This chapter explores the ways in which Jewish people and communities have been constructed and imagined in heritage and history projects, and how these constructions have changed over time. Focusing on small communities outside London, including Bradford, Merthyr Tydfil and Cornwall, the chapter looks at ways in which recent projects and studies have curated the Jewish past. The chapter argues that British Jewish people, as part of a broader trend across and beyond British society, grew more interested in heritage and family history from the 1980s onwards. A growing degree of prosperity and security, changes in technology, and a decline in traditional religious practice have encouraged British Jewish people to look to heritage and history for answers to questions about belonging and identity in a way that was not prioritised by previous generations. Ultimately, the chapter considers why the ideas of decline, dying and ‘the last Jew’ have been so compelling, and have occurred so frequently in depictions of British Jewish history. The chapter probes the meanings and uses of Jewish decline narratives, arguing that these have been valuable to the community in terms of promoting participation, and that decline and death is sometimes perceived as preferable to embracing radical change in the make-up of the Jewish community and its patterns of devotion.
Since the establishment of the state of Israel, some 35,000 British Jews have moved to live there. This chapter tells the story of some of these Jews, focusing on the rise of Zionist youth groups and their promotion of ideological Jewish migration to Israel, known as making aliyah. In particular, the chapter focuses on the socialist Habonim youth movement, which encouraged its members to pursue chalutziut, a pioneering Jewish life among peers on an Israeli kibbutz. Several Israeli kibbutzim were bolstered by such efforts, and a few, notably Kfar Hanassi in the Galilee, came into being as a result of British Jewish migration. This chapter unpacks the concept of aliyah, looking at how the idea was employed in post-war Jewish Britain. It explores the ideologies of Jewish youth who saw their future in Israel and not Britain, asking how such thinking emerged and what it might tell us about contemporary Jewish identities and British multiculturalism. Finally, the chapter analyses the many ways in which those who made aliyah took their British culture with them, questioning what this reveals in terms of migrant identities, and what this Britishness meant for new communities built in Israel.
This chapter outlines the social and legal processes by which free people could become chattel slaves, with special attention to the potential for elasticity that could respond to fluctuation in demand for slaves. It examines the mechanisms that allowed for enslaving people from within a society, such as penal slavery and the direct sale of free people into slavery, and external mechanisms, such as captive taking in warfare and opportunistic kidnapping. Captive taking was the most flexible enslavement process, meaning that it could respond quickly to changes in demand by targeting specific numbers and types of people – options not always open to opportunistic kidnappers. A final section of the chapter looks at the targets of this process to understand who became slaves. Annals and chronicles indicate that victims were typically women and children of lower status, as high-status individuals more often had the resources and social networks necessary for ransom. The overall picture of enslavement provided by this chapter, therefore, is one in which insiders and outsiders alike contributed to the pool of tradeable slaves, and that, although captive taking normally targeted certain people, anyone was at risk of becoming a slave in this manner.
Rest-in-Peace Shirts, adorned with pictures or names of loved ones lost too soon, are sombre manifestations of the violence of marginalization of racialized communities. Designed as wearable memorials to keep the memory of family members and friends alive, these shirts have become part of a growing cottage industry of grief in the wake of national outrage over police brutality in the United States. Designers tell reporters that their shirts are “some type of therapy,” and this chapter uses that claim to position RIP shirts as a technology of healing. By reading RIP shirts through the heuristic tool of family therapy, with comparisons to other items such as Race-for-the-Cure apparel and the AIDS quilt, Rudeen argues that the materiality afforded by this technology helps externalize and disperse group trauma, albeit in ways haunted by larger capitalist regimes. Since structural family therapy conceptualizes pathology as inherent within groups of people, not individuals, the figures immortalized on these shirts arguably highlight societal ills. Those seeking out RIP shirts also effectively become unwitting patient-consumers, hoping for care but contending with commercial interests. Using newspaper reports and vendors’ websites, the chapter explores the therapeutic potential of RIP shirts. Considering groups and objects not often included in histories of medicine (communities suffering loss and the clothes they wear), the chapter illustrates broader themes of how care can be co-opted to other interests when it becomes commercialized.
