Making and Remaking the Jewish East End: Space, Language and Time

While British attitudes to immigration from the Victorian period onwards have increasingly come under scrutiny, the experience of immigrant minorities remains under-researched. Our project focuses on one instructive case study: the history of Jewish immigrants to east London, their children and grandchildren. Around 150,000 Jews migrated to Britain in the late Victorian period, the majority settling in east London. Their story has largely been written from sources produced by the leaders of the established Anglo-Jewish community, who regarded immigrant Jews as profoundly different from them - poor, pious and politically radical - and who had little understanding of the East End environment where Jewish immigrants settled. However, this perspective has limited our understanding of Jewish culture and social change in modern London.

Our project seeks instead to attend to the voices of working-class and lower middle-class East End Jews. Crucially, this entails study of the Yiddish language culture of Jewish immigrants, which flourished in east London in the early twentieth century and subsequently became a formative influence on Jewish culture after World War II. The project will analyse a body of rarely used sources in Yiddish and English-language popular culture, drawing on literature, periodicals, theatre, songs, and oral history recordings. Contesting the still dominant view of Yiddish-speaking immigrants as pliable subjects moulded by philanthropy and schooling, our study will examine the forms of agency and creativity they exerted in the process of acculturation.

Instead of assuming that Jewish immigrant culture in the East End was inward- and backward-looking, we will approach it as a mobile, hybrid and transnational phenomenon. For immigrants and their children, we contend, the East End was experienced not as a ghetto but through relationships to other social and cultural spaces: to the West End Jewish world but also to European or north American centres of Jewish culture, to Cockney London and to other immigrant communities. We will explore how this diasporic hybridity was enacted in immigrant culture, including London Yiddish - a dynamic language that absorbed and adapted words, ideas and literary forms from eastern Europe to the East End. In the postwar period, the Jewish East End continued to be remade. As Jews migrated to suburbs, it became a temporal as well as a spatial marker. We will examine how, in novels, memoirs and oral histories, looking back to the East End, and the Yiddish culture in which many Jews were raised, produced new understandings of the present.

The research will be undertaken by two leading academics in the field of British Jewish studies from the disciplines of History and English, and a postdoctoral researcher experienced in Yiddish-language text and performance. Academic outputs will include articles, conference papers, an anthology of translated Yiddish literature and the digitization and transcription of oral history recordings. Impact activities will take place with partner institutions in north and east London and include public lectures, a rehearsed reading of London Yiddish drama, a guided walk in London's East End and a short film. A sound installation and creative workshops will involve contemporary East Enders with local oral history and reflection on east London's hybrid cultures in the past and present.

The project's multi-dimensional approach to the history of Jewish immigration, acculturation and integration will speak to the history of other immigrant populations in Britain. As part of our impact programme we will bring together comparative perspectives from east London community history organisations and other historians of immigration, whose expertise will help shape our research. Documenting the multi-relational character of immigrant cultures in the past will, we believe, generate a more complex and empathetic understanding of immigrant cultures in the present.

Our public engagement activities will extend the project's research to influence public understanding of immigration, place and community. Activities will draw on the extensive experience of the PI, Co-I and PDRF in innovative forms of public engagement and performance and the administrator's strong track record in organising impact activities. The project will build on existing successful partnerships between the Jewish Museum and the PI and Co-I and establish a new relationship between QMUL and its neighbour THLHLA. Activities will disseminate, test and debate ideas generated by the research for the benefit of heritage professionals working with Jews and other immigrant communities. Textual resources will be made accessible to general readers. Engagement with the immigrant history of east London for local audiences will be encouraged through activities designed to be interactive and creative, and participants' perspectives will be fed back into the work of the research team.

Beneficiaries

1. Partner heritage organisations: Jewish Museum; Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archive (THLHLA)
2. Public history professionals including museum curators, archivists, librarians, oral historians, tour guides, heritage managers and their networks
3. Third sector organisations involved in community history including Everyday Muslim, Black Cultural Archives, Eastside Community Heritage Trust, Migration Museum Project (MMP)
4. GCSE history teachers delivering the 'Historic Environment' component of the OCR History 'A' syllabus on Migration to Britain (2020-22 specified site is Spitalfields, east London)
5. People of Jewish heritage; people with an interest in Yiddish language and culture: folk singers, performers, poets, Yiddish students and native speakers
6. People interested in London history and literature
7. Local residents; migrants and their children, people with visual impairment.

How will they benefit?

1. The collections of the Jewish Museum and THLHLA will be enhanced through preservation of oral history sources (Impact Activity 5). The Museum's permanent gallery will be augmented with a new exhibit linking East End social history sections to the present day (IA 9). Curators will also benefit more broadly from the research, which will bring current historiographical developments to the Museum's presentation of Jewish history. The sound installation will enable THLHLA to extend their curatorial repertoire by working with new audio technology. The installation and related activities will stimulate engagement with unexplored areas of their audio archive (IA 3, 4 & 8).
2. For museum and heritage professionals, attending the Migration History workshop (IA 1) will deepen their understanding of immigrant history, enabling discussion of new approaches to sources such as literature and oral history.
3. The comparative focus of the workshop (IA 1) will enable community history organisations, along with the research team, to see their work in the wider context of immigrant history, local history and global history. The workshop will promote networking among community historians and extend the MMP's networks.
4. GCSE history teachers will gain access to new primary and secondary sources (IA 6) on migrant history.
5. The Yiddish theatre staging and exhibit at the Jewish Museum, (IA 7 & 9), public lectures (IA 8) and anthology (IA 6) will enable people with family connections to, or interests in the Jewish East End to learn about little-known aspects of Jewish history.
6. People interested in London literature will be introduced to a new minority literature through the guided walk (IA 2), designed for those with little knowledge of Jewish history.
7. The sound installation and related events will offer free cultural enrichment activities to east Londoners (IA 3 & 4). It will seek to attract under-represented groups including people with visual impairment who may experience barriers to visiting exhibitions.