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-centuryLondon.Thesocietywas foundedandinitiallyrunbyagroupoffirstgeneration 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,towhichJewshadbeenrestrictedunderincreasinglyanti-semiticregimesover 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 America5 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

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 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 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 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.