Regulating Sexuality in The Jewish East End

Historians have written very little about sexual health in the Jewish East End. This is despite the fact that a rich historiography exists on 'white slavery', a moral panic which pushed the degenerate sexuality of England's Jewish minority to the forefront of debates on immigration (Bristow, 1985). Although Britain's anti-alienists did not fixate on the spectre of the syphilitic Jewish prostitute to the same degree as their European counterparts (Geller, 2011), the 1905 Aliens Act was nonetheless focused on obstructing an influx of both Jewish prostitutes and Jewish disease (Knepper, 2007 and Maglen, 2006). As such, the image of the Jewish sexual deviant came to play a key role in consolidating the boundaries of whiteness and citizenship in Britain, and became a pervasive feature of antisemitic conspiracy (Yarfitz, 2019). This in turn produced a rich tapestry of welfare institutions aimed at the reform and regulation of the East End's immigrant community, often with conflicting visions of acceptable forms of Jewish citizenship.

The records of the Whitechapel Venereal Disease Clinic offer a uniquely intimate insight into the way notions of Jewish sexual deviancy played out on the ground, revealing traces of the patient/doctor interaction, as well as potentially shedding light on the actual sexual practices of Jewish immigrants. My research would make use of this material to take a dual focus: exploring the construction of Jewish immigrants as harbingers of physical and moral degradation in tandem with the actual lived experiences of the immigrant community. Through reading the medical data held at the Whitechapel Clinic 'against the grain', and considering it as part of a wider system of regulation, I intend to build on the work of historians Lara Marks (1994) and Susan Tananbaum (2014) to ask how Jews made use of their interactions with medical and welfare professionals. I will seek to identify both instances of agency and dynamics of coercion, exploring how new British Jewish identities were constructed in the process.

Through the use of oral histories (inspired by Fisher & Szreter, 2010), I will explore how Jewish sexual self-understanding evolved in the post-war years, with a sensitivity to the intergenerational tensions produced by acculturation, and the persistence of connections between Jews and sexual 'underworlds' (both real and imagined). I hope to analyse the long-term legacies of eugenicist understandings of sexual health for shaping contemporary border regimes, with a focus on how notions of sexual citizenship evolved with the advent of the NHS.

Through probing at the processes by which Jewish identities have been constructed within and against medico-moral politics in Britain (Mort, 2000), this research will make an important contribution to British Jewish history while also enriching understandings of contemporary sexualised antisemitic conspiracy (Langer, 2022). Centrally, this history speaks to the way that health and welfare services continue to contribute to the construction of 'outsiders' - both sexualised and racialised - in modern Britain. As such, it brings serious implications to bear on our understandings of the development of immigrant identities and the construction of British citizenship more broadly.