Dr Lily Ford: Dreams of Art in the Jewish East End: The early history of the Ben Uri, 1915-1930

DREAMS OF ART IN THE JEWISH EAST END: THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE BEN URI 1915-1930 DR LILY FORD

DATE July 2015 SOURCE Courtesy of the Author Essay written as part of the Ben Uri Gallery’s Researcher in Residence programme

Dreams of Art in the Jewish East End: The early history of the Ben Uri, 1915-1930 Dr. Lily Ford Introduction This paper aims to present the first chapter of a century-long history of Jewish, socially engaged art collecting in London. The Ben Uri Art Society was founded exactly one hundred years ago, and its recent centenary celebrations show it to be thriving, with a rich body of scholarship around many of its artists and patrons and a strong programme of events that includes art and wellbeing in the community. However there has been insufficient exploration of the early years of the society because much of the relevant archival material was inaccessible for the greater part of the twentieth century. Recent developments, including the re-accession of the society’s first minute book after some thirty years at New York’s YIVO archive, the appointment of an archivist to scrutinize and catalogue the Ben Uri’s quite large collection of papers, and the translation from Yiddish to English of much of the archival material dated between 1915 and around 1940, have facilitated new research possibilities for the English-speaking historian, enabling a fresh approach to the foundation and early life of this unique organization.1 As Ben Uri’s Researcher in Residence, I have spent several months consulting its archive and seeking to contextualize its personalities, organisations and ideas within broader histories – of London Jewry, Yiddishism, and wartime and interwar social and cultural life. My research is primarily driven by an interest in the protagonists of the society, rather than in the artists whose work it began to acquire. The Ben Uri’s own catalogues already offer substantial scholarship on many of its artists, including the Whitechapel boys, Alfred Wolmark and William Rothenstein, and work also exists on such notable figures as Simeon Solomon and Solomon J. Solomon.2 There is far less on those art-loving businessmen, shopkeepers and intellectuals who sustained the society through some tumultuous years in the 1910s and 1920s. As Professor Tony Kushner has pointed out, the Jewish East End was neglected by Jewish historians up until the 1970s, and although since then several key works have brought it more to the fore, there are very few accounts of the networks of groups and associations and their broader cultural impact . Several of these are by David Mazower, who through his own interest and extensive knowledge of the period, has made important contributions to the history of this community . It is to the research already undertaken by Mazower that I hope to add with this paper, which provides a chronological, archive-based, and contextualized history of the Ben Uri’s first fifteen years.

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The first part of the paper establishes some background by addressing the wave of Jewish migration to London that resulted in the formation of the Ben Uri, and the centrality of Whitechapel and the East End for Eastern European Jews in London. Part 2 turns to the foundation of the Ben Uri and the profiles of its principal proponents.

Although several pages are devoted to the society’s progenitor, Lazar Berson, I move on to focus on the groupings of individuals who dominated the society’s activities as the 1910s turned into the 1920s, reflecting on the broader cultural and ideological associations these brought into the organization, and its transformation from a society to a collecting and exhibiting body, which is described in Part 3. As the story of the Ben Uri Society unfolds from the minutes and cuttings of its archive, I pause to consider proceedings with a wider lens on London – of the geographical and cultural connotations of the east and the west for London Jews, of the city in wartime conditions, of what it was to be a Jew travelling through the metropolis, and of how far Yiddish culture reached any kind of mainstream media recognition in this period. Finally, as the Ben Uri settles into its first East End home in 1930, I revisit the changing dynamic of Yiddishism and Jewish East London, on the cusp of a new and quite different wave of Jewish immigration from Germany and Austria.

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Part 1: The Background to the Ben Uri The Yiddish East End The origins of the Ben Uri Art Society lie in the fluorescence of Yiddish culture in early twentieth-century London. The society was founded and initially run by a group of firstgeneration Jewish immigrants. They had arrived in the capital between 1900 and 1914, fleeing religious and political persecution in the Pale of Settlement, that area of Eastern Europe on the fringe of Russia, now comprising parts of Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine, to which Jews had been restricted under increasingly anti-semitic regimes over the nineteenth century. Since a particularly harsh wave of pogroms following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 (in which one of the conspirators was Jewish), hundreds of thousands of Jews left the Pale of Settlement for the west, either staying in Britain or, in far greater numbers, reaching North and South America 5. The figures who would later run the Ben Uri arrived piecemeal in the latter part of this great wave of migration, disembarking at the London docks to find a host of compatriots in tenuous occupancy of the nearby areas of Whitechapel, Aldgate and Stepney. The Jewish population of the East End at the turn of the century was not well established, in that most residents were extremely poor, in transient housing and employment situations. Their apparent dominance of the area was frequently contested by longer standing non-Jewish residents of the borough, whose objections contributed to the generation of the Aliens Act, made law in early 1906, which imposed greater controls on immigration. The use of the word ‘alien’ to describe East End Jews at this time was routine.

This new community of immigrants, which numbered 125,00 between 1900 and 1914, was constructed around family and kin. 6 Often men would arrive alone and later send for their families; many of those who arrived were single unmarried men. Support would be sought from acquaintances or distant family members, or from their landsmen, those who had left the same village or town in the Pale. The glue of the community was the common language, Yiddish, a transnational dialect spoken by 97% of East European Jews. 7 The language was of practical importance for the London immigrants, but also served to set them apart from other Londoners. The well-known Anglo-Jewish novelist Israel Zangwill described a typical 1880s East End streetscape (Petticoat Lane) in Children of the Ghetto: The dead walls and hoardings were placarded with bills from which the life of the inhabitants could be constructed. Many were in Yiddish, the most hopelessly corrupt and hybrid jargon ever evolved. Even when the language was English the letters were Hebrew. Whitechapel, Public Meeting, Board School, Sermon, Police, and other modern banalities, glared at the passer-by in the sacred guise of the Tongue associated with miracles and prophecies, palm-trees and cedars and seraphs, lions and shepherds and harpists. 8 3

The Hebrew script used for Yiddish presented holy historical connotations to the initiated but made such signs totally unintelligible to the non-Jewish population of the area. Indeed, it felt to visitors from other parts of London like they were stepping into a foreign country. ‘O Thomas Cook & Son…’, wrote Jack London in People of the Abyss (1902), ‘unhesitatingly and instantly, with ease and celerity, could you send me to Darkest Africa or Innermost Thibet, but to the East End of London, barely a stone’s throw distant from Ludgate circus, you know not the way’. 9 It was not only gentile visitors who experienced a frisson of otherness in the streets of Whitechapel, but also visitors from the more established Anglo-Jewish community which had moved out of East London some fifty years earlier towards the suburbs. 10 Zangwill himself was among their number and his Yiddish was limited, which helps to explain his outsider view of the ‘ghetto’, a trope he was partly responsible for generating. 11 Even prominent Yiddish writers, on visiting the East End in 1906, declared it to be ‘like a shtetl in the Russian Pale. It was an amalgam of Jews from Vilna and Warsaw, Lodz and Bialystock, Odessa and Kiev, and every place in the Pale.’ 12 Sholem Aleichem described Whitechapel in his novel Wandering Stars, serialized in Warsaw’s Yiddish newspapers between 1909 and 1911: Nowhere else did the Yiddish pulse beat as strongly as in this English Whitechapel. Its atmosphere was our atmosphere, its language our language, the hustle and bustle, the chasing, the shouting, the hand gestures—all ours… […] In a word, when you arrived in Whitechapel, you had come home. 13 If such an atmosphere was a home from home for the East European Jewish community, it also showed its isolation, in marked contrast to the assimilated Anglo-Jews who had long ago left East London for more prosperous parts of the capital.

No discussion of early twentieth-century Jewish culture in London is complete without reference to this tension between first-generation Eastern European immigrants and established British Jews that emerged after 1881. As V.D. Lipman points out, after this date, the regular arrival of Eastern European immigrants (and one must include the impact of those who did not remain long in the area) transformed it into a classic example of an area of first settlement of “immigrant ghetto”. It produced, in the Anglo-Jewish context, an antithesis between “East End” and “West End” – the latter an inaccurate term, since so much of the London Jewry outside the East End was already suburban. 14 Though, as Lipman makes clear, ‘West End’ was not an entirely appropriate way of describing the Jews who lived outside the East End, it nonetheless existed as a contemporary term. Indeed, in discussing this question it is necessary to generalize, and 4

to use the stereotypes that then existed, always keeping in mind their sometimes-loose application. The ‘West End’ Jews included upper-class Sephardic Jewish families that had been in England for centuries, were successful in banking, politics, and the cultural sphere, politically conservative, and strongly in favour of assimilation and Anglicization of new immigrant Jews. As well as these prominent families, and numerically more significant, were German and Dutch Jews who had arrived earlier in the nineteenth century, often themselves residing in East London before becoming wealthy enough to leave for suburbs in north and west London in the second half of the nineteenth century. 15 By contrast, the Eastern European Jews fleeing the pogroms in the Pale of Settlement after 1881 were mostly destitute, with socialist leanings and religious customs that were radically different, and autonomous, to the established United Synagogue. The newer immigrants found at least limited security in the family or friends from back home who resided in the East End, associating around these cultural groupings or landsmanshaftn, and in general they were an insular community uninterested in assimilating into British society. Some had a high level of education, usually in seminaries, and most were interested in learning English. But their use of Yiddish was a very visual and oral reminder of their difference, and their congregation around Whitechapel gave the East End an oriental quality in more than the geographical sense. Ben Gidley points out that it was only in the late nineteenth century ‘that the phrase “the East End” entered the English language, swiftly passing into Yiddish’. 16 This difference, and apparent colonization of an area of London, threatened the equilibrium enjoyed by Anglo-Jewry. In 1881 the Jewish Chronicle declared: Our fair fame and fortune is bound up with theirs: the outside world is not capable of making minute distinctions between Jew and Jew, and forms its opinion of Jews in general as much, if not more, from them than from the Anglicized portion of the community. 17 That this fear was well founded can be seen in the pages of the chapter on ‘Jewish London’ in George Sims’ 1901 compilation Living London, where the first three pages are dedicated to the ‘utterly alien aspect’ of the ‘Whitechapel Ghetto’ before moving on to the wealthier (and less sensational) Jewish communities in Maida Vale, Hampstead, and Bayswater. 18 At the risk of hammering home the trope of exotic Whitechapel which should by now be obvious, the contributor’s words are worth reproducing: Its denizens are a complicated piece of human patchwork, with the ringleted Pole at one point, the Dutch Jew at another, the English Hebrew in his own corner, and the Gentile coster running like a strange thin thread through the design. The whole is a reproduction in little of the stricken Jewish world. If you would understand the immortal agony of Jewry, go into the East-End colony.

Its cosmopolitanism is symbolic of the vagabondage of the race. Its beshawled 5

women with their pinched faces, its long-coated men with two thousand years of persecution stamped in their manner, its chaffering and huckstering, its hunger, its humour, the very Yiddish jargon itself which is scrawled on its walls and shop windows, are part of the grand passion of the chosen people.

But it is its utterly alien aspect which strikes you first and foremost. For the Ghetto is a fragment of Poland torn off from Central Europe and dropped haphazard into the heart of Britain – a re-banished [>30] Jewry weeping beside the waters of “Modern Babylon”.

Here once again Yiddish is referred to as ‘jargon’ – Zangwill’s description of it as ‘the most hopelessly corrupt and hybrid jargon ever evolved’ was an iteration of the prevalent Anglo-Jewish distaste for the language. By the turn of the century, however, Yiddish was reluctantly accepted as a feature of Eastern European Jewish identity. A Yiddish press had taken off in the ‘Old Country’, with Warsaw hosting a thriving set of Yiddish newspapers and printers. Over the next few decades groups such as that behind the German journal Ost und West (1901-1923) endeavoured to reorient European Jewish identity towards the east and vindicate the long-despised cultural traditions of Ostjuden or Eastern European Jews as having more spiritual and aesthetic worth than the Westjuden culture that had been dominant in Western European Jewish identity since the Enlightenment. 19 The distance between West End Jews and East End Jews went beyond the geographical, then. Between Whitechapel and Bayswater, Hampstead and beyond there was an ideological dissociation. Anglo-Jews made arm’s-length efforts to intervene in the East End, motivated both by charitable concern for the wellbeing of their co-religionists, and by the need to promote assimilation into English culture. There was patent resentment of such intervention by the more radical East End Jews, particularly as figures such as the Whitechapel MP Samuel Montagu or Lord Rothschild would invariably weigh into bitter disputes such as that on the ‘sweating’ system of employment, or ‘rackrenting’ landlords, to limit the power of nascent local political organizations. 20 As Jerry White has pointed out, there was a Jewish class struggle going on, not only between poor workers and aristocratic bankers, but with a bourgeoisie of master tailors, landlords and businessmen, from which in fact the members of the Ben Uri committee were largely drawn. 21 Leo Kenig (Koenig), the Russian Jewish intellectual and Di Tsayt columnist who became involved with the Ben Uri Society in 1919 22, set out the relationship of east European and west European Jews quite explicitly in 1917. Like many Russian Jews in London, he greeted the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II with jubilation in the months before the Bolshevik coup of October 1917, seeing it as changing the dynamic between the Ostjuden, often seen as ‘scroungers’, and the Westjuden (‘men of substance’): ‘Now, we will be just as rich and equal as they’. Sharman Kadish suggests that ‘Kenig was referring as much to the relationship between “East” and “West End” Jewry, as to that between the Jews of east and west.’ 23 Though simplistic, it is not inaccurate to see the East-West polarity within London as a microcosm of the same 6

polarity between Ostjuden and Westjuden brought out in the German Ost und West journal in this period.

If the Yiddish language was the point of both practical and symbolic cohesion for East European Jewish immigrants in London, it was Yiddish oral and written heritage that provided an important cultural continuity for the émigré community. Despite the denigration of the language, often among Jews, as ‘abominable jargon’, its tenacity as a lingua franca over the nineteenth century had resulted in a rich profusion of song, poetry and folklore that was even more portable because of its oral nature. Though Hebrew was always the language of worship, Yiddish began to be recognized, by those Jews searching for their cultural identity as a migrant but proto-national community, as a uniquely Jewish marker. At the same time, the late nineteenth century saw a degree of cultural enfranchisement of the tens of thousands of poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants that provided an unceasing and easily exploited pool of labour for the East End garment industry. Socialist agitators such as Morris Winchevsky and Rudolf Rocker helped to give this population a voice, and as W.D. Rubenstein points out, ‘London became a recognized centre of radical, proletarian-oriented Yiddish political and literary activities’. 24 By the 1910s London had its own Yiddish theatre, several Yiddish newspapers including the most widely read, Di Tsayt, and dozens of Yiddish cultural, political, and charitable organizations. 25 These were largely based in the East End, and still separate from the older networks and cultural outlets of the Anglo-Jewish community which conducted its business in English.

The recognition and enshrining of Yiddish as the language of émigré Jewish communities both in London and, with far more cultural dominance, in New York, between the 1880s and the 1920s, was an important factor in the formation of a twentieth-century diasporic Jewish identity. ‘Yiddish’ and ‘Jewish’ were consonant terms. Just as ‘English’ can mean both the language and the nationality, yidish or idish can be translated as ‘Yiddish language’ and ‘Jewish’. This made it the perfect vessel for Jewish nationalism, and the Zionist movement, which was gathering momentum across Europe and the Atlantic from the 1900s, published much of its material in Yiddish. Ber Borochov, a leading light in the socialist Zionist movement Poale Zion, conducted research at the British Museum on Yiddish philology while in London in 1914 26. Borochov was a Yiddishist, or someone holding the belief, in David Mazower’s words, ‘that Yiddish language continuity and Yiddish cultural literacy were fundamental to Jewish life’. 27 Historian Leonard Prager has pointed out that yidishkeyt has often been often used as a word for Jewishness as a whole. 28 This should be kept in mind as the aims of the Ben Uri Society, whose first appellation included the words idish-natsional, are examined. Indeed, it is not so much the Ben Uri’s artistic aspirations that are remarkable during its first fifteen years, but its commitment to the Yiddish side of Jewish culture.

