[ARTICLE] On Foreigners Swarming Late 19th Century Britain

[rfmcdonald]

I noticed this excerpt from Robert Winder's book Bloody Foreigners (available from Amazon.ca) in The Guardian while googling idly at news.google.ca.

In 1886, Bismarck expelled "alien Poles" (ie Jews) from Prussia. The Russians responded by banishing Jews from Moscow in 1890. In 1900, some 3,000 Jews left Romania and walked west, crossing Europe by foot until they arrived on British soil. Between 1881 and 1914, some 150,000 Jewish settlers came to Britain. In 1888, Myer Wilchinski told a House of Commons committee that his own evacuation had been relatively easy, since he had sufficient money to buy off the officials who blocked his path. But it was still a nerve-tingling nocturnal adventure until he was finally able, with "a few more bits of silver", to slip across the frontier into Prussia. And then he had to face the predators hovering above the crowd at the docks - ticket swindlers, bogus recruitment officers, luggage thieves and muggers - before boarding a ship at Hamburg.

[. . .]

The scale and speed of this disembarkation took everyone by surprise: all at once, whole areas of London, Hull and Manchester were distinctly un-British enclaves. Jewish elders overcame their centuries-old reluctance to show their hand in public. Nathan Adler, the chief rabbi, called the new arrivals "unfortunates who have come here to seek rest", and a Jewish bureaucracy was fully mobilised to help. "There are many," warned Adler, "who believe that all the cobblestones of London are precious stones, and that it is the place of gold. Woe and alas, it is not so."

[. . .]

[F]earful migrants [were] inclined to seek safety in numbers. The Jewish neighbourhoods swiftly evolved a striking new appearance: black hats, long hair, beards, Yiddish signs above the shops, snatches of strange (to the bewildered locals) foreign music from upstairs rooms and kosher butchers. They were, in other words, distinctive and isolated, clustered as they were around the "hebrot" - small, independent religious societies oblivious to the wider world. To worried Jewish leaders, they seemed to present an easy target for British scorn.

[. . .]

Women were especially at risk: up to 1,000 each year, at the peak of the upheaval, were seduced away from the docks by suave charmers who promised them refuge, before raping them and imprisoning them in a life of prostitution from which escape was almost impossible. The trade was well organised: sex agents in Russia made tidy profits by tricking girls on to boats bound for London, Bombay or Buenos Aires. The English police were not much interested: the scoundrels were often themselves Jewish, and the authorities did not see it as their business to intervene.

The voyager who made it safely to the East End found much that was familiar: synagogues, cemeteries, Russian vapour baths and Jewish shops. The new arrivals jostled for work, money and advancement, and quickly built a ghetto with its own institutions and commerce, its own cultural and religious life. There were Jewish theatres and music halls, Jewish publishers and booksellers, Jewish tobacconists and jewellers - a complete community in exile. It was even possible to see signs advertising rooms for rent with the unusual proviso: "No Christians need apply."

[. . .]

In October 1904, the Evening Standard - a sparky new paper with a mission to sensationalise - offered its readers an alarming picture of where these people lived. It was all gloomy alleys and stealthy footsteps running through patches of shadow, with fleeting echoes of strange passwords and shards of for eign vocabulary. Here you might find the "thin" Galician, the "foxy-looking" Lithuanian, the "restless" Pole and the "muddle-headed" German. This was a fanciful and loaded picture, but it chimed with the first impressions of many outsiders, who looked on London's new ghetto with anguish. When Jack the Ripper embarked on his grisly series of slaughters, public opinion was quick to assume that he must be one of those pitiless ruffian Jews.

By the beginning of the first world war, there were 300,000 Jews in Britain. It is easy in retrospect to regard this remarkable migration - the arrival of more than 100,000 very foreign foreigners - as a lively parable of assimilation and success. They engaged with and enriched the country in which they made so gloomy a landing. But, of course, it was anything but smooth at the time. The newly arrived Jews were the chief victims of the anti-immigration lobby.

Popular novelists leapt into the fray, inspired by silly predictions that more than 7 million immigrants would soon swamp these shores. The visionary socialist HG Wells captured this aspect of the zeitgeist in 1898 with his fantasy The War of the Worlds, which described an apocalyptic battle between civilisation and alien invaders. A few years later, in 1902, he spoke with enthusiasm about eugenics, controlling human breeding in order to eliminate "inferior races" for ever. "If I had my way," wrote DH Lawrence, "I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace ... I'd go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them all in, the sick, the halt, the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile a weary thanks." In the decades to come, such vivid fantasies would find the most squalid expression.

[. . .]

Soon there was a virulent chorus of voices raised in protest at the process (1887 was a year of heavy unemployment). The Evening News began a campaign against the "foreign flood", and the Conservative MPs for Bow and Stepney campaigned fiercely against their new constituents, whom they called "Yids", and managed to create a noisy faction in their party that demanded action. "East of Aldgate one walks into a foreign town," said Major Evans Gordon, the vociferous MP for Stepney. The modern Englishman lived, he felt, "under the constant danger of being driven from his home, pushed out into the streets, not by the natural increase of our own population but by the off-scum of Europe". The parliamentary hopeful David Hope Kyd wailed that intermarriage was leading to "the extermination of the British working man in the East End of London" - a sentiment that might have had more force had he shown any sympathy for the working man before.

It strikes me how similar the origins, problems, and reactions relating to the massive wave of Jewish immigration into belle époque Britain are to modern concerns about immigration in all manner of First and Second World countries, from Britain to Russia to South Korea to Argentina. The underlying demographic dynamics may well differ substantially, granted; then again, they might not. It does strike me as essential, though, that people should keep in mind that though degrees of foreigness might change, the underlying reaction to the foreign remains constant.