The internal chronology of British–Jewish literature extends back to the eighteenth century and is therefore difficult to incorporate into recent theories of multiculturalism which focus mainly on the post-war period. For this reason, British–Jewish writing is for the most part excluded from the received historiography of post-war literature in Britain. The widespread orthodoxy in the 1960s and 70s concerning the parochialism of British culture – having supposedly rejected the cosmopolitan Modernist tradition of the first half of the century – has led to the assumption that ‘new’ postcolonial literatures reinvigorated a moribund and hopelessly provincial national tradition. It is in these terms that the belief in the decline of the English novel has been related to the decline of British imperial power and a subsequent loss of a sense of national futurity. The historical longevity of British–Jewish writing, however, helps to qualify postcolonialism as a master signifier in relation to other minority literatures in post-war Britain. By overdetermining the supplementary role of ‘new’ immigrants to Britain’s shores, other histories of migration are either foreshortened or written out altogether. The black/white paradigm of literary multiculturalism – essentially non-white writers contributing to white culture – clearly down-plays other ‘comparative ethnic histories’.

It is in the context of this conventional literary historiography that an understanding of contemporary British–Jewish writing might prove to be a useful corrective. After all, East European Jews migrating to Britain were the object of the earliest anti-immigration and naturalisation acts in the first half of the twentieth century and this legislation was extended in each decade from the 1960s onwards.