Moving ‘out’ to be ‘in’: the suburbanization of London Jewry, 1900–1939

Abstract

Between 1900 and 1939, Jewish Londoners departed the East End for the suburbs. Relocation, however, was not always the result of individual agency. Many Jews became the object of institutional strategies to coerce and persuade them to disperse away from inner-city areas. Simultaneous to this was the emergence of a dominant pro-suburban rhetoric within and beyond Jewish cultural circles, which aimed to raise aspirations towards middle-class lifestyles. This striking suburban ‘urge’ amongst London Jewry, managed by the community's elite institutions and leaders, was far more than a phenomenon running parallel to wider British society. As this article argues, it was a decisive response to an insidious culture of intolerance and antisemitism.

‘Until I was sixteen I lived in the East London borough of Bethnal Green, in a small street that is now just a name on the map. Almost every house in it has gone and it exists, if at all, only in the pages of this book.’¹ So begins the preface to Anglo-Jewish novelist Emanuel Litvinoff's 1972 memoir, Journey through a Small Planet. His is a familiar lament for a bygone age, bitter memories of an impoverished childhood in a rotten urban slum sweetened by nostalgia. Certainly, by the final quarter of the twentieth century, the Jewish East End of the fin de siècle, populated, at its height, by hundreds of thousands of Jewish migrants of Eastern and Central European origin, was in terminal decline. Its vitality and identity as a distinctly ‘Jewish’ locale had been weakened in the pre-war and inter-war years by northerly out-migration to surrounding inner- and then outer-lying suburbs, and then almost fatally wounded by incessant German bombing assaults during World War II. Confidence in the district as a site for sustained Jewish life waned, ‘destroyed’, as Bryan Cheyette has observed, ‘as much by the cultural amnesia of those who left as by the bombs of the German Luftwaffe’.²

A plausible interpretation of this dispersal might well cast the children and grandchildren of immigrants – English-born Jews – as deliberate in their rejection of place in favour of prospects. This is a common enough assumption that has led many to regard Anglo-Jewry as the ‘model minority’ who set the precedent for integration through social mobility.³ Within such narratives, second-generation Jews, such as Litvinoff, have been cast – or cast themselves – as the primary agents for this change. As Litvinoff insisted, ‘Those of us who survived [the war] and were still young were moving eagerly into the universe of the future and had no wish to look back at the retreating past.’⁴

However, the apparently unfettered agency of Jews as willing suburbanites is but part of the story. Despite the prevalence of self-affirming relocation narratives (of which Litvinoff's is just one example), mass Jewish migration out of the East End was instrumentalized by factors besides, and, on occasion, in direct opposition to, the wishes and actions of the individual.⁵ Perhaps the most important of these were the activities of sections of the Anglo-Jewish leadership who, across the pre-war and inter-war period, did not merely support attempts by Jews to suburbanize but actively encouraged and even orchestrated them. These efforts ranged from the mass marketing of suburbia and suburban lifestyles through to the coercive removal of Jews to suburban districts. Doing so required the adoption of a full gamut of strategies by some of the community's foremost institutions such as the Federation of Synagogues and the Board of Guardians to persuade, entice or even intimidate Jews into leaving the East End. Behind such strategies lay a concern about rising levels of antisemitism, the locus for which throughout the early twentieth century doggedly remained Jewish East London. From the height of anti-alien rhetoric at the turn of the century, through to the running street battles of the 1930s between fascists and communists (many of whom were local Jews, or had built allegiances with local Jews), British antisemitism in its myriad of forms coalesced all too frequently around the geographical target of East London. Here, Jews were constructed within cultures of intolerance as ghettoized, ‘clannish’ and living as a ‘distinct block’ even as the numbers within the East London community declined.⁶ Dismantling and dispersing the Jewish East End was, hence, co-opted as a strategy within the broader objective of defending the community against external attack.

Where dispersal and relocation were key aims, London's suburbs offered a promising solution. The necessary groundwork was, if not already laid, certainly very much under construction in a variety of locations across north and north-west London by the inter-war period. Jewish out-migration from the first place of settlement in the inner city towards the capital's urban peripheries had been happening ‘organically’ since at least 1900, driven – at Litvinoff himself hints – by the cumulative factors of personal ambition and the enticements of economic prosperity. As might be expected for any sustained episode of social mobility, this impetus towards the suburbs was supported and in fact expedited by the emergence of community infrastructure such as synagogues, schools, kosher shops, cultural centres and philanthropic organizations. Distinct from ‘generic’ suburban infrastructure emerging in many suburban districts by the inter-war period, these organizations and businesses adhered ideologically, operationally and even geographically to a set of principals that governed Jewish life. Synagogues, for example, needed to lie within walking distance of the homes of religiously observant Jews, thereby enabling them to walk to Shul on Shabbat. Equally important were the operational credentials of butchers, cafes, restaurants and grocery shops, which all had to abide by the laws of Kashrut, the strict dietary rules overseen by the Beth Din. Influential publications, such as the Jewish Chronicle, did much throughout the inter-war period to promote the appeal of these emerging districts to its predominantly Jewish readership.

