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The collection examines the production and organisation of colonial knowledge, analyses cultural encounters and power dynamics within empires, and provides insights into the construction of identity in colonial and imperial contexts, with contributions from leading scholars in the field.
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This chapter focuses on a range of Jews who moved from pedlar origins to play remarkable roles in the British Empire and beyond. Some remain obscure, such as Samuel Gordon, a Jewish migrant from Poland, who started trading in Hull and became one of a group of entrepreneurs importing eggs to the United Kingdom from Egypt. Others became famous/infamous, such as Joseph Silver, one of the leading figures in the ‘white slave trade’, especially in South Africa. Most spectacular of all was Morris ‘Two-Gun’ Cohen who, having been sent to Canada as a juvenile delinquent, became a general in the Chinese army, celebrated on the silver screen. In terms of impact, the career of John Harris, a colonial adventurer in Sierra Leone, was the greatest, provoking conflict in West Africa to enhance his trading networks. Alongside their trading and tendencies towards criminality, what brings together these individuals of former pedlar, Jewish migrant origins are issues of race, sexuality, family structure and empire. While most spent their later lives in quiet respectability in the metropole, they had played, for better or worse, a major role in exploiting the opportunities offered by the British Empire. Like Jacob Harris over a century before, the energy of those of migrant origin and their ability to practise radical assimilation led to remarkable lives inside and outside the law.
The Conclusion begins by outlining the disappearance or removal of sites of memory relating to Jacob Harris and the events of 1734 in the early twenty-first century. These include the demolition of the Royal Oak pub where the murders took place; the absence of mention in the Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft; and the decay of the heritage display at Jacob’s Post. These are related to the parallel absence from heritage and museum sites of anything relating to the presence of the Jewish pedlar across the UK. In contrast, there has been interest in the écorché figure of Solomon Porter, one of the Chelsea gang which carried out the notorious murder of 1771. There has been little sensitivity regarding the display of this figure, which is related here to the similar abuse of the body of Sara Baartman. The Conclusion draws parallels in the representation and memory work relating to Sara Baartman and the smous in South Africa, drawing especially on Graaff-Reinet, where the only memorial in the world to the Jewish pedlar is located. Using the fictional work of Antony Sher, it makes connections to the Jewish migrant, the colonial and the Holocaust to place finally who Jacob Harris was and what he represents.
This chapter charts how during the nineteenth century Jewish pedlars moved to more urban settings in England but still lived marginal lives. Representations of them became more negative and developed an insistence on the racialised Jewish ‘voice’. Such stereotypes even extended to Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. Through the example of Ikey Solomons, with strong connections to the East End of London, the chapter shows how some former Jewish pedlars still turned to lives of crime – in his case ending up being transported to Australia. It was, however, lurid accounts of Solomons’s career, as well as his tendency to criminalise Jews in his writing, that led Charles Dickens to create the character Fagin, one of the most enduring and hostile representations of ‘the Jew’ in English literature. The chapter also outlines how Jacob Harris became racialised by Victorian antiquarian and travel writers, who presented him as an alien outsider to the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ county of Sussex. In contrast, by the fin de siècle Jacob’s Post had become a major site in the world of heritage, visited by a variety of groups including cycling clubs, leisure motorists, hunt meetings and cricket teams. Arthur Conan Doyle referenced this gibbeting site in a novel, his writing more generally revealing an ambiguity towards Jews, including the figure of the Jewish pedlar.
This chapter explores how the historian is to deal with folklore in the absence of traditional archives – there is no relevant dated material for a century after Jacob’s Harris’s murders. It deals especially with the importance of the gibbeting of the perpetrator, and how it was used in the creation of local identities. The significance of the naming of the site as ‘Jacob’s Post’ is outlined, and the magical properties associated with first the body of Jacob Harris as a source of folk medicine, and then the gibbet post, is explored in depth. It became a ‘third space’, transcending categories of Jewish, Christian or Pagan, and how local identification with Jacob Harris was rejected by later church moralists who presented the murderer as ‘matter out of place’. The chapter also explores how the memory of the crimes was continued by the ‘Ballad of Jacob Harris’ and how both oral/aural and written transmission ensured its survival in the neighbourhood centuries after the crime was committed. Jacob Harris’s flight from the scene of the crime to West Hoathly and Turner’s Hill is explored using the folk evidence. Finally, the chapter explores the various and intriguing names used by Jacob Harris to conclude that without reasonable doubt he was of Jewish origin.
This chapter explores different responses in Sussex to the Jewish refugee crisis during and immediately after the Nazi era. More generally, it analyses responses to the persecution of the Jews that culminated in the Holocaust, and how Sussex, as a construct of Englishness, has been represented as the opposite of continental extremism and persecution. It outlines the work of individuals and committees to bring Jewish refugees to the county as children (including the Kindertransport) and adults (especially as domestic servants). The life of world-famous photographer Dorothy Bohm, who came to Ditchling as a young refugee, and of the very young Holocaust survivors who went to West Hoathly in 1945 are featured, as are the life stories of other Jews who found safety in Sussex. In contrast, it explores the celebrated artists’ colony in Ditchling from the 1900s through to the 1940s and how its leading members, including the now notorious Eric Gill (an incestuous paedophile), followed a conspiratorial antisemitism and Catholic-influenced pro-fascism. Linked to their racist world view, they vehemently opposed the entry of Jewish refugees to the UK. There were other Sussex artists who campaigned in favour of refugees, but until now it is the Ditchling colony that has been remembered and subject to heritage celebration.
