Lily Ford: Dreams of Art in the Jewish East End, Part 1

DREAMS OF ART IN THE JEWISH EAST END PART 1: THE BACKGROUND TO THE FOUNDING OF THE BEN URI, 1900-1915 DR LILY FORD

DATE JULY 2015 SOURCE COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR ESSAY WRITTEN AS PART OF THE BEN URI GALLERY’S RESEARCHER IN RESIDENCE PROGRAMME

Dreams of Art in the Jewish East End Part 1: the background to the founding of the Ben Uri, 1900-1915

by Lily Ford Introduction to project This collection of essays examines the early decades of a century-long history of Jewish, socially engaged art collecting in London. The Ben Uri Art Society was founded over one hundred years ago, but its early years have remained unexplored because much of the relevant archival material was inaccessible for the greater part of the twentieth century. Recent developments, including the reaccession of the society’s first minute book after some thirty years at New York’s YIVO archive, the appointment of an archivist to scrutinize and catalogue the Ben Uri’s quite large collection of papers, and the translation from Yiddish to English of much of the archival material dated between 1915 and around 1940, have facilitated new research possibilities for the English-speaking historian, enabling a fresh approach to the foundation and early life of this unique organization 1.

As Ben Uri’s Researcher in Residence I spent several months consulting its archive and seeking to contextualize its personalities, organizations and ideas within broader histories – of London Jewry, Yiddishism, and wartime and interwar social and cultural life. My research is primarily driven by an interest in the protagonists of the society, rather than in the artists whose work it began to acquire. The Ben Uri’s own catalogues already offer substantial scholarship on many of its artists, including the Whitechapel boys, Alfred Wolmark and William Rothenstein, and work also exists on such notable figures as Simeon Solomon and Solomon J. Solomon2. There is far less on those art-loving businessmen, shopkeepers and intellectuals who sustained the society through some fairly tumultuous years in the 1910s and 1920s. As Tony Kushner has pointed out, the Jewish East End was neglected by Jewish historians up until the 1970s, and although since then several key works have brought it more to the fore, there are very few accounts of the networks of groups and associations and their broader cultural impact 3. Several 1 Footnote references to the Ben Uri’s first minute book are abbreviated to ‘1916-21 Minutes’. Page numbers refer to the page numbers in the original Yiddish manuscript, which are retained in Sima Beeri’s translation into English, from which all quotes are taken. Dates for the meetings to which the minutes refer are also given in the footnotes, and if the meeting is recorded as a members’ or committee meeting this is also noted. Footnote references to translations of Yiddish press cuttings use the Ben Uri Archive catalogue reference, eg. PR 01/01/01, which refers to the volume and page number of Judah Beach’s cuttings albums. The Ben Uri Archive will be referred to in notes as BU Archive.

2 Relevant Ben Uri catalogues include: Rachel Dickson and Sarah MacDougall eds. Out of Chaos: Ben Uri: 100 Years in London, London: Ben Uri, 2015; Dickson and MacDougall eds. Ben Uri: 100 Years in London: Art Identity Migration, London, Ben Uri, 2015; MacDougall and Dickson eds. Whitechapel at War, London: Ben Uri, 2008; The Ben Uri Story from Art Society to Museum and the influence of Anglo-Jewish Artists on the Modern British Movement, London: Ben Uri Gallery, 2001; Jenny Pery ed. Solomon J. Solomon, RA, London: Ben Uri, 1990. Other relevant publications include: Sarah MacDougall ‘“Something is happening there”: early British modernism, the Great War and the “Whitechapel Boys”’ in Michael J. Walsh ed. London, Modernism and 1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010, pp. 122-148. There is an online research archive on Simeon Solomon run by Roberto C. Ferrari and Carolyn Conroy: http://www.simeonsolomon.com Simeon Solomon Research Archive. Published 28 February 2010. Accessed 9 July 2015. Peter Gross’s unpublished PhD thesis 'Ostjuden and Westjuden: art and Anglo-Jewish identity' has valuable chapters on Solomon J. Solomon, William Rothenstein and Alfred Wolmark. Thanks to Rachel Dickson for making the latter available to me.

