The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry, 1841-1991 (review)

128 SHOFAR Spring 1995 Vol. 13, No.3 deepens our knowledge of the issues captivating and dividing Anglo-jewry during the years of the Nazi Holocaust. Susan L. Tananbaum Department of History Bowdoin College TheJewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry, 1841-1991, by David Cesarani. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 329 pp. £40.00. The last fifteen years or so have witnessed a renewed interest in modern Anglo-Jewish history. Once mainly the province of amateur historians associated with theJewish Historical Society ofEngland, the field is being transformed by a younger generation of historians on both sides of the Atlantic. Part of the impetus for this new work has come from changing understandings of the status of minorities in apparently liberal societies. Paradoxically, the relative absence of persecution of Jews in England has ceased to be a reason for avoiding the study of Anglo-Jewish history, as it once was, and has become, instead, one of the prime reasons to study it. The creation and transformation of the modern Anglo-Jewish community in a relatively tolerant and liberal society now seems to tell us more about the internal workings of assimilation, acculturation, and "modernization" of a Jewish community than does the struggle against overt discrimination and antisemitism. This new perspective is particularly resonant for Americans, the inhabitants of the other great liberal democracy whose citizens, too, have struggled with the conflicting pulls of cultural particularism and acculturation. This new flowering of Anglo-jewish history has also meant that the field, which once seemed placid, has become far more contentious. Competing interpretations of the Jewish experience in England have emerged. Questions dealing with the extent of antisemitism in British life and the nature of the "Emancipation bargain" that Jews had to make in order to become accepted within the larger British society are particularly hot issues. Among the new generation of scholars who have contributed to this new liveliness, David Cesarani has been one of the most prominent. Cesarani has now written a history of one of the central Anglo-jewish institutions, the jewish Chronicle, the weekly newspaper that began publication in the 1840s and has been published continuously since. It was, and remains, an institution that was, in Cesarani's words, "both a part Book Reviews 129 of Anglo-Jewish history and the medium through which it was refracted" (p. ix). Cesarani's point is well taken. For the historian, the Chronicle serves two related purposes. On the one hand it is a source of information about the Jewish community that is unrivaled. All the major issues that exercised the Anglo-Jewish community were explored in its columns. The articles, editorials, features, advertisements, and letters that filled its pages provide a unique glimpse of the changes within the Anglo-jewish community. On the other hand, the very existence of the paper and the role that it played within the Jewish community is an indication that it was never simply an observer of that community. For that reason, the full title of Cesarani's book, The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-jewry, is significant. Cesarani persuasively argues that the emergence of the Chronicle, and the modern European press generally, provided "an essential medium through which a newJewish identity could be constructed" (p. 248). Paradoxically, Cesarani argues, the paper served the purpose both of contributing to the creation of a specifically English (or British) Jewish consciousness and to the creation of a new international identity for the Jewish people in an age of growing nationalism. The dual role that the Chronicle played does create problems for Cesarani. On the one hand he has attempted to write a fairly detailed and complete institutional history of the paper; on the other hand, he has attempted to use the story of the paper as a device for telling the story of the Anglo-Jewish community over the past 150 years. That he is more successful at the first task than the second does not detract from the major contribution that he has made to the growing field ofAnglo-jewish history. It does mean, however, that his book may be more usefully mined by other scholars of the period, seeking to understand the institutional context of their own...