When seen in this light, far from being the result of individual agency the move to the suburbs for Jews in London was a process that was, at various points, both institutionally driven and culturally promoted. It was, in a sense, managed suburbanization. This reappraisal of both agency and objective offers an important new reading of spatial and social change in Anglo-Jewish history. Yet, in forging this new interpretation, it stands almost alone within the historical canon. What little scholarship has attempted to tackle the vast but neglected topic of Jewish suburbanization has tended to treat the origins of the movement uncritically. There has been a tendency to assume that suburbanization was an organic process, little different from the ‘embourgeoisation’ displayed by previous generations of Jews. Mainstream scholars of suburbanization processes such as Mark Clapson, for example, although unusual in treating the experience of ethnic minorities within the wider framework of socio-urban growth, nonetheless concluded that Jewish (and Asian) suburbanization was straightforwardly ‘coterminous' with ‘upward occupational mobility, and economic advancement’.⁷ In the same vein William Rubinstein dismissed patterns of Jewish suburbanization in the inter-war years as ‘merely continu[ing] a time-honoured tradition begun by the Sephardim and German Ashkenazim more than a century before’ that, whilst larger in scale was ‘no different in kind’.⁸ Only a select number of more cautious scholars have attempted to offer a more nuanced reading. In a thoughtful survey of social change between the wars, David Cesarani, for example, argued that the notion of swift and uniform upward social mobility was ‘substantially a myth’ and that, rather, ‘the experience was one of stasis or sideways movement’ for working-class and lower-middle-class Jews in particular.⁹ Others have similarly probed whether there was a common race to suburbanize, and if an intention to depart the East End can and should be read as an intention to distance oneself from the Jewish community altogether. Scholarship in this vein has instead argued that, despite the physical separation brought about by relocation, Jews of all ages worked hard to maintain familial, cultural and spiritual links with the wider community.¹⁰

This article builds upon these more nuanced approaches. However, it also argues that, to truly understand the impetus behind Jewish suburbanization, our reading of its history needs to start by questioning the drivers behind it. Personal aspiration, personal circumstances and personal choice undoubtedly played their part, as the first section of this article demonstrates. In fact, when measured against patterns of suburbanization amongst the English population as a whole, the suburbanizing urges of London Jewry appear not merely to mirror those exhibited by non-Jews but actually to exceed them. Nonetheless, as the discussion within the second and third section suggests, individual agency was ultimately dwarfed by persuasive and coercive tactics devised in circles generally far beyond the realm of ‘ordinary’ Jews. As these two sections argue, first- and second-generation immigrant Jews often found themselves targeted in two ways; as the objects of physical dispersal on the one hand, and the targets for cultural assimilation on the other. The toxicity surrounding the Jewish East End as a locus for xenophobes and antisemites exacerbated the ‘need’ for relocation to help safeguard the well-being and security of Jews. Dismantling this problematic spatial association between ‘Jew’ and ‘inner city’ thus worked hand-in-hand with ambitions to replace it with a new, more positive association: the hallowed and highly desirable environs of middle-class suburbia.

Race to the suburbs

At its peak in 1900, the Jewish population of East London stood at roughly 125,000. By 1929, this was down to approximately 85,000.¹¹ This displacement of London Jewry from the immigrant quarter of the East End to their second and even third place of settlement in north and north-west London continued apace throughout the 1930s. By the inter-war period, Jews in London were attaining middle-class status at a far faster rate than the wider English population.¹² As upward social mobility typically goes hand-in-hand with residential relocation, this statistic indicates the widespread movement of Jews towards the capital's more affluent areas. Jews, in other words, were suburbanizing en masse in London by the mid-twentieth century.

Jewish migration to London's peripheries was mirrored in the Gorbals in Glasgow, the Leylands in Leeds, Manchester's Cheetham Hill and, beyond the British context, in the Jewish urban settlements of North America.¹³ As Deborah Dash Moore has commented, ‘the children and grandchildren of immigrants embraced the American dream of home ownership and suburban living’, with a ‘Jewish’ suburb emerging in most American cities with a Jewish population. However, Jews did not begin to move to the suburbs en masse ‘until the mass-produced suburbs of the 1950s and 1960s brought home ownership within reach of millions of middle-class Americans’.¹⁴

For British Jews, suburbanization was a much earlier phenomenon. As Vivian D. Lipman outlined in the mid-1960s, suburbanization had been a feature of London Jewry's experience from at least the eighteenth century, as wealthy and well-to-do Jews sought to keep pace with their non-Jewish counterparts by acquiring country residences on the edge of London, or in villages that fringed the city.¹⁵ By the 1830s, however, with the coming of the railway, the commuting suburbanite was born. The cutting through of railway lines across the city, pushing outwards to the urban peripheries, enabled the middle classes – including middle-class Jews – to take advantage of better-quality housing and living conditions, removed from the smog and congestion of central urban districts.¹⁶

By the 1870s, working-class suburbs had begun to spring up. These were made possible by cheap railway fares, the emergence of the ‘workmen's train’ and the development of a network of horse tramways, which offered the cheapest fares of all.¹⁷ As Lipman makes clear, ‘a rise in real incomes per head by as much as 25% between 1880 and 1890’ provided the financial stimulus for many working-class Jewish families to join the commuter classes in these newly emergent suburbs.¹⁸ For those more hesitant, large-scale redevelopment and slum clearance projects in central districts of the capital, including the East End, forced their hand. Social ambition and occupational mobility away from low-paid and low-skilled jobs in the garment industry to lower-middle-class clerical and retail positions or self-employment as hairdressers and taxis drivers, also prompted the abandonment of inner-city districts. For Jews in the capital, the rapid expansion of the London transport network similarly assisted the de-population of the city centre, with the out-migration of Jewish Londoners replicating a broader trend amongst non-Jewish urbanites.

