Who was who? Race and Jews in turn-of-the-century Britain

Journal of British Studies

Volumn 41, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 460-483

  Cohen, Deborah ^a  

^a BROWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; CULTURAL FACTOR; ECONOMICS; EDUCATION; ETHNIC GROUP; ETHNOLOGY; HISTORY; HUMAN; JEW; LEGAL ASPECT; POLICY; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; RACE; RELIGION; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR; SOCIAL PROBLEM; SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY; SOCIAL STATUS; UNITED KINGDOM;

CONTINENTAL POPULATION GROUPS; CULTURAL CHARACTERISTICS; ETHNIC GROUPS; GREAT BRITAIN; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; JEWS; PREJUDICE; PUBLIC POLICY; RACE RELATIONS; RELIGION; SOCIAL CONDITIONS; SOCIAL IDENTIFICATION; SOCIAL PROBLEMS;

EID: 33646719716     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/341438     Document Type: Article

References (158)

1. George Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago, 1982)
2. Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960 (Hampden, Conn., 1982)
3. Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London, 1971)
4. Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 15-19
5. Paul Kennedy and Anthony Nicholls, eds., Nationalist and Racialist Movements in Britain and Germany before 1914 (London, 1981)
6. Michael Banton and Jonathan Harwood, The Race Concept (New York, 1975), p. 38
7. H. L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, Calif., 1996)
8. Jacques Barzun, Race: A Study in Superstition (1934; rev. ed., New York, 1965), p. 203
9. Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History, and Culture in Western Society (Basingstoke, 1996), p. 91
10. Ivan Hanna-ford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, D.C., 1996)
11. On Jews and race, see John Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Finde-Siècle Europe (New Haven, Conn., 1994)
12. George Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (1987; reprint, New York, 1997), pp. 65-76; 113-27
13. Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, Assimilation and Racial Anti-Semitism: The Iberian and the German Models (New York, 1982)
14. Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion and Philology in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, 1992)
15. James King, The Biology of Race (Berkeley, 1981)
16. On Jewish assimilation, see Eugene Black, Social Politics of Anglo-Jewry, 1880-1920 (Oxford. 1988)
17. Todd Endelman, Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History, 1656-1945 (Bloomington, Ind., 1990)
18. David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840-1914 (New Haven, Conn., 1994)
19. David Cesarani, ed., The Making of Modern Anglo-Jewry (Oxford, 1990)
20. Colin Holmes, Antisemitism in British Society, 1876-1939 (New York,1979)
21. Bill Williams, The Making of Manchester Jewry (Manchester, 1976), pp. 78-110
22. Juliet Steyn, The Jew: Assumptions of Identity (New York, 1999), esp. pp. 42-78, 98-114
23. Efron, Defenders of the Race, p. 28
24. See, esp., Paul Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 12-26
25. Paul Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (London, 1987)
26. Stepan, The Idea of Race
27. Bolt, Victorian Attitudes
28. Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism, pp. 15-19
29. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution, pp. 65-76, 113-27
30. Feldman, Englishmen and Jews, p. 342
31. Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of 'The Jew' in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 15
32. On the Beck case, see Committee of Inquiry into the Case of Mr. Adolf Beck, Report from the Committee Together with Minutes of Evidence, Appendix, and Facsimiles of Various Documents (London, 1904)
33. Eric Watson, Adolf Beck (Edinburgh, 1924)
34. Roger Chadwick, Bureaucratic Mercy: The Home Office and the Treatment of Capital Cases in Victorian Britain (New York, 1992)
35. "Fresh 'Double' Mystery," Daily News (1 September 1904), p. 5
36. John Briggs, Christopher Harrison, Angus McInnes, and David Vincent, Crime and Punishment in England (New York, 1996), p. 232
37. On Beck's previous career, see Report, pp. 113-19
38. T. Duerdin Dutton to the Under Secretary of State, Home Office, 25 May 1898, Public Record Office (PRO), Home Office (HO) 144/939/A60181