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Cultural life in Whitechapel in the 1910s The Ben Uri was not the first organization to try to touch East End working-class lives with art – the Whitechapel Gallery, and the work done previously by its founders Canon Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, had already led the way there. 29 Nor was it the first Jewish art organization in Britain. Two Anglo-Jewish painters had been made members of the Royal Academy over the nineteenth century – Solomon Hart and Solomon J. Solomon. In 1891 the latter had founded the Maccabeans, a philanthropic body of artists and writers seeking to further Jewish culture. This in turn led to the establishment of the Jewish Educational Aid Society (JEAS), which helped poor Jewish students progress in their studies, preferably away from the ‘ghetto’ and into English-speaking integration within British society. 30 There had already been several large exhibitions of Jewish art by 1915, and a high-profile modern art exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1914 had featured several young Jewish artists (some of them first-generation East European immigrants) sponsored to study at the Slade by the JEAS. 31 Nor was the Ben Uri a pioneer in offering edifying lectures to an East End public. The Barnetts had also founded Toynbee Hall in 1884, a settlement house where students of Oxford and Cambridge Universities could volunteer their services advocating for tenants’ and workers’ rights on behalf of local people. The hall hosted lectures and reading groups which, by the 1910s, were well attended by a new generation of Jewish intellectuals and artists, later dubbed ‘The Whitechapel Boys’. A brief account of this circle and the form in which its cultural life unfolded is apposite as context for the Ben Uri’s history and allows for an introduction to an important chronicler of this period, Joseph Leftwich.

Joseph Leftwich is an interesting figure for the historian, at once invaluable and unreliable. He was undoubtedly an integral member of the Whitechapel Boys, that generation of Jewish East End intellectuals and artists for whom he himself coined the name. The Whitechapel Boys were of a younger generation than the Ben Uri’s founders and had generally arrived in the East End as young children, growing up with both English and Yiddish and very much aware of their bi-cultural heritage. Leftwich’s immediate coterie consisted of John Rodker, Samuel Winsten and Isaac Rosenberg, and the wider group included young East End artists training at the Slade – Clara Birnberg (the only ‘Whitechapel Girl’), Mark Gertler, David Bomberg, Bernard Meninsky and Jacob Kramer. 32 Of the original group, Rodker and Winsten were writers, Rosenberg a writer and artist. Rosenberg is the best known, though his fame was achieved only after he died in the trenches of the First World War, and in great part through the testament of his friends, who saw to it that his poems and plays were published, and his artworks exhibited. Both Rodker and Winsten went on to publish books and articles. Leftwich was a prolific writer but is best known as a translator from Yiddish to English, and a memoirist. The diary he decided to keep for a year when he was 19 is a fascinating record of the years 1911-12, and he drew on this and other, possibly less directly 8

documented, memories for many recollections of the Jewish East End which he made later in life 33 . In some of these, notably several articles about the Ben Uri’s early history, Leftwich seems to remember his own role in events as more important than other accounts would suggest; on the other hand, his anecdotes give a valuable and vivid insight into the world of Yiddish art and letters in the 1910s and 1920s where few others exist.

By Leftwich’s account, an evening spent in the Toynbee Hall would often preface long talks, conducted as the thinkers walked miles through the London night. He remembered ‘discussing with [the brilliant mathematician Selig Brodetsky, who grew up in the East End] one night the difference, which he as a mathematician posed, between the Jewish Question and the Jewish Problem.’ 34 It is easy to imagine these earnest young men addressing the complexities of contemporary Jewish identity by pacing them out, stimulated by London’s nocturnal environment, sometimes along the Thames, sometimes up into the countryside. Leftwich recollected.

As the streets had been our playground as boys, so the streets were our promenade when we were young men. We walked till past midnight along the stretch of road leading from Whitechapel to the Bank of England and on to the Thames Embankment and back by the Tower and the Dockyard walls, the nightly promenade of my boyhood group. Often we went to Epping Forest, sometimes on all-night rambles. 35 He wrote poems about some of these excursions. ‘Imminence’ (1912) describes one evening spent with his close friends John Rodker, Isaac Rosenberg and Samuel Winsten: Winsten, Rosenberg, Rodker, I How we are saddened and broken by Struggles and teasing hopes and fears.

What awaits us in coming years?

Midnight struck, then one o’clock, two, We still talked of what things we would do.

Down Hannibal Road, Jamaica Street, Then back again, with untiring feet, We talked of our hopes and of our fears. 36 Samuel Winsten’s recollection is similar: See those young people walking around the gas-lit streets talking quietly, laughing at a brilliant epigram, stopping suspiciously under a lamp-post while one fumbled in all his pockets for his latest poem. He read and they criticized, and then they returned to their unsympathetic homes to write a little more while 9

sleep could be conquered. There was a club which drew them together. An artist or critic would sometimes lecture, and he little knew that his ideas were discussed after the meeting in long walks. Epping Forest was less than ten miles away, splendid for an all-night walk, an all-night talk on life and death, love and youth. 37 By the mid-1910s, then, Jewish Whitechapel already had a vigorous artistic and intellectual life. Elements of its art scene were favourably contrasted by some critics with staid West End art conventions, in reviews of the 1914 Whitechapel Gallery exhibition. 38 It is particularly remarkable that so much soul-searching was conducted on foot, as if by leaving the East End and walking north or west one might gather distance, perspective, intellectual resources for tackling the very present questions of Jewish identity and culture as an Eastern European immigrant Londoner. But such reflections could also take place on urban transport networks, as we can see from another poem by Leftwich. In ‘In the Tube’ (1916), he imagines how he must look to fellow passengers on his underground train travelling to Golder’s Green as he mutters the Mincha, the Jewish sunset prayer, to himself. 39 I suppose they’re laughing at me, some of them, And some of them are wondering whether I am mad, Because I stand here holding to the strap, And mumble to myself and seem absorbed and sad. […]

Let them look on and think I am insane – I thank my God! I utter the old Hebrew prayer, And half the time I cannot see these folk for thoughts of God, God hearkening to my prayer […] 40 Leftwich was not known for his religious observance yet feels the need to follow the Jewish phases of the day and is unembarrassed, perhaps even pleased at the mysterious figure he cuts, to say his prayers in the confined space of the underground carriage. In the poem, he looks forward to the brisk walk home from the station, and the company of his brother ‘home on leave – and we shall talk!’. This relishes his private life, his identity as brother, son, Jew, from within the social melee of the train’s carriage.

By crossing the city, from a zone of immigrants and arrival to other zones in which one might stand out, these boys must have been testing out their identities, trialing their ‘Londoner’ persona. This ambulatory experience of the city has its echoes in the movement of the Jewish population, among many others, across London over previous decades, and indeed in more specific travel experiences incurred during daily life, as will be described in the next section.

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The Whitechapel Gallery and the Toynbee Hall, the Maccabeans and the JEAS were all British institutions, the first including Jewish art in a section of its own within a wider exhibition, and the latter two promoting Jewish culture as British. Where the Ben Uri differed was in its declaration, from the outset, of its Yiddish character. This is immediately apparent from the society’s archive which is, for the first eight years, almost entirely in Yiddish, from minutes to official notices to members. This was not simply for convenience – most of its committee were fluent in English – but as a statement of intent.

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Part 2: The People behind Ben Uri Ben Uri begins The Ben Uri Art Society is by no means a society of millionaires and wealthy art patrons, but then, in place of money, it has a wealth of idealism. 41 The list of Ben Uri’s committee and founder members was printed as part of its first published output, a Yiddish art album produced in July 1916. 42 This is, in fact, the earliest surviving evidence of the society’s participants and constitution apart from an article in the Yiddish daily newspaper Di Tsayt on 25th July 1915, although the minute book dating from January 1916 shows that the committee was meeting every fortnight.

Later accounts dated the society’s foundation to July 1st, 1915 43, and at some point, the recollection that this took place in a restaurant in Aldgate East called Gradel’s slipped into the story, though it has recently been discovered that these premises were not open until 1919. 44 Given that many of the early member meetings were conducted over dinner in another Whitechapel restaurant, the ‘American’, it is very plausible that this hosted the inaugural meeting. 45 The apocryphal foundation story is worth retaining for the very clear links it establishes between the Ben Uri, the East End, and the social lives of its members, indeed, we might permit further embellishment of the tale by quoting once more from Sholem Aleichem’s Wandering Stars, which begins the second half with a description of the (fictional) Whitechapel restaurant, the ‘National’: In fact, it was more like a Jewish club than a restaurant. No matter what time of day or night you went there, you would find a collection of Jews of every type that your heart desired: stockbrokers, doctors of philosophy, traveling salesmen, missionaries, peddlers, actors, diamond merchants, office workers, journalists, chess players, clerks, Zionists, Territorialists looking for a piece of land even in Africa where Jews could settle, and young people from who knew where, shouting and blustering, laughing and smoking, taking up most of the chairs and tables. 46 Aleichem’s picture is probably not an inaccurate indication of that night of July 1st – we know from Ben Uri minutes that meetings often took place late at night, and around dinner, and it is clear from the archives that the membership encompassed a range of professions and political persuasions. The liveliness that Aleichem describes is certainly consonant with the mood of subsequent meetings in the society’s first year. It was founded in a spate of energy and goodwill and its functioning was sustained by regular ‘socials’ in hired halls or the members’ own houses and gardens. Balls, fetes, outings, and banquets formed the backbone of the society’s activities, with lectures and exhibitions attracting far lower attendance; though the former were intended as fundraisers for the society’s acquisitions of artworks, it was consistently in debt throughout the 1920s.

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The impressive 100-strong membership list which was published in 1916 contains many names which it has not been possible to trace, but by cross-referencing with other scholarly studies, we can begin to get a sense of how the Ben Uri committee recruited associates. Strong links emerge, of family, kin or landsmen, politics, Yiddish journalism and printing, and the predominant profession of East End Jews, the garment trade. The most stalwart protagonists of the Ben Uri in its first fifteen years were a group of East European Jewish tradesmen who had arrived in Britain around 1900 and managed to establish their own businesses. Of this group Judah Beach and Edward Good were the most prominent, though Isaac Braydburg 47 and his brother Henry were also instrumental, and several other key figures would join the committee over the years.

Turning to the complexion of the 1916 members list, family groups are the most obvious – with four Braydburgs, four Roses and five Victors (the brothers Isaac and Henry Braydburg, Max Rose and V. Victor were all on the committee) – and there are many married couples (sadly the voices of the wives, daughters and single women on the list are rarely, if ever heard). Judah Beach, the honorary secretary, had at least one landsman in the form of Mr Elstein; 48 it is probable that other members were also acquainted with committee members through existing political clubs, friendly societies and landsmanshaftn. 49 The founder, Lazar Berson, was already active in the London branch of Poale Zion alongside Solly Abrahams, who called himself Bezalel, an appropriate moniker for his role of honorary secretary of the Ben Uri. Berson and Bezalel probably knew the West End intellectual Dr Jochelman through Poale Zion, alongside Jacob Pomerantz, a Stoke Newington book merchant and later Poale Zion’s general secretary, and the rabbi and radical intellectual Dr Yankev Meyer Salkind, who is not on the first members list but was actively involved with the society in the early 1920s. 50 Indeed, by David Mazower’s estimate, ‘somewhere between a third and a half of the early Ben Uri members and enthusiasts came from [Poale Zion’s] ranks.’ 51 There are several Yiddish journalists and writers on the list, no doubt ushered into the society via Morris Myer, the founder and editor of the first Yiddish daily newspaper in London, Di Tsayt, Poale Zion activist, and an early champion of the work of the Ben Uri’s founder, Lazar Berson. 52 Jacob Capitanchik was not on the members list but would shortly become involved in the society – he worked for Myer on Di Tsayt and was active in Poale Zion. The Yiddish book trade was also represented, with Israel Naroditzky, the famously prolific East End printer (who had already printed Isaac Rosenburg’s plays), and Pomerantz. Even figures from Yiddish theatre appear to have joined the Ben Uri. 53 Both Edward Good and Jacob Slivko were jewellers and antiques dealers and five of their fellow committee members were in the garment industry: Max Rose was a furrier, and Beach, Victor and the Braydburg brothers were tailors. 54

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If it seems perplexing that an art society should be led by a body of journalists, tailors and jeweler’s, perusal of archive material from the Ben Uri’s first few years demonstrates the deep, almost spiritual commitment to art and its elevation of ‘the Jewish soul’ that these men possessed. Furthermore, it is easy to see how the world of work and the world of worship, or spiritual contemplation, was not so separate for these Jewish Londoners, almost all of whom, as first-generation immigrants, were concerned with carving out an amenable environment for themselves, their families and their kinsmen and coreligionists. Many figures involved in the Ben Uri already juggled a day job or profession with a trade union office, a role in a charitable organization, or a writing habit. Activism in artistic and cultural matters often went hand in hand with political activism, and there was a strong tradition of socialist philanthropy in the Jewish East End after the notable success of the Jewish working-class anarchist and libertarian movement around the Arbeter Fraint newspaper between 1885 and 1914.55 The final statute of the Ben Uri’s constitution declared that it ‘carries no inclination for any political affiliations and is open to anyone who wishes to partake in it’. 56 While the society maintained political neutrality, it was by no means divorced from the turbulent issues in which its members were often engaged. At one of the Ben Uri’s first celebrations, Dr Jochelman noted the presence of ‘Zionists, territorialists, Bundists, PPS and anarchists’. 57 This disparate group was, for Jochelman, ‘united under the banner of art’, but there would be various instances in the coming years where ‘the banner of art’ was not binding enough to maintain a suspension of political differences.

Berson’s Ben Uri Lazar (or Eliezer) Berson was in fact only associated with the Ben Uri for 14 months, but he was instrumental in setting it up, and shaping its early objectives. He was a Lithuanian Jew who left his village to study painting in St Petersburg around 1900 (aged about 18), and from there moved to Paris, where there was an established community of Eastern European Jewish artists known as the École de Paris, among whose number Berson exhibited in 1911. 58 He arrived in London in August 1914, found a studio and probably lodgings in Notting Hill, at 67 Blenheim Crescent, and began painting portraits and writing articles on Jewish identity, Zionism and art for the Yiddish daily newspaper Di Tsayt. Early in 1915 he was giving lectures and art classes in Whitechapel and had also received an important artistic commission from the editor of Di Tsayt, Morris Myer: a wooden shield to commemorate a recent controversial declaration of Anglo-Jewish identity by the prominent novelist Israel Zangwill. 59 Indeed, although Berson was a painter, his principal passion was decorative art, and the carving of wooden vessels, plates and boxes with motifs drawn from ancient, illuminated manuscripts. It was in this respect that Berson’s theories on the Jewish artistic tradition, and the importance of continuing it, united his nationalism with his artistic practice. He told a correspondent of the Jewish Chronicle:

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Hidden away in ancient manuscripts, monuments and coins are decorative elements which are essentially Jewish, and which lend themselves to modern application with surprisingly beautiful effect. It is not true… that the ancient Jewish artists were mere imitators who adopted the style of the countries in which they lived. If this were so, we would not find, as we actually do, that the same decorative types are utilized in manuscripts from the Genizahs of Cairo, the Crimea and Palestine. […] It would have been a great pity if such fine material were allowed to remain forever buried in the museums and not made to live again in modern artistic expression. 60 It is a compelling argument, and an important contribution to the ongoing debate about whether, and what, Jewish art could be, given the traditional religious strictures on the graven image. As Joseph Guttman has pointed out, this question was tied up with Jewish self-definition and nationalism from the late nineteenth century. 61 Like many of the Jewish writers and artists in 1910s London (and, as we have seen, many other Ben Uri members), Berson was a Zionist; his efforts to assert a Jewish national identity through art were channeled into the Ben Uri from 1915. At the society’s first Hanukah Banquet, in December 1915, he pointed out that while the Jewish literary heritage was well known, the Jewish ‘creative spirit’ was not.

Human culture has evolved to talk on the telephone over long distances. Human thought, however, also has a telephone to talk to the spirits of the antiquity, the spirits who lived and created many thousands of years before us. These are the antiques, the antiquities of every people. The telephone exchanges are the museums, the British Museum, the Louvre! We must make sure that we also build such a telephone exchange for ourselves so that through it we could talk to those creative spirits of the Jewish past! 62 According to the report of this event in The Daily World, Berson’s speech made ‘a strong impression on the audience’. There is no doubt that Berson’s ideas, which resonated long after his departure from the Ben Uri, shaped the society’s ambitions as a cultural body for British Jews.