The London suburbs exercised a pull not only upon the city's own Jewish residents but also attracted Jews from other English cities. Nancie Craig (née Livingstone), born in Bradford in 1915, moved with her family to the new suburban district of Golders Green in 1917 when her father was appointed the first official for the small community of pioneering Jews who had already made the journey to the rather distant reaches of semi-rural north-west London.¹⁹ Although home ownership still typically remained beyond the grasp of the majority of these new suburbanites, at least until the house building boom of the 1930s, Jews marked their arrival in other ways by building synagogues and cemeteries, opening kosher butchers and delis, founding Jewish schools and relocating the headquarters and meeting houses of various Jewish clubs and societies.²⁰ Golders Green's first synagogue was erected on Dunstan Road in 1922 to accommodate the rapidly expanding congregation who could no longer fit inside a local church hall.²¹ The need for a synagogue reflected a growth in numbers, but it also signified the community's permanence. Care was taken in the design of the building's modest exterior, notable for its mock-Georgian fan windows and its elegant stone portico, to exude suburban respectability by adopting a classically ‘English’ architectural style. This hinted at the desire of some local Jews to blend in rather than stand out.

This mass Jewish out-migration from inner-city London from the 1920s onwards (and indeed even earlier in a limited number of cases, as the history of ‘Jewish’ Golders Green indicates) led to the large-scale colonization of several of the capital's suburban districts. What community had been lost in the exodus from the East End had seemingly been recovered and reformed elsewhere. What is more, these newly formed suburban communities prospered, relocating, often within a generation, from the inner suburbs of Hackney, Dalston and Canonbury along two trajectories to the lower-middle-class districts of Ilford, Leyton and East and West Ham, and to the affluent, firmly middle-class north-west London suburbs of Golders Green, Hampstead, Hendon and Edgware. As Henrietta Adler painstakingly detailed in her research for the New Survey of London Life and Labour in 1934, at least 32 new synagogues had been founded in these emerging suburban districts since 1905, against just 13 in the traditional heartland of Stepney, East London.²² Jewish inhabitants of these outer-lying districts became suburbanites par excellence – husbands commonly commuting into the city to work whilst wives looked after the home and children, careful to foster the appearance of respectability and prosperity for the neighbours. As Lipman wrote of the early Jewish suburban dweller, ‘[a]s so often, we find the Jew is like his neighbour, only more so’.²³

Whilst the Jewish journey to the suburbs for all intents and purposes mirrored and even led the broader demographic and cultural shift ‘from the heart to the limbs’ of the urban milieu occurring within the Anglo-American context, it was neither a seamlessly linear, homogeneous process nor a wholly uncontested one.²⁴ In the first instance, whilst the drive to suburbanize may have been a defining feature of the Jewish experience in early twentieth-century London, it was neither achievable nor desirable for everyone. In 1945, 30,000 Jews still lived in the East End, with perhaps only a third of this number remaining by 1975 – although to Emanuel Litvinoff it seemed only a wasteland of Jewish memories by then. Suburbanization was a process that, for all intents and purposes, passed these Jews by, although their alternative journey through London and its environs is little known and virtually unacknowledged.²⁵ These Jews either could not afford to leave the working-class district or chose not to, regarding the East End as the heartland of Jewish religious and cultural life. In the case of the latter, relocation for this small group of, often socialist-minded, Jews was seen as nothing short of a wholesale rejection of Jewish life in favour of a vapid, sanitized alternative. Simon Blumenfeld captured the essence of this feeling in his 1935 novel Jew Boy in which the sister of the protagonist's girlfriend marries a non-Jew and moves to the suburbs: ‘At least the Jewishness she had discarded, for all its faults, its turbulent excitable people and habits, had life and colour, throbbed with vitality. He couldn't for the life of him understand how any intelligent person could exchange that for the anaemic narrow-minded dreariness of suburbia.’²⁶ Suburban living evidently faced opposition by those who perceived it to be indicative of not only a physical departure from the urban centre to its peripheries, but also as symbolic of a spiritual and cultural de-centring of oneself – the ebbing away of one's vivacity and verve for life. Such anti-suburban narratives not only reflected the denigration of suburban life within mainstream culture of the period; they also spoke of an antipathy towards suburbia that was unique to the Jewish experience. As Blumenfeld's novel implied, it was the city (principally London's East End) that remained cherished as the spiritual heartland of the community. This was despite, or perhaps because of, that locale's reputation as a site for undiluted, ‘unapologetic’ displays of Jewishness. The alternative, suburbanization, would, according to these narratives, render Jews sickly and weak, a shadow of one's former self: in essence, assimilated.

