Language:
English
Year of publication:
1985
Titel der Quelle:
City, Class and Culture
Angaben zur Quelle:
(1985) 74-102
Keywords:
Jews
;
Antisemitism Periodicals
;
Jews History 19th century
;
Manchester (England)
Abstract:
In the last quarter of the 19th century, Manchester was home to the largest Jewish community in provincial England. By 1870 the ideology of tolerance had become part of the generally accepted currency of middle-class opinion, but its application depended on a delicate balance of social forces. During the 1870s changes occurred to upset this balance; Polish and Russian Jewish immigrants began to settle in the city, who were generally poor and were easily identifiable as a "foreign element". Discusses periodicals of the 1870s-80s which launched attacks on Jewry, drawing on medieval stereotypes. The anti-Jewish attacks generally arose from anti-alienism (expressed strongly in the "Manchester City News") rather than racist antisemitism (except in the literary and satirical weekly "Spy"). However, the tradition of toleration remained dominant in middle-class attitudes toward Jews, because the Jewish elite promoted policies of Anglicization which alone would render immigrant Jewry acceptable. Jews were validated on the basis of their conformity to the values and manners of bourgeois English society. Antisemitism became disreputable, but it was not destroyed.
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