Before analysing left-wing attitudes to ethnicity and socialist interactions with minority communal institutions in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, the text will examine the processes by which Ashkenazi Jews and Irish Catholics came to settle in the East End from the early nineteenth century onwards. This chapter will identify both the similarities in the Jewish and Irish experiences of settlement in East London, the common factors involved in leaving a (predominantly rural) homeland for a distant urban metropolis, and also the crucial differences between the Irish and Jewish diasporic experience of migration, flight, and settlement in the nineteenth century. The varying political and economic circumstances in which Irish Catholics and Jews left their countries had important consequences for subsequent minority interactions with radical politics and with the wider host society. The post-Famine wave of migration from Ireland from the mid-1840s and the Jewish exodus from Eastern Europe post-1881 constituted the two great British immigration ‘crises’ of the nineteenth century. The ways in which the host society received those arrivals that had crossed the Irish Sea were substantially replicated in the reception awaiting those refugees who left the Pale of Settlement (the areas of Western Russia and Poland in which Jewish settlement was restricted under the Tsarist legal system) forty years later.

The Roots of the Irish and Jewish Communities in East London

Jewish settlement in the metropolis dates back to the Norman Conquest. From the beginning, Jewish traders were a target for hostility and ethnic violence, particularly in times of economic distress or religious fervour. At the coronation of Richard I a widespread pogrom against London Jews formed a part of the events to mark the occasion. William of Newbury noted: ‘[A] pleasing rumour spread with incredible rapidity through all London, namely that the King had ordered all the Jews to be exterminated.’ The attacks spread to the rest of the country. By the second half of the thirteenth century, monarch-sanctioned and Church-condoned anti-Jewish violence was a frequent occurrence. In 1290, the entire Jewish population was expelled, the first example of a complete expulsion of Jews to take place in Western Europe. Jews would not be allowed openly to settle in England until 1655.