Reasons contributing to the rise of Leeds Jewry
Before 1840 there were negligible numbers of Jews
living in Leeds. A member of the present-day Jewry
reported that in about 1841 her great grandfather had
been asked to move from Bradford to Leeds by the Leeds
Jews so they could form a minyan. By 1877 there seem
to have been about 500 Jewish families living in the
city (Krausz, 1964:5). Thereafter, the rate of increase
rose steeply, to reach 10,000 twenty years later in
1897, and 25,000 by 1907. (Lipman, 1954: 102 and
160).
Leeds was, for many Jewish immigrants, only a
staging post on the long journey from Eastern Europe
to North America. Having crossed from a Baltic port
to Hull, the refugees would make their way across England
to Liverpool to board a ship for America. In 1889 the
Select Committee on Emigration and Immigration calculated that as many as 40% of the Jews in Leeds were in
fact transient and did not intend to settle.
Chain migration played an important part in Jewish
settlement in Leeds: many religious congregations
named after particular towns in Eastern Europe which
sprang up in Leeds give evidence of this pattern of
emigration, and countless respondents reported that
their grandfathers came to Leeds because they had
friends or relatives already settled there. Owners
of tailoring workshops sent back to their home towns
for recruits; for instance Herman Friend sent to
Russia for hands for John Barran's shop with which he
was involved, and newcomers arriving from Kiev knew to
apply to Levi Zagofski for work in his small tailoring
factory.
The fact that there was tailoring employment in
Leeds was a specific attraction to many Jewish immigrants fleeing from Eastern
Europe. From records
kept by the Poor Jews' Temporary Shelter in London between 1895 and 1908, it appeared that approximately 30%
of Jews arriving 'had made garments of some sort before
coming to England" (Gartner, 1973: 58). The spectacular expansion of the tailoring industry in Leeds,
following the introduction of division of labour and
the invention of techniques of mass production in
garment cutting and making, meant that not only were
there abundant employment opportunities in tailoring,
but also that trade as a whole flourished in Leeds and
in an expansionary period there was work in other
industries, - in furniture making, boot and shoe making,
and in retail and wholesale trading.
Factors affecting the integration of the Jews in Leeds
Leeds stood in great contrast to both London and Manchester in that, when
mass immigration started in the 1880s, the new immigrants found no
long-established, Sephardi Jewish community already settled in the town, and
highly anglicised. This meant that there was not a fundamental division
within Leeds Jewry from the very beginning, reinforced and compounded by
merchant class, adherence to the Sephardi tradition, and greater length of
settlement. In practice, those families that had arrived earlier in Leeds
tended to regard themselves and be regarded by the mass of immigrants
who came later as something of an elite, but the distinction between them and the mass immigration was so
slender - based as it was, solely on date of arrival -
that over time it could not be maintained and naturally
dissolved. Thus the mass of Jewish immigrants found
no strong leadership or corporate consciousness when
they arrived in Leeds, - nor did they have any reference group to which to look in the process of adjustment and anglicisation.
While this may have had its
disadvantages, it meant that they did rot have to
oppose an entrenched minority within their own ethnic
group which had vested interests in retaining its
privileged position, nor did they have an anglicised,
community "aristocracy" trying to hurry them out of
their immigrant ways through control of educational,
cultural and welfare resources.
One consequence of the absence of a richer, long
established group of Jews in Leeds was the nature of
the stereotype attributed to the Jewish minority by
the wider community. In Leeds, up until after the
turn of the century, the image of the Jewish minority
was unequivocally one of a working-class, immigrant
group, and this can be clearly seen in the local newspapers at that period. Respondents of the present-day Jewry, unprompted, would compare their local group
favourably with that of Manchester, in terms of Gentile
attitudes, and put it down to the fact that in Leeds
there are virtually no Jewish money-lenders. Similarly in 1906, a Leeds correspondent wrote to the
Jewish
Chronicle "...The happy relations existing between
Jews and Christians in Leeds are to be attributed to
the democratic character of the community, or to be
more explicit, to the proportionately small number of
money-lenders existing in our midst." (6th July 1906.)
As already mentioned, the mass of Jewish immigrants arriving in Leeds found little institutional
structure or corporate organisation among the resident
Jews: it was the newcomers who set up, among other
things, a Talmud Torah, Friendly Societies, Jewish
trade unions, a burial society, and a workers' co-operative. There was little attempt to represent the
minority to the wider community, - there was no organ
that acted as a spokesman for the entire group, or that
had a "mandate" from the Jewish population to act on
its behalf or take responsibility for its actions.
