ACCORDING to the historian Todd Endelman, ‘With some exceptions, native English Jews were to be found in commerce and finance, not in the professions, the civil service, the universities, and the arts (although more Jews were entering these fields from year to year … In the absence of this [elsewhere prevalent] anticapitalist ethos, Anglo-Jewish sons tended to follow the occupational paths of their fathers and grandfathers [into commerce and finance].’ This analysis of the Anglo-Jewish occupational structure is supported by the pathologist and distinguished geneticist Redcliffe Salaman (1874‒1955), who observed that in the late Victorian age fathers in upper-middle-class Anglo-Jewish house - holds (such as his own) tried to place their sons in the family business, and only if this were not suitable would they urge them to go into the professions of law and medicine. Addressing a dinner of the Maccabeans in October 1892, the great public health reformer Ernest Abraham Hart (1835‒98) told this gathering of Jewish professionals:

If Jews wanted a higher education in the early Victorian period, they had to go to the University of London, incorporated in 1837, which (unlike the two older universities of Oxford and Cambridge) was not affiliated to the established Church and allowed Jews to receive degrees. Elsewhere there were restrictions on the admission of Jews to the universities.