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Glynn 04_Tonra 01 19/06/2014 12:50 Page 79 4 British Bangladeshis Probashi Bengalis had shown massive support for their homeland as it struggled for independence, but after the war was over very few wanted to go back and live there. Some took up opportunities of influential positions with the ruling party, but generally the pulls were all in the other direction. This was the time when many of the Bengali men who were already working here began to bring over their wives and families – partly as a response to the traumas of separation and uncertainty that
Rosenthal suggested that ‘in central and western Europe assimilation was the price demanded from the Jews for their legal and social emancipation’. 14 The flight from Eastern Europe was not one made simply as an individual Jew but also one made as a community. Arrival in Leeds and other cities throughout Britain did not rob migrants of identity; rather, it afforded them an opportunity to assess in their own minds what was Jewish and what it meant to be Jewish in Leeds. However, at the same time, those who already resided there and jealously guarded hard won positions in
Britain's Chief Rabbis were attempting to respond to the new religious climate, and deployed a variety of tactics to achieve their aims. This book presents a radical new interpretation of Britain's Chief Rabbis from Nathan Adler to Immanuel Jakobovits. It examines the theologies of the Chief Rabbis and seeks to reveal and explain their impact on the religious life of Anglo-Jewry. The book begins with the study of Nathan Marcus Adler, Chief Rabbi from 1845, and it then explores how in 1880 Hermann Adler became Delegate Chief Rabbi on his father's semi-retirement to Brighton. In the pre-modern era, and for a while after, rabbis saw themselves and were seen as the heirs of the rabbinic tradition, whose role first and foremost was to rule on matters of religious law. The book argues that the Chief Rabbis' response to modernity should be viewed in the context of Jewish religious responses that emerged following the Enlightenment and Emancipation. It sketches out a possible typology of those responses, so that Chief Rabbis can be placed in that context. Chief Rabbis were members of the acknowledgement school, which contained a number of different theological currents: romantic, scientific, aesthetic and nostalgic. Hermann Adler was the Chief Rabbi during his time, and his religious policies were to a great extent motivated by his religious ideas. Joseph Herman Hertz's theology placed him in the traditional group within the acknowledgement school, although he was influenced by its scientific, romantic and aesthetic branches.
This collection of essays examines the place of ‘saints’ and sanctity in nineteenth-century Britain. It argues that holy men and women were pivotal in religious discourse, as subjects of veneration and inter-confessional contention. Protestants were as fascinated by such figures as Catholics were. Long after the mechanisms of canonization had disappeared, they continued not only to engage with the saints of the past but continued to make their own saints in all but name. Just as strikingly, it claims that devotional practices and language were not the property of orthodox Christians alone. Even in an age of confessional strife, doubt and secularisation, devotional practices and language remained central to how both Christians and their opponents reflected on that changing world. Making and remaking saints is significant, then, because until now no-one has explored how sainthood remained significant in this period both as an enduring institution and as a fruitful metaphor that could be transposed into unexpected contexts. Each of the chapters in this volume focuses on the reception of a particular individual or group. Together they will attract not just historians of religion, but those concerned with material culture, the cult of history, and with the reshaping of British identities in an age of faith and doubt
mission. 4 The most sustained analysis of the relationship between the churches and emigration to the ‘British world’ is Hilary Carey’s recent monograph on the colonial missionary societies that raised funds and sent out clergy to emigrants. Though some of these bodies, like the SPG, are well known, others are not: for Carey, historians’ ignorance of colonial mission has left us with an anachronistic
9780719082542_C01.qxd 8/9/11 15:50 Page 21 1 Race, faith and freedom in American and British history Simon Schama ‘The Americans, they’re not really like us, are they?’ said the lady beside me at a lunch in the Welsh countryside last spring, pretending, only momentarily, a kind of grand bafflement before going on to pronounce her own answer: ‘they’re so religious’. To which one could only concede, yes, they were, but possibly not in the way she assumed – which was of course to classify them as credulous devotees of right-wing fanatics sworn to uproot the
honourable, the Lord Mayor […] April 1652 (1653); Giles Firmin, Separation examined (1652); Worden, Rump , pp. 295–6. 16 Woolrych, Britain in revolution , p. 517. 17 [Henry Vane], Zeal examined (1652), pp. 45–6. 18 The presbyterian stationers were Luke Fawne, Samuel Gellibrand, Joshua Kirton, John Rothwell, Thomas Underhill and Nathaniel Webb. 19 For a full survey of the controversy see T. H. Clancy, ‘The
In 1804, a group of British Protestant men founded the British and Foreign Bible Society, or BFBS, in London. Initially inspired by a girl named Mary Jones, who had allegedly crossed mountains to find a Welsh Bible, they insisted that individuals should be able to acquire Bibles and understand them. ‘If for Wales,’ they continued by asking, ‘why not for the kingdom? Why not for the world?’ 1 Eager to expand access to Bibles in Britain and beyond, the BFBS went on to sponsor translations of
When members of that oft-maligned institution, the Anglican Church – the 'Tory Party at prayer' – encountered the far-flung settler empire, they found it a strange and intimidating place. Anglicanism's conservative credentials seemed to have little place in developing colonies; its established status, secure in England, would crumble in Ireland and was destined never to be adopted in the 'White Dominions'. By 1850, however, a global ‘Anglican Communion’ was taking shape. This book explains why Anglican clergymen started to feel at home in the empire. Between 1790 and 1860 the Church of England put in place structures that enabled it to sustain a common institutional structure and common set of beliefs across a rapidly-expanding ‘British world’. Though Church expansion was far from being a regulated and coordinated affair, the book argues that churchmen did find ways to accommodate Anglicans of different ethnic backgrounds and party attachments in a single broad-based ‘national’ colonial Church. The book details the array of institutions, voluntary societies and inter-colonial networks that furnished the men and money that facilitated Church expansion; it also sheds light on how this institutional context contributed to the formation of colonial Churches with distinctive features and identities. The colonial Church that is presented in this book will be of interest to more than just scholars and students of religious and Church history. The book shows how the colonial Church played a vital role in the formation of political publics and ethnic communities in a settler empire that was being remoulded by the advent of mass migration, democracy and the separation of Church and state.
In this essay, I want to suggest that we should read the pilgrimage-minded Helena of All’s Well That Ends Well in the light of two holy women, St Helena of Britain and Mary Magdalene. First, however, I want to pause on one of the most prominent of many problematic moments in this strange, difficult play, when Helena sends her mother