Dispersion as an antidote to intolerance

Assimilation through relocation may not have been welcomed by all. For many Jews in London, however, especially those considered to be part of the ‘established community’ (those already settled before the period of mass migration), assimilation was both prized and coveted. The overt ‘exoticism’ of the immigrant generation who arrived across the fin de siècle threatened not only their status as ‘Englishmen of the Hebrew persuasion’ but also marked out Jews as ‘other’. Despite the acute differences in religious observance, culture and appearance between the pre-existing, predominantly middle-class Anglo-Jews and the immigrant community, the heightened attention that the newcomers’ presence provoked overshadowed the conformist ethos of their forebears. The commentators’ gaze was instead drawn to sites such as London's East End where Jewish ‘difference’ appeared to map itself onto the very urban landscape.²⁷ ‘To-day, the Brick Lane end of Wentworth Street, Whitechapel, is one of the most un-English spots in the British Isles’, wrote one commentator in 1907. ‘On finding oneself there, it would require but little imagination to believe oneself in some foreign city; the sights, sounds, and incidentally the smells, are so utterly different to those found in purely English slums.’²⁸

For the established community this visibility of difference was a cause for considerable alarm. ‘If poor Jews will persist in appropriating to themselves whole streets, in the same districts’, admonished the Jewish Chronicle in 1888,

if they will conscientiously persevere in the seemingly harmless practice of congregating in a body at prominent points in a great public thoroughfare like the Whitechapel or Commercial Road, drawing to their peculiarities of dress, of language and of manner, the attention which they might otherwise escape, can there be any wonder that the vulgar prejudices of which they are the objects should be kept alive and strengthened?²⁹

For the newspaper, the immigrants’ flagrant occupation of inner-city space, combined with the continuation of cultural practices deemed ‘foreign’, was both provocative and dangerous. Indeed, within such anxious imaginings, urban living itself was seen as an anathema to integration.

In response to this ‘problematic’ correlation between ‘space’ and ‘image’, Anglo-Jewish individuals and organizations began working tirelessly in the early years of the twentieth century to encourage the ‘dispersal’ of immigrant Jews and their descendants away from London's East End. The Jewish Board of Guardians was first amongst the community's own bodies to actively sift, filter and ultimately prevent Jews from settling in the East End. Strategies intended to deter would-be migrants from making the journey to Britain, such as issuing notices to press outlets on the continent warning against travel, evolved alongside a commitment to repatriation.³⁰ Historians have estimated that this policy alone resulted in the repatriation of 50,000 people between 1881 and 1914.³¹ This, when put into context of the overall number who arrived in Britain during the same period means that for every two Jews who remained, one further migrant was assisted to return. This, as Severin Hochberg has argued, shows Anglo-Jewry's astonishing level of commitment to population control of its own immigrant element.³² Moreover, this was a policy that employed social Darwinist principles to ‘weed out’ those Jews least likely to ‘flourish’; namely the poor and the physically infirm. However, it was not just the weakest who were targeted for ‘redistribution’ away from the East End. In more select cases, the youngest, fittest and most highly skilled were supported to emigrate to the United States, Canada, Australia and South Africa.³³

By the close of the nineteenth century, then, the politics of ‘place’ were pitting London's East End against eastern Europe, the colonial sphere and settlements in the new world in the race to safeguard the image of Anglo-Jewry. The Jewish East End had morphed into the terrifying spectre of all that was unassailably alien, and must, therefore, be dismantled, even decimated. As one correspondent to the Jewish Chronicle declared in ominous mood, ‘the sooner the Hebra movement [of the East End] is crushed out of existence the sooner we will remove from our midst the only draw-back to the advancement of Jews in this country’.³⁴

Similar self-serving concerns underscored the development of a parallel scheme devised by the Federation of Synagogues, which also sought to move immigrant Jews away from the noxious and injurious shadow cast by the East End. Unlike the work undertaken by the Board of Guardians, however, the Jewish Dispersion Committee (JDC) looked to domestic settings for redistribution opportunities. Established in 1902 by former Liberal MP Samuel Montagu under the auspice of the Federation of Synagogues, the primary ‘object’, as Montagu himself explained, was the ‘distributing, so far as we could, [of] the working-class Jews, particularly foreign Jews, those who could speak English and knew a trade’.³⁵ Framed as a charitable association, the JDC proposed to loan sums of up to £30 to any working man currently residing in the East End willing to relocate to fill a vacancy in an outer-lying urban district or within one of the provincial communities.³⁶

The scheme was, in part, modelled on an equivalent American plan carried out by the Industrial Removal Office (IRO). Established in 1901, the IRO arranged the distribution of Jews ‘from the eastern seaboard to the interior of the country’, working in conjunction with the Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society to encourage immigrants to try their hand at farming or to settle away from the metropolises along the east coast.³⁷ In London, the JDC similarly began by considering relocation opportunities to so-called ‘smaller places’ such as Reading, Blackburn and Dover; all towns with modest Jewish populations and some level of pre-existing communal infrastructure sufficient to support spiritual life. As Montagu himself admitted, there was a careful balance to be struck between the need to distribute immigrant Jews away from the capital whilst not, as a consequence, transplanting the ‘alien problem’ elsewhere. ‘If we sent a dozen families to Chester’, Montagu explained to the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration in 1903, ‘we should consider that we had done enough for Chester. We do not want to make ghettos or Jewish quarters in the provinces.’³⁸