Berson’s physical resemblance to the celebrated Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, noted by the Jewish Chronicle correspondent, must have helped to attract attention among London’s Yiddish and East End intellectuals. Israel Zangwill was apparently inspired to write ‘a remarkable tribute’ to Berson for publication in the Ben Uri album.63 ‘He is every inch the artist,’ went on the Jewish Chronicle correspondent, ‘and one has only to look at him to be impressed at once by a personality.’ 64 Other contemporary accounts also suggest Berson was a charismatic and ambitious figure: ‘a fine agitator, a man who could inspire others’ according to Edward Good. 65 Judah Beach remembered that ‘[i]n addition to his artistic abilities, young Berson had a highly developed social instinct and a flair for organization work’. 66 He placed Berson at the 15

heart of the London Jewish art scene in 1915 in his 1930 history of the Ben Uri, and it is easy to see how the artist could have united enthusiasts one summer evening in Whitechapel to join with him in forming a society for the promotion of Jewish creativity. Reading through the original statutes, the artist’s personal stamp on the organization is most apparent – the first seven describe activities in which Berson was already engaged, with only four remaining to define the operation of the society itself. 67 It was Berson who came up with the name Ben Uri (denoting Bezalel, the son of Uri the architect of the Tabernacle and sculptor of the Menorah), both referencing the most famous biblical craftsman and suggesting a link with the recently founded Bezalel School of Art in Palestine. 68 Furthermore, Berson is described as ‘director and founder of the society’ and his name appears on the letterhead of official correspondence, alongside the logo of his design. David Mazower points out that membership came at a high price – 20 shillings – ‘presumably at least partly due to the need to pay for Berson’s services as Art Director’. 69 His commitment to the society was steady over the first year: he created forty ‘decorative’ works (mostly in wood) in its first six months to constitute the Ben Uri collection, and then worked on drawings of these and other subjects to be sold as loose-leaf prints in the 1916 album.

It is clear from the minutes of 1916 that Berson was the leading light of the Ben Uri group. The committee met fortnightly in Berson’s atelier, renamed the ‘Ben Uri Studio’, which felt profoundly Jewish to the Jewish Chronicle correspondent, ‘as if he had entered the workshop of Bezalel of old’. 70 Though other committee members expressed opinions and put forward proposals, and Edward Good joined Berson in contributing his own creations, in the form of a diamond-studded brooch for the collection, it was Berson who set the tone of the meetings, met any disagreements or problems with a spiritually rousing proclamation, and furnished the group with lectures, both programmed and impromptu, inspired by the subjects he was working on at that moment. 71 Many of these are abridged in the minutes, but they record, for example, that on Sunday 16th January 1916, friend Berson gave an explanation about the latest creations/undertakings of Ben Uri. Using philosophical analysis of each stroke and line, elaborating on the importance of colour as well as harmony of colour of which each dot is Jewish. And maintains [sic] that there was always Jewish art amongst Jews as well as Jewish artists. 72 There is a sense in which the founding committee members, by Judah Beach’s description ‘art lovers and social workers’ (the latter is perhaps better translated as civic-minded members of the community) 73, were drawn to Berson’s intense creativity and inspiring views, visiting his studio twice a month almost as patrons, being persuaded to part with ever more donations towards publishing the album and contributing to running costs, simply for the pleasure of being associated with such a visionary.

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Nevertheless, as would soon be proved after Berson left London, the committee contained personalities with complex and developed attitudes towards the role of art in life. Although Berson had been the force behind the Ben Uri for its first year, it was quite a different sort of enthusiast who proceeded to lead the society through the next decade. Like many East European Jews present in 1910s London, Berson turned out to be a transient member of the community, for whom the British capital served as a stopping point between Europe and the United States. The sustenance of the Ben Uri fell to those art-lovers who Berson had brought together over 1915. It is to these individuals who, unlike Berson, were permanently involved in the London Jewish community, that we now turn. It is important to attend to their personal stories, or as much as we know of these, as these were the people that kept the society going over the 1920s, and their own experiences of life as first-generation London Jews shaped the society’s aims and achievements.

Judah Beach and Edward Good Judah Beach had come to London in 1905 from Rava, a shtetl on the border of Poland and Ukraine, to escape Tsarist political persecution. He set up as a tailor and by 1915, aged 33, he had a shop selling bespoke ladieswear near Baker Street, a house in West Hampstead, and a wife and baby daughter. 74 Like most of his contemporaries, operating in a bilingual and to an extent a bi-national environment, Beach used several names.

Judah Beach was an anglicisation of Yehudah Pshibish, which in turn was also transliterated from the Hebrew script as Yude-Y Bietsh. 75 He was deeply committed to the Yiddish language and contributed many Yiddish stories and articles to periodicals such as Loshn und lebn over his lifetime, some of which were published in book form in 1952. 76 Beach was the keeper of the Ben Uri society in several respects. He had taken on the role of honorary secretary in January 1916, replacing Bezalel. 77 As well as storing the growing collection of artworks purchased by the society at his home for long periods between 1916 and 1930, he acted as unofficial archivist, keeping his own minutes, handwritten in Yiddish, of the meetings between 1916 and 1921, and compiling several volumes of press cuttings and correspondence pertaining to the Ben Uri between 1915 and the 1950s. Without Beach’s records, we would know very little of the society’s first decade, indeed little was known until they were discovered in New York’s YIVO archive; David Mazower draws on them for his 2001 article, and their recent translation into English has made them a wonderful resource for non-Yiddishspeaking historians.

Although without access to Beach’s Yiddish writing of his later years it is difficult to explore his personality, there are various clues in the Ben Uri archives. At the Hanukah Banquet celebrating the society’s first six months, a record of which was written up for the Yiddish newspaper The Daily World and preserved in Beach’s cuttings book, many

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speeches were given in a convivial and jubilant atmosphere. After dinner Beach said a few words, alongside fellow member Mr Magdil: They both stress[ed] how distant they used to be from their people and how the events of the recent years moved them to do some soul searching and how the result thereof was their return to their people, their language and their culture.’78 The distance that Beach speaks of is as much spiritual as geographical – the preoccupation seems not to be with the shtetl left behind some ten years earlier, but with the Jewish cultural identity he had perhaps let lapse in the interim. The reference to ‘events of recent years’ can be taken as the outbreak of the First World War, which figured largely in his later recollections of the beginnings of the Ben Uri. In his 1930 account of the founding of the society, he located the conception of the Ben Uri ‘in the early stages of the Great War, when mankind was engaged in writing one of the darkest pages in the history of the world, and large numbers of people were forced to leave their homeland and seek refuge in foreign countries’. 79 This was a third wave of displacement for East European Jews, after the turmoil of the failed 1905 revolution which had propelled Beach himself to London, and also to the terrible pogroms of the 1880s which resulted in many inhabitants of the Pale of Settlement descending on the East End over the next 20 years. Beach’s contextualization is certainly accurate, and it also serves to associate the Ben Uri very concretely with a people in search of an identity, among whose number he had professed to be. There is no doubt that the Ben Uri provided them with such an identity. Another of Beach’s recollections conjures up the great passion of the Ben Uri committee very eloquently: The word ‘art’ had some kind of a sacred ring to us. We weaved our loveliest dreams around the treasures we had collected… we saw luminous visions for our future. 80 Beach was certainly not the only committee member to have visions. To encounter more, let us turn to another crucial figure in the history of the Ben Uri, that of Edward Good. Good had set out from Poland aged 18 to seek his fortune in 1903, arriving in Whitechapel with nothing but an interest in jewellery. After four lonely years apprenticed to watchmakers around London, he returned to Poland with his savings but was unable to buy exemption from conscription into the Russian army and once again fled. His savings enabled him to rent his own premises on New Oxford Street in 1908, at which point he was prompted by the sign painter for his new business to anglicise his name from Goodack. As he recounted in his autobiography, he came to regret this and adopted a new Yiddish penname, Moshe Oved or ‘humble servant’, soon afterwards. 81 Judging by his writing and his activities Good was a vivacious, industrious, and gregarious figure. He bankrolled most of the Ben Uri’s early acquisitions with the proceeds from his successful and long-standing antiques and jewellery shop, Cameo Corner. Like Beach, he was passionate about Yiddish literature 18

and counted many of the leading European Jewish writers of the time, such as Scholem Asch, as friends. When he began writing his own prose in 1917, he was not afraid of approaching the respected intellectual and Zionist Nahum Sokolov for a review, which came back lukewarm. 82 He also suggested to Israel Zangwill that he translate the manuscript into English and was politely declined 83. Nevertheless, Good was buoyed along by his own confidence and sufficient funds to pay for both a translation to English and a print run in both English and Yiddish of his first book, Out of Chaos (1917), with the East End Yiddish printer (also a founding member of the Ben Uri and printer of their album) Israel Naroditzky.

Out of Chaos describes a quite extraordinary experience that Good had in 1916, quite possibly on his return home to Hackney from an evening committee meeting at the Ben Uri Studio.

In the autumn of 1916, I was riding all alone on the top of a bus, from the west to north-east of London. A dark, twilight drizzle accompanied the bus, and covered me.

My ever-scattered thoughts, which beat against the fringes of all subjects, like fragments of a shipwreck, on that twilight became concentrated in a vision which lasted the whole forty minutes of the journey. The vision was as follows: I was writing a book, an appeal to all nations to forgive one another the greatest sin they had committed – that of not having forgiven one another until now. And I thought that the whole world was listening to my words and was living in love, and at peace.

When I got off the bus I felt, for the first time in my life, that I had been, for forty minutes, in a world of truth, wherein I had lived a full life and had been of some use. There, in the mighty rock-world, I had built an abiding dwelling place for myself. 84 The result of this vision is an extended sermon, a series of psalms and orations, framed as instructions from God. They are shot through with Jewish mystical motifs, but also remarkably accessible to the unversed reader. Good, who signed this book with his adoptive Yiddish name ‘Moysheh Oved’ for the first time, wonders aloud why God has chosen him, ‘a weak and sinful man, a child of chaos, a child of sorrow, a child of the most unfortunate of peoples, with a broken speech of exile’. 85 For ‘that very reason’, replies God, ‘thou art the man for whom thyself has waited and hoped, that he should deliver thee’. 86 Perhaps this speaks to Good’s ‘arrival’, his successful establishment as a London businessman after a slow climb up from ‘greener’ status. If so, it is an ascent echoed in the book, in the opening metaphor in which we may recognize Good on his eastbound bus journey, climbing to the top deck of the bus and looking out over the autumn gloom of a city.

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In the mournful days of Nicholas the Second, William the Second and George the Fifth, in the third year of the great world-war, I cast my eyes Eastward and beheld, through a mist, a ladder standing in a welter of human blood, and the top of it reached to heaven. Immediately I took my wanderer’s staff and my lantern, the perpetual light, and sought a way to the ladder. But the further and more anxiously I sought, the thicker the mist, and the ladder of fire almost disappeared from me. 87 The mist would have been all the thicker for the war. Zeppelin and aeroplane raids had been taking place over the capital since 1915 (indeed one Ben Uri members’ meeting in that autumn of 1916 was dissolved at the news of zeppelins spotted over London once more). 88 London’s gaslights were tinted blue to give off only a ghostly glow, with little light spilling out from the black-out blinds of windows or shops. 89 The wartime context provided an immediate premise for Good’s sermon, a sense of crisis to precipitate his vision and a ‘chaos’ from which to emerge. Aside from his stance of peace and reconciliation, though, the book contained some direct messages to Jews, including, in the form of a commandment, an instruction to found ‘a great national temple of art’ ‘when you come into the land of Israel’. 90 A vindication of the Jewish creative talent follows, with an exhortation to make monuments commemorating Jewish history. Good sets out his confidence in art as the basis for contemporary Jewish spirituality: Art consoles and heals, art preaches and reforms, art chases away gloomy foreboding and drives out evil thought. Art sanctifies and makes divine, for not in schools and churches am I God, but in real works of art, in laws of justice and in hearts of love. There shall you seek me, and there shall you find me, thus says God. 91 While it may seem extraordinary to find a respectable jeweller, literary enthusiast and bon viveur producing such a fervently religious treatise, one at marked odds with the style and tone of his autobiography, it is an important indication of the way in which an alertness to the spiritual and metaphysical could underlie the everyday lives of ordinary, busy people like Good.

Like Good, Beach was capable of finding meaning in the mundane, particularly when engaged in Ben Uri matters. He recorded a meeting in June 1916 when the group met on Hampstead Heath as a change from their usual venue: And when the trees are dipping [sic] in the glitter from the sun and spread enchanting reflections of all sorts of shapes by their sheer movement and the birds burst into song for nature, our business is discussed.

But as if for spite, the weather changed and disrupted the noble ideas of how to immortalise Jewish life through art.

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But the determination of the supporters of Jewish art overcame the negative spirits and after a lengthy march through various paths we finally found a place for our meeting. 92 A certain amount of pathetic fallacy is attributed to the June weather by Beach, who romanticises the quest for a sheltered spot by linking it to ‘noble ideas’. This gives a good indication of the general tone of Ben Uri meetings, in which Berson and members were prone to verbosely lyrical reflections on Jewish identity. As the quote from Kenig so aptly puts it, they may not have been rich, but they had a wealth of idealism.

Ben Uri in wartime London, 1914-1918 The Hampstead excursion may have been to celebrate the publication of the first part of the Ben Uri album 93. Beach reflected at a member’s meeting in July 1916 that the Ben Uri had created much of ‘spiritual value’ during its first year, in particular ‘our album which one can rightfully say is the only existent Jewish work of art and as such, the Ben Uri Society seeks to democratise’. 94 In other respects, though, the committee was beginning to lose patience with Lazar Berson, who pleaded the artist’s excuse of lack of inspiration to account for not having completed the artworks necessary to finish the album. Over July and August, the sustainability of the society came under question, as committee members puzzled over how to obtain a consistent income. Berson’s contributions as recorded in the minutes became less and less ambitious and more practical – possibly this shows a concern to try and establish the society on a more secure footing before, unknown to his colleagues and for reasons still unknown to us, he planned to leave Britain for good. Part of Berson’s strategy seems to have been to link the society to other worthy East End organizations. In August 1916 he recommended the society take a stall at the Bazaar of the Million Penny Fund, which raised money for the relief of Jewish victims of the war 95, and that September saw him attempt to involve the Ben Uri in another organization advocating for the rights of Jews, this time British Jews, for exemption from conscription, the Foreign Jews Protection Committee. In spite of the fact that it went against the original non-political clause in the Ben Uri statutes, Berson argued that the FJPC represented ‘a question of life or death for the Jewish youths, and therefore it also affects the Ben Uri’. 96 This was the meeting cut short by news of a Zeppelin attack; the next time the committee met, only a week later, it would be reeling at the news of Berson’s departure for the United States.

The war, by that time, had had a great effect on London life. After the momentous Somme Offensive in the first week of July 1916, the capital was flooded with war casualties, arriving daily at the London stations for transfer to overcrowded and improvised hospitals around the city. The ever-elastic Defence of the Realm Act, responsible for many infringements of civil liberties during this period, was extended to ban whistling for taxis anywhere in the city in case military invalids be disturbed. 97 The city was also paralysed by fear of Zeppelin attacks, which had commenced in 1915 21

but were yet to return in the summer of 1916. One Australian visitor to London commented on the extent of the city’s paranoia in July 1916: The Zeppelin scare is just as if the whole place was in imminent fear of an earthquake. At night the whole of London is in absolute darkness, every window heavily screened, no streetlamps, no lamps on vehicles, all trains with windows closed and blinds drawn, constant street accidents and traffic blocks, and a bewildering pandemonium of confusion in the streets. 98 Despite these measures, fleets of Zeppelins were once more successful in bombing London in two raids at the end of August and beginning of September, though the raid causing the most damage was that mentioned in the Ben Uri’s minutes, on the night of 23rd-24th September. The fact that two of the eleven airships were spectacularly shot down that night did not make up for the devastation they had caused – twenty-six dead, seventy three injured, and thirty fires, including serious conflagrations in the East End. 99 Such physical damage was not the only result of the war to overshadow the East End. Since conscription had begun in early 1916, many East End Jews, for whose families the horrendous threat of conscription into the anti-semitic Russian army had been a major motive in fleeing the Pale of Settlement, had sought exemption. In May conscription was extended from single men to all men between the ages of 18 and 41, and talks began between the British and Russian governments on a convention that would funnel all non-naturalized Russian men resident in Britain (mostly Jews) into one or other army. It was to protest this eventuality that the Foreign Jews Protection Committee was set up in June 1916 by Solly Abrahams/Bezalel, who chaired it, along with Lazar Berson, Jacob Kapitanchik, Jacob Pomerantz and Yankev Meir Salkind, to mention the Ben Uri associates who were involved. 100 It is not difficult to see how the fraught wartime environment in which the Ben Uri society was attempting to celebrate a year’s achievement in the arts, and creation of ‘spiritual worth’, was leaking into the organization’s proceedings. It is possible to sympathize with Berson’s championing of the FJPC against a very real threat to Russian-born Jews in September 1916 – both he and Bezalel would face deportation to Russia should a convention be signed. Their involvement with this cause was uncomfortably at odds with Ben Uri’s non-political stance, however, and objected to by members. 101 Though there is no mention in the archive of naturalization or exemption, we might assume that the committee members who opposed Ben Uri’s involvement in such a political cause were themselves already naturalized Britons and were either over 41 or (presumably in the case of Beach and Good, respectively 34 and 31 in 1916) exempt from military service.

