible Association. For good measure, he is also a long-standing member of the editorial board of and frequent contributor to Jewish Affairs. In addition to editing the volume, he has contributed a substantial chapter on Jewish immigration to the US, from the first few scattered individuals arriving in the mid-17th Century through to the post-World War II era, when by 1960, about a quarter of a million British Jews had relocated there. As is the case with the other essays in the book, the chapter essentially begins as a story of individuals and proceeds from there to one of formally organised communities as the Jewish population gradually increased.
The Jewish Emigrant from Britain was brought out in memory of Lloyd Gartner, who passed away in 2011 after having served for over three decades as founder-chairman of the JHSE’s Israel Branch. The subject was chosen because it well complemented Lloyd’s own ground-breaking work, The Jewish Immigrant in England, 1870-1914 (London, 1960). The aim of the book would be to “investigate the reasons why Jews left the British Isles for North America, Southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand, providing case histories and statistics wherever available”. It would further examine the little-known phenomenon of Jews returning to Russia and pay special attention to those who settled in Israel.
The subject of this volume is naturally of considerable relevance to South African Jewish historiography. Time and again, one sees the experiences of the first Jewish immigrants to this country paralleled by very similar developments in other pioneering colonial societies. These include the initial lack of religious facilities and clergy and the inevitable attrition that occurred through intermarriage and sometimes conversion to Christianity. In Canada and the US, as in South Africa, there were initial social and cultural tensions between the Anglicised establishment and the numerically dominant Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe. One sees also how despite their small numbers, Jews were disproportionately involved in the development, economic or otherwise, of the territories in which they settled (the achievements of the small New Zealand Jewish community are particularly striking in this regard). The Australian experience was somewhat different, in that for the first six decades following the British arrival, most of the Jews who arrived were deported convicts rather than free settlers. Jews were also thus present, if unwillingly, at the very commencement of European settlement in Australia. This was not the case with the other major countries featured, where Jews began arriving at a somewhat later stage.
The chapter on immigration to South Africa, as well as to both Northern and Southern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia and Zimbabwe), was contributed by Gwynne Schrire, whose name will be familiar to readers of this journal through her numerous articles on aspects of the South African Jewish experience over many years. It is a lively account, replete with interesting episodes that Schrire has herself unearthed over the years and written up in these pages. For example, we are told of the difficulties experienced by the young Jewish community’s first minister, Reverend Isaac Pulver, whose dissatisfaction with the low standards of religious observance contributed to his early departure to Australia several years later. There is also reference to the Jewish criminal class, and to the Jewish prisoners who were held in Cape Town’s Breakwater prison. Schrire shows how strong and lasting has been the Anglo-Jewish influence in the emergence of formal Jewish communal structures and modes of religious worship, despite the subsequent arrival of the numerically preponderant East European immigrants after 1880. Institutions like the Chief Rabbinate and the SA Jewish Board of Deputies are among the lasting legacies of this early influence.
The South African interest in this book goes beyond this one specific chapter. Since 1976, some 40 000 South African Jews have left the country, with some four out of five moving to Australia, Canada, the US and the UK itself (as well as, albeit in much smaller numbers, to New Zealand). The fact that these were English-speaking countries was a decisive factor in their choice of destination.
Schrire further sketches the rise and effective demise of the once substantial Jewish communities of Zimbabwe and Zambia, from their establishment in the 1890s onward through to the post-colonial period. Zimbabwe Jewry today numbers around 260 souls, down from a peak of over 7000 in the 1960s, while perhaps a few dozen remain in Zambia where once there were well over a thousand. During their heyday, however, these were vibrant and highly influential communities, about one-third of whose members compromised immigrants from the UK. One of the noteworthy contributions of this book is that it brings to a wider readership the story of these now largely vanished centers of African Jewry and help to ensure that that their part in the greater saga of Jewish peoplehood does not slip into obscurity.
The chapter on Jewish immigrants to the UK who either chose or were compelled to subsequently return to Russia adds a new, and hitherto largely unknown aspect to the Jewish immigration experience. Available evidence suggests that such returnees constituted just over 15% of the total. Of those who did not die in the Shoah, the majority were condemned to live under the Soviet jackboot until the fall of Communism.
Although the book’s subject is Jewish migration from Britain, the editor has also included an essay by the late Lloyd Gartner entitled ‘The Great Jewish Migration, Myths and Realities, 1881-1914’. This is a sensible decision, since it puts the whole phenomenon of mass Jewish immigration during those years into better context. It also highlights some of the important findings of Gartner’s research, amongst them his exposure of the fallacy that pogroms and persecution were primarily behind the Jewish exodus from Europe in those years.
The Jewish Emigrant from Britain constitutes a very thorough and scholarly contribution to a still rather neglected subject, and significantly adds to our understanding of how and why the modern Jewish Diaspora came about. It is certainly a worthy vehicle for perpetuating the life and achievements of a distinguished Jewish historian, for which its editor and all others involved deserve much credit.
The Jewish Emigrant from Britain 1700-2000: Essays in memory of Lloyd P Gartner, edited by Gabriel A. Sivan, published by the Israeli Branch of the Jewish Historical Society of England, Jerusalem, 2013, 228pp.
David Saks is Associate Director of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies and editor of Jewish Affairs.