39. On the habitual criminal, see Martin Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England, 1830-1914 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 342-58
40. Clifford Sully, Mistaken Identity (London, 1925)
41. On the role of the press in creating scandal, see Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight (Chicago, 1992)
42. G. R. Sims. "The Police and Mr. Beck," Daily Mail (29 August 1904), p. 5
43. On the Daily Mail's conservatism, see Steven Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981), p. 395
44. Daily Telegraph (8 August, 1904)
45. "Justice - Blind and Deaf!" Pall Mall Gazette (26 November 1904)
46. "The Case of Adolf Beck," Nation (22 December 1904), p. 495
47. See also "An English Dreyfus Case," Harper's Weekly 48 (24 September 1904). p. 1464
48. "Adolf Becks Sag," Aftenpost (6 September 1904)
49. Gerald Lambourne, The Fingerprint Story (London, 1984)
50. Simon Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Cambridge, Mass., 2001)
51. Colin Beavan, Fingerprints: The Origins of Crime Detection and the Murder Case That Launched Forensic Science (New York, 2001)
52. "Distinctive Marks." PRO, HO 144/939/A 60.181/50
53. Leader, Daily Telegraph (19 August 1904), PRO, DPP 1/1
54. "Who is Smith?" Evening News and Evening Mail (9 July 1904), p. 2
55. "Who Put Adolph Beck Away?" Daily Mail (15 August 1904), p. 4
56. George R. Sims, Two King's Pardons: The Martyrdom of Adolf Beck (London, 1904), pp. 11, 18
57. "The False Lord Willoughby: An Extraordinary Case of Mistaken Identity Which Led to the Imprisonment of an Innocent Man," Famous Crimes, vol. 2, no. 35 [1904?]. p. 201
58. On a likeness between the two men, see "The Case of Adolph Beck," Daily Graphic (30 July 1904), p. 5
59. On physical stereotypes, see Sander Oilman, The Jew's Body (London, 1990)
60. Holmes, Antisemitism in British Society, pp. 17, 36-48
61. Robert Knox, Races of Men (1850; reprint, Miami: 1969), p. 133
62. In literature, see Cheyette, Constructions of "The Jew" (Cambridge. 1993), pp. 13-54
63. Bryan Cheyette, ed., Between "Race" and Culture: Representations of "the Jew" in English and American Literature (Stanford, Calif., 1996), pp. 5, 36, 132-33
64. Edgar Rosenberg, From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction (Stanford, Calif., 1960)
65. Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: The "Jewish Question" and English National Identity (Durham, N.C., 1995)
66. For an earlier period, see Frank Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660-1830 (Baltimore, 1995), pp. 10-26, 40-58, 87-88
67. "Beck's Double," Daily Express (15 September 1904), p. 5
68. Nor, for that matter, did Smith resemble the criminal types cataloged by physiognomists. See Mary Cowling, The Artist as Anthropologist: The Representations of Type and Character in Victorian Art (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 290-316
69. "The False Lord Willoughby: An Extraordinary Case of Mistaken Identity Which Led to the Imprisonment of an Innocent Man," Famous Crimes, 2, no. 34 [1904?], p. 185
70. "John Smith Found," Chronicle (30 July 1904)
71. also see " 'I am Innocent'." Daily Chronicle (27 August 1904)
72. "Another 'Double.'" News of the World (14 August 1904), p. 6
73. Adolf Beck, "The Story of Adolf Beck, Evening News and Evening Mail (2 August 1904), p. 2
74. Rosenberg, From Shylock to Svengali, pp. 10. 187-233
75. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (Munich, 1899)
76. quoted in Geoffrey Field, Evangelist of Race: Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (New York, 1981), p. 93
77. "The Just Pride of the Jew," Spectator 88 (14 June 1902): 909-10
78. Fred Dowsett, "Both Sides of Jewish Character," Westminster Review 130 (1888): 147-54
79. For a bibliography of articles and books on Jews (including European citations), see Joseph Jacobs, The Jewish Question, 1875-1884: Bibliographical Handlist (London, 1885)
80. Board of Trade, Alien Immigration, Report on the Volume and Effects of Recent Immigration from Eastern Europe into the United Kingdom (London, 1894), p. 42
81. Samuel Barnett, "Preface," in C. Russell and H. S. Lewis, The Jew in London: A Study of Racial Character and Present-Day Condition: Being Two Essays Prepared for the Toynbee Trustees (New York, 1901), pp. xxvi-xxvii
82. Goldwin Smith, "Can Jews Be Patriots: Response to Hermann Adler," Nineteenth Century 3 (1878): 878
83. Goldwin Smith. "The Jewish Question," Nineteenth Century 10 (October 1881): 495