However after more than a year of work by the JDC, Montagu was forced to admit that progress was interminably slow, with only 51 families satisfactorily ‘placed’ in the provinces in the preceding months.³⁹ Although no official change in policy was ever announced, these early failures appeared to reignite an interest in London's inner suburbs as a destination for immigrant Jews. An advertisement placed in the Jewish Chronicle in July 1904 attests to this shift in approach that, whilst continuing to promote migration to the provinces, nevertheless conceded that relocation to the suburbs would also be supported: ‘Capable Artizans desirous of settling in the provinces (Birmingham, Dublin, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester excepted), or needing facilities for transfer to the suburbs are invited to communicate (giving particulars) with Mr J. E. Blank, Club Rooms, 15, Gt. Alie-street, Aldgate, E.’⁴⁰ This change of tack reflected the resistance offered by immigrant Jews to being ‘distributed’ away from the capital. As one East London newspaper reported in October 1904, ‘the [JDC] movement bristles with difficulties. The greatest of these’, the journalist confirmed, was ‘the disinclination of the people concerned to migrate as wages in the provinces are not so high as in London, while the extensive metropolitan Hebrew colony in the East End possesses special attractions for them.’⁴¹ Some promising progress had been made by the JDC, however, to persuade a small number of families to relocate to inner-lying districts such as Tottenham and Canning Town, where plans for a new synagogue were already underway.⁴²

Anglo-Jewry's bid to ‘resolve’ the East End's ‘alien problem’ also resulted in some efforts to look to other suburban development schemes to provide a ‘solution’. This included Henrietta Barnett's Hampstead Garden Suburb project; a scheme in part devised to mitigate against the ‘evils’ of London's slums by encouraging suburban migration amongst the inner-city working classes.⁴³ Whilst no formal arrangement between Barnett and the Anglo-Jewish establishment was ever brokered, accounts within the Jewish Chronicle reveal the protracted interest shown in the establishment of the suburb by one of the Jewish community's most dynamic leaders, Carl Stettauer. A Bavarian by birth, Stettauer settled in Britain in the 1880s. He was an executive of the Russo-Jewish Committee (a body devised to oversee the Anglo-Jewish relief efforts for Jews persecuted in Russia), a member of the Jewish Board of Deputies, and was also heavily involved in the work of the Poor Jews Temporary Shelter, situated in the heart of the East End immigrant quarter.⁴⁴

In all likelihood, it was Stettauer's involvement in the work of the Leman Street Shelter that opened his eyes to the fetid living conditions newly arriving immigrants endured as they navigated life in the East London slums. Hence, Stettauer's initial interest in Barnett's scheme was to see it as a source of inspiration for bringing fundamental change to this first place of settlement. As the Jewish Chronicle speculated, the ethos upon which Hampstead Garden Suburb had been founded might, at the very least, lead to calls for an improved ‘aesthetic’ in the East End.⁴⁵ Stettauer appeared to take steps to realize that vision, inviting German garden city experts to visit East London in September 1912. There, the visitors outlined with keen interest the many changes to be implemented in that quarter, replacing slum terraces with newly sown ground, were they given the opportunity.⁴⁶ For a fleeting moment, Hampstead Garden Suburb seems to have been the inspiration for a reappraisal and remodelling of the East End. Yet, despite such promising signs, the Jewish Chronicle was forced to concede in the very same issue that the wholesale migration of East End Jews to the newly established suburb was unlikely: ‘[A]s far as can be observed these projects do not appeal to the individual Jew, who much prefers to dwell among his brethren and to whom the comparative isolation of a garden suburb is abhorrent’.⁴⁷

Selling the suburbs

Whilst neither the efforts of the Jewish Dispersion Scheme nor the enticements of Hampstead Garden Suburb seem to have gained much traction with the immigrant community, in the decades that followed the London suburbs nonetheless became increasingly desirable to second- and third-generation Jews. Making direct reference to the Federation of Synagogue's failed dispersion scheme, the Jewish Chronicle reflected in 1928 that, in the end, wholesale migration to the suburbs had ‘come about without any definite plan being put into operation’.⁴⁸ This was not wholly the case. The rapid development of the London transport network and the growing availability of motor cars by the late 1920s had opened up vast tracts of land across Middlesex, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Essex for a new breed of urban worker willing to commute. The lucrative potential of developing suburban neighbourhoods had been quickly recognized by the Underground Electric Railway Company (UERL) and was realized in the first instance with the extension of the tube to Golders Green in 1907. A massive housing boom followed, transforming what had been a rural hamlet into a populous and thriving suburban district.⁴⁹