The Introduction explores the challenges of the archive in recovering the lives of ordinary Jews who were pedlars, criminals (or both) from the late seventeenth century to after the Second World War. These difficulties arise because, on the one hand, there is an absence of material and, on the other, distortion when such figures do appear because of the prejudices of those creating the historic records. This is especially the case with the chapter’s principal subject matter, Jacob Harris, who speaks not one recorded word. The Introduction considers the dangers of presenting Jewish pedlars within a ‘rags to riches’ narrative, and equally the pitfalls of either sensationalism or defensiveness about Jewish criminals. It highlights the complexity of defining Jewishness and the importance of incorporating multiple identities. Concepts such as gender (especially masculinity), race and nationality, and the role of imperial thinking will be of critical importance in understanding the Jews, who are the focus of this book, and responses to them. Finally, it notes how contextualisation in time and place – given the wide chronology and geographies of the book – will be crucial in placing these Jewish pedlars and criminals in a historical framework.
This chapter focuses on the last places in the British Isles to experience Jewish pedlars – Ireland and Scotland. It charts their tough lives in keeping their heads above water, including by developing weekly credit so that their poor customers could afford their goods. Their presence and apparent difference prompted literary responses, most famously from James Joyce in Ulysses. The chapter also explores a rich variety of autobiographical practice from the pedlars and their descendants, and how they have been remembered. The link to criminality is explored through Oscar Slater, a former pedlar of Jewish migrant origin, and a disturbing if relatively minor figure in the international ‘white slave trade’. Slater was accused of a vicious murder in Glasgow. Found guilty – despite an absence of evidence – in an atmosphere of heightened antisemitism, he was defended at the time by Arthur Conan Doyle but his conviction was not overturned for some decades afterwards. In Sussex, one of the associates of Slater, Charles Cohen, also caused a scandal for his involvement in the sex industry in a case that, although the victim was a young Jewish woman, also brought a local antisemitic reaction. It was in this atmosphere that the 1905 Aliens Act restricted entry to poor Jews, many of whom before this had become pedlars in Britain.
This chapter explores all the contemporary evidence to create a chronology of events and biographies of all the leading players connected to the triple murders of May 1734. It shows how all the sources – legal documents, newspapers, a folk ballad and a diary – have to be treated very carefully. Indeed, the diary was rewritten and distorted by Victorian antiquarians to produce the narrative they thought was appropriate to emphasise that Jacob Harris’s Jewishness was the key issue in explaining his horrendous crime. Coming at a key stage in the early modern era when newspapers were increasing in number and frequency, and legal documents were being standardised, the historian of these murders is in a fortunate position regarding the quantity of evidence available. Through a close reading of this material, it becomes apparent that there are complexities, especially regarding naming of the key figures – murderer, victims, law enforcers and reporters – that make this a fascinating and revealing case study of insiders and outsiders.
This chapter explores where Jacob Harris fits within both English and continental Jewish history, and regarding responses to the Jews across Europe during the eighteenth century. His origins, almost certainly as a pedlar, were typical of many Jews in England and beyond, who played a key role in the creation of provincial communities. It also seems likely that he was connected to the German or Dutch Betteljuden – poor Jews who wandered around the continent, with strong links to criminality. Harris, it seems, was one of the small number of Ashkenazi Jews in England born at the turn of the eighteenth century, and whose presence deeply worried the elite Jewish community at the time. The wealthier Jews tried to remove these poorer Jews to other countries, including overseas settlements outside Europe. Jacob Harris was also part of the closely connected world of Sussex smugglers and apparently well-integrated into this ‘occupation’, which was looked on fondly by ordinary people as providing cheap goods, but seen as a menace by the government. Although false ritual murder accusations were made against the Jews in London just two years before Harris committed his crimes, there is no evidence that this prejudiced charge was made against him. As there were ritual murder accusations on the continent that led to the widespread persecution of the Jews, it shows that there were some limitations to such crude antisemitism in England.
This chapter charts the history of Jacob’s Post after 1918 and how it became increasingly neglected until the late twentieth century. After the trauma of the First World War, there were many who reached to the countryside for solace. Jacob’s Post was neither sufficiently ‘pastoral’ nor ‘eerie’, and as a result there were fewer visits to the site. It became rare to ask who Jacob Harris was, and when it was raised the answers tended to lack any degree of accuracy. Memory of the 1734 murders became largely limited to the local sphere, through the struggling Royal Oak pub or memoirs of people who grew up in Ditchling or Ditchling Common. In the late twentieth century, through the opening of the Ditchling Museum which had a display on the murders, and local school plays, there were initiatives that helped preserve the memory of the murders. In 2000, a heritage display at the site marked the ‘deadly deeds’ of Jacob Harris. For the first time Jacob Harris’s Jewishness was acknowledged, which allowed for the possibility that he had been part of a wider community and might possibly have been a victim of antisemitism. It reflected a belated sensitivity coming out of an engagement with the Holocaust.