There was no institutional or ritual representation
of the totality of the Jewry in Leeds. Thus, although
there was no major, fundamental division of the Jewish
minority into two separate sections, neither was there
a high degree of unity or of integration. Rather
than regarding Leeds Jews as forming one community,
it seems more appropriate to see them as making up
a number of more or less closely linked groups, or
sections. A Jewish Chronicle journalist, writing in
1906, made the following comment: "The casual investigator into the conditions of the Leeds Jewish community
cannot fail to be struck by the lamentable lack of co-operation that exists among the various sections."
(29th June 1906.)
These sections within Leeds Jewry were made up of
individuals belonging to the same synagogue, or having
the same national origin, or holding the same political
belief, and a Jewish person seemed to identify with
this section or sub-group rather than with his entire
local ethnic group, for the latter had no unitary, all-
embracing structure, - no unified institutional framework. The entire Jewish population of the locality
was never mobilised as a corporate entity, nor articulated as a cohesive body. The main groupings within
the Jewish minority at the turn of the century derived
from national origin (simplified in Leeds to a dichotomy between Litvaks and Pollaks), from degree of orthodoxy (ranging from ultra-orthodoxy to radical left-wing
atheism), from economic situation (there was intense
conflict between Jewish sweaters and Jewish workers in
the tailoring industry, for instance), or from politics
(even among the socialists, reformists opposed revolutionaries). Perhaps these divisions within Leeds
Jewry diminished the tendency of minority members to
regard themselves, or to be regarded, as a homogeneous
group and therefore facilitated their integration into
the local community.
Certainly in the field of trade unionism this
effect can be seen to have operated. Those Jewish
workers caught up in the evils of the sweating system
were anxious to demonstrate their solidarity with the
general English working classes and to dissociate themselves from the sweat-shop owners, the masters, who
were largely Jewish. It has been argued that the
Jewish trade unionists, by their success in labour
organisation, did succeed in modifying Gentile anti-alien prejudice in Leeds prior to the passing of the
Aliens Act in 1905 (Buckman, 1968 : 322 passim), In
so far as Jewish individuals were acting in response to
stimuli from the employment situation, rather than
allowing ethnic considerations to override their
economic interests, so they found themselves in some
contexts identifying more strongly with their Gentile
colleagues than with their co-religionists to whom
they were in economic opposition. Thus, identification
was with a section of Leeds Jewry, not with its totality.
In fields other than trade unionism, the Jews were
also politically active in Leeds and this readiness to
participate in local affairs probably contributed significantly to their integration into the non-Jewish
society of Leeds. In 1899 the first Jew to be made a
magistrate was one Paul Hirsch. This man was a very
successful businessman and moved in Gentile circles with
some ease and frequency. Although at one time the
President of the Great Synagogue, by the end of his
life he had moved so far out of the Jewish community
that he was buried in a Gentile cemetery. The first
Jew to win a seat on the Leeds City Council did not do
so until after Queen Victoria's death, in 1904; and
the first Jew on the Board of Guardians was not elected
until 1912. There were no instances of Jewish Lord
Mayors and Members of Parliament in Leeds until many.
years later. However, the ordinary Jewish people took
an active part in politics, and many political groups
sprang up within their ranks, including vociferous
socialist and anarchist organisations. In 1906 the
Jewish Chronicle noted that in Leeds "the Jews hold the
balance of electoral power in the Central and Brunswick
Wards, and they always take a very keen interest in
local and general elections". (29th June 1906.)
Gerald Balfour was in fact defeated by the Jewish vote
when he stood for Parliament in Leeds, because of his
support for anti-alien restrictions. That the Jewish
population was by no means united in political adherence
is shown by the fact that Gerald Balfour's candidacy
was strongly supported by one section of Leeds Jews,
whose spokesman was the influential Dr. Julius Friend.
The political consciousness, and maybe more
generally the anglicisation, of the Jewish immigrants
in Leeds was greatly stimulated by the labour movement
in the tailoring industry. Because industrial relations
and conditions of employment in tailoring were matters
of such importance to so many Jews in Leeds, the trade
union concerned, - the Jewish Tailors', Machinists'
and Pressers' Union - had a very strong influence on
the local Jewish community as a whole, and on the
shaping of its development in the political sphere and
other areas of adjustment to British culture and society. Its club constituted one of the main social
centres for the Jewish minority, and in the eyes of
many Leeds people (both Gentile and Jew) the Jewish
tailors' trade union seems to have gone further towards
constituting a body representative of Leeds Jewry as a
whole, than any other institution or organisation.