3 Tony Kushner ‘The End of the ‘Anglo-Jewish Progress Show: Representations of the Jewish East End, 1887-1987’ in Kushner ed. The Jewish Heritage in British History: Englishness and Jewishness. London: Frank Cass, 1992. 78-105. The same year that Kushner’s historiographical review appeared saw the publication of Sharman Kadish’s Bolsheviks and British

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of these are by David Mazower, who through his own interest and extensive knowledge of the period, has made important contributions to the history of this community 4. It is to the research already undertaken by Mazower that I hope to add with this paper, which provides a chronological, archive-based and contextualized history of the Ben Uri’s first fifteen years.

The first part of the project establishes some background by addressing the particular wave of Jewish migration to London that resulted in the formation of the Ben Uri, and the centrality of Whitechapel and the East End for Eastern European Jews in London. Part 2 turns to the foundation of the Ben Uri and the profiles of its principal proponents. Although several pages are devoted to the society’s progenitor, Lazar Berson, I move on to focus on the groupings of individuals who dominated the society’s activities as the 1910s turned into the 1920s, reflecting on the broader cultural and ideological associations these brought into the organization, and its transformation from a society to a collecting and exhibiting body, which is described in Part 3.

As the story of the Ben Uri Society unfolds from the minutes and cuttings of its archive, I pause to consider proceedings with a wider lens on London – of the geographical and cultural connotations of the east and the west for London Jews, of the city in wartime conditions, of what it was to be a Jew travelling through the metropolis, and of how far Yiddish culture reached any kind of mainstream media recognition in this period. Finally, as the Ben Uri settles into its first East End home in 1930, I revisit the changing dynamic of Yiddishism and Jewish East London, on the cusp of a new and quite different wave of Jewish immigration from Germany and Austria.

Jews: The Anglo-Jewish Community, Britain and the Russian Revolution, London: Frank Cass, 1992, which does offer a history of the political aspects of the Jewish East End in the first decades of the twentieth century.

4 David Mazower ‘Lazar Berson and the origins of the Ben Uri Art Society’ in The Ben Uri Story from Art Society to Museum and the influence of Anglo-Jewish Artists on the Modern British Movement, London: Ben Uri Gallery, 2001, pp. 3758, and ‘The Ben Uri and Yiddish Culture’ in Dickson and MacDougall eds. Ben Uri: 100 Years in London: Art Identity Migration, London, Ben Uri, 2015, pp. 36-51.

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The Yiddish East End The origins of the Ben Uri Art Society lie in the fluorescence of Yiddish culture in early twentieth-century London. The society was founded and initially run by a group of firstgeneration Jewish immigrants. They had arrived in the capital between 1900 and 1914, fleeing religious and political persecution in the Pale of Settlement, that area of Eastern Europe on the fringe of Russia, now comprising parts of Poland, Lithuania and the Ukraine, to which Jews had been restricted under increasingly anti-semitic regimes over the nineteenth century. Since a particularly harsh wave of pogroms following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 (in which one of the conspirators was Jewish), hundreds of thousands of Jews left the Pale of Settlement for the west, either staying in Britain or, in far greater numbers, reaching North and South America 5. The figures who would later run the Ben Uri arrived piecemeal in the latter part of this great wave of migration, disembarking at the London docks to find a host of compatriots in tenuous occupancy of the nearby areas of Whitechapel, Aldgate and Stepney.

The Jewish population of the East End at the turn of the century was not well established, in that most residents were extremely poor, in transient housing and employment situations. Their apparent dominance of the area was frequently contested by longer standing non-Jewish residents of the borough, whose objections contributed to the generation of the Aliens Act, made law in early 1906, which imposed greater controls on immigration. The use of the word ‘alien’ to describe East End Jews at this time was routine.

This new community of immigrants, which numbered 125,00 between 1900 and 1914, was constructed around family and kin 6. Often men would arrive alone and later send for their families; many of those who arrived were single unmarried men. Support would be sought from acquaintances or distant family members, or from their landsmen, those who had left the same village or town in the Pale. The glue of the community was the common language, Yiddish, a transnational dialect spoken by 97% of East European Jews 7. The language was of practical importance for the London immigrants, but also served to set them apart from other Londoners.