When Berson suddenly absconded to America in September 1916, there was consternation. It became clear how closely allied the organization was with Berson’s persona and activities. A new venue for committee meetings had to be sought, and it is 22

likely that these moved to the nearby Notting Hill residence of the committee’s chairman, tailor Isaac Braydburg. 102 The society withdrew its membership of the Protection Committee. 103 Several meetings were spent reviewing letters from Berson, who had made no mention of his departure at a meeting two weeks beforehand, with members lining up to denounce his action as irresponsible and profess their disappointment. But by November the society was beginning to chart its new postBerson course. On Sunday 12th November a members’ meeting was held, and inspired by a visit from Morris Myer, the Di Tsayt editor who spoke of the need for greater cultural cohesion on ‘the Jewish Street’ (that is, the East End), members agreed to drop the emphasis on ‘decorative’ art from the name and include sculpture and painting in the society’s remit. 104 It had already been decided that the collection, such as it was, must remain in London. 105 Berson had taken material that committee members felt belonged to the Ben Uri, and presumably they were worried that he would send back from America for more or try and start another branch of the Ben Uri there. 106 Now the mood was strongly in favour of establishing an institute for Jewish art. The minutes were taken by Beach, who while showing the influence of Berson’s rhetoric, also revealed his personal preoccupation with a spiritual Jewish culture.

It was also reported during the discussion that the Jewish people exists at the moment in an irrational (sic) state and in order to emerge from these difficult times, there is only one way, the way of creativity.

To change oneself by transformation of renewed spirit, to wake up a feeling for the beautiful and good is the main aim of the Ben Uri, however, if it cannot create this on its own, it should make provision for it.

At the same time to strive to create a centre where the creations of Jewish artists could send their creations to a Jewish place. And Jewish youth could appreciate it as well as draw future artistic inspiration for their own future creative talents, and to put this in motion we established a Jewish Museum Fund on behalf of which a collection was made for £3 and 13 shillings. 107 The members left the meeting in a good mood and ‘high spirits’108, perhaps feeling a little liberated in Berson’s absence. This concrete commitment to a Jewish Museum would linger on the Ben Uri’s agenda for the next sixteen years, with various financing schemes essayed and dropped, until the society moved into the new Jewish Communal Centre at Euston, where a Jewish Museum was founded. Even then, the Ben Uri retained a separate gallery for its artworks, and continued to seek a permanent home over the rest of the twentieth century. But a shift had occurred in the Ben Uri’s main purpose, from being an organ promoting the pursuit of creativity among Jews, through learning craft and drawing, to being an institution promoting Jewish art and artists through exhibition.

The committee continued to meet over the remainder of 1916, invigorated by the members’ meeting of November 12th. Two lectures on Jewish art were organised by the 23

society in the East End that December. The radical intellectual Dr Salkind spoke on Arabic art at the Old King’s Hall, Commercial Road. Leopold Pilichowski, a wellknown Polish painter who had arrived in London in 1914 and was made an honorary founding member of the Ben Uri, gave a talk on the history of Jewish art featuring some of his own work. For the latter, Beach wrote a notice for publication in Di Tsayt advertising its ‘spiritual worth’: We are convinced that this lecture will awaken the Jewish masses of London and bring them closer to their Jewish artists and create the possibility that their work could find a place with us and not somewhere else. Thereby the Jewish National existence can be enriched. We hope that everyone will take advantage of this opportunity and arrive in masses... 109 It is not known how many followed Beach’s exhortation to attend, although the talk was warmly praised by committee members afterwards and a move was made to acquire one of Pilichowski’s paintings. 110 Braydburg was also in touch with another artist, already of some British renown, Alfred Wolmark, about buying some of his work 111. Wolmark was a Warsaw-born painter who had come to England as a child in the 1880s, and to the East End in the 1890s. By the 1900s he was exhibiting, working in studios around London, and visiting Cracow for artistic inspiration. 112 Wolmark has been called the father of the Whitechapel Boys, a generation older than them and already noted for his scenes of East End Jewish life. The discussion around these potential acquisitions, and the fact that committee members were bringing particulars of rental properties to meetings in February 1917, shows that the society was seriously looking to consolidate its holdings. But after a committee meeting in April, there is a gap in the records of over two years. 113 It is clear from subsequent recorded meetings that activities had continued for some of that period, but it is likely that, as in many other organizations in 1917, the Ben Uri committee members were overwhelmed by current affairs.

1917 saw the onset of a generalized war-weariness in London, as historian Jerry White documents. Food and fuel shortages left most Londoners at a low ebb. The embattled atmosphere bred outbreaks of anger and grievance, and men who appeared to be of fighting age were regarded with suspicion and hostility. Xenophobic aggression, which had been focused on German and Austrian Londoners up until 1917, turned in May of that year to East End Russian Jews. One night 640 young men were rounded up from East End restaurants, dance halls and billiards rooms by heavy handed police and soldiers and accused of conscription-dodging, for only nine to be found guilty. 114 That number would have increased in July, when the convention to deport non-naturalized Russians who refused to sign up for the British army was eventually signed between Russia and Britain. The Defence of the Realm Act was used to undo the FJPC, justifying a raid on its office in late July and the deportation of Bezalel who had in any case been monitored by the local constabulary for some time (he was dubbed, fondly, 24

‘Beelzebub’ by the police; any further information is now out of the historian’s reach as the Home Office subsequently destroyed their file on him). 115 If East End Jews were suffering in their domestic circumstances, international events were also pressing on them. Though the Russian Revolution of March 1917 had met with a euphoric response from Russian émigrés, many of whom entertained the possibility of returning voluntarily to what could only be a better society, the Bolshevik coup of October complicated things. On one hand, the Bolshevik administration soon proved to be almost as bad for Jews at the Tsarist regime, with many pogroms occurring in the Pale of Settlement in the name of the revolution. 116 On the other, because there were several Jews in Bolshevik positions of power, there was an international propensity to perceive of Jews as Communists. In Britain the ‘Red Scare’ was strong, and even Anglo-Jews suspected Russian Jews of Bolshevism if they chose to return to Russia rather than sign up to the British army. 117 As Sharman Kadish has pointed out, the 3000 men who did return to Russia under the convention represented ‘the radical cream of the Ghetto’, leaving the East End a slightly less politically active place. 118 The one item in the archive from this tumultuous summer of 1917 is a communiqué from the committee to Ben Uri members, calling them to attend a meeting on July 1st at a Kensington address.

Esteemed Member, we have not called you for a long time because we thought that the daily, current questions, which have embraced everyone’s thoughts like a fever, allow no time to attend to national problems. However, time has shown us that the national sentiment is strongly manifesting itself everywhere, and we think that an art society is an important element that a nation can be proud of.119 Presumably the ‘daily current questions’ were those of hunger, fuel shortages, transport chaos and increased anti-semitism that accompanied the third year of the war. But the communiqué also speaks to the Zionist currents flowing now stronger than ever through European Jewish communities. It seems likely that when the Ben Uri committee said national, they meant Jewish national.

A great deal is being said about national greatness, but what constitutes greatness if not collecting valuable art objects of the Jewish creative genius of bygone generations and also of the present time. 120 In a few months, the Balfour declaration would set Zionist hopes soaring with a promise from the British government to establish a home for the Jews in Palestine. This is not mentioned in the Ben Uri minutes, except, early in the 1920s, to preface a petition for funds from the Bezalel School of Art in Palestine. 121 Furthermore, we do not know what was said or decided at the 1917 Kensington meeting. The archival silence for the whole of 1918 suggests that the society was struggling to maintain momentum in 25

wartime circumstances, and still righting itself after the departure of Lazar Berson in 1916. But as Part 3 of this paper will show, the post-war period ushered in a fruitful period for the Ben Uri.

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Part 3: Expansion and exhibition After its beginnings during the First World War, functioning more as a society than a collecting body, sustained by meetings and events which as the section above has shown were alternately haphazard and joyful, the Ben Uri began from 1919 to acquire a wider selection of Jewish art, and to embark on lecture programmes in earnest, offering a platform to a variety of Eastern European intellectuals, performers and artists as they passed through London, alongside a sense of community for both the original members and those who would go on to join the Ben Uri. This section describes the society’s progress through the 1920s, as it consolidated and began to exhibit its collection.

The Collection expands, 1919-1924 When Beach once again took up his pen to minute Ben Uri meetings in the summer of 1919, there were some new names in attendance. As in 1916, many of the meetings were chaired by Isaac Braydburg at his Notting Hill home. But now they counted with the presence of Leo Kenig, already a firm friend of Good 122 (as he probably had been of Berson), and of Joseph Leftwich. Kenig, also a Notting Hill resident, had been brought in to oversee the literary side of the catalogue that committee members were keen to organise and print. 123 Leftwich, the Yiddish writer and member of the Whitechapel Boys, had formed a similar venture to the Ben Uri only three weeks after Berson’s founding meeting, and came to the committee to seek support in reestablishing his own society for Jewish culture, which he claimed elsewhere had fallen victim to the ‘exigencies of war’ by this time. 124 Though the Ben Uri declined to take on Leftwich’s group, he began attending Ben Uri meetings and soon became involved, as editorial secretary, with the Yiddish literary journal conceived of by Leo Kenig and Edward Good, Renesans.

It’s possible that Beach was motivated to start recording meetings again because the Ben Uri collection, until now consisting only of the somewhat disgraced Berson’s work, had been enhanced. On Saturday 2nd August 1919, ‘Friend Good reported that… a wonderful collection of paintings by a certain great Jewish painter by the name of Simeon Solomons [sic] was discovered.’ With the help of Kenig and Braydburg, Good had chosen 15 works and paid £165 for them, which he hoped to claim back from the society as the money was raised. 125 Simeon Solomon was at that time a forgotten artist, a Victorian who had forfeited the usual accolade due someone of his Pre-Raphaelite style by practicing his homosexuality and falling into destitution, and he died in disgrace. 126 Yet he was a rare example of a British painter who included Jewish subjects in his art, and as such seemed an appropriate addition to Ben Uri’s nascent collection.

No doubt the relatively cheap price and job lot also made the purchase an attractive one to Good, who, with a pronounced interest in art and an ability to bankroll purchases, would continue to steer the development of the Ben Uri collection through the 1920s.

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In fact, the Solomon acquisitions only included one painting, a watercolour, and were otherwise studies in chalk, pencil and charcoal, all dating from the 1890s. Their soft lines, tracing romantic androgynous visages, draw on a mixture of Jewish, New Testament, classical and Symbolist themes. The contrast with the Berson work already in the Ben Uri collection is quite marked, and the addition in 1920 of a third artist, David Bomberg, would only accentuate the eclectic nature of the Ben Uri accessions policy.

Besides an amplification of its collection, which was celebrated with a Hanukah banquet at Braydburg’s home featuring addresses by Pilichowski and Kenig, there was also a concrete move towards including Yiddish cultural criticism in the Ben Uri’s remit in 1920, when it took over Renesans. 127 The journal had been running since January 1920, with Kenig as editor, Good on the editorial board, and Joseph Leftwich as editorial secretary. 128 The second issue, dated February 1920, featured a long article by Leftwich on Simeon Solomon illustrated by reproductions of some of the Ben Uri’s new acquisitions. It seems as if the society’s patronage of Renesans did little to keep it going – the journal ceased after the sixth issue, possibly the only one to be released under Ben Uri auspices. 129 Still, a rare British example of Yiddish art criticism, it counted Alfred Wolmark, Lucien Pissarro and Stephen Winsten among its contributors, as well as featuring work and writing by many of the artists the society would go on to acquire, including Jacob Kramer, Jacob Epstein, Bernard Meninsky, Isaac Lichtenstein and David Bomberg, who illustrated a cover. 130 It was at some point in 1920 that work by the third artist in Ben Uri’s collection, David Bomberg, was purchased. 131 This represents one of several intriguing black holes in the society’s history – there is very little reference to him in the society’s records of the time, indeed seven months of 1920 are unaccounted for in the minute book. 132 Bomberg, born in Birmingham to East European Jewish parents and brought up in Whitechapel, had entered the Slade in 1911 as part of the cohort of East End students funded by the JEAS, but left in 1913 after disagreement with the tutors there. He painted gridded, almost abstracted scenes of East End life – of the docks, the Jewish baths and Yiddish theatre – and was quite widely exhibited over the years 1912-1914, also being chosen by the Whitechapel Gallery, alongside Jacob Epstein, to select international works for the Jewish Section of their ‘Twentieth Century Art’ exhibition. Bomberg was squarely in the avant-garde of modernist art, and polarized critical opinion, making it all the stranger that no discussion by the Ben Uri committee is recorded or referred to during the period of the acquisition. Epstein may have been on the list of Ben Uri’s founding members, but it was Leftwich who, by his own recollection (the limits of which were mentioned in Part 1) introduced Bomberg to the committee. 133 Judah Beach would provide a kind of post-hoc rationalization of the Bomberg acquisitions in his 1930 account of the Ben Uri, on the grounds of making the collection ‘representative’ ‘of both the older and the younger Jewish artists, irrespective of school, 28

or tendency, or period’. 134 Beach insisted that ‘the Ben Uri has always been strictly impartial in the purchase of its exhibits’, giving the sense of a policy which was clearly not in operation in the early 1920s. The society’s lack of funds made it dependent on the credit, and therefore judgement, of treasurer Edward Good. Though there are records of discussions about around half the artworks bought between 1919 and 1924 in the minutes, it is only by their appearance in the 1925 list of works that we know other items had been bought by then. An art-buying committee was set up later in the century (the first archival records for this date from 1946), but the early history of Ben Uri collecting unfolds along lines of acquaintance, personal recommendation, and goodwill rather than as a clear-cut policy. The emphasis was certainly on art from the Yiddish-speaking world, in keeping with the society’s identity as Jewish/Yiddish national, and the artworks that were bought can be read in the context of the Ben Uri’s wider cultural commitment to Yiddish. There are records of many Yiddish musical, dance and theatrical events hosted by the society in this period. Besides these, every celebration of a new purchase or a Jewish festival involved Yiddish songs, readings, and instrumentals. In the records of events from this period, the artworks really do seem to be secondary to the parties, or, to put it another way, the acquisition of works of art was only one element of an ongoing endeavour to celebrate Jewish identity. Looking back in 1930, Beach remembered ‘If the society acquired forty pictures, it was a holiday. An album, another holiday. Four years of existence, a jubilee.’ 135 A good example of the meshing of the Ben Uri’s dual commitments, to Jewish art and Jewish life, is the society’s activity in 1921, in organizing a fundraising concert in tribute to the Polish Jewish sculptor, Enrico Glicenstein. Glicenstein was already a wellestablished artist on the continent, having followed commissions and offers of exhibitions to Italy, Germany and Switzerland, and was keen to try London. Leo Kenig saw in Glicenstein’s trip to London the chance for the Ben Uri to put on ‘a peoples’ celebration’. 136 Possibly the fact that Glicenstein, by virtue of his itinerant career, could represent a kind of pan-European Jew uncategorized by nationality, was also an attractive factor. Edward Good exclaimed that the sculptor ‘is almost the only Jew with whom we are close’ in the context of visual art, a strange statement given the association of the society with Pilichowski and Wolmark at this time. 137 Another factor that may have made Glicenstein a worthy subject of the Ben Uri’s energies was his impecunious situation. He could not afford to have his work transported from Rome to London, nor to pay the duty on its arrival when the society advanced him the necessary sum for the transport. 138 Joseph Leftwich wrote a poem about him in 1921 which suggests he was too poor to buy the materials necessary for his sculpture.

So I must model clay, in vain, To fling back my forms into clay again.

How little has he done, they say, at his age, And my heart like an earthquake rocks with rage.

Even when I smile, tranquil-faced, 29

It is like a quiet field with a mine in its bosom placed. 139 The noble figure, suffering for his art and profoundly creatively committed, clearly appealed to the Ben Uri committee. Aware of Glicenstein’s financial difficulties, they agreed to try and put on an exhibition to help him sell his work, or at least postcards of his work; this was converted into a drive to raise funds to enable the Ben Uri to buy at least one item for its collection. 140 The event drew more new figures into the Ben Uri committee. The printer and impresario Moyshe Susman, who was to bring many Yiddish theatre troupes from Eastern Europe to perform in London, including the very successful season of the Vilna Troupe the following year, took charge of organizing the evening alongside Shamay Pinski, the Hebrew and Yiddish writer and Zionist. 141 The event took place at the People’s Palace on Sunday 26th June, chaired by Israel Zangwill, with speeches by all the usual Ben Uri luminaries (Pilichowski, Wolmark, Good) as well founding members Dr. Jochelman and Morris Myer, and the respected Zionist scholar and Sephardic chief rabbi Dr. Moses Gaster. 142 Though it was clearly an important cultural event, the evening failed to raise sufficient funds, and it is likely that the second event of 1921 was organized in order to make up enough money to buy some of Glicenstein’s work. Susman, who had proved himself so capable in June, held committee meetings at his home in August and September, drawing on his network of European musicians and actors to plan a concert on September 18th at the Rivoli. 143 The line-up included singers Mischa Léon, Elsa Stralia, Dorothy Stram and Vladimir Rosing, musicians Isolde Menges and Lilia Kanevskaya, and the Jewish Drama League, directed by Leo Kenig, acting out character sketches from the work of Sholem Aleichem and Israel Zangwill. 144 The concert seems to have been a success, and at last a profit was made, enough for the society to purchase a bronze, ‘Messiah’, and several drawings by Glicenstein the following month. Good also took the opportunity of the Ben Uri’s relative liquidity to buy two paintings from Isaac Lichtenstein, the Polish Jewish painter who had been in London since 1920, having studied at the Bezalel in Palestine, and served in the Jewish Legion during the war. 145 Lichtenstein had contributed to Renesans and subsequently attended a Ben Uri meeting 146, and would work with Good illustrating his Lebens-Lieder in 1924.

The activities of 1921, or perhaps Susman himself, attracted to the Ben Uri two men who were already deeply involved in the life of East End Jews: Adolph Michaelson and Abraham Mundy. 147 They were respectively superintendent and secretary of the Jews’ Temporary Shelter on Leman Street, Aldgate, a very important institution for arriving émigrés. 148 Within a few months, Michaelson was weighing into committee discussions (‘Friend Michaelson thinks that the Society should become a mass movement.’ 149), and he would become a dominant voice in the Ben Uri, hosting many meetings at the Shelter and serving as chairman from 1926 until 1940.

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The Ben Uri artworks were at last turning into a collection worthy of the name. It was decided after the success of both that year’s events, with their prominent guests and speakers, that the society needed to pin its colours to establishment figures and ‘gain support from the Anglo-Jewish press’. 150 In October 1921 Zangwill was invited to be Honorary President, with Honorary Vice-President roles going to two well-known Jewish artists of East European origin: Leopold Pilichowski, who was already a member and collaborator with the committee, and Alfred Wolmark.

Both Zangwill and Wolmark professed themselves unwilling to take up their roles.

Wolmark felt he was not representative of ‘the “Jewish Street” and its diversity’, but accepted the post out of ‘a duty towards the Jewish people’; furthermore, he professed that the Ben Uri seemed to be the only society, among many, to survive in its creative aspirations. 151 Zangwill declared that the role would be better occupied by someone with more ‘Jewish feeling’, a curious idea coming from a figure so widely identified with Jewish letters. He suggests approaching the Anglo-Jewish painters Sir William Rothenstein or Solomon J. Solomon. 152 With these nominations, Zangwill was suggesting that Ben Uri might seek patronage from figures in the highest echelons of Anglo-Jewish society. Both Solomon and Rothenstein were British establishment artists, schooled in Paris in the 1870s and 1880s respectively, and members of the New English Art Club. While Rothenstein had dabbled in East European Jewish themes, with his ‘discovery’ of stimulating portrait matter in East End synagogues in the first years of the 1900s, he was very much an outsider to Whitechapel. His choice of title for one canvas executed in this period, ‘Aliens at Prayer’, is indicative of his detachment as an Anglo-Jew from this very different species of religious East End Jew. 153 Solomon, ensconced in his reputation as the most sought-after society portraitist both in and outside Anglo-Jewish circles, seems to have expressed no interest in East End Jewish culture, but alongside Rothenstein, who as a younger artist Solomon had mentored, served on the committee of the JEAS. On behalf of the JEAS both artists helped the careers of Jacob Epstein and Mark Gertler as well as other emerging Whitechapel Boys. 154 It is notable that when approached for advice by Epstein in 1905, Rothenstein could see no audience in Britain for the sculptor’s avant-garde style despite admiring it himself, and suggested he seek a sympathetic public in Paris instead. 155 Despite the prominence of these two figures in the art world, the Ben Uri committee was initially resistant to allying itself to them. To understand their compunctions, we may turn to the tension between East End Jews and West End Jews outlined in Part 1, but they were also artistic scruples. Solomon and Rothenstein represented the old guard.

Leo Kenig would write of Solomon after his death in 1927 that he was a thoroughly ‘normal’ painter. While recognizing Solomon’s skill as a great academician, he could not help but wonder if he might have amounted to something more interesting in different circumstances. ‘[I]t could be that if he had been born a little later, we would have had a great constructivist artist instead of a respectable academic portrait painter’. 156 Kenig’s subtle deprecation of the artist can be taken to represent one 31

element in the Ben Uri committee’s attitude towards such painters, which might amount to the belief that artists should take more risks and pay more attention to ‘the Jewish soul’. It answered Zangwill’s suggestion with the response that it was inappropriate to ‘appoint as head an artist who favours a certain direction in Modern Art’ 157, and the writer acquiesced in becoming President. He would step down from the position three years later, forcing the committee to swallow its compunctions and approach Rothenstein and Solomon.

The higher profile representation did not gain the Ben Uri much more coverage in the Jewish Chronicle. Another hiatus in the minutes means the details of planning what turned out to be a good autumn for Yiddish events in London are obscured. 158 Only the programmes remain from that year’s society activity. Rothenstein gave a lecture for the Ben Uri at the Whitechapel Gallery on 13th May. 159 A garden party was held on 30th July at Brook House in Tottenham, with Mr and Mrs Zangwill as guests, a display of the collection’s artworks, and several entertainments from the musical to the frivolous (a fortune-teller was installed in ‘the cavern of Ben Uri’). 160 By this point in the year Whitechapel Boy Samuel Winsten had become secretary of the Ben Uri, and must have had a part in organizing a lecture series in the autumn at the Whitechapel Gallery. The Whitechapel Gallery talks took place between October and December 1922. According to the programme, the art collection was displayed on each occasion. 161 The lectures were given in Yiddish or English, depending on the speakers, who were both drawn from within the Ben Uri’s ranks – Dr. Salkind on ‘Art and the Jew’ (Yiddish), Kenig on Yiddish literature (Yiddish), Oved on ‘The Spirit of Jewish Art’ (Yiddish), Winsten on everyday art (English) – and from a wider sphere spanning the arts of the time.

Edward McKnight Kauffer, the artist behind many successful London Underground posters, spoke on poster art. Cinema was addressed by Bertram Jacobs, who as Benedict James was a successful screenwriter (his film Son of David (1920), now lost, was about a Whitechapel Jew who became a professional boxer to avenge his father). Thomas Moult, poet, novelist and journalist, lectured on ‘The Future of the Novel’ – Moult may well have been recruited to speak by Zangwill – their children would marry. And the actor, novelist and critic E. Graham Sutton spoke on ‘The Drama of Tomorrow’.

There is no indication that Sutton included Yiddish theatre in this category, though he may have. He had written earlier that year on Irish drama, and portrayals of the Irish on the English stage, but his literacy of or attitude towards Yiddish theatre is unknown.162 In fact this latter enjoyed its first wave of critical acclaim in the English press in the same weeks as Sutton’s lecture on October 21st. The Vilna Troupe, an ensemble brought over from a residency in Antwerp by Ben Uri member Moyshe Susman, performed a very successful run at the Kingsway Theatre in late October, eliciting comment, and praise from a range of non-Jewish drama correspondents, none of whom understood a word of the show, but all of whom were impressed by the acting skills of the troupe. ‘It is a daring venture to play in the language of the Ghetto in the West End’, remarked the Weekly Westminster Gazette reviewer, ‘but it is fully justified’. 163 32

Such praise of a Yiddish art form in the national papers, including the Sunday Times, the New Statesman, the Daily Herald and the Manchester Guardian, signals that by the early 1920s the language could count on greater recognition in the British cultural arena. The Ben Uri’s new associates – Kenig, Leftwich and Susman, among others – had helped enhance the society’s programming and network of Yiddish writers and performers. The broad remit of the programme of Ben Uri lectures in the autumn of 1922, with its meshing of Yiddish themes with remarkably contemporary, indeed forward-looking, British art forms, suggests a certain confidence in the society’s place as a proponent and arbiter of both literary and visual art in London.

Another gap in the records occurs at this point, with only the balance sheet for 1923 offering a clue as to the society’s activities during that year. It shows that the Ben Uri acquired a painting by Samuel Hirszenberg, a well-established Polish-born painter who was now resident in Jerusalem and involved in the Bezalel School of Art. 164 Sabbath Rest (1894) constituted the first item in the Ben Uri collection to portray a classic scene of Jewish family life and religious observance, as three generations listen to a scriptural reading. 165 The painting was bought with the help of Edward Good, who then attempted to recoup funds in instalments from members – the issue of non-payment would provoke ‘heated discussion’ in the January 1924 committee meeting.166

1924-1927: adventures in exhibiting The middle years of the 1920s saw the Ben Uri develop into an exhibiting organization, with a series of displays of its growing collection in more or less formal settings. After a pause of three years, possibly represented in a missing minute book, the minutes were resumed by a new honorary secretary, W. J. Simons. Simons wrote in English and, in contrast to the 1916-21 minute book, his notes were checked and signed by the chairman of each subsequent meeting. The location of the meetings was almost always the Jewish Shelter on Leman Street, with Michaelson taking a prominent role, rotating chairmanship with Good and Chechanover, a fellow Yiddish writer. Chechanover may have been an associate of Susman, or at any rate part of the Yiddish theatre network, for he proposed a concert in aid of the ‘remaining members’ of the Vilna Troupe, who had arrived on a less successful second tour in 1923. His motion was rejected by Michaelson, who ‘objected to the “Ben-Uri”’s acting as a charitable constitution’.167 As superintendent of the Jewish Shelter, Michaelson was perhaps all too familiar with the mechanisms of local Jewish philanthropy and wished to maintain the Ben Uri’s separate integrity as a cultural society.

Early in the year the committee was engaged in appointing a new honorary president, after Zangwill’s resignation, and coming up with a new scheme upon which the society’s finances could be made sustainable, perhaps as a club. On this matter Beach and Michaelson presented opposing plans, neither of which seem to have been actioned 33

despite a committee being set up to deal with the matter. 168 Solomon J. Solomon agreed to becoming president in April, and in early July he visited Beach’s home to view the collection and meet members of the committee.

Interestingly, a meeting with the reputable Anglo-Jewish artist seems to have held little interest for many committee members, with Beach complaining that they did not attend in sufficient numbers. Solomon showed himself ‘highly interested and pleasant’ but seems to have attempted to curb the committee’s ambitions: He did not approve of opening a club yet awhile and thought that the best means of attaining anything was by the Committee’s personal efforts and sacrifice. We must prepare the Jewish Community for the desire, and finally the necessity of Jewish Culture, for we have many competitive institutions which are all deserving of assistance. 169 It had recently been decided by committee that Beach should keep a visitor’s book at home ‘for all visitors to the Collection to enter names and addresses’. 170 Solomon’s discouragement of the plan to open a club must have left Beach resigned to housing the collection for some time longer. This small moment represents the point at which one might locate the first permanent exhibition of the Ben Uri collection – the capital letter given it by Simons in the minutes marking it out further as an entity in its own right.

Although Beach never called his home a gallery, he had opened it often for members’ events to take place surrounded by the society’s artworks. 171 The inauguration of a visitor’s book suggests an openness to attendance by the wider public.

Despite his active involvement in the older Anglo-Jewish philanthropic society the Maccabbeans, which he had founded, Solomon does not seem to have been a particularly effective advocate for the Ben Uri. Unlike Zangwill, he did not speak or write publicly about the society. He was unavailable to open its first official exhibition, and he seems to have donated neither funds nor works for the collection. The paintings of his now in the Ben Uri collection were donated by family members years after his death. The society’s aims languished over the rest of 1924 despite the efforts of committee members to organise lectures and find premises, but its social life was robust. A summer day trip to Eastcote, a stately home and garden to the north of London, attracted 143 adults and 28 children. 172 It seems that the work of organizing such outings impacted negatively on the Ben Uri’s other activities; certainly a year later Simons was complaining he had been kept so busy by arrangements for a forthcoming ball that he had no time to prepare accounts. 173 The minutes of a meeting at the end of the year show the committee dejected and bickering, in agreement only ‘that we are not going about things in the right manner’. 174 In a twist of fate made mysterious by another gap in the minutes, however, March 1925 saw the group reunited by candlelight in the Ben Uri’s first ever home, a set of rooms 34

at 68 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury. This seems to have been due in large part to the efforts of Edward Good, who chaired their first meeting there with the air of a host, apologizing for the absence of electricity and furniture. 175 Good had had his own shop nearby since 1908 and it is probable that he organised the rent on Great Russell Street. 176 The venue was opened officially on May 17th by the Reverend Dr Gaster, chaired in Solomon’s absence by Wolmark, with addresses by Councillor Arthur Howitt, the first Jewish Mayor of Richmond and an active art collector and philanthropist, and Dr Jochelman. According to the Jewish Chronicle, ‘over sixty people were packed into a room which would offer comfortable accommodation for half that number’. 177 After a mellifluous introduction by Wolmark, and Gaster’s inaugural address, a note of criticism was introduced to the proceedings by the representative of another Yiddish organization, The Workers’ Circle, who said the gallery ought to be in the East End. Considering the amount of discussion that had gone on about rooting the Ben Uri in East London over past years, the reactions of the committee are a little surprising. Good, as committee chairman, protested that Anglo-Jewry was not content to remain in a ghetto in the East End. The Gallery was not very far from the East End, and people really interested in art were ready to walk a much greater distance for anything from which they could derive inspiration.

Beach, interestingly, pointed out that ‘they had had little but abuse and laughter from the East End, and it was Notting Hill that had been the foundation stone of the institution’. 178 Such remarks show no little frustration with the lack of enthusiasm of the very community that the Ben Uri had been set up to address, and echoes of this sentiment would resound through to the early 1930s.