Similarly to Henrietta Barnett's Hampstead Garden Suburb campaign, the UERL accentuated the health benefits and pleasing rural aesthetics of suburban living, coupled with the ease of access into and out of the city. The company's marketing poster tagline for Golders Green, which urged Londoners to view it as ‘A Place of Delightful Prospects’, also played up the promise of social advancement that the image of suburbia seemed to symbolize, appealing to the aspirations of the would-be middle classes.⁵⁰ More particularly, in depicting the appeal of suburbia, the poster conceptualized a quintessentially ‘English’ idea of home and environment as the Englishman's castle in miniature: self-contained living within a rural idyll; the dream of land ownership realized; and a little corner of England all of one's own. The contrast between the urban claustrophobia of the inner city and the open freedom of suburbia acted as a powerful and persuasive sub-text within the poster – indeed not even a sub-text in later posters.⁵¹

Jews were by no means immune to such enticements, as available statistics suggest. In 1889, 90 per cent of Jewish families in London resided in the East End. By 1929, this number had fallen to 40 per cent.⁵² Conversely, across the same period, the number of so-called ‘foreign-born’ residents of Stoke Newington, Golders Green and Edgware had risen considerably.⁵³ The early establishment of synagogues in each of these districts was a marker of their popularity amongst Jews moving out of the East End. Moreover, the chronology of their establishment reveals patterns of northward Jewish migration. The Stoke Newington Synagogue opened its doors in 1903, whilst Golders Green's congregation dates its origins to 1915, and the Edgware United Synagogue – the strength of numbers needed for its establishment probably dependent upon the extension of the tube line to Edgware in 1924 – was consecrated in 1927.⁵⁴ The latter two districts in particular were the object of intensive marketing by the UERL to day-trippers and would-be suburbanites alike.⁵⁵

However, it was not only the marketing strategies of the transport companies that enticed Jews out of the East End. The Jewish Chronicle also engaged in efforts – either directly, through targeted articles, or indirectly, via the advertising that featured in their pages – to promote suburbia and suburban lifestyles. These were not mutually exclusive developments. Under the editorship of Leopold Greenberg, himself the owner of a successful advertising agency, the 1920s marked a shift in tone for the newspaper, a shift that recognized that its readership were increasingly upwardly mobile with a degree of expendable income. Hence, the newspaper's turn towards capturing greater revenue through the sale of advertising space coincided with a heightened interest from the editorial team in the social mobility of the newspaper's core readership. In a prominent article in August 1928, for example, the newspaper reflected, with no small degree of pleasure, at the ‘vast spread of Jewish migration in the Capital’.⁵⁶ Where once Hampstead had marked the most northerly outpost of London Jewry, ‘motor locomotion’ and the growth of the railway had done much to speed up the dispersal of Jews to all corners of the city. The suburban urge had become a ‘phenomenon’, enabling some Jews to complete the ‘journey’ out of the East End to north-west London in a single move. Running parallel to the article was a half-page advertisement for the high-end department store Selfridges, flaunting its ‘Fashions for “Bridge”’, carefully placed, no doubt, to appeal to the newspapers’ affluent, or aspirating-to-be-affluent, female readership.⁵⁷

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, advertising within the Jewish Chronicle both influenced and reflected this period of change within London Jewry's demographic.⁵⁸ An increase in full-page advertisements for English holiday resorts, high-end fashion, real estate and leisure activities was one of the most noticeable developments. These adverts in part catered to the growing affluence and consumerism of the emerging middle classes, reflecting the steady move away from orthodoxy towards more secular and, indeed, more ‘English’ pastimes and priorities by the second and third generations. Many of the adverts were not specifically tailored to address a Jewish audience but were exact replicas of those that appeared in the mainstream, non-Jewish press.⁵⁹ Even notices for hotels and boarding houses in English seaside resorts forewarned that ‘The Kashrut [Jewish dietary regulations] of any of these Establishments is not to be implied by the appearance in THE JEWISH CHRONICLE of advertisements of them.’⁶⁰ Nonetheless, their presence in the Jewish Chronicle probably helped to legitimize these trappings of the middle classes amongst the newspaper's predominately Jewish readership.

These advertisements also addressed another market, speaking implicitly to the aspirations of working-class Jews. They presented an alluring fantasy world – as advertisements strive to do – which, through ownership and commodification, promised wealth, success and happiness. The Austin Motor Company, for example, promised male readers of the Jewish Chronicle that their turnover could be ‘considerably increased’ and their reputation elevated (‘it will be a credit to you and the House you represent’) by purchasing their new 12 horsepower Fabric Saloon.⁶¹ In a similar vein, the purchase of Homochord records for one's gramophone would be a marker of good taste as well as being an ‘essential luxury’ for every home.⁶² Of course not all English Jews were on the fast track to suburban living by the inter-war period. Tens of thousands still lived in the narrow and overcrowded streets of the East End, working in traditional trades such as the garment industry and cigarette making. Even for those Jews who had made the significant move away from Whitechapel and Stepney, that move was often largely symbolic, exchanging an East End postcode for an address in a nearby working-class inner-suburban area such as Hackney. Occupations would typically remain the same, and annual incomes substantially unaltered.⁶³

