London: The Biography

In 1272 hundreds of Jews were hanged on suspicion of adulterating the coinage, and then eighteen years later-their usefulness at an end after the arrival of Italian and French financiers-all were expelled, beaten, spat upon or killed in a mass exodus from the city. It would have seemed that the wandering race could find no permanent haven even in the cosmopolitan and commercial city of London. London, instead, had become the very pattern of urban exploitation and aggression. But some returned, quietly and almost invisibly, over the next two or three centuries under the guise of Christians; in the seventeenth century Charles I made use of their financial skills and resources but it was Cromwell who, with a more profound biblical knowledge, allowed the right of settlement after a “Humble Petition of the Hebrews at Present Residing in this city of London.” They requested that “wee may therewith meete at our said private devotions in our Particular houses without feere of Molestation either to our persons famillys or estates.” These were Sephardic Jews who, like Isak Lopes Chillon, one of the signatories to the petition, came out of Spain and Portugal; but in the latter part of the seventeenth century, from central and eastern Europe, arrived the Ashkenazi Jews who were less affluent, less well educated, and variously depicted as “down-trodden” and “poverty-stricken.” Charles Booth has described how “the old settlers held aloof from the newcomers, and regarded them as a lower caste, fit only to receive alms.”

And here emerges the other face of the immigrant population. The newcomers were not necessarily the accepted and acceptable, not merchants and doctors, but the wandering alien, the lowly refugee, the poor unskilled migrant fit only for the “sale of old clothes or in peddling goods such as fruit, jewellry and knives.” The Ashkenazim were representative of an entire impoverished and wandering population, alternately exploited and abused by the native residents.

More Ashkenazi Jews arrived at various notable occasions in the eighteenth century; there were persecutions, and partitions, and sieges, which sent them flocking to their co-religionists already in London where the first Ashkenazi synagogue had been established in Aldgate in 1722. But they were not welcomed, principally because they were poor. It was suggested that they would “deluge the kingdom with brokers, usurers and beggars”; once more emerges the irrational but instinctive fear of being “swamped.” They were also accused of taking jobs from native Londoners, although, since they could not be apprenticed to Christian masters, the fear of their usurping available employment was a false one. But, in London, such fears have always been widely advertised and believed; in a society where financial want and insecurity were endemic among the working population, any suggestion of unfair labouring practices could arouse great discontent. Thus in the 1750s and 1760s Jew-baiting became a “sport, like cock-throwing, or bull-baiting, or pelting some poor wretch in the pillory.”

There is another problem, evinced as early as the seventeenth century, whereby immigrants are lent distinct and opprobrious identities. “As the Frenchmen love to be bold, Flemings to be drunken,” Thomas Dekker wrote in 1607, so “Irish [love] to be costermongers” or street pedlars. It is a question, in the modern term, of “stereotyping” which afflicts all migrant populations. The irony, of course, is that certain groups seem unable to escape this matrix of false expectations and misperceptions. The London Irish, for example, had always been typecast as the poorest of the poor. By 1640 parish records note the presence of “a poor Irishman … a poore distressed man from Ireland … a shroude for an Irishman that dyed … a poore gentleman vndone by the burning of a cittie in Ireland … his goods cast away comeing from Ireland … four poore women and sixe children that came oute of Ireland … poor plundered Irish.” All these instances, and more, come from the registers of St. Giles-in-the-Fields and evoke the first steps in a sad history of migration. Yet it was not quite the beginning. Eleven years before, an edict had declared that “this realm hath of late been pestered with a great number of Irish beggars, who live here idly and dangerously, and are of ill-example to the natives.” This has always been one of the cries against the immigrants of London: that they are lazy, living off hand-outs like beggars, and thus demoralising the resident population. The assumption here must be that immigrants are a threat because they undermine the will to work, and provide examples of successful idleness; they are also receiving help or charity which, paradoxically, the native population claims by right to itself. The same complaints have been levelled in recent years against the Bangladeshi population of Whitechapel, and of Tower Hamlets in general.