The well known Anglo-Jewish novelist Israel Zangwill described a typical 1880s East End streetscape (Petticoat Lane) in Children of the Ghetto: The dead walls and hoardings were placarded with bills from which the life of the inhabitants could be constructed. Many were in Yiddish, the most hopelessly corrupt and hybrid jargon ever evolved. Even when the language was English the letters were Hebrew. Whitechapel, Public Meeting, Board School, Sermon, Police, and other modern banalities, glared at the passer-by in the sacred guise of the Tongue associated 5 Many more Eastern European Jews settled in America than in Britain. It is only possible to estimate, but perhaps 2.5

million Jews arrived in the United States between 1880 and 1914, compared to 100,00-150,00 in Britain in the same period.

Another comparison can be made in population density between London and New York: in 1901 there were 42,000 Russianborn Jews and their children in Whitechapel, of a total population of two million; in 1920 New York there were 2.5 million Jews living in a total population of 5.6 million – that is, almost half of New Yorkers were Jewish. See W.D. Rubenstein A History of the Jews in the English-Speaking World: Great Britain, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996, pp. 95-96.

6 V.D. Lipman ‘Jewish Settlement in the East End of London 1840-1940: The Topographical and Statistical Background’ in A. Newman ed. The Jewish East End, 1840-1939 London: The Jewish Historical Society of England, 1981, pp. 17-40. p. 34.

7 Sarah Abrevaya Stein Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004, p. 28. This figure comes from the Russian census of 1897.

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with miracles and prophecies, palm-trees and cedars and seraphs, lions and shepherds and harpists. 8 The Hebrew script used for Yiddish presented holy historical connotations to the initiated, but made such signs totally unintelligible to the non-Jewish population of the area. Indeed it felt to visitors from other parts of London like they were stepping into a foreign country. ‘O Thomas Cook & Son…’, wrote Jack London in People of the Abyss (1902), ‘unhesitatingly and instantly, with ease and celerity, could you send me to Darkest Africa or Innermost Thibet, but to the East End of London, barely a stone’s throw distant from Ludgate circus, you know not the way’ 9. It was not only gentile visitors who experienced a frisson of otherness in the streets of Whitechapel, but also visitors from the more established Anglo-Jewish community which had moved out of East London some fifty years earlier towards the suburbs 10. Zangwill himself was among their number and his Yiddish was limited, which helps to explain his outsider view of the ‘ghetto’, a trope he was partly responsible for generating 11. Even prominent Yiddish writers, on visiting the East End in 1906, declared it to be ‘like a shtetl in the Russian Pale. It was an amalgam of Jews from Vilna and Warsaw, Lodz and Bialystock, Odessa and Kiev, and every place in the Pale.’ 12 Sholem Aleichem described Whitechapel in his novel Wandering Stars, serialized in Warsaw’s Yiddish newspapers between 1909 and 1911: Nowhere else did the Yiddish pulse beat as strongly as in this English Whitechapel. Its atmosphere was our atmosphere, its language our language, the hustle and bustle, the chasing, the shouting, the hand gestures—all ours… […] In a word, when you arrived in Whitechapel, you had come home. 13 If such an atmosphere was a home from home for the East European Jewish community, it also showed its isolation, in marked contrast to the assimilated Anglo-Jews who had long ago left East London for more prosperous parts of the capital.

No discussion of early twentieth-century Jewish culture in London is complete without reference to this tension between first-generation Eastern European immigrants and established British Jews that emerged after 1881. As V.D. Lipman points out, after this date, the regular arrival of Eastern European immigrants (and one must include the impact of those who did not remain long in the area) transformed it into a classic example of an area of first settlement of “immigrant ghetto”. It produced, in the Anglo-Jewish

8 Israel Zangwill Children of the Ghetto, London: William Heinemann, 1893 (3rd Edition), p. 29.

9 Quoted in Peter Gross ‘The Lachrymose Mr Rothenstein’ (chapter in unpublished PhD thesis) p. 14 (but n.p.).

10 Lipman points out that in 1840, the Jewish population of London was concentrated in East London, but by 1881, prior to

the arrival en masse of Eastern European Jews from the Pale of Settlement, most middle-class Jewish Londoners had moved out to the suburbs. Lipman op. cit. p. 40.

