THIS chapter seeks to establish why so many young Jews from east European immigrant backgrounds in England set out to become doctors, when this trend began, and how it gathered momentum. It considers the rate of recruitment of Jewish medical students in London and the leading provincial centres with large immigrant populations—Manchester, Leeds, and Liverpool; and I discuss whether or not there was antisemitism in the admissions policy of the medical schools, and how important antipathy towards Jews was among English medical students.

According to Calvin Goldscheider and Alan Zuckerman (writing about America),

However, this is not the whole story, at least not for England, where many Jewish medical students, although not the majority, came from poor households. An additional important factor is the strong tradition of Bible and Talmud study among Jews. Joel Perlmann, after examining a sample of 12,000 individuals from different ethnic backgrounds in Providence, Rhode Island, asserted that certain shared cultural values and the love of learning were as important in explaining the high levels of Jewish educational attainment as the structural factors emphasized by Goldscheider and Zuckerman. ‘Westernisation did not affect this instinct [for learning]’, noted D. B. Stanhill in 1932. ‘It merely secularised the character of the learning. The thirst for knowledge in the emancipated continental Jew at the University today is no less keen than that of his grandfather at the Yeshibah fifty years ago.’ As Perlmann put it, ‘The point is not so much the level of learning achieved, but rather the honorable place learning enjoyed in the traditional culture.’