Despite the adverse publicity that the Jewish
immigrants in the tailoring industry attracted around
the time that the Board of Trade published its Report
on the Sweating System in Leeds, in 1888, nevertheless
the overall contribution that the immigrants made to
the expansion of the Leeds clothing trade and, thereby,
to the whole economy of the city cannot be ignored.
Occupationally, the Jews were highly concentrated
within a narrow range of employment, and it was not
only in skilled jobs that the newcomers faced discriminatory exclusion. Respondents interviewed during
the course of this study reported grandfathers who,
before immigration, had worked in breweries, mines,
and railways being unable to obtain work in these
occupations in Leeds on account of being Jewish.
The concentration of Jews in tailoring in Leeds
means that in certain sectors of the clothing industry
and in certain institutions, Jews predominated, (and
still do to this day). Gentile tailors, outnumbered
by Jewish colleagues at work, learnt to speak Yiddish:
non-Jews picked up Jewish habits of expression, humour,
gesture and food preferences. As one present-day
respondent put it "Nowhere are Gentiles as much like
Jews as in Leeds". Although there was doubtlessly a
certain degree of acculturation by the majority to the
ways of the Jewish minority, by far the greater cultural
adaption, was of course in the opposite direction, -
an adoption of majority traits and patterns by the
minority-group members.
Analytically, acculturation might be broken down
into several different processes. The minority may
adopt majority traits because they are the cultural
patterns of the dominant majority (patterns concerned
with social interaction and leisure-time pursuits are
commonly of this kind) or it may adopt a similar response to some facet of the total social structure as
that adopted by the majority (the greatly lowered birthrate of the Jews after settling in Leeds might be an
example here). The immigrant minority might respond
to the social structure of the receiving society in a
different way to the majority, and yet this must still
be regarded as acculturation (the way in which the Jews
made such good use of the state-provided education in
Leeds exemplifies this process); finally, the minority
group might evolve new cultural patterns that have
their antecedents neither in the pre-immigration Jewish
culture, nor in the Leeds Gentile culture, but represent a case of genuine culture generation.
(Voluntary-association activity, especially among the womenfolk of
the present day Jewry in Leeds might qualify for inclusion here. Charitable,
cultural, and social ends are served simultaneously by the fund-raising
functions which are an integral part of most of the voluntary associations,
and which are peculiar to the Jewish minority in their form.)
Acculturation entails the loss or modification of
cultural traits, at the same time as the adoption of
new patterns. In Leeds, the area of religious practice was one in which there was a conspicuous abandonment of pre-immigration patterns. The change to a
more secular way of life on leaving the shtetl or ghetto
meant, among other things, that full time commitment to
religious study ceased to be regarded any longer as an
ideal for adult males. A "yeshiva bocher" soon ceased
to be an ideal or 'preferred' son-in-law in Leeds, and
fathers of marriageable girls started looking rather
for young men who might succeed economically. Among
all the life-histories of early Jewish immigrants to
Leeds, collected from their descendants in the course
of this study, not one case of an English-born son
becoming a "yeshiva bocher" was reported. This surely
represents a serious modification of value and behaviour
patterns that had formerly been followed in Eastern
Europe.
The ease or difficulty with which a local immigrant
minority adapts to the ways of its new host society
must have some bearing on the success with which that
minority is integrated into the local community. In so
far as Leeds Jewry embraced values and ideals that were
highly regarded by the Gentile society also, then they
were "successful", and became upwardly socially mobile.
Education was a sphere in which the Jews made very good
use of the resources available to everyone and thereby
improved their potential to succeed in the occupational
and social fields. The Board schools in the Leylands -
the district in which the Jewish minority was concentrated residentially - became almost totally Jewish over
time, and became nationally renowned for high attendance
rates and for outstanding scholastic achievement. As
the Jewish enrolment rose at these neighbourhood
schools there was complaint from the non-Jewish parents:
in the log of the Darley Street School the headmaster
noted, in the Spring of 1888, that "many of the Gentile
parents were displeased because their children had
holiday the week before Easter on account of Jewish
Passover". But the staff of these schools and the
education authorities were highly impressed by their
immigrant pupils and the rapidity with which they learnt
English and the 'earnestness with which they pursued
their studies. "Since 1897, Gower Street School, which
is exclusively attended by Jewish children...holds the
record for attendance...with the almost miraculous percentage of 99.47." (Jewish Chronicle, 29th June 1906.)