11 Leonard Prager Yiddish Culture in Britain: A Guide, Frankfurt am Main and New York: Peter Lang, 1990, p. 717.

12 Joseph Leftwich ‘“Jewish” London Fifty Years Ago’ in Jacob Sonntag ed. Ben Uri, 1915-1965: Fifty Years’ Achievement in the Arts London: Ben Uri Art Society, 1966, pp. 12-16. p. 12.

13 Sholem Aleichem Wandering Stars translated from the Yiddish by Aliza Shevrin, New York: Viking, 2009, p. 201.

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context, an antithesis between “East End” and “West End” – the latter an inaccurate term, since so much of the London Jewry outside the East End was already suburban.14 Though, as Lipman makes clear, ‘West End’ was not an entirely appropriate way of describing the Jews who lived outside the East End, it nonetheless existed as a contemporary term. Indeed in discussing this question it is necessary to generalize, and to use the stereotypes that then existed, always keeping in mind their sometimes loose application. The ‘West End’ Jews included upper-class Sephardic Jewish families that had been in England for centuries, were successful in banking, politics and the cultural sphere, politically conservative, and strongly in favour of assimilation and Anglicization of new immigrant Jews. As well as these prominent families, and numerically more significant, were German and Dutch Jews who had arrived earlier in the nineteenth century, often themselves residing in East London before becoming wealthy enough to leave for suburbs in north and west London in the second half of the nineteenth century 15. By contrast, the Eastern European Jews fleeing the pogroms in the Pale of Settlement after 1881 were mostly destitute, with socialist leanings and religious customs that were radically different, and autonomous, to the established United Synagogue. The newer immigrants found at least limited security in the family or friends from back home who resided in the East End, associating around these cultural groupings or landsmanshaftn, and in general they were an insular community uninterested in assimilating into British society. Some had a high level of education, usually in seminaries, and most were interested in learning English.

But their use of Yiddish was a very visual and oral reminder of their difference, and their congregation around Whitechapel gave the East End an oriental quality in more than the geographical sense. Ben Gidley points out that it was only in the late nineteenth century ‘that the phrase “the East End” entered the English language, swiftly passing into Yiddish’ 16.

This difference, and apparent colonization of an area of London, threatened the equilibrium enjoyed by Anglo-Jewry. In 1881 the Jewish Chronicle declared: Our fair fame and fortune is bound up with theirs: the outside world is not capable of making minute distinctions between Jew and Jew, and forms its opinion of Jews in general as much, if not more, from them than from the Anglicized portion of the community 17.

That this fear was well founded can be seen in the pages of the chapter on ‘Jewish London’ in George Sims’ 1901 compilation Living London, where the first three pages are dedicated to the ‘utterly alien aspect’ of the ‘Whitechapel Ghetto’ before moving on to the wealthier (and less sensational) Jewish communities in Maida Vale, Hampstead and Bayswater 18. At the risk of 14 Lipman op. cit. p. 40.

15 Ibid, and Ben Gidley ‘The Ghosts of Kishinev in the East End: Responses to a Pogrom in the Jewish London of 1903’ in Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman eds. The Jew in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: between the East End and East Africa Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 98-112. p. 100.

16 Gidley op. cit. p. 100.

17 Jewish Chronicle editorial 12/08/1881. Quoted in Gross ‘The Jewish Art and Antiquities Exhibition of 1906’ (chapter in unpublished PhD thesis) pp. 23-24.

18 ‘Jewish London’ by S. Gelberg in George Sims Living London (3 vols). London: Cassell, 1901, Vol 2, pp. 29-35. pp. 2930.