This chapter explores the relationship between Orthodox and Progressive Judaism in post-war Britain, placing a particular focus on the rise of ‘ultra’ Orthodox communities and the growth of the Reform Movement. Highlighting expansion in both Progressive and Orthodox synagogues since the Second World War, the chapter considers the thesis that British Jewry has pulled in different directions to the extent that it is no longer tenable to approach it as a unitary whole. Highlighting some of the flashpoints of Progressive/Orthodox conflict (the death of Hugo Gryn, Clause 43, the Jacobs Affair) and considering the underlying theological tensions which brought these matters to a head, the chapter charts changes in the devotional habits and affiliations of British Jews. In so doing, it highlights the importance of some specifically Jewish factors in driving change (the immigration to Britain of European Orthodox and Progressive Jews, the Holocaust and Zionism), as well as broader British trends in religious practice (rising secularism and the increasing tendency to view religion as a matter for individual conscience). Ultimately it argues that there remain good reasons to consider British Jewry as one community, as similar factors have driven Jewish action across the religious spectrum, and because of the long-standing tendency of Jewish people to make divergent choices about their practice and lifestyle.
Throughout this period Messianic Jews have mostly been perceived across the Jewish community as posing a significant threat to Jewish welfare. Underpinning Jewish concerns has been the idea that Messianic Judaism was merely a ruse to lure Jews to Christianity, offering an untenable identity; that a person could both be a Jew and accept Christ as Messiah. Jewish fears were significantly fuelled by the widespread belief that Messianic Jewish communities were deploying manipulative methods to achieve conversions, targeting vulnerable Jewish people. In post-war Britain, these concerns grew after a Jewish student took his own life after having become involved with Messianic Christians at university in 1979, and when Jews for Jesus formally launched in Britain in 1991 following its founding in the United States. In response to fears about Messianic Judaism a concerted Jewish campaign was launched to counter missionary activities, focused on protecting Jewish students. Operation Judaism was the brainchild of a Lubavitch rabbi from Birmingham, Shmuel Arkush, and grew into a nationwide campaign backed by the Chief Rabbi and the Board of Deputies. This chapter focuses on Messianic Judaism, and Jewish responses to it, as a window into evolving Jewish/Christian relations in post-war Britain. It explores the borders between the two faiths, as well as changing Christian attitudes towards the conversion of Jewish people after the Holocaust.
Being gay and Jewish in post-war Britain, Rabbi Lionel Blue once observed, could feel like a ‘double crucifixion’, as gay Jewish people had to manage both the homophobia and antisemitism of British society, and hostility towards homosexuality within the Jewish community. Slowly and inconsistently, however, attitudes towards gay people have evolved in Jewish Britain, change which has both reflected and shaped broader social attitudes towards homosexuality. This chapter explores the growth of Jewish gay activism, set in the context of international struggles for gay rights. It charts the birth of the Jewish Gay and Lesbian Group, highlighting some of the many challenges posed by coming out as a Jewish gay person in a community which continued to struggle with homophobia. The chapter analyses different responses to gay Jewish people and organisations across Jewish denominations, from Orthodox communities which struggled to accept gay living at any level to Progressive Judaism which, despite considerable challenges, eventually accepted the training and practice of openly gay rabbis. The chapter strives to explain the differing approaches of Orthodox and Progressive Judaism across this period and highlights the impact of Jewish gay activism both on attitudes towards homosexuality within and beyond the community, and on Jewish/non-Jewish relations in Britain more broadly.
This chapter discusses the surgical establishment’s claim that the rapid adoption of minimally invasive gallbladder surgery, or laparoscopic cholecystectomy, was a “patient-driven revolution” in general surgery. It shows that the motivations for developing a less invasive surgical procedure for gallstone treatment did not first originate from patients, but that demand was only generated after surgeons began publicizing its availability. Tang argues that the common and non-fatal nature of gallstones gave patients the consumer sovereignty and power to significantly influence surgical practice. In fact, the popularity for the new procedure among patients, once they knew about it, pressured some surgeons to offer it, sometimes even without adequate training. Examining patients who were seeking treatments they learned about outside of the doctor’s office, such as laparoscopic cholecystectomy, helps to better understand the circumstances in which consumer sovereignty can exist in medical care and how it can affect medical practice. Still, Tang suggests that the emphasis on patient demand to explain the procedure’s rapid adoption obscures the efforts made by some surgeons and hospitals to incite competition for gallbladder patients, and the lack of professional oversight in surgