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

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