Not only were the pupils apt, but their parents were very
keen for them to do well at school. In marked contrast
to the Gentile parents from the same or similar class
and district, the Jewish parents gave their children
every encouragement to continue with their education
and go on to secondary school; it was largely this
factor that contributed to the disproportionate number
of Jewish children who annually took up the Junior City
Scholarships to go to secondary school, for the primary
school headmaster was bound to ask the permission of
the parents before entering pupils for the scholarship
examination. By 1909, Jewish children were taking over
25% of the 150 scholarships awarded each year (Jewish
Chronicle, 9th July 1909), in spite of their ethnic group constituting only
a fraction of that percentage of the total population of Leeds at that time.
[In 1904 the total Leeds population was approximately
437,000 and the Jewry's 25,000=5.7%.]
Again and again, during the collection of life-histories in the course of this research, the pattern
was repeated: children of impoverished tailors were
somehow supported through secondary and even university
education, so that they then became professionals in
the legal, medical, dental or teaching fields, generally.
Few of these early Jewish graduates obtained non-vocational degrees.
Another area in which it might be assumed that a
certain degree of development may have contributed to
the success with which the Jewish minority was integrated
into the fabric of the local Leeds community, is the
area of minority organisation. To the extent that
minority organisations provided the immigrant with
means of self-help and mutual aid, with a psychologically satisfying framework of support, control and
identification, and with a corporate basis from which
to negotiate with the majority society, then the
institutional structure of the ethnic group can be seen
as promoting that group's integration and co-aptation.
Developed beyond a certain degree, of course, all
these three functions of minority organisation would
hinder assimilation and tend to cause a pluralist type
of situation to grow up, but up to a certain level
there seems little doubt that an organised minority
group is better equipped to adapt and adjust to the
majority society than is a group with no internal
institutional structure.
The chief organisation that the Jewish minority
established for looking after the welfare of its own
was the Leeds Jewish Board of Guardians, which was
founded in 1878. Its funds derived from collections
made among individuals, and from money granted to it
by synagogues. Because of the lack of a wealthy
section of the Jewish minority, the Board of Guardians
was in effect taking from the poor to give to the poorer,
and it was always very short of funds, - although this
shortage may have been somewhat exacerbated by lack of
co-operation among the different sections of the Leeds
Jewish population. In 1894 its annual .expenditure was
around £500, while by 1908 this had risen to almost
£1,000. (Saipe, 1956 : 29.) The philosophy of the
Board was to help people help themselves, and loans and
grants were given in great numbers to enable immigrants
to set themselves up in business, or to continue their
journey to North America. Every effort was made to
keep Jewish people from going to the work-house, and in
relation to the size and poverty of the Jewish group,
very few Jews received Poor Law Relief in Leeds:-
in 1891 only 11, 1894 - 120, and in 1906 - 147. (Buckman,
1968 : 447.)
In 1899, another institution of great significance
to Leeds Jewry was set up, and that was the Leeds Jewish
workers' Burial and Trading Society. This was a co-
operative whose aims were to provide members with
burial for themselves, their wives and children with
no additional payment, and to supply members with
Kosher meat at the cheapest possible price.
A further institution of self-help and mutual
aid that was highly developed in Leeds Jewry was the
Friendly Society. The earliest was founded in 1852,
and by the end of the Victorian era there were numbers
of these associations in Leeds. Members made weekly
contributions, then drew benefits at times of sickness,
bereavement and (in some cases) unemployment. Some
lodges were dividing societies or "tontines", and the
accumulated funds were disbursed at the Jewish New Year
and Passover. Some of these Friendly Societies were
associated with trade unions: V.D. Lipman notes two in
Leeds in 1901. (Lipman, 1954 : 120.)
Many other associations concerned with welfare
sprang up in the last years of the nineteenth century
among the Jews of Leeds, and Kransz writes that "apart
from the Jewish Board of Guardians, at least ten charity
organisations were founded". (Krausz, 1964 : 11.)
The main function of these charitable associations
was undoubtedly the relief of hardship, but they also
had a secondary and very important function of providing
their members with a framework within which to do voluntary work, to interact with other Jews, to identify
with the ethnic group and generally to feel that they
'belonged'. Other institutions had these social and
ethnic goals as their ostensible and main aim. The
Leeds Jewish Institute, founded in 1896, falls into
this category of organisation. Less obviously, but
arguably, the Talmud Torah and the proliferation of
"chevrot" or small congregations could also be included
here, as their function was to promote religio-ethnic
identification. The Talmud Torah was founded in the
late 1870's, and in 1888 a Leeds Hebrew School was
inaugurated which operated in the evenings on the
premises of the Board School in Gower Street. The
number of synagogues and chevrot increased in Leeds
throughout the reign of Queen Victoria, and in 1901
stood at around ten.