The programme issued for the opening contains the first published list of the Ben Uri’s art collection, numbering some 88 artworks. Samuel Hirzenberg’s ‘Sabbath Rest’ headed the list, before 15 works by Simeon Solomon, five by Isaac Lichtenstein, four

by David Bomberg, Pilichowski’s ‘Hear O Israel’, three works by Arno Stern, Mark Wayner’s caricature of Lord Kitchener, four works by Glicenstein and the 53 items that comprised Lazar Berson’s output in 1915-16. The first review of the collection, published in the Jewish Chronicle, was not effusive. The correspondent took issue with the society’s admittedly ecumenical approach to what might constitute Jewish art, wondering ‘what is the “Jewish interpretation” of Lord Kitchener?’. He went on: The artist who is numerically the best represented is Simeon Solomon, but with one or two notable exceptions – “Head of a Rabbi” is one – there is little Jewish atmosphere in his work, which for the most part has the rather sentimental prettiness of Burne-Jones. Stern has one or two notable pictures, “Head of a 35

Woman” being a work of striking, though gloomy, beauty. There are some impressionistic views of Palestine by I. Lichtenstein, and some grotesque but striking essays in futurism by D. Bomberg – “A Ghetto Theatre”, and “The Window” cannot fail to attract attention if not admiration. 179 The reviewer concluded, scathingly, with the observation that visitors ‘can, if they desire, be co-opted as members of the Society’ – clearly, he or she did not sign up. The disdain for Bomberg’s early work is characteristic of the period – there was little appreciation of this artist until after his death in the 1940s. It was, in all, a rather cruel appraisal of the Ben Uri’s first proper exhibition and is perhaps indicative of continued Anglo-Jewish condescension towards these eager East End Jews.

The committee took advantage of its new home to organize Sunday lectures at Great Russell Street over the summer, though not everybody turned up to these. Simons complained in September that ‘both he and Mr. Good had attended the Sunday functions on their own, the Committee failing to assist’. 180 Once the matter of further social events was on the agenda, however, the committee members threw themselves back into activity, organizing a winter opening complete with ‘social’ for October 11th, to be followed by a ball a fortnight later. There are no programmes or cuttings from this ball in the archive, however a note of ticket sales in the minute book suggests that over 500 tickets were issued.

Only two months later, in December 1925, the society was once again finding it difficult to make ends meet. A letter from the director of the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem expressing interest in the collection prompted suggestions among some in the committee that it should be sent to Palestine permanently, given the ongoing financial problems around housing it in London. 1925 ended as 1924 had, with a despondent meeting, resolving only to convene a debate about ‘The Future of the Society’ in the new year. This, which took place on January 31st, 1926, was full of conflicting ideas about how to redeem the society’s perennial funding problems, and a degree of sniping.

Mr. L. Good, brother of Edward Good, even ‘considered one of the main failures of [the] society to be due to the absence of a Jewish writing secretary’, possibly a criticism of Simon’s taking minutes in English rather than Yiddish, but probably a reference to there being no designated role within the Ben Uri officers addressing Yiddish literature, rather than art. 181 By March matters were no further resolved, and even Edward Good, who had done so much to build up the collection, suggested it go to Jerusalem as ‘he cannot carry on as he has done in the past with the Society’s work’. 182 It was agreed to give up the Great Russell Street premises at the end of the month, and the next recorded meeting saw the committee back at the Jewish Shelter in Leman Street, with ‘the spirit of the Society […] greatly shattered’. 183 Michaelson, who chaired this meeting, led a mea culpa:

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… we have failed to indulge in carrying out our moral duty towards Jewish thought and outlook, and neither for ourselves nor for the mass of our people have we tried to illuminate the various questions and problems of a modern Jewish life.

“Ben-Uri” must be a centre for all types of Jewish creative efforts and be a home for social and spiritual repose. 184 A letter was issued to members explaining the closure of the Bloomsbury ‘club’ and announcing a reorientation of the society towards more ‘literary and educational work’. 185 And sure enough, by the society’s annual meeting in October, plans were afoot to resume Sunday lectures at the Whitechapel Gallery, commencing with a tribute to the recently deceased Israel Zangwill. The focus of the meeting was the question of where in London to establish a home for the collection, and there was no more mention of Palestine. The artist and vice-president Leopold Pilichowski, before pressing the case for East London, ‘marvel[led] at the stubbornness and resolve of the handful of the members of the society’ 186 , as well he might. Once more the Ben Uri cohort had bounced back from adversity with renewed energy and intentions.

Again, as in 1922, the society had a fruitful winter of literary and social events, including the Zangwill memorial evening on November 7th, 1926. The latter, as reported in Di Tsayt, provides an interesting set of perspectives on the dimensions of being at once Jewish, Yiddish and a public intellectual. Eulogies were given by Morris Myer and by the writer J. M. Landau. Myer assessed the novelist’s philosophy and writings, thanking him for contributing to a better understanding of ‘East End Jewish life… by the English’, and perceiving in one book Zangwill’s ‘own struggle against westernized Jews’. 187 For Myer, this advocacy of East End Jewish identity as separate from both Anglo-Jewish and British culture was of great importance. He must have expressed regret that Zangwill wrote almost exclusively in English, for Landau picked up on this in his speech: I agree with Mr Myer that if Zangwill had been born in Russia or Poland and had written in the Yiddish language, he would have engaged more deeply with the Jewish soul, but, on the other hand, by writing in English, Zangwill presented to the English people the true Jewish character, showing them good Jewish traits and qualities that they, the gentiles, had had no idea about before Zangwill. Also, if he had written in Yiddish, he would have been unknown, whereas now he is world-famous. 188 The implication is that Zangwill could not be a true Jewish writer without writing in Yiddish, yet his use of English made him a kind of cultural ambassador for the Jews.

This neatly sums up one of the issues facing British Yiddishists as the 1920s went on – how to look inwards and nurture tradition while at the same time looking out for the place of Jewish culture in the wider world. While the Ben Uri and a few other 37

organizations continued to cater to Yiddish interests, the number of Yiddish-speaking immigrants was shrinking. David Mazower notes that the Yiddish theatre was suffering from a decline in its audience and suggests that ‘there were about four times as many Yiddish books and pamphlets published in London in the decade 1905-14 as there were in the years 1920-29. 189 This characteristic feature of East European Londoner identity, so integral to the founding of the Ben Uri eleven years earlier, was beginning to fade into a niche interest.

In January 1927, Leopold Pilichowski gave a lecture on his recent trip to Palestine.

Though Pilichowski subsequently set off for America, his lecture may have given impetus to a turn back towards art in the society’s programme for the rest of 1927. In April Lena Pillico, the artist married to Pilichowski, opened her own exhibition, possibly of canvases she had painted on the Palestine trip, in association with the Ben Uri 190. Beach signed the invitation to Pillico’s show, and he was also supporting Isaac Lichtenstein the same month. Although the Ben Uri was not directly involved in Lichtenstein’s exhibition in Aldgate, 191 Beach advertised for sale a limited-edition album of engravings by the artist in the Jewish Chronicle. 192 The exhibition of Jewish art and antiquities at the Whitechapel Gallery in May and June 1927 afforded an opportunity for some of the Ben Uri collection to go on display and was the first time the society had lent pictures. The curator, J. Nightingale Duddington, had requested the loan of a Jacob Epstein bust of Edward Good, but in the end 19 Ben Uri artworks were lent, and Ben Uri advertised a talk by Duddington at the gallery. 193 It was a large show, with 375 artworks, 200 antiquities and some 50 books on display from several lenders. 194 The Ben Uri was among the largest lenders of art, alongside Councillor Howitt, and the only organization to lend. Although the Ben Uri collection represented a small part of the total artworks, curatorial decisions at the Whitechapel certainly endorsed the society’s acquisitions roster to date. The main gallery was devoted to Glicenstein, with seven bronzes, and a further five Glicenstein sculptures in the neighbouring small gallery along with Epstein’s head of Good. Epstein was singled out for mention by Sir Herbert Samuel in his opening words, but the bronze of Good was the only work of his that could be obtained. Lichtenstein, Pilichowski and Bomberg were all well represented, though a greater number of Bomberg’s recent and more conventional Palestinian landscapes appeared than of his 1910s Cubist works. Ten of the Ben Uri’s Solomon drawings were displayed, as well as the shield made by Lazar Berson for Israel Zangwill, commissioned by Morris Myer in 1915.

This was the second exhibition devoted to Jewish art at the Whitechapel Gallery; the first had taken place in 1906. Peter Gross has suggested that the earlier exhibition represented an attempt to present an Anglo-Jewish vision of the assimilated Jew in British society to the East End Jewish community. 195 By contrast, the 1927 show included a far greater proportion of East European Jewish artists and reflected a much

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better established Jewish cultural life in Whitechapel. Sir Herbert Samuel, at that point High Commissioner of Palestine, declared in his opening speech: Here, in England, the Jews are proud to claim the greatest sculptor of the day in Epstein. All about us in these halls we may see the signs that the spirit of art is alive among the Jewish people of the present time.

Nonetheless he made no mention of the Ben Uri Society, who, besides being an important lender, had frequently brought Jewish culture into the gallery over the decade, with their lectures and literary and musical evenings. Due to the absence of clippings and minutes for 1927, we lack responses from the committee to the exhibition, but it is not difficult to see how, although their involvement represented a certain validation by the wider art establishment, the exhibition might not have satisfied their aims as a society.

The last three years of the 1920s saw the Ben Uri’s social and cultural programme continue, with lectures at the Whitechapel Gallery by David Bomberg, Yiddish poet Zalman Schneur, Yiddish writer and editor of the Hebrew journal Haolam Moshe Kleinman and journalist and playwright M.J. Landa, a number of musical and literary evenings and festive banquets, and several ‘at homes’ chez Beach or at the home of another active committee member, Yankev or Jack Seres. 196 One cutting in Beach’s album offers a rare viewing of the committee gathered at one of these occasions.

Disagreements over the conduct and direction of the society continued to be voiced.

Though we have no minutes from 1927 to 1930, evidence of this tension can be seen in occasional irruptions into the local press. In the summer of 1927 Chechanover, Michaelson and Beach had it out publicly in columns for the ‘Free Platform’ of the Yiddish-language Jewish Post. Michaelson accused the Ben Uri of neglecting ‘the living Yiddish word’ and focusing too much on art at the expense of letters. 197 Beach insisted that Yiddish literature was alive and well, and that art, by contrast, required much more advocacy in order to alter ‘the understanding of the masses. Though never citing Berson directly, Beach drew on the Bersonian tendency for metaphor and physical description of conceptual ideas: Among other nations and among us alike, many are born with a rich soul and a taste for beauty, a feeling of love for the people and respect for cultural treasures, which strengthens belief in its creativity. This train of thought, which moves almost every discerning Jew, who feels detachment from his past, must have the precedent to create temples, where thought would immerse itself in the spiritual tissues of its creators.

It is quite clear that Sister Art, this form of folk creativity, is very much neglected among us. The reasons for it are manifold. First, the artistic and literary atmosphere is lacking, which would enable us to establish granaries for gathering the fruits of the peoples’ strength, and because of it many historical 39

strings have been torn into shreds of the Jewish soul, and folk poetry has been lost. 198 Perhaps unconsciously, Beach is appropriating religious language to express the place of art in life. It is reminiscent of some of the declarations of Good in Out of Chaos, and chimes with the interjections of several speakers at Ben Uri celebratory occasions, some of which are reproduced overleaf.

In the annual members meeting of February 1928, written up for the Jewish Times, debate over the degree to which the Ben Uri did and should support Yiddish writers, and over the most desirable location for the society’s home, continued to rumble along unproductively. Most of those at the meeting advocated an East End location ‘where Jewish life pulsates more than anywhere else’, as the Di Tsayt journalist Capitanchik put it. 199 A year on, there had been no developments, but the committee’s propensity for parties resulted in a Purim banquet in March 1929 honouring two of the original founder committee members, Beach, and Victor. Among the heartfelt speeches by Morris Myers and the guest poet Ben-Zion were lighter performances from comedians and satirists, and as ever, some Yiddish folksongs. 200 In early 1930 Michaelson announced to the Ben Uri members gathered in the Mecca Café on Leadenhall Street that the society was close to achieving a long-cherished goal: a home in the heart of the Jewish East End.201 Part of the newly built Jewish Shelter on Mansell Street, the home would consist of a room for the art collection, which, after a donation by Leopold Pilichowski, was augumented by 30 new paintings, and a hall for lectures and literary evenings. To raise funds that spring, a special night directed by actor Rudolf Zavlavsky at the famous Yiddish theatre, the Pavilion, was put on, as well as a ball at the New Burlington Gallery organised by the new Ben Uri youth committee.

According to Beach, donations were also made by individuals, including Seres. 202 The fifteenth anniversary banquet of the Ben Uri was a happy occasion indeed. Though the clipping in Beach’s album is undated, we might assume it took place in July 1930, a decade and a half after the society’s foundation. It was held at the Jewish Shelter, presumably in the knowledge that in only a few months the Ben Uri would have a permanent home in the same building. Chechanover, Pilichowski, Good, Beach and Michaelson all took turns to express their joy at the anniversary and reflect on the society’s achievements. ‘Art’, exclaimed Chechanover, ‘is the Sabbath soul of life…

Art is the very attire… which elevates grey everyday life to festive beauty.’ Good continued on this theme: ‘Decorative art is the song of the eye, in which a Jewish spark is twinkling, and brightens the hard, grey life, which is so short and transient, but true art never goes down and true artists live forever.’ 203 Beach contrasted the society’s beginnings with the current moment, in words already quoted in the last section:

40

If the society acquired forty pictures, it was a holiday. An album, another holiday. Four years of existence, a jubilee. The word ‘art’ had some kind of sacred ring to us. We weaved our loveliest dreams around the treasures we had collected, we saw luminous visions for our future. And we have lived to see a contented pride. Now we have brought our work to the point of a peoples’ institution, and we rejoice at our fifteenth anniversary. 204 While this small group of Londoners celebrated, the broader context was one of depression. ‘The times are now very bad’, reflected Capitanchik in August 1930, ‘how will the London public respond to the Ben Uri events?’. It had been almost a year since the London Stock Market had crashed, and unemployment was on the way to doubling (between 1929 and the end of 1930). But just as the society had forged ahead in the dark years of the First World War, the committee members seemed unphased by the economic depression as they wrote and translated an ‘art edition’ catalogue and made their preparations for the gallery’s grand opening in November 1930. Morris Myer, covering the opening in his Di Tsayt editorial, also referenced current affairs.

It is perhaps not entirely beside the point to mention that the Ben Uri art gallery is opening precisely at the moment of heated struggle and great election frenzy.

Is it not characteristic of the Jews? Is it not symbolic of our character? Even in the moments of heated struggle and great confusion we do not forget our cultural and art enterprises. 205 The catalogue represented a substantial effort and outlay of capital. It featured a cover designed by Wolmark and essays by Kenig and Beach, along with a very thorough inventory of the collection, including details such as dimensions of the artworks which would not be included in subsequent catalogues until the 1980s, and biographies of some artists. The essays recapitulate many themes that had arisen during ceremonial speeches and meetings down the years; Beach’s certainly represents the first official history of the Ben Uri. Two thousand copies were printed, in both English and Yiddish, and sent out far and wide. It was probably the catalogue which caught the attention of a Times reviewer, gaining the society its first mention in that newspaper. The correspondent was not greatly impressed by the exhibition, ‘[which] cannot be called more than a “scratch” affair’, but did admit, apparently persuaded by Kenig’s essay, that it represented ‘a first step towards fulfilling an obvious need’. 206 The opening itself unfolded ‘in a festive and grand manner’, just as we might expect given the Ben Uri society’s evident enjoyment of ceremony and celebration. It was, of course, a moment for the committee, so often dejected, harried by financial problems and worried about the future, to rest upon their laurels. Pilichowski, as chairman opening the event, noted the great difference between the Ben Uri collection and collections amassed by individuals, both Jew and Gentile, and kept privately. ‘[T]his small yet unique collection that you have seen here, believe me, has cost the handful of 41

people who have worked for these 15 years, a lot of effort, energy and money to put together.’ Having repeatedly rebutted the idea of the Jewish veto on art over the 1920s, Pilichowski used his opening comments to point to the presence of ‘two distinguished rabbis’ at the event as proof ‘that the society does not violate the second commandment with its exhibition of artistic paintings’. One of these, Dayan Dr Feldman representing the Chief Rabbi, blessed the proceedings and the other, Dr Gaster, warmly welcomed the society into the East End. Gaster had, of course, been present at the opening of Great Russell Street in 1925 and witnessed the disagreement over the proper location for the gallery then, so his words had an extra charge to them: ‘It is very symbolic that we are gathered in East London. The sun rises in the East, all the high ideals come from the East and the greatest works have been created in the East.’ Gaster’s conflation of East London with a broader oriental culture is significant, showing the continuity of the sense identified in the 1910s of East London Jews identifying with Eastern Europe.

