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AP Wolf
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Apwolf
Post Number: 1227
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, August 08, 2004 - 5:36 pm: |       |
again something I fear might have passed us by:
Alien nation
The Guardian, 10 May 2004
In the three decades after 1880, tens of thousands of Jews arrived in Britain from eastern Europe. But despite the fact that they were fleeing persecution, they were met with suspicion and fear. In an exclusive extract from his new book, Robert Winder examines the first great immigration crisis of the 20th century.
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 crossing was overcrowded and filthy. A reporter from the Evening News and Post made the trip in 1891 and found himself aboard a floating hovel packed with men and women "so enfeebled that one might have fixed their age at nearer 70 than 30". Below decks, where the Jewish evacuees were jammed together like cattle, the air was dark and poisonous: "The horrors of the place were increased by the accumulation of filth, which had taken place by the ever-increasing indisposition of the passengers the longer we were at sea." The Jews were not nautical, and many were heartily seasick. Quite a few changed their minds about undertaking the much longer trip west to America: they didn't want to stay on a boat a minute longer than they had to.
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."
Jewish organisations began a major fundraising effort under the slogan, "Giving Without a Murmur". This action was not entirely altruistic: it was motivated also by a fear that the vast unwashed crowd of newcomers could rock what by then had become quite a steady boat. One Jewish newspaper urged its readers to adopt a low profile: "Jews, look about while there is yet time!" it cried. "A pogrom in Brick Lane, at the crossroads of Commercial Road, can be more terrible, bloodier than a pogrom in Balta."
If anything, this made the fearful migrants even more 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.
In 1880, the Jewish Chronicle stated: "They have no right to isolate themselves from their English co-religionists. They should hasten to assimilate themselves completely." The following year, the paper repeated itself: "If they intend to remain in England, if they wish to become members of our community, we have a right to demand that they will show signs of an earnest wish for a complete amalgamation with the aims and feelings of their hosts."
Still the boatloads came, six ships a week from the Baltic in the 1890s, and not just to London. A huge fire in Lithuanian Kottingen in 1889 provoked the evacuation of an entire community to Sunderland. Some were fleeced the moment they stepped off their ships in Hull or London, by thieves posing as porters or guides. Some stepped ashore convinced that they had landed in America - victims of dodgy ticket salesmen. This was a distressing first glimpse of Britain. "Robbery and chicanery," warned the Jewish Chronicle, "is quite as active in London as on the Russian frontier."
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."
But by far the most vivid feature of this new commercial landscape was the sweatshop. Rather than seeking employment on the general labour exchange (difficult for people who spoke little English), new arrivals could join tiny clothing contractors in basements or lofts. An impromptu Jewish labour exchange sprang up on the Whitechapel Road: men and women would huddle there while employers picked out who they needed. It was, said one scornful Home Office report, a "pig market ... You will see masters (you will recognise dealers at once by their gross bellies) scurrying about like poisoned mice among the dishevelled men."
The world of sweated labour was hideous. The little textile shops lay outside the scope of factory regulations, and they were rough places. Masters would pay newcomers an insignificant apprentice wage, but when the apprenticeship was completed they often found it cheaper to cut loose the qualified man and take on another desperate trainee. "At all hours of the day and night," reported the Lancet in 1884, "the street resounds with the rattle and whir of the innumerable sewing machines, the windows shine with the flare of gas."
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.
There was little factual logic in the idea that Britain was being swamped. In fact, between 1871 and 1910, nearly 2 million Britons emigrated - far more than the number who arrived. But, in 1886, the Pall Mall Magazine, reaching for the tired vocabulary it had deployed against the Irish and Italians, described England's new Jews as a "pest and a menace", and warned of "a Judenhetz brewing in east London". In 1887, the Conservative MP for Tower Hamlets, Captain Colomb, wondered "what great states of the world other than Great Britain permit the immigration of destitute aliens without restriction; and whether her majesty's government is prevented by any treaty obligations from making such regulations as shall put a stop to the free importation of destitute aliens into the United Kingdom".