This continued stratification of the Anglo-Jewish community meant that adverts for fashion, property and tourist destinations were consumed by working-class suburbanites in a wholly different manner to their middle-class counterparts living sometimes not more than a few miles further north or west. In his fourth novel, With Hope Farewell, which begins in 1928, the novelist Alexander Baron sketched the agonies of desire, ambition and frustration that such adverts provoked amongst working-class Jews. In an early scene, the narrator observes of the character Clara Strong,

For most of the last twenty years it had been her consuming ambition to move to a house of their own. She had haggled with shopkeepers, gone without new clothes, refused to spend money on holidays, in order to save. She had studied advertisements, scrutinized house agents’ lists, tramped the suburbs in search of a cheap house, but all in vain.⁶⁴

The Strongs live in a two bedroomed flat in Khartoum Road, Hackney – an apparently ‘noisy, child-infested thoroughfare’.⁶⁵ Despite all of Clara's endeavours, seasonal work, ill health and the costs of their son's schooling make Hackney inescapable and the advantages of middle-class suburban living maddeningly beyond reach.

By the 1930s, the Jewish Chronicle, under the new editorship of the well-heeled and highly educated Jack Rich, had still done little to check its exclusionary narrative towards working-class Jews. One of Rich's first acts in 1932 was to create a weekly column entitled ‘Property notes’, which urged readers to take advantage of the investment potential and enviable lifestyles to be found in London's newly developing north-western suburbs. Of Golder's Green, the newspaper bragged of its ‘wonderful shopping centres, and up-to-date modern housing, all fitted with labour-saving conveniences’, careful also to include details of the ‘splendid synagogue’ and ‘very large congregation’ for those anxious to retain links to the Jewish community. With some considerable foresight, the newspaper predicted that in the future Golders Green, together with Hendon, ‘will be among the most important Jewish centres in London’.⁶⁶ However the middle-class dream was not only to be found in the suburbs. In July 1932, the newspaper insisted, ‘To dwell in pleasant places and to obtain the benefits of the sea air for themselves and their families are among the ambitions of many members of the Jewish community now resident in the more crowded areas of the metropolis and the suburbs of Greater London.’⁶⁷Alongside more conventional residential locations such as Hampstead and Wembley, the newspaper stressed the appeal of Margate, Brighton, Bournemouth and Westcliffe-on-Sea as towns that might offer an excellent alternative to city life.

This promotion of Jewish life at considerable remove from the city is not as remarkable as it might first appear, given the disappointing outcome of previous efforts to incorporate Jews into the provinces. Small Jewish communities already existed in each of these coastal towns – some for considerable duration.⁶⁸ Furthermore, as hoteliers’ adverts littering the pages of the Jewish Chronicle make abundantly clear, these resorts were also all favourite holiday destinations for Jews. Prospective guests were invited to stay at the New East Cliff Court Bournemouth for ‘every comfort and modern facility’, East Cliff Manor where sea water baths had been installed on every floor, or The Berachah for ‘dancing, tennis and all indoor amusements’ in an environment that was ‘Strictly Kosher’.⁶⁹ These hoteliers evidently understood the value of marketing their facilities and surroundings as modern, luxurious, desirable, replete with leisure activities and yet culturally sensitive to the needs of Jews. In doing so, they cast these seaside resorts as essentially a ‘Jewish’ space by the sea moulded in the likeness of an English middle-class suburb.⁷⁰

Travel and tourism was promoted with vigour by the Jewish Chronicle in the inter-war period. The newspaper's travel column, ‘Travel notes’ was launched in July 1933, apparently answering the appeal of Jewish families up and down the land whose reported singular topic of conversation at that time of year concerned where they might spend their summer holidays. The newspaper had observed, ‘In a large number of English households at the present moment, conversation in Jewish family circles is now being mainly devoted to the problem of holiday-making, with the perennial question uppermost: Where shall we go?’⁷¹ However, the article's by-line – ‘Safety, economy and comfort’ – hinted at the troubling political climate facing Jews in the 1930s. The next issue of ‘Travel notes’ lends this suspicion some credence. It contains a letter sent by the London Office of the Austrian Federal Railways who wished to assure the newspaper's readership that Jewish holiday-makers in Austria would be made welcome.⁷² The unspoken context – that fascist antisemitism was a very real and present danger for the Jewish holiday-maker travelling to Austria – disrupted somewhat the image of pleasant and desirable tourism for affluent suburban Jews.

In fact, the reality was darker still. Whilst holidays to the seaside for various sections of the Jewish community were increasingly available and affordable by the inter-war period, undercurrents of antisemitism remained a domestic as well as a continental menace. From 1923, the British Fascisti, later to become the British Fascists, became active, winning support from all strata of British society.⁷³ However, the real danger for Jews was to come from the breakaway group, the Imperial Fascist League, whose main plank was antisemitism.⁷⁴ Although these groups never elicited the same widespread appeal as fascist organizations on the continent, their very existence was enough to make Jews in Britain feel distinctly uncomfortable.⁷⁵

The activities of these groups once again raised the question of Jewish ‘difference’. A hostile and deeply upsetting encounter of this type provides the opening setting for With Hope Farewell, as the protagonist, Mark Strong, and his family, holiday in Margate. Mark and his brother wake up excited to be at the seaside, but their parents, far removed from the familiar ‘Jewish’ surroundings of Hackney, cannot help but be on edge as they encounter other holiday-makers, wondering if their ‘Jewishness’ is discernible. Initially, there is no trouble, but Mark's father cannot hold his tongue when one couple they meet cheerfully confide that Bournemouth had lost its appeal because it was ‘Overrun with Jews’. ‘Swarming with ’em. Couldn't get away from them whichever way we turned. Could we, Edna?’⁷⁶ A nasty scene ensues. The children of both couples come to blows, but it is the Strongs who find themselves ostracized and chided for bringing their ‘Whitechapel ways among decent people’ – a humiliating snub that figuratively returns the family to the East End ghetto.⁷⁷ The Strongs quickly pack up their belongings and vacate the Margate guesthouse where both families had been staying.

