Pogroms, Peasants, Jews

There is now a considerable literature on Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe into Britain between 1880 and 1914, and the response it provoked among British Jews and the population as a whole. However, as Sam Johnson points out here, much of this scholarship is weakened by a rather parochial approach. There has been little effort to relate the perception of immigrant Jews to the ways in which the Tsarist Empire (from which most of them came) was understood, or to the ways in which the British viewed the Jewish population of Eastern Europe. Except for the obvious role of persecution driving Jews westwards, consideration of the ‘Jewish question’ in Russia and Romania has been treated separately from domestic anti-Jewish feeling and anti-alienism, in particular. Johnson is to be congratulated for, at last, bringing all these strands together. He has plugged a genuine gap in the literature by exploring the dynamic relationship between domestic politics, embracing perceptions of Jewish issues and foreign affairs, including British comprehension of the countries that were expelling their Jews

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