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.
The campaign chimed with public opinion and drew supporters from all sectors of society: nationalist Tories and Anglicans, resentful trade unionists, even nervous Jewish grandees and socialist ideologues all found a home in the anti-alien movement. Against this united front of left and right, the Liberal party, whose faith in free trade extended to people as well as corn, was weakening.
But a few prominent figures fought to prevent popular sentiment gelling into policy. The young Winston Churchill lent his weight to the immigrant cause. In 1904, he wrote a letter to the Times arguing that there was no good reason to abandon "the old tolerant and generous practice of free entry and asylum to which this country has so long adhered and from which it has so greatly gained". Elsewhere, he sneered at that "loathsome system of police interference" by which "the simple immigrant, the political refugee, the helpless and the poor may be harassed and hustled at the pleasure of petty officials".
Finally, on August 10 1905, after more than a decade of lobbying and election promises by the Tories, the Conservative government passed the Aliens Act. It was a fateful day: for the first time, Britain was a club with sharp restrictions on membership. Of course, there had never been a shortage of animosity against foreigners, but here it was translated into, and dignified by, official policy. For the century that followed, immigration would cease to be a right and would be buffeted by the shifting whims of party politics. Parliament would redefine and qualify both the idea and the practice of immigration and citizenship. Each time, these unruly concepts would be hedged with fresh restrictions.
A culture of official harassment and suspicion, exactly what Churchill had warned against, was installed on the frontiers. It would prove a good deal harder to dismantle than it had been to erect. Voices were raised most eloquently against the Aliens Act only after it had been passed. "I have never been so ashamed of this House of Commons," said a sober Josiah Wedgwood MP as the applause died down, "as I have been today. I have some regard for the traditions of my country. We have never seen such a unanimous spirit of persecution in this house since the time of the Popish plot in 1678."
Ford Madox Ford, meanwhile, set to work on a book called The Spirit of the People: An Analysis of the English Mind, which shook its head over the government's new, narrow definition of nationality. "In the case of a people descended from Romans, from Britons, from Anglo-Saxons, from Danes, from Normans, from Poitevins, from Scotch, from Huguenots, from Irish, from Gaels, from modern Germans and from Jews, a people so mixed that there is in it hardly a man who can point to seven generations of purely English blood, it is almost absurd to use the almost obsolescent word 'race'. These fellows are ourselves."
· This is an edited extract from Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain, by Robert Winder, published by Little, Brown, price £20, on May 20.
Source link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Refugees_in_Britain/Story/0,2763,1213039,00.html
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Natalie Severn
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Severn
Post Number: 1036
Registered: 11-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, August 08, 2004 - 6:45 pm: | |
And this too AP-superb-thanks a lot for it.Natalie |
AP Wolf
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Apwolf
Post Number: 1276
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, August 19, 2004 - 5:47 pm: | |
Another superb insight into the morals and murders of the East End of the LVP is:
'The UVM History Review, December 1999, Volume 10, No. 1
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Demonic Specter: Jack the Ripper as Legendary Serial Killer'
by Peter Stier
A small snippet of a spanking read:
'On the other hand, the actual inhabitants of the East End, the "seething slum of destitute men and women and Jewish immigrants,"[16] were transfixed by the spectacle of the Ripper but for entirely different reasons than those of the more affluent classes. Not only did they fear for their lives, they also recognized the pernicious meaning behind the selection of the Ripper's victims. It was not accidental that his victims were all prostitutes; these murders were seen as a deliberate statement against lower class women who were engaged in the sale of sex. By the beginning of October 1888, a petition was drawn up and signed by over 4000 women of the East End. It apologized for the "lives of those of our sisters who have lost a firm hold on goodness and who are living sad and degraded lives."[17] The petition also called for the Queen to use her resources to "close bad houses within whose walls such wickedness is done and men and women are ruined in body and soul."[18] The poor efficiency with which the investigation was undertaken was another particularly contentious issue amongst the citizenry of Whitechapel. They accused the police department of discrimination and demanded protection.