Despite its frequent intransigence in the face of the society’s efforts, the East End represented a geographical and symbolic compass point. The Ben Uri had, at least for the moment, come home.

Coda In fact, the consecration of the Ben Uri Gallery in East London in 1930 would prove to be some fifteen years late. The Jewish population of Whitechapel was shrinking. As Lipman points out, during the interwar period, ‘East End Jewry was a community which was losing by movement out and gaining very little by movement in; and compared with the situation in 1881-1914, it was an ageing population.’ 207 Not only was the ‘Jewish Street’ in decline, but as we have seen, there was less demand for Yiddish cultural products. The new generation, now at two removes from the Old Country, may not even have spoken Yiddish. 208 The Ben Uri’s two years at Mansell Street did not mark a great departure from form.

The society continued to function as it had for the past decade, putting on lectures and greeting its mounting debts with plans to raise money through events and social functions. These were for the most part ‘not a financial success’, 209 and by the annual meeting of September 1932 it was £156 overdrawn. Council member L. Hersh reflected ‘The general crisis, which is now reigning in the world, has without a doubt seized our society as well’. 210 In 1933 the organization moved in to the new Jewish Communal Centre in Woburn House, Euston, provoking a flurry of letter-writing. Disgruntled committee members Goldenburg and Koldofsky complained in Di Tsayt that the Ben Uri ‘has climbed into high society and is deserting our miserable Whitechapel’, to which the treasurer Seres retorted that hardly anybody had visited the gallery in Mansell Street. 211 After another three years in Soho, the Ben Uri would find a longer-lasting home on Portman Street in the West End after the Second World War. It would not return to the 42

East End of London, but rather followed the Jewish population of London north. The great magnetism around the ‘Jewish Street’, the effervescence and excitement of new immigrant culture in the East End in the first two decades of the twentieth century, gave Ben Uri its founding ethos, and an enduring commitment to Jewish and Yiddish culture in London. For seventeen years, the society was part of a Whitechapel moment, in which the immigrant community – businessmen, intellectuals, artists and performers – demanded and created a new culture that saw diasporic traditions transplanted to a metropolis in flux, where scenes from scriptural history could hang side by side with avant-garde canvases, and suburban garden parties could resound with the heartily rendered choruses of Yiddish folk songs.

Commissioned, researched, and written for Ben Uri by Dr. Lily Ford, July 2015

Endnote references to the Ben Uri’s first minute book are abbreviated to ‘1916-21 Minutes’. Page numbers refer to the page numbers in the original Yiddish manuscript, which are retained in Sima Beeri’s translation into English, from which all quotes are taken. Dates for the meetings to which the minutes refer are also given in the footnotes, and if the meeting is recorded as a members’ or committee meeting this is also noted. Footnote references to translations of Yiddish press cuttings use the Ben Uri Archive catalogue reference, eg. PR 01/01/01, which refers to the volume and page number of Judah Beach’s cuttings albums.

2 Relevant Ben Uri catalogues include: Rachel Dickson and Sarah MacDougall eds. Out of Chaos: Ben Uri: 100 Years in London, London: Ben Uri, 2015; Dickson and MacDougall eds. Ben Uri: 100 Years in London: Art Identity Migration, London, Ben Uri, 2015; MacDougall and Dickson eds. Whitechapel at War, London: Ben Uri, 2008; The Ben Uri Story from Art Society to Museum and the influence of Anglo-Jewish Artists on the Modern British Movement, London: Ben Uri Gallery, 2001; Jenny Pery ed.

Solomon J. Solomon, RA, London: Ben Uri, 1990. Other relevant publications include Sarah MacDougall ‘“Something is happening there”: early British modernism, the Great War and the “Whitechapel Boys”’ in Michael J. Walsh ed. London, Modernism and 1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010, pp. 122-148. There is an online research archive on Simeon Solomon run by Roberto C. Ferrari and Carolyn Conroy: http://www.simeonsolomon.com Simeon Solomon Research Archive. Published 28 February 2010. Accessed 9 July 2015. Peter Gross’s unpublished PhD thesis has valuable chapters on Solomon J. Solomon, William Rothenstein and Alfred Wolmark. Thanks to Rachel Dickson for making the latter available to me.

3 Tony Kushner ‘The End of the ‘Anglo-Jewish Progress Show: Representations of the Jewish East End, 1887-1987’ in Kushner ed. The Jewish Heritage in British History: Englishness and Jewishness.

London: Frank Cass, 1992. 78-105. The same year that Kushner’s historiographical review appeared saw the publication of Sharman Kadish’s Bolsheviks and British Jews: The Anglo-Jewish Community, Britain and the Russian Revolution, London: Frank Cass, 1992, which does offer a history of the political aspects of the Jewish East End in the first decades of the twentieth century.

4 David Mazower ‘Lazar Berson and the origins of the Ben Uri Art Society’ in The Ben Uri Story from Art Society to Museum and the influence of Anglo-Jewish Artists on the Modern British Movement, London: Ben Uri Gallery, 2001, pp. 37-58, and ‘The Ben Uri and Yiddish Culture’ in Dickson and MacDougall eds. Ben Uri: 100 Years in London: Art Identity Migration, London, Ben Uri, 2015, pp.

36-51.

5 Many more Eastern European Jews settled in America than in Britain. It is only possible to estimate, but perhaps 2.5 million Jews arrived in the United States between 1880 and 1914, compared to 100,00150,00 in Britain in the same period. Another comparison can be made in population density between London and New York: in 1901 there were 42,000 Russian-born Jews and their children in 1

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Whitechapel, of a total population of two million; in 1920 New York there were 2.5 million Jews living in a total population of 5.6 million – that is, almost half of New Yorkers were Jewish. See W.D. Rubenstein A History of the Jews in the English-Speaking World: Great Britain, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996, pp. 95-96.

6 V.D. Lipman ‘Jewish Settlement in the East End of London 1840-1940: The Topographical and Statistical Background’ in A. Newman ed. The Jewish East End, 1840-1939 London: The Jewish Historical Society of England, 1981, pp. 17-40. p. 34.

7 Sarah Abrevaya Stein Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004, p. 28. This figure comes from the Russian census of 1897.

8 Israel Zangwill Children of the Ghetto, London: William Heinemann, 1893 (3rd Edition), p. 29.

9 Quoted in Peter Gross ‘The Lachrymose Mr Rothenstein’ (chapter in unpublished PhD thesis) p. 14 (but n.p.).

10 Lipman points out that in 1840, the Jewish population of London was concentrated in East London, but by 1881, prior to the arrival en masse of Eastern European Jews from the Pale of Settlement, most middle-class Jewish Londoners had moved out to the suburbs. Lipman op. cit. p. 40.

11 Leonard Prager Yiddish Culture in Britain: A Guide, Frankfurt am Main and New York: Peter Lang, 1990, p. 717.

12 Joseph Leftwich ‘“Jewish” London Fifty Years Ago’ in Jacob Sonntag ed. Ben Uri, 1915-1965: Fifty Years’ Achievement in the Arts London: Ben Uri Art Society, 1966, pp. 12-16. p. 12.

13 Sholem Aleichem Wandering Stars translated from the Yiddish by Aliza Shevrin, New York: Viking, 2009, p. 201.

14 Lipman op. cit. p. 40.

15 Ibid, and Ben Gidley ‘The Ghosts of Kishinev in the East End: Responses to a Pogrom in the Jewish London of 1903’ in Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman eds. The Jew in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: between the East End and East Africa Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 98-112. p.

100.

16 Gidley op. cit. p. 100.

17 Jewish Chronicle editorial 12/08/1881. Quoted in Gross ‘The Jewish Art and Antiquities Exhibition of 1906’ (chapter in unpublished PhD thesis) pp. 23-24.

18 ‘Jewish London’ by S. Gelberg in George Sims Living London (3 vols). London: Cassell, 1901, Vol 2, pp. 29-35. pp. 29-30.

19 See Peter Gross ‘The Jewish Art and Antiquities Exhibition of 1906’ (chapter in unpublished PhD thesis) p. 17, and David A. Brenner Marketing Identities: The Invention of Jewish Ethnicity in Ost und West, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998, pp. 15-16.

20 Bill Fishman East End Jewish Radicals 1875-1914 London: Duckworth, 1975, p. 197; Jerry White ‘Jewish Landlords, Jewish Tenants: An Aspect of Class Struggle within the Jewish East End, 18811914’ in Newman The Jewish East End 205-215. p. 212.

21 White ‘Jewish Landlords’ p. 205.

22 Kenig gave a lecture on ‘Jewish Art in Comparison with Jewish Literature’ at a meeting celebrating four years of the Ben Uri on 28th December 1919. 1916-21 Minutes, p. 74. The next year the society took on the journal Renesans of which Kenig was editor.

23 Sharman Kadish Bolsheviks and British Jews: The Anglo-Jewish Community, Britain and the Russian Revolution, London: Frank Cass, 1992, p. 186.

24 Rubenstein op. cit. p. 180.

25 Mazower op. cit. p. 42. Rubenstein op. cit. p. 180. See also Mazower ‘Ben Uri and Yiddish Culture’.

26 Mazower ‘Ben Uri and Yiddish Culture’ p. 41.

27 Mazower ‘Ben Uri and Yiddish Culture’ p. 38.

28 Prager op. cit. p. 7: ‘To Yiddish-speaking Jews and, often, to their children and grandchildren, Jewish experience seems most authentically Jewish when incorporated in that most Jewish of languages, Yiddish.’

29 See Seth Koven ‘The Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions and the Politics of Seeing’ in Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff eds Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, London: Routledge, 1994.

30 See Lisa Tickner and Peter Gross ‘The Jewish Education Aid Society and Pre-First World War British Art’ in The Ben Uri Story from Art Society to Museum and the influence of Anglo-Jewish Artists on the Modern British Movement London: Ben Uri Gallery, 2001, pp. 59-65.

31 See Sarah MacDougall ‘“Something is happening there”: early British modernism, the Great War and the “Whitechapel Boys”’ in Michael J. Walsh ed. London, Modernism and 1914, Cambridge:

44

Cambridge University Press 2010, pp. 122-148, and Lisa Tickner Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000.

32 See MacDougall op. cit. pp. 126-8.

33 A photocopy of the English handwritten manuscript of Leftwich’s diary is at the Imperial War Museum along with other papers pertaining to Isaac Rosenberg.

34 Leftwich ‘ “Jewish” London Fifty Years Ago’, p. 14.

35 Ibid.

36 Leftwich Along the Years: Poems 1911-1937 London: Robert Anscombe and Company, 1937, p. 24.

37 Samuel Winsten ‘Poet in a Tank’ School November 1933, p. 22. Photocopy of issue in Leftwich papers at IWM. 38 See MacDougall op. cit.

39 Leftwich Along the Years, p. 45.

40 Ibid.

41 Leo Kenig ‘Jews and Plastic Art’ in Catalogue and Survey of Activities London: Ben Uri, 1930, p.

11.

42 The list is to be found on the back cover of the album, which exists in the Ben Uri archive (PR 01/01/60). A full copy of the album has not survived. David Mazower investigated the making and afterlife of the album for his article: ‘Lazar Berson and the origins of the Ben Uri Art Society’.

43 Judah Beach ‘The Ben-Uri: Its History and Activity’ in Catalogue and Survey of Activities London: Ben Uri, 1930, p. 12.

44 Charles S. Spencer mentions Gradel’s in his 1966 essay ‘Jewish Art Since 1915 – Fifty Glorious Years’ (p. 20) and A.B. Levy suggests the society was conceived ‘during discussions in a Whitechapel restaurant’ in his 1966 essay ‘The First Twenty-Five Years’ (p. 24) both in Jacob Sonntag ed. Ben Uri, 1915-1965: Fifty Years’ Achievement in the Arts London: Ben Uri Art Society, 1966.

45 ‘A member’s meeting took place Saturday, 19th February 1916 at 131 Whitechapel Road’ (premises of Louis Eidelstein’s ‘American Restaurant’), 1916-25 minutes p.11. Meetings also took place there on Saturday, 1 April 1916 (p. 21), Saturday, 21 May 1916 (p.26), Saturday, 23rd September (p.26) and Saturday, 16th December 1916 (p. 63).

46 Aleichem op. cit. p. 201.

47 I have not come across Braydburg’s first name in the archive sources, but the fact that his initial is variously given as Y and I suggests that he may have been a Yitzhak/Isaac.

48 According to Prager both Saul Elstein/Elshteyn and Judah Beach/Bietsch were secretaries of the Polish landsmanshaft Rover Hilfs Fereyn in 1920. Prager op. cit. p. 559.

49 The list refers to a Mr. Epstein, who may have been the manager of the North London Jewish Club in 1914, mentioned in Abraham Mundy’s account of the Jewish Shelter. A. Mundy ‘Some Reminiscences of the Shelter’s Activities for the Last Quarter of a Century’, translated by A. Michaelson, typed MS at the Jewish Museum, London, p. 84.

50 Kadish op. cit. pp. 199, 202. Mazower ‘Ben Uri and Yiddish Culture’ p. 40. Prager op. cit. p. 526.

51 Mazower ‘Ben Uri and Yiddish Culture’ p. 41.

52 Myer was a member, as was co-founder of Di Tsayt Baruch Weinberg (Prager op. cit. 671) if allowance be made for misspelling/mistransliteration (‘B. Weinrib’ is listed). Mazower mentions Bernard Weinryb as a member of both Poale Zion and Ben Uri (Mazower ‘Ben Uri and Yiddish Culture’, p.41). ‘Mr Cahan’ was probably Abraham Cahan, an important New York Yiddish journalist who had links with England (Prager op. cit. p. 183), and ‘Mr Dingal’ was Solomon Dingol, another Yiddish writer who spent eight years in England before emigrating to the US in 1916 (Prager op. cit. p.

203). ‘Mr Vichevsky’ probably referred to Ozer Warshafsky/Varshavski, then a Polish-based Yiddish novelist and journalist (Prager op. cit. p. 670).

53 Mr and Mrs Poliakoff were comic actors with the Kampaniets troupe, which played in London several times (Prager op. cit. p. 526). M. Goldberg may have been Michl Goldberg (281) and S. Erlich may have been Zanvl Erlich (Prager op. cit. p. 221), both Yiddish theatre actors. If allowance can be made for similar initials, then B. Rosenthal may have referred to Phil Rosenthal, manager (with his brother J.W. Rosenthal) of the Pavilion theatre which was the East End’s leading Yiddish theatre (Prager op. cit. p. 556).

54 Mazower ‘Lazar Berson and the origins of the Ben Uri Art Society’, p. 45.

55 See Fishman East End Radicals and, for a shorter account, ‘Jewish Immigrant Anarchists in East London 1870-1914’ in Newman ed. The Jewish East End, pp. 233-254.

56 The statutes are also on the back cover of the album (see note 39). PR 01/01/60.

57 ‘The Hanukah Banquet of Art Society Ben Uri’, cutting from The Daily World, 5th December 1915.

PR 01/01/05.

58 Mazower ‘Lazar Berson’ p. 41.

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Mazower ‘Lazar Berson’ pp. 43, 37.

Jewish Chronicle September 10th 1915 p. 12.

61 Joseph Guttman ‘Is there a Jewish Art?’ in Clare Moore ed. The Visual Dimension: Aspects of Jewish Art Boulder, San Francisco, and Oxford: Westview Press, in cooperation with the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies, 1993, pp. 1-19. p. 3.

62 ‘The Hanukah Banquet of Art Society Ben Uri’, cutting from The Daily World, 5th December 1915.

PR 01/01/05.

63 Jewish Chronicle March 24th, 1916, p. 23. The album is now lost.

64 Jewish Chronicle September 10th, 1915, p. 12.

65 Mosheh Oved Visions and Jewels: autobiographic in three parts London: Faber & Faber 1952, p.

83.