84. Russell and Lewis, The Jew in London, p. 138
85. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (1992; reprint, London, 1994), esp. pp. 15, 18
86. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London, 1995)
87. Jennifer Brody, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture (Durham, N.C., 1998)
88. G. R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and Political Thought, 1899-1914 (Oxford, 1971), pp. 6-18, 34-67, 95-96
89. Richard Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (1990; reprint, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995), pp. xvii-17
90. See, e.g., Emil Reich, "The Jew-Baiting on the Continent," Nineteenth Century 40 (September 1896): 422-38
91. As the Dictionary of National Biography entry on Reich notes, he "attached little to no importance to race in national history." Dictionary of National Biography, 1901-11, 23:174-75. In The Jewish Question and the Mission of the Jews (1899), Charles Walston denied the existence of a Jewish race, except historically. Walston - an American born Waldstein in 1856-was an archaeologist. Between 1883 and 1889 he served as the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, and between 1895 and 1901, he held the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Cambridge University
92. Hermann Adler, "Jews and Judaism: A Rejoinder," Nineteenth Century 4 (July 1878): 135
93. On Adler, see Black, Social Politics, pp. 28-29
94. Charles Kensington Salaman, Jews as They Are (London, 1885), pp. 9, 11
95. Board of Trade, Alien Immigration: Reports on the Volume and Effects of Recent Immigration from Eastern Europe into the United Kingdom (London, 1894), p. 41n.
96. Joseph Jacobs, Jewish Ideals and Other Essays (London, 1896), p. xii
97. Arnold White, "Influence of Jews," Academy and Literature 53 (1898): 342
98. See, e.g., John Elijah Blunt, A History of the Establishment and Residence of the Jews in England With An Enquiry into their Civil Disabilities (London, 1830), pp. 65-66
99. For Gladstone, advocating the entrance of Jewish members into Parliament, Jews constituted "a very limited class in the nation." See W. E. Gladstone, Substance of a Speech on the Motion of Lord John Russell for a Committee of the Whole House, with a View to the Removal of the Remaining Jewish Disabilities, House of Commons, 16 December 1847 (London, 1848), p. 7
100. George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York, 1987), pp. 48-53
101. Stepan, Idea of Race
102. J. Gould Avery, "Racial Characteristics, as Related to Civilisation," Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 1 (1873): 63-64
103. Grant Allen, review of Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, Academy 24 (14 July 1883): 30
104. On eugenics, see G. R. Searle, Eugenics and Politics in Britain 1900-1914 (Leyden, 1976)
105. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration
106. John Beddoe, "On the Physical Characteristics of the Jewish Race," which was reprinted from Ethnological Transactions (London, 1861)
107. A. H. Sayce, "Language and Race," Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 5 (1876): 212-21
108. Later studies include A. Neubauer, "Notes on the Race-Types of the Jews," Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 15 (1886): 16-23
109. Joseph Jacobs, "On the Racial Characteristics of Modern Jews," Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 15 (1886): 23-62
110. Joseph Jacobs and Isidore Spielman, "On the Comparative Anthropometry of English Jews," Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 19 (1890): 75-88
111. On early visual representations, see Isaiah Shachar, "The Emergence of the Modern Pictorial Stereotype of 'the Jews' in England," in Studies in the Cultural Life of the Jews in England, ed. Dov Noy and Issachar Ben-Ami, Folklore Research Center, Studies E (Jerusalem, 1975)
112. "The Jews and Judaism: A Lecture by the Reverend Hugh McNeile, D.D. Delivered before the Young Men's Christian Association in Exeter Hall, 14 February 1854," in Lectures Delivered before the Young Men's Christian Association (London, n.d.), p. 416
113. David Schloss, "The Jew as a Workman," Nineteenth CenturyJanuary 1891): 96-109
114. A. Dyce, "The Jewish Workman," Cemporary Review 73 (1898): 35-50
115. Arnold White, "A Typical Alien Immigr nt," Contemporary Review 73 (1898): 241-50
116. J. A. Dyche, "The Jewish Immigrant," Contemporary Review 75 (1899): 379-99