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hammering home the trope of exotic Whitechapel which should by now be obvious, the contributor’s words are worth reproducing: Its denizens are a complicated piece of human patchwork, with the ringleted Pole at one point, the Dutch Jew at another, the English Hebrew in his own corner, and the Gentile coster running like a strange thin thread through the design. The whole is a reproduction in little of the stricken Jewish world. If you would understand the immortal agony of Jewry, go into the East-End colony. Its cosmopolitanism is symbolic of the vagabondage of the race. Its beshawled women with their pinched faces, its long-coated men with two thousand years of persecution stamped in their manner, its chaffering and huckstering, its hunger, its humour, the very Yiddish jargon itself which is scrawled on its walls and shop windows, are part of the grand passion of the chosen people.

But it is its utterly alien aspect which strikes you first and foremost. For the Ghetto is a fragment of Poland torn off from Central Europe and dropped haphazard into the heart of Britain – a re-banished Jewry weeping beside the waters of “Modern Babylon”.

Here once again Yiddish is referred to as ‘jargon’ – Zangwill’s description of it as ‘the most hopelessly corrupt and hybrid jargon ever evolved’ was an iteration of the prevalent AngloJewish distaste for the language. By the turn of the century, however, Yiddish was reluctantly accepted as a feature of Eastern European Jewish identity. A Yiddish press had taken off in the ‘Old Country’, with Warsaw hosting a thriving set of Yiddish newspapers and printers. Over the next few decades groups such as that behind the German journal Ost und West (1901-1923) endeavoured to reorient European Jewish identity towards the east, and vindicate the longdespised cultural traditions of Ostjuden or Eastern European Jews as having more spiritual and aesthetic worth than the Westjuden culture that had been dominant in Western European Jewish identity since the Enlightenment 19.

The distance between West End Jews and East End Jews went beyond the geographical, then.

Between Whitechapel and Bayswater, Hampstead and beyond there was an ideological dissociation. Anglo-Jews made arm’s-length efforts to intervene in the East End, motivated both by charitable concern for the wellbeing of their co-religionists, and by the need to promote assimilation into English culture. There was patent resentment of such intervention by the more radical East End Jews, particularly as figures such as the Whitechapel MP Samuel Montagu or Lord Rothschild would invariably weigh into bitter disputes such as that on the ‘sweating’ system of employment, or ‘rackrenting’ landlords, in order to limit the power of nascent local political organizations 20. As Jerry White has pointed out, there was a Jewish class struggle going on, not only between poor workers and aristocratic bankers, but with a bourgeoisie of master tailors, landlords and businessmen, from which in fact the members of the Ben Uri 19 See Peter Gross ‘The Jewish Art and Antiquities Exhibition of 1906’ (chapter in unpublished PhD thesis) p. 17, and David A. Brenner Marketing Identities: The Invention of Jewish Ethnicity in Ost und West, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998, pp. 15-16.

20 Bill Fishman East End Jewish Radicals 1875-1914 London: Duckworth, 1975, p. 197; Jerry White ‘Jewish Landlords, Jewish Tenants: An Aspect of Class Struggle within the Jewish East End, 1881-1914’ in Newman The Jewish East End 205215. p. 212.

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committee were largely drawn 21. Leo Kenig, the Russian Jewish intellectual and Di Tsayt columnist who became involved with the Ben Uri Society in 1919 22, set out the relationship of east European and west European Jews quite explicitly in 1917. Like many Russian Jews in London, he greeted the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II with jubilation in the months before the Bolshevik coup of October 1917, seeing it as changing the dynamic between the Ostjuden, often seen as ‘scroungers’, and the Westjuden (‘men of substance’): ‘Now, we will be just as rich and equal as they’. Sharman Kadish suggests that ‘Kenig was referring as much to the relationship between “East” and “West End” Jewry, as to that between the Jews of east and west.’ 23 Though simplistic, it is not inaccurate to see the East-West polarity within London as a microcosm of the same polarity between Ostjuden and Westjuden brought out in the German Ost und West journal in this period.

If the Yiddish language was the point of both practical and symbolic cohesion for East European Jewish immigrants in London, it was Yiddish oral and written heritage that provided an important cultural continuity for the émigré community. Despite the denigration of the language, often among Jews, as ‘abominable jargon’, its tenacity as a lingua franca over the nineteenth century had resulted in a rich profusion of song, poetry and folklore that was all the more portable because of its oral nature. Though Hebrew was always the language of worship, Yiddish began to be recognized, by those Jews searching for their cultural identity as a migrant but proto-national community, as a uniquely Jewish marker. At the same time, the late nineteenth century saw a degree of cultural enfranchisement of the tens of thousands of poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants that provided an unceasing and easily exploited pool of labour for the East End garment industry. Socialist agitators such as Morris Winchevsky and Rudolf Rocker helped to give this population a voice, and as W.D. Rubenstein points out, ‘London became a recognized centre of radical, proletarian-oriented Yiddish political and literary activities’ 24. By the 1910s London had its own Yiddish theatre, several Yiddish newspapers including the most widely read, Di Tsayt, and dozens of Yiddish cultural, political and charitable organizations 25. These were largely based in the East End, and still separate from the older networks and cultural outlets of the Anglo-Jewish community which conducted its business in English.

The recognition and enshrining of Yiddish as the language of émigré Jewish communities both in London and, with far more cultural dominance, in New York, between the 1880s and the 1920s, was an important factor in the formation of a twentieth-century diasporic Jewish identity. ‘Yiddish’ and ‘Jewish’ were consonant terms. Just as ‘English’ can mean both the language and the nationality, yidish or idish can be translated as ‘Yiddish language’ and ‘Jewish’. This made it the perfect vessel for Jewish nationalism, and the Zionist movement, 21 White ‘Jewish Landlords’ p. 205.

22 Kenig gave a lecture on ‘Jewish Art in Comparison with Jewish Literature’ at a meeting celebrating four years of the Ben

Uri on 28th December 1919. 1916-21 Minutes, p. 74. The next year the society took on the journal Renesans of which Kenig was editor.

23 Sharman Kadish Bolsheviks and British Jews: The Anglo-Jewish Community, Britain and the Russian Revolution, London: Frank Cass, 1992, p. 186.

24 Rubenstein op. cit. p. 180.

25 Mazower op. cit. p. 42. Rubenstein op. cit. p. 180. See also Mazower ‘Ben Uri and Yiddish Culture’.

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which was gathering momentum across Europe and the Atlantic from the 1900s, published much of its material in Yiddish. Ber Borochov, a leading light in the socialist Zionist movement Poale Zion, conducted research at the British Museum on Yiddish philology while in London in 1914 26. Borochov was a Yiddishist, or someone holding the belief, in David Mazower’s words, ‘that Yiddish language continuity and Yiddish cultural literacy were fundamental to Jewish life’. 27 Historian Leonard Prager has pointed out that yidishkeyt has often been often used as a word for Jewishness as a whole 28. This should be kept in mind as the aims of the Ben Uri Society, whose first appellation included the words idish-natsional, are examined. Indeed it is not so much the Ben Uri’s artistic aspirations that are remarkable during its first fifteen years, but its commitment to the Yiddish side of Jewish culture.

Cultural life in Whitechapel in the 1910s The Ben Uri was not the first organization to try to touch East End working-class lives with art – the Whitechapel Gallery, and the work done previously by its founders Canon Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, had already led the way there 29. Nor was it the first Jewish art organization in Britain. Two Anglo-Jewish painters had been made members of the Royal Academy over the nineteenth century – Solomon Hart and Solomon J. Solomon. In 1891 the latter had founded the Maccabeans, a philanthropic body of artists and writers seeking to further Jewish culture.

This in turn led to the establishment of the Jewish Educational Aid Society (JEAS), which helped poor Jewish students progress in their studies, preferably away from the ‘ghetto’ and into English-speaking integration within British society 30. There had already been several large exhibitions of Jewish art by 1915, and a high-profile modern art exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1914 had featured several young Jewish artists (some of them first-generation East European immigrants) sponsored to study at the Slade by the JEAS 31.

