Of Englishness and Jewishness

As should be the case with the best journals of a certain vintage, the Jewish Quarterly Review enjoys a storied and reverberant past. In its very first volume (1.4 [1889], pp. 376–407), under the inspired editorship of Israel Abrahams and C. G. Montefiore, it published an extended essay by a self-styled "simple layman" titled "English Judaism. A Criticism and a Classification." The young writer earnestly argues that to him

the word "Jew" is duplex. Formerly, a Jew by birth was a Jew by creed; the two meanings were inseparable. Now we must distinguish; and separate born Jews who profess Judaism, from born Jews who do not.

(p. 389)

In an intellectual climate that encourages plurality of belief and in a country (Great Britain) that but thirty years before had granted its Jews full citizenship under the law, Judaism has become—so the author contends—a faith of questionable relevance to an increasingly assimilated people. "Man is a religion-making animal," he maintains, but "fossilization is the fate of all spiritual truths" (p. 395). Nodding at what he perceives as the ossified ghetto mentality of the Jews of London's East End, he finds

something touching … in the common belief of a people in an apparent impossibility, … in the return of its olden glories, in the triumph of its national ideals after persecution and repression, something pathetic in its simple faith and credulous hope, as of a mother who clasps her dead child to her breast, and will not let it go.

(p. 406)

The skepticism and negativity here are of a man whose secular impulses have thrown the spiritual beliefs of his forefathers into question. Yet, as one reads the piece today, there is throughout a strongly counterintuitive sense that the essayist's whole being has been molded and absorbed by his Judaism, the religion that he claims in the same breath has "undergone a very rigor mortis" (p. 392). A disturbing imbalance is created by the sheer difficulty in weighing his "Jewishness" with his "Englishness." The title of the essay, "English Judaism," and its tenor remai n perplexingly oxymoronic. They foretell a strained relationship that would possess the mind of the young author for the rest of his life, no less at this time than when—as Israel Zangwill—he would become the most celebrated Jewish writer of his day.

The uneasy tensions brought to a head by the perception of being both English and Jewish are central to all four works under review here. They raise questions about what it is to be "English" perhaps even more so than they probe into the particular and sometimes peculiar Jewish identity of their subjects. And although they deal with a historical period ranging from the early nineteenth century through to the start of the 1920s, those questions of identity and its construction are no less pertinent to us in the multicultural ambience of the still uncharted twenty-first century. More than a generation ago, it was not uncommon to listen to Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany express their pride at becoming British citizens but simultaneously demurring from calling themselves "English" (which they clearly saw themselves as not). Today, with a shrinking Anglo-Jewish population and a persistent undercurrent of anti-Semitism in the country, young English-born Jews often face a similar quandary both in terms of self-identification and in their coping with how others in the gentile world might perceive them. A reading of any one of these four books will show that there is nothing new to...