66 Beach ‘The Ben Uri’ p. 12.

67 See note 53.

68 Beach ‘The Ben Uri’ p. 12.

69 Mazower ‘Lazar Berson’ p. 45.

70 Jewish Chronicle September 10th, 1915, p. 12.

71 ‘The Hanukah Banquet of Art Society Ben Uri’, cutting from The Daily World, 5th December 1915.

PR 01/01/05.

72 1916-21 Minutes. Committee meeting 16th January 1916, p. 7.

73 Beach ‘The Ben Uri’ p. 12.

74 Mazower ‘Lazar Berson’ p. 45.

75 He is listed as such in Leonard Prager’s Yiddish Culture in Britain: A Guide Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990, p. 157.

76 Draft obituary of Beach by Barry Fealdman, 27th October 1964, Ben Uri archive. The collection is called Sheydvegn: dertsaylungen and published in Britain by Loshn und lebn; a copy exists in the British Library (under the author’s name Yehudah Y. Bietsh); unfortunately, it has not been translated from the Yiddish.

77 Letter from Berson to Beach, January 1916, BU Archive.

78 ‘The Hanukah Banquet of Art Society Ben Uri’, cutting from The Daily World, 5th December 1915.

PR 01/01/05.

79 Beach ‘The Ben Uri’ p. 12.

80 Judah Beach’s speech, ‘Fifteenth Anniversary of Ben Uri’, undated cutting, source unknown, PR/01/01/53.

81 Oved Visions and Jewels pp. 51-2.

82 Oved Visions and Jewels p. 66.

83 Prager op. cit. p. 718.

84 Oved Visions and Jewels pp. 62-63.

85 Mosheh Oved Out of Chaos London: Printed for the author, 1918, p. 84.

86 Ibid.

87 Oved Out of Chaos p. 9.

88 1916-21 Minutes. Committee meeting 15th September 1916, p. 47.

89 Fermin Rocker The East End Years: A Stepney Childhood London: Freedom Press 1998, p. 137.

90 Oved Out of Chaos p. 36.

91 Oved Out of Chaos pp. 36-37. NB in the British Library’s copy, the word ‘schools’ is crossed out and ‘synagogues’ written in in Oved’s hand.

92 1916-21 Minutes. Committee meeting 4th June 1916, p. 28.

93 Beach wrote to Dr Jochelman a note accompanying the ‘first issue of our album’, pointing out that it was as yet incomplete, and requesting financial support on May 31st, 1916. BU Archive: archive_translation_3_notice_31_1916.doc.

94 1916-21 Minutes. Members’ meeting 2nd July 1916, p. 32.

95 1916-21 Minutes, meeting 25th August 1916, p. 44.

96 1916-1921 Minutes. Members’ meeting 23rd September 1916, pp. 44-47.

97 Jerry White Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War London: The Bodley Head, 2014, p.

168.

98 Letter from General Sir John Monash, quoted in White Zeppelin Nights p. 170.

99 White Zeppelin Nights p. 171.

100 Kadish op. cit. pp. 197-198. Mazower ‘Ben Uri and Yiddish culture’ p. 42.

101 1916-21 Minutes. Members’ meeting 23rd September 1916, pp. 46-7.

102 The first few committee meetings after Berson’s departure are recorded as chaired by Braydburg but the location is not given; on 30th December 1916 the committee meeting chaired by Braydburg took 59 60

46

place at 236 Lancaster Road (1916-21 Minutes, p. 65). This address was given for Braydburg on an advertisement for tickets for a Ben Uri boat trip in 1920 (BU Archive PR/01/01/04).

103 Meetings on 23/09/16 and 30/09/16, from 1916-1921 Minutes, pp. 46-7, 49.

104 1916-21 Minutes. Members’ meeting 12th November 1916, pp. 55-57. There is some confusion over dates at this point in the minute book; the translator notes that in many cases the dates 1916 and 1917 were later amended (presumably by Beach) to 1918 and 1919; I think it safe given the chronology to assume that these amendments were inaccurate.

105 1916-21 Minutes. Committee meeting 28th October 1916, p. 53.

106 Ibid.

107 1916-21 Minutes, members’ meeting 12th November 1916, pp. 57-58.

108 Ibid.

109 Text of announcement in Di Tsayt in 1916-21 Minutes, p. 61.

110 1916-1921 Minutes, text of thank-you note from Beach to Pilichowski, p. 64; committee meeting 13th January 1917, p. 67. The painting was not acquired in the end, partly through lack of the necessary £100, and partly due to the artist’s own attachment to the canvas. This may have been ‘Hear O Israel’, which was acquired finally in 1924.

111 1916-21 Minutes, committee meeting 13th January 1917, p. 67, and committee meeting 24th February 1917, p. 69.

112 Peter Gross ‘Mr Wolmark, The Painter of the Ghetto’ (chapter of unpublished PhD thesis) [n.p] pp.

3-4.

113 This is the first of several gaps in the BU 1916-21 minute book. It is complicated by Beach’s tendency to alter dates after the event, evident in the manuscript version and noted by the translator.

Perhaps having noticed the long lapses between recorded meetings, he seems to have gone back and changed the year of several meetings to bring them forward in time. Cross-referencing with other archive notices and cuttings, and a check of historical calendar dates where weekdays are mentioned, allows for some clarification of these dates, though one meeting, dated Sunday 5th June, could not have been in 1917, 1918 or 1919 – it may have in fact been Sunday 15th June, 1919, given that Leo Kenig, soon to bring the journal Renesans under Ben Uri’s control, is mentioned. BU Minutes 1916-21, pp.

55-71.

114 White Zeppelin Nights p. 86.

115 Kadish op. cit. p. 199; Colin Holmes ‘Government Files and Privileged Access’ Social History 6:3 (Oct 1981), pp. 333-50, p. 341.

116 Kadish op. cit. p. 190-191.

117 Kadish op. cit. p. 211.

118 Kadish op. cit. p. 209.

119 ‘National Jewish Art Society “Ben Uri” invitation to members meeting on Sunday 1st July 1917. BU Archive.

120 Ibid. Members who turned up were promised an image of one of the items in the collection, which at that point was exclusively Berson’s work.

121 Minutes of the Executive Council January 1924-July 1926. Monday 7th April 1924. Future references to this minute book will cite the BU Archive catalogue reference Exec/01/02. The book has no page numbers.

122 Oved Visions and Jewels pp. 150-151.

123 1916-21 Minutes p. 71. This meeting is one of those whose date cannot be confirmed, but it may have taken place in June 1919.

124 Leftwich’s society was called the Jewish Association for Advances in Arts and Sciences (JAAS), and the group was nicknamed the ‘Focussers’. The Ben Uri Minutes refer to Leftwich’s society as the Anglo-Jewish Arts Society. BU Minutes 1916-21 p. 72. Sarah McDougall op. cit. p. 134 125 1916-21 Minutes, committee meeting 2nd August 1919, p. 72. The wording suggests that it was Kenig and Braydburg who selected the Solomon paintings to buy, with Good merely financing them as treasurer.

126 See Ferrari, Roberto C, and Carolyn Conroy, Simeon Solomon Research Archive. Internet.

Published 28 February 2010. Accessed 9 July 2015. Available: http://www.simeonsolomon.com 127 1916-21 Minutes, meeting 28th December 1919, p. 74.

128 Oved Visions and Jewels pp. 150-151.

129 1916-21 Minutes, p. 75. Renesans is only mentioned in the 20th September 1920 meeting (though it can be assumed that it would have been discussed in previous, undocumented meetings), at which there was a proposal to celebrate the journal’s sixth and last issue, and an apology from Kenig about the wrong kind of paper being used by the printer.

130 MacDougall op. cit. p. 134. The British Library holds issues 1-4 (Jan-April 1920) of Renesans.

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According to an annotated copy of the 1925 list of the Ben Uri collection in the BU Archive, four paintings by Bomberg (‘Ghetto Theatre’, ‘The Window’, ‘A Studio’ and ‘A Writer’) were bought in 1920. That is the only existing information about this acquisition.

132 A lecture by D. Bomberg was being planned in December 1921 but there is no evidence this ever took place; 1916-21 Minutes, meeting 13th December 1921, p. 92. Bomberg did lecture for the Ben Uri in 1928 on his Middle Eastern tour (the notice is in the BU Archive). The gap in the minutes goes from the meeting about taking over Renesans on 20th September 1920, to ‘the first open meeting’ in 30th April 1921, concerned with gathering support from ‘various organizations’ (not named) to organise a reception for the artist Glicenstein; a second open meeting was held 8th May 1921 (BU Minutes 191621, pp. 75-77). A flyer in the BU archive shows that the Ben Uri put on a fancy-dress ball at the Hampstead Conservatoire on December 4th 1920, but details of the organization around this event are not available.

133 ‘I also brought in Bomberg, by taking Mosheh Oved, Beach and a few others to his studio.’

Leftwich ‘’Jewish” London Fifty Years Ago’, p. 16.

134 Beach ‘The Ben Uri’ p. 14.

135 ‘Fifteenth Anniversary of Ben Uri’, undated cutting, source unknown, PR/01/01/53.

136 1916-21 Minutes, meeting 30th April 1921, p. 76.

137 1916-21 Minutes, meeting 8th May 1921, p. 77.

138 1916-21 Minutes, meeting 19th July 1921, p. 80.

139 Joseph Leftwich ‘Glicenstein’ (1921) in Along the Years p. 47.

140 1916-21 Minutes, meeting 8th May 1921, p. 77; text of announcement by Beach, PR 01/01/19.

141 1916-21 Minutes, meeting 8th May 1921, p. 77. Prager op. cit. (on Zusman) p. 731, (on Pinski) p.

517, (on the Vilna Troupe’s success), pp. 681-3.

142 Levy ‘The First Twenty-Five Years’ p. 25, see also programme in BU Archive.

143 1916-21 Minutes, committee meetings 8th, 17th, 24th and 29th August and 6th September 1921, pp.

81-6.

144 There are two reports on the Rivoli concert in the cuttings book, publications unknown. PR 01/01/20.

145 Prager op. cit. p. 416.

146 1916-21 Minutes, meeting 30th April 1921, p. 76.

147 The first meeting they attended was on Wednesday, 8th August 1921 at Mr Susman’s house. 191621 Minutes, p. 81.

148 Prager op. cit. p. 475. Mundy wrote ‘Some Reminiscences of the Shelter’s Activities for the Last Quarter of a Century’, translated by A. Michaelson, typed MS at the Jewish Museum, London.

149 1916-21 Minutes, meeting 11th October 1921, p. 87.

150 Ibid.

151 1916-21 Minutes, meeting 3rd November 1921, p. 89.

152 1916-21 Minutes, meeting 6th December 1921, p. 91.

153 See Peter Gross ‘The lachrymose Mr Rothenstein’, Chapter 6 of unpublished PhD thesis, for more on Rothenstein and the East End. 154 Tickner and Gross op. cit. pp. 62-63.

155 John Stevenson The Penguin Social History of Britain: British Society 1914-45. London: Penguin 1984, reprinted 1990, p. 434.

156 Leo Kenig ‘Solomon J. Solomon’ in The Jewish Post, undated. PR/01/01/60.

157 1916-21 Minutes, meeting 6th December 1921, p. 91.

158 Beach’s handwritten Yiddish minutes end on the eve of the society’s sixth Hanukah celebration, which probably took place at the Monickendam Hall on Saturday 25th December 1921, fuelled by an interesting assortment of foodstuff and drinks donated by committee members. 1916-21 Minutes, meeting 22nd December 1921, p. 93. The next minute book in the archive begins in January 1924, written in English by a newly appointed honorary secretary, W. J. Simons. Exec/01/02.

159 Invitation in BU Archive.

160 Programme in BU Archive, see also report on PR 01/01/34 and report in the Jewish Chronicle August 4th 1922, p. 26.

161 Programme in BU Archive.

162 E. Graham Sutton ‘The Irishman in the Theatre’ The English Review May 1922 (Vol. 34) pp. 442446.

163 Prager op. cit. p. 683. See also pp. 52-3 and pp. 681-3.

164 Printed Balance sheet, 31st December 1923, BU Archive.

165 See Gross ‘Wolmark’ chapter 7 pp. 34-5.

166 Exec/01/02, 15th January 1924.

131

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Exec/01/02, 29th January 1924.

Exec/01/02, Monday 25th February 1924.

169 Beach’s report of Solomon’s visit, Exec/01/02, 1st July 1924.

170 Exec 01/02, June 3rd 1924.

171 Eg. 15th January 1922 as reported in the Jewish Chronicle. PR 01/01/61.

172 Exec 01/02, 22nd July 1924.

173 Exec 01/02, 31st October 1925.

174 Exec 01/02, 30th December 1924.

175 Exec 01/02, 4th March 1925.

176 Oved Visions and Jewels p. 50.

177 Jewish Chronicle 22nd May 1925, p. 32.

178 Ibid.

179 Ibid.

180 Exec 01/02, 29th September 1925.

181 Exec 01/02, 31st January 1926.

182 Exec 01/02, 10th March 1926.

183 Exec 01/02, 5th July 1926.

184 Ibid.

185 Judah Beach letter to members, 9th July 1926, BU Archive.

186 ‘Ben Uri Society Undertakes New Work’, October 15th 1926, publication unknown. PR 01/01/47.

187 ‘Israel Zangwill’s Life and Work’, Di Tsayt, Sunday November 7th 1926. PR/01/01/22.

188 Ibid.

189 Mazower ‘Ben Uri and Yiddish Culture’ p. 48.

190 Invitation from Ben Uri (signed by Beach) for April 9th, 1927. BU Archives.

191 This was arranged by the Central Education Committee / J L Peretz Institute / Circle House at Alie Street, Aldgate and took place in March-April 1927 with 31 works listed. My thanks to David Mazower for this information from a brochure in his collection.

192 PR 01/01/61 letter by Beach to Jewish Chronicle, April 22nd 1927. This was probably Isaac Lichtenstein by Jan-Topass, published by Editions Ars in Paris (no date), of which a copy remains in the Ben Uri Archive.

193 Correspondence, flyer and invitation in BU Archive. See also Ben Uri archivist Claire Jackson’s blog entry on the topic, http://www.benuri.org.uk/public/news.php?blog=centenary-stories-from-thearchive-part-5-the-jewish-art-and-antiquities-exhibition-1927 194 This and the following information is taken from the catalogue of the exhibition, available in the Whitechapel Gallery’s reading room.

195 Peter Gross ‘An Offer of Integration’ (chapter 5 of unpublished PhD thesis) p. 28.

196 Bomberg lectured on 4th March 1928, Schneur read his poetry on 14th October 1928, Kleinman appeared on 18th November 1928 and M.J. Landa lectured on Leo Feuchtwangel’s Jew Suss on 20th October 1929. Programmes and brochures in BU Archive. See Prager op. cit. p. 573 for information on Seres.

197 Mazower ‘The Ben Uri and Yiddish Culture’ p. 50.

198 Judah Beach ‘What is Ben Uri’ Jewish Post August 26th, 1927, PR 01/01/54.

199 ‘The Ben Uri and its Work: Where Should the Club it is Planning to Open Be?’ February 17th, 1928, publication unknown. PR 01/01/52.

200 ‘Uplifting Ben Uri Evening’ 30th March 1929, publication unknown. PR 01/01/49.

201 ‘A Jewish Cultural Centre in London’ undated but probably February or early March 1930, publication unknown. PR 01/01/13.

202 Beach ‘The Ben Uri’, p. 17.

203 ‘Fifteenth Anniversary of Ben Uri’, undated cutting, source unknown, PR/01/01/53.

204 Ibid.

205 Morris Myer ‘Today, Historic Date of a Cultural and Art Event’ November 30th, 1930, assumed to be Di Tsayt. PR 01/01/23.

206 ‘Art Exhibitions: Ben Uri Gallery’ The Times 3rd December 1930, p. 12.

207 Lipman op. cit. p. 40.

208 ‘Whereas in 1891 only a sixth of children in the Jews Free School had English-born parents, in 1931, two thirds had.’ Lipman op. cit. p. 38.

209 Exec/01/04, executive meeting 30th July 1931.

210 Notice of annual meeting to take place September 25th, 1932. PR 01/01/36.

211 Y. Seres ‘Ben Uri in High Society’, letter to Di Tsayt, undated (c. 1933). PR 01/01/28.

167 168

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