Nor was the Ben Uri a pioneer in offering edifying lectures to an East End public. The Barnetts had also founded Toynbee Hall in 1884, a settlement house where students of Oxford and Cambridge Universities could volunteer their services advocating for tenants’ and workers’ rights on behalf of local people. The hall hosted lectures and reading groups which, by the 1910s, were well attended by a new generation of Jewish intellectuals and artists, later dubbed ‘The Whitechapel Boys’. A brief account of this circle and the form in which its cultural life unfolded is apposite as context for the Ben Uri’s history, and allows for an introduction to an important chronicler of this period, Joseph Leftwich.

26 Mazower ‘Ben Uri and Yiddish Culture’ p. 41.

27 Mazower ‘Ben Uri and Yiddish Culture’ p. 38.

28 Prager op. cit. p. 7: ‘To Yiddish-speaking Jews and, often, to their children and grandchildren, Jewish experience seems most authentically Jewish when incorporated in that most Jewish of languages, Yiddish.’

29 See Seth Koven ‘The Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions and the Politics of Seeing’ in Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff eds Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, London: Routledge, 1994.

30 See Lisa Tickner and Peter Gross ‘The Jewish Education Aid Society and Pre-First World War British Art’ in The Ben Uri Story from Art Society to Museum and the influence of Anglo-Jewish Artists on the Modern British Movement London: Ben Uri Gallery, 2001, pp. 59-65.

31 See Sarah MacDougall ‘“Something is happening there”: early British modernism, the Great War and the “Whitechapel Boys”’ in Michael J. Walsh ed. London, Modernism and 1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010, pp. 122-148, and Lisa Tickner Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000.

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Joseph Leftwich is an interesting figure for the historian, at once invaluable and unreliable. He was undoubtedly an integral member of the Whitechapel Boys, that generation of Jewish East End intellectuals and artists for whom he himself coined the name. The Whitechapel Boys were of a younger generation than the Ben Uri’s founders, and had generally arrived in the East End as young children, growing up with both English and Yiddish and very much aware of their bicultural heritage. Leftwich’s immediate coterie consisted of John Rodker, Samuel Winsten and Isaac Rosenberg, and the wider group included young East End artists training at the Slade – Clara Birnberg (the only ‘Whitechapel Girl’), Mark Gertler, David Bomberg, Bernard Meninsky and Jacob Kramer 32. Of the original group, Rodker and Winsten were writers, Rosenberg a writer and artist. Rosenberg is the best known, though his fame was achieved only after he died in the trenches of the First World War, and in great part through the testament of his friends, who saw to it that his poems and plays were published, and his artworks exhibited.

Both Rodker and Winsten went on to publish books and articles. Leftwich was a prolific writer but is best known as a translator from Yiddish to English, and a memoirist. The diary he decided to keep for a year when he was 19 is a fascinating record of the years 1911-12, and he drew on this and other, possibly less directly documented, memories for many recollections of the Jewish East End which he made later in life 33. In some of these, notably several articles about the Ben Uri’s early history, Leftwich seems to remember his own role in events as more important than other accounts would suggest; on the other hand his anecdotes give a valuable and vivid insight into the world of Yiddish art and letters in the 1910s and 1920s where few others exist.

By Leftwich’s account, an evening spent in the Toynbee Hall would often preface long talks, conducted as the thinkers walked miles through the London night. He remembered ‘discussing with [the brilliant mathematician Selig Brodetsky, who grew up in the East End] one night the difference, which he as a mathematician posed, between the Jewish Question and the Jewish Problem.’ 34 It is easy to imagine these earnest young men addressing the complexities of contemporary Jewish identity by pacing them out, stimulated by London’s nocturnal environment, sometimes along the Thames, sometimes up into the countryside. Leftwich recollected As the streets had been our playground as boys, so the streets were our promenade when we were young men. We walked till past midnight along the stretch of road leading from Whitechapel to the Bank of England and on to the Thames Embankment and back by the Tower and the Dockyard walls, the nightly promenade of my boyhood group.