One final group of organisations that should be
mentioned here is the Zionist ones. The earliest
Zionist association in Leeds was formed in 1898, and
there was also a small intellectual movement called
the Hebrew Literary Society which pursued cultural and
educational activities associated with Zionism. This
laid the early foundations for what was to become a
movement of supreme importance in the Jewish minority
in Leeds, boosted as it was by the advent of Selig
Brodetsky to live in the city.
Then considering institutions that provided the
Jewish immigrant with a corporate basis from which to
negotiate with the majority, the one that springs most
readily to mind is the Amalgamated Jewish Tailors',
Machinists' and Pressers' Union. This became known
nationally for its successful organisation of clothing
industry labour. It was founded in 1893 although it
was built on earlier Jewish tailoring trade unions that
had preceded it. England's first official strike of a
Jewish trade union had been called in Leeds in May 1888,
but there had been an unofficial strike even earlier
than that, in 1885. Having begun with an initial
membership of 100, six years later, in 1899, this
number had risen to 1,200 and the union remained a
very strong and stable one, unlike any that was achieved
in the tailoring industry in the East End of London, or
elsewhere. There has been much discussion of why
this trade union was so successful in Leeds, and it
is generally attributed - in part at least - to the
fact that tailoring work-shops in Leeds tended to be
larger, and orders were more regular, than in London,
because Leeds sweatshops tended to fill large orders
for the wholesale factories.
It has already been suggested that the activities
of the Jewish tailoring trade union diminished anti-alien feeling in Leeds, and there is evidence from
local newspapers that many Leeds Gentiles admired and
respected the Jewish minority for the way in which it
coped with so many of its welfare problems itself.
The extent to which social, cultural and religious
organisations helped Jewish people in their adjustment
to life in. Leeds is difficult to assess, but at the
cost of appearing "clannish" and exclusionist to the
non-Jews, these Jewish institutions, by providing an
alternative, minority, status system, might be considered to have had a positive effect on the ability of
the Jewish minority member to cope successfully with
the life in a new and different majority society.
Summary
Thus the fact that geographically Leeds was strategically placed on a migration route, the fact that
once immigration started a chain reaction came into
effect, the fact that there was tailoring work in Leeds
when so many Jews had some kind of tailoring experience,
and the fact that Leeds was in a state of economic
expansion and development at the time of mass emigration from Eastern Europe, - all contributed to the
settlement of a sizeable Jewish minority in Leeds.
The consideration of the factors affecting the
integration of the Jews in Leeds was started by a discussion of the composition and degree of homogeneity
of the Jewish minority. The effects of the absence
of a"long-established Jewry and the lack of a minority-
wide unity were also considered. It was suggested
that Jewish participation in local politics contributed
to the penetration of majority networks and circles
by the immigrant Jews, and the role of political con-
sciousness, and the contribution that the Jews made to
the expanding clothing industry and Leeds' economy were
also discussed.
A consideration of acculturation followed, and of
the ways in which the behaviour and value patterns of
the minority changed in response to the new situation
facing it after immigration. The extent to which the
post-immigration values of the Jewish minority contributed to the success with which it was integrated into
the local community was assessed, with particular
reference to education.
Minority organisation among Leeds Jewry was examined at some length and was considered in terms of its
supplying the immigrant with means of self-help and
mutual aid, of its providing a psychologically satisfying framework for support, control and identification for the minority member, and of its establishing
a corporate basis from which to negotiate with the
majority society. In all these aspects the institutional structure of the Jewish minority in Leeds was
found to have contributed to the adaptation evolved
between the Jewish minority and the Gentile majority
in Leeds.
| Bibliography |
|
|
| Buckman, J. |
1968 : |
"The Economic and Social History of Alien Immigrants to
Leeds, 1880-1914." Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Strathclyde University |
| Gartner, L. P. |
1973 : |
"The Jewish Immigrant in
England, 1870-1914" (2nd
Edition). Simon. London. |
| Krausz, E. |
1964 : |
"Leeds Jewry", Heffer. The
Jewish Historical Society
of England. Cambridge. |
| Lipman, V. D. |
1954 : |
"The Social History of the
Jews in England, 1850-1950".
Watts. London. |
| Saipe, L. |
1956 : |
"Leeds Tercentenary Celebrations." Booklet of the
Leeds Jewish Representative
Council. Leeds. |
Introductory
Data on
Leeds
A Sketch of Leeds Jewry in the 19th Century
by A. S. Diamond
Provincial Jewry in Victorian
Britain - List of Contents
Leeds Jewish Community
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