Clearly (in Baron's literary imagination at least) a working-class suburban address and holidays by the sea were not sufficient to eradicate Jewish difference. Yet, for Jews raised away from the East End community, their continued vilification remained perplexing. Mark Strong examines himself obsessively ‘in the mirror a hundred times’, monitoring his own speech, actions and appearance to try to ‘find what it was’ that ‘set him apart’ from other boys. Although he can find no obvious cause, ‘this word ‘Jew’ sprang up like barbed wire between himself and the world’. Yet, he concedes, ‘in his own life it had meant so little’.⁷⁸

For many Jews in the inter-war period, shaking off the damaging association between Jewish life and the East End was fraught with difficulties. Despite the physical dispersion of the urban ‘ghetto’, Jews in London could not so easily dismantle the image of ‘Jewish’ space as markedly foreign, insular, degraded and, above all, urban, which had taken root at the fin de siècle. If Englishness is bound up in the pastoral images of its countryside, as numerous academic observers and literary commentaries would have us understand, then, equally, ‘the Jew’ has been, and continues to be, associated with ‘the city’.⁷⁹ As the encounter between Hackney Jews and other non-Jewish Londoners in With Hope Farewell suggests, the working-class Jewish suburb also carried these markers of difference. Whilst Jews in London – and Britain more broadly – were certainly part of what, in American literature, has been termed the ‘white flight’ to the suburbs, across the inter-war period the Jewish community's ‘whiteness’ was still very much in question.

Conclusion

As Anglo-Jewry's drive to suburbanize demonstrates, the community's image was clearly bound up with perceptions of Jewish space. Whilst the East End symbolized the community's immigrant past – a past which, for many years, the established community preferred to ignore rather than embrace – the middle-class suburb was the future, a little piece of England that represented acceptance and integration. Images of desirable suburbia and suburban lifestyles produced within advertising, press articles and literary culture were encoded with a rather trite yet nevertheless beguiling ‘Englishness’ of idyllic semi-rural settings, genteel leisure activities and comfortable, ‘cultured’ homes. It was a fabricated new world, not quite an authentic rural idyll but happy to pose as it. What is more, the suburb, being neither the racialized city nor the non-racialized countryside, seemed to offer the possibility of being a space in which a community with particular (albeit discreet) cultural and religious needs might happily exist and integrate. Indeed, the middle-class suburb was as medicinal as it was aspirational, presented as a necessary antidote to one's overt ‘Jewishness’. It appeared to offer sanctuary through conformity.

Yet investment in this enticing vision was not universal. In the first decades of the twentieth century, many immigrant Jews were coerced into suburban relocation; by the inter-war period, they were the object of aggressive marketing to persuade them to become – or aspire to become – suburbanites. Whilst some Jews actively resisted these efforts devised and implemented by members of their own community, others whose voices have been lost within the historical record were prevented from leaving East London behind. These fraught exchanges reveal much about the intersections between ‘race’ and space’, demonstrating how control of those marked as ‘other’ can be achieved through shaping and dictating the spaces they inhabit.⁸⁰ In each of these scenarios it was, moreover, pernicious politics of place that dictated and determined the migration and movement of Jews to, through and beyond London. These domestic politics also worked to expedite the emergence of London's Jewish suburbs, growing their populations at a rate that might not – indeed probably would not – have happened organically.

Of course, despite the hopeful agenda behind the managed suburbanization of Jews in London across the pre-war and inter-war period, the vision of a tolerant world in the urban peripheries would take decades to materialize. There are still questions as to whether it ever has. The ferocity of debates surrounding the constructions of an eruv (an invisible Jewish enclosure that facilitates the free movement of Orthodox Jews on Shabbat) in north-west London in the late 1990s and early 2000s, for example, attests to the persistence of racial and religious intolerance.⁸¹ So too does the exponential rise in antisemitic incidences in Britain since 2016 – many of which have taken place within identifiably ‘Jewish’ suburban neighbourhoods – speak of the insidious, place-specific and place-driven character of prejudice. The strategies adopted by Anglo-Jewry in the early twentieth century to safeguard Jews by implementing certain ‘image control’ measures is thus striking but not wholly unjustified. Whilst the shimmering veneer left behind by the perceived success of Jewish suburbanization has obscured such strategies, greater appreciation of the role of aspiration, agency, intolerance and image can begin to unpick the complex processes that drove the rise of London's Jewish suburbs.