Often we went to Epping Forest, sometimes on all-night rambles. 35

32 See MacDougall op. cit. pp. 126-8.

33 A photocopy of the English handwritten manuscript of Leftwich’s diary is at the Imperial War Museum along with other papers pertaining to Isaac Rosenberg.

34 Leftwich ‘ “Jewish” London Fifty Years Ago’, p. 14.

35 Ibid.

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He wrote poems about some of these excursions. ‘Imminence’ (1912) describes one evening spent with his close friends John Rodker, Isaac Rosenberg and Samuel Winsten: Winsten, Rosenberg, Rodker, I How we are saddened and broken by Struggles and teasing hopes and fears.

What awaits us in coming years?

Midnight struck, then one o’clock, two, We still talked of what things we would do.

Down Hannibal Road, Jamaica Street, Then back again, with untiring feet, We talked of our hopes and of our fears. 36 Samuel Winsten’s recollection is similar: See those young people walking around the gas-lit streets talking quietly, laughing at a brilliant epigram, stopping suspiciously under a lamp-post while one fumbled in all his pockets for his latest poem. He read and they criticized, and then they returned to their unsympathetic homes to write a little more while sleep could be conquered. There was a club which drew them together. An artist or critic would sometimes lecture, and he little knew that his ideas were discussed after the meeting in long walks. Epping Forest was less than ten miles away, splendid for an all-night walk, an all-night talk on life and death, love and youth. 37 By the mid-1910s, then, Jewish Whitechapel already had a vigorous artistic and intellectual life. Elements of its art scene were favourably contrasted by some critics with staid West End art conventions, in reviews of the 1914 Whitechapel Gallery exhibition 38. It is particularly remarkable that so much soul-searching was conducted on foot, as if by leaving the East End and walking north or west one might gather distance, perspective, intellectual resources for tackling the very present questions of Jewish identity and culture as an Eastern European immigrant Londoner. But such reflections could also take place on urban transport networks, as we can see from another poem by Leftwich. In ‘In the Tube’ (1916), he imagines how he must look to fellow passengers on his underground train travelling to Golder’s Green as he mutters the Mincha, the Jewish sunset prayer, to himself 39.

I suppose they’re laughing at me, some of them, And some of them are wondering whether I am mad, Because I stand here holding to the strap, And mumble to myself, and seem absorbed and sad. […]

36 Leftwich Along the Years: Poems 1911-1937 London: Robert Anscombe and Company, 1937, p. 24.

37 Samuel Winsten ‘Poet in a Tank’ School November 1933, p. 22. Photocopy of issue in Leftwich papers at IWM. 38 See MacDougall op. cit.

39 Leftwich Along the Years, p. 45.

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Let them look on and think I am insane – I thank my God! I utter the old Hebrew prayer, And half the time I cannot see these folk for thoughts of God, God hearkening to my prayer […] 40 Leftwich was not known for his religious observance, yet feels the need to follow the Jewish phases of the day and is unembarrassed, perhaps even pleased at the mysterious figure he cuts, to say his prayers in the confined space of the underground carriage. In the poem, he looks forward to the brisk walk home from the station, and the company of his brother ‘home on leave – and we shall talk!’. This relishes his private life, his identity as brother, son, Jew, from within the social melee of the train’s carriage.

By crossing the city, from a zone of immigrants and arrival to other zones in which one might stand out, these boys must have been testing out their identities, trialling their ‘Londoner’ persona. This ambulatory experience of the city has its echoes in the movement of the Jewish population, among many others, across London over previous decades, and indeed in the startling bus-top epiphany described by Ben Uri founder member Edward Good in 1916 (see Part 2).

The Whitechapel Gallery and the Toynbee Hall, the Maccabeans and the JEAS were all British institutions, the first including Jewish art in a section of its own within a wider exhibition, and the latter two promoting Jewish culture as British. Where the Ben Uri differed was in its declaration, from the outset, of its Yiddish character. This is immediately apparent from the society’s archive which is, for the first eight years, almost entirely in Yiddish, from minutes to official notices to members. This was not simply for convenience – most of its committee were fluent in English – but as a statement of intent.

40 Ibid.

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