Modern British Jewry (review)

Book Reviews 175 idiosyncratic) Muslim world. Goldberg also claims that their life has to be understood in the context of "the text"-the Torah. Tripolitanian Jews were literate and religious, some of them learned: they interpreted their lives in scripture. In this respect his work has more than ethnographic interest: the people's routines and day-to-day rituals were linked by them to an ancient and universalistic Text and drew meaning and significance from that. The book has a further general interest. When post-modernists criticize anthropologists for constituting an "other," they often take as their example those European or American anthropologists who worked in Mrica or Papua New Guinea. They might achieve more nuanced analyses if they considered also what is by now the recognizable genre of studies ofJewish communities byJewish anthropologists: the corpus is sometimes pietistic, and there are undoubtedly bridges to build between Ashkenazim and others. But the imperatives of homecoming and shared Jewishness seem to explain why some anthropologists are more liable to constitute "others," and some arc less so. John Davis Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology Oxford University Modern British Jewry, by Geoffrey Alderman. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. 397 pp. $89.00. Geoffrey Alderman, a political scientist doubling as a historian, has produced an interesting and highly literate survey of the evolution, or perhaps one should say devolution, of modern British Jewry. No general historynas resynthesized the considerable body of monographic material since the days of V. D. Lipman and Cecil Roth, so such an enterprise is welcome. Unfortunately, Modern British Jewry, in spite of many virtues, falls short of our needs. Alderman's is an oddly old-fashioned history, although cast from an intriguing perspective growing out of his strong congregational commitments. No friend of the United Synagogue, his roots lie in the East End world of the Federation of Synagogues, and he speaks for the highly observant Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations. Alderman's history, therefore, while traversing much familiar ground, does so from an uncommon vantage point. His political view, quaintly Tory Hadical, revolves around the workings or, more commonly, the malfunctions of Jewish institutions. He belittles 176 SHOFAR Fall 1994 Vol. 13, No. 1 or minimizes the labors of each Chief Rabbi from the Adlers to Jakobovits while extolling the merits of the separatist Machzike Hadath or such Federation of Synagogue worthies as Bernard Homa and the ultimately criminal Morrie Davis. From his middle- to lower middle-class Jewish arriviste perspective, he devotes considerable space to intercommunal disputes about shechita and the virtues of various lesser figures among the more observant. I find this refreshing in its way and far from the traditional hagiographic or attenuated History Workshop perspectives. Alderman constantly alludes to the diversity of British Jewry and insists the notion of a "community',' is misleading. So far so good, but Alderman's own perspective remains that of a suburban, observant, generally successful, often self-isolating segment of English Jewry. However significant and previously ignored this element may be, its centrality limits Alderman's scope. The reader will look in vain for any serious discussion of the striking contributions Jews have made to British arts, culture, and education. So, too, we have surprisingly little informative discussion about London East Enders in their Stepney shtell or their greater London migrations, no feel for the rich variety of Jews and their cultures that scholars such as Bill Williams have conveyed of Mancunians or Lloyd Gartner for the East End. Alderman also makes no effort to deal with nonobservant Jews or to confront the issues of marrying out and apostasy. His history says as little as possible about Jewish relations with the wider British society of which it is and has been a part. Alderman's history is an institutional history, generally cast in a traditional mode. With a few important exceptions, he writes, as one might expect a political scientist to do, of the struggle for power within British Jewry and among British Jews. But were those institutions and the questions with which they were concerned the mainsprings ofJewish life for the past century and a half! Alderman's history is strongly although not exclusively London-centric. The introductory chapter...