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  • Albion and Jerusalem: The Anglo-Jewish Community in the Post-Emancipation Era, 1858–1887
  • David S. Katz (bio)
Albion and Jerusalem: The Anglo-Jewish Community in the Post-Emancipation Era, 1858–1887, by Michael Clark; pp. x + 308. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, £61.00, $100.00.

The history of the Jews in England is usually divided into three periods. The first, from 1066 to 1290, is the pre-Expulsion era. The next runs from somewhere in the sixteenth century (with readmission along the way in 1655 to 1656) to 1858, the year in which Lionel de Rothschild took his seat in the House of Commons as the first Jewish MP, ending an eleven-year struggle to sit for the City of London, which had returned him five times. The third and final period goes from 1881 until today, the first twenty-five years of which being the time when between one hundred twenty and one hundred fifty thousand east European Jews settled in Britain, with perhaps another three hundred fifty thousand Jews spending at least two years there while passing through. In 1881, there were only about sixty thousand Jews in Britain; by 1914, only a quarter of British Jewry was native-born.

Although there are a few books that treat each of these three long periods, Michael Clark is really the first professional historian to cast his eye on the time between so-called emancipation and the beginning of mass immigration; the result, published in the prestigious Oxford Historical Monographs series, is outstanding. The chief reason for Clark's success is that he is not a Jewish historian. Indeed, as he discloses in [End Page 355] the preface, he is not even Jewish. He is a historian of Britain, and he places the history of Anglo-Jewry fully in the context of what is often called the host community by scholars whose focus is on Jewish history alone.

Under his focus, the thirty years between 1858 and 1887 become absolutely essential for understanding the transitions undergone by the Jews in England, and it now seems incredible that a book like his was not written earlier. The key watersheds for Anglo-Jewry were not only emancipation and mass immigration, but also the Bulgarian Agitation of 1876 and the subsequent renewal of the Eastern Question during the following two years. Reports of the sufferings of Bulgarian Christians during the Turkish pacification of their rebellious Balkan territories prompted William Gladstone to return from retirement to lead the Liberal party in a campaign against the Ottoman Empire. As Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli adhered to his life-long affection for Turkey and the East, and refused to be swept along with the national hysteria against the Ottomans, not only for sentimental reasons, but more importantly because of his perception that even a sickly Ottoman Empire was a crucial barrier against a healthier Russian one, the rival to British imperial ambitions.

The position of Jews in Turkey was much more secure than in Russia, and Anglo-Jewry tended to back Disraeli's policies against those of Gladstone and the Liberals. In any case, as the Jewish Chronicle insisted, "Disraeli belongs to the Jewish people, despite his baptismal certificate" (qtd. in Clark 88). This was a view held by his detractors as well, made easier by Disraeli's constant harping on the racial superiority of the Semitic race, Arabs—"Jews on horseback"—included (The Works of Benjamin Disraeli: Tancred, Volume II [M. Walter Dunne, 1904], 110). Disraeli was the first to play the racial card here, emphasizing both in parliamentary speeches and in his novels that not only was he not ashamed of his Jewish birth, but in fact he was a kind of Sephardi aristocrat whose lineage was superior to that of any bog-dwelling medieval English nobleman. At the end of the Eastern Crisis, Disraeli secured a Jewish equal rights clause in the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, spurred on by a written request from Rothschild.

The years of the "Bulgarian Horrors" were crucial for Anglo-Jewish politics. There were eighteen Jews who sat in Parliament between 1858 and 1887, and in the 1870s and 1880s there were usually...

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