After the simultaneous third and fourth killings (dubbed the "Double Event" for obvious reasons), the public called for the resignation of Sir Charles Warren and the Home Secretary, two of the principal administrators of the local police force.[19] The fact that no reward for the perpetrator's capture was ever offered lent support to the idea that no serious action was taken because the victims were all poor.[] Whitechapel residents felt as if Victorian society was willing to let this madman run rampant in the alleys of the East End savagely slaying prostitutes as long as the threat to the rest of genteel London remained minimal. The issue of the proliferation of prostitution in London, especially in the Whitechapel neighborhood has already been mentioned but it is important to note that the problem was universal to the processes of urbanization and industrialization around the world. Along these lines, a wealth of recent academic research has challenged the traditional notion that prostitution is the "world's oldest profession" and has instead, traced its origins to the historical context of this specific era.[21] Challenges to the traditional social, political and cultural conceptions of the woman and her appropriate gender role were beginning to take shape during this period. The reality of selling sexual favors was disturbing to the prudish character of Britain's elite gentry. Accordingly, to these same people "prostitutes formed a subterranean counter-society, an explicit moral, social, sanitary and political threat."[22] On a more abstract level, "[prostitutes] symbolized disorder, excess, pleasure, and improvidence."[23] To this end, the vulgar behavior of the inhabitants of the East End was addressed as an issue of concern by society at large, especially at the time of the Ripper murders. In a well-known typical pamphlet produced in October 1883, Reverend Andrew Mearns warned that "immorality is but the natural outcome of conditions like these. 'Marriage,' it has been said, 'as an institution, is not fashionable in these districts...and this is only the bare truth."[24] Mearns's statement is typical of the cultural concern with the corruption of public morals and virtue that prostitution created for Victorian London.
In dealing with the issues of moral decay, women of the upper-middle class applied a crusading mentality with vigilance. However, the solutions presented by these individuals blamed prostitutes for their condition and did not in any way try to change the roots of the problem. In line with the Anglican preoccupation with sin and guilt, the reformers presented prostitutes with a "new sexual order based on individual responsibility, internalized sexual repression, and self-control."[25] This solution underscored the popular notion of the time that "a women's highest duty is so often to suffer and be still."[26] The fact that Jack the Ripper specifically chose to murder prostitutes and to perpetrate these killings in such a brutal manner was definitely not an arbitrary decision on his part. His sexual and class motives were evident to the public because the idea of sex crime and sexual murder were already available by 1888.[27] Upper class Victorian society was far from sympathetic about the plight of the prostitutes in London's East End, demonstrating the class boundary at which the crusading mentality ended.
The issue of prostitution brought a plethora of contemporary issues to light for people of all classes; it was the proverbial "hot topic" of the times. The animated public reaction to these murders is also understandable when one understands that "sensational stories of prostitution and sexual danger...shaped the way people of all classes interpreted and made sense of their urban environment."[28] For this reason then, the myth making that accompanied the murders in Whitechapel was the natural outgrowth of a society that "transformed the Ripper into a timeless urban parable, a mythic portent to women on the sexual perils of modern life."[29] In fact, the public's fascination with the Ripper began as soon as he commenced his killing spree. By tracing the reaction of the people of London to the Ripper, this phenomenon can be better understood as an escape from Victorian morality.'
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Natalie Severn
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Severn
Post Number: 1069
Registered: 11-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, August 19, 2004 - 6:34 pm: | |
I enjoyed this AP-thanks again for your trouble.
I"m wondering whether "alien Nation" ought to be retitled "Nation of Hypocrisy and Perpetual Indulgence"
Natalie |
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