117. For a lucid account of the difficulties of interpreting the visual representations of the past, see Carol Ockman, "When Is a Jewish Star Just a Star?" in The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, ed. Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb (London, 1995), esp. p. 123
118. Leonard Merrick, Violet Moses (1891; reprint, New York, 1927), pp. 206-7
119. For a good example, see George Meredith, Tragic Comedians (1894; reprint. London, 1924), pp. 19-21
120. Charles Morley, Studies in Board Schools (London, 1897), p. 200
121. See Deborah Nord, Beatrice Webb's Apprenticeship, p. 275, n. 48
122. On Bamardo, see Gerald McKnight, The Scandal of Syrie Maugham (London, 1980), p. 19
123. Unlike the Latin American mulatta, whose ability to pass in white society distinguished her from her male counterpart, Jewesses were not widely credited with any such facility. See Vera Kutzinski, Sugar's Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism (Charlottesville, Va., 1993)
124. Ragussis, Figures of Conversion (n. 29 above), pp. 234-59
125. Israel Zangwill, Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People (New York, 1892), p. 407
126. Merrick, Violent Moses, p. 253
127. Jacobs, "On the Racial Characteristics," p. 50
128. Fr. Galton, "Mr. Fr. Galton on Generic Images and Automatic Representation," Mind 4, no. 16 (October 1879): 551
129. "Jewish Question, 1882," London Quarterly 59 (1882): 94-119
130. Gainer, Alien Invasion, p. 13
131. Lloyd Gartner, The Jewish Immigrant in England, 1870-1914 (Detroit, Mich., 1960)
132. John Garrard, The English and Im igration, 1880-1910 (London, 1971)
133. Arnold White, The Modern Jew (London. 1899), p. xvii
134. For a critical review of White, see "The Dread of the Jew," Spectator 83 (9 September 1899): 338-39
135. Isaac d'Israeli, The Genius of Judaism (London, 1833), p. 237. The book protests the social exclusiveness of modern Jewry, as well as its adherence to superstition
136. Salaman, Jews As They Are, p. 11
137. Bill Williams, "'East and West' in Manchester Jewry, 1850-1914," in Cesarani, ed., Making of Modern Anglo-Jewry, esp. pp. 21-22
138. Adler. "Jews and Judaism: A Rejoinder," pp. 133-50
139. Joseph Jacobs, "Jewish Ideals," Jewish Quarterly Review (July 1890): 505-6. This was a lecture delivered before the Ethical Society, 12 May 1889
140. My thanks to Deborah Nord for this observation. Also see Malchow, Gothic Images, pp. 126-66
141. Board of Trade, Alien Immigration, p. 42
142. "The Just Pride of the Jew," Spectator 88 (14 June 1902): 909
143. In the second reading of the Aliens Bill, Sir Charles Dilke cited the Board of Trade's report: " 'The same individual within a few years excites the hostility of his English neighbours for his pauperism and their indignation for his wealth." Hansard, 25 April 1904, p. 1071
144. See also Geoffrey Drage, "Alien Immigration," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 58 (March 1895): 14
145. Charles Russell (1872-1917) was the principal of Patna College, India. See his Sonnets, Poems, and Translations, ed. John Alexander Chapman (London, 1920)
146. Bernard Gainer, The Alien Invasion: The Origins of the Aliens Act of 1905 (London, 1972)
147. Jewish Chronicle (26 August 1904), p. 27; (2 September 1904), p. 24
148. On Jewish racialism, see Michael Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation: A Study of the French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Oxford, 1971), pp. 10-27
149. Eric Goldstein, " 'Different Blood Flows in Our Veins': Race and Jewish Self-Definition in Late Nineteenth Century America," American Jewish History 85 (March 1997): 29-55
150. Jacques Barzun, Race: A Study in Superstition (1934; rev. ed., New York, 1965), p. x
151. Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution, p. 44
152. Nochlin and Garb, eds., The Jew in the Text, p. 23
153. Cheyette, Constructions of "The Jew," p. 270
154. Zygmunt Bauman, "Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern," in Modernity, Culture and the "Jew" ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (Cambridge, 1998), p. 144
155. and Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge, 1989), esp. pp. 40-57
156. Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, trans. Kevin O'Neill and David Suchoff (1980: reprint, Lincoln, Nebr., 1994), p. 83
157. Bauman, "Allosemitism," p. 154
158. David Feldman, "Was Modernity Good for the Jews?" in Cheyette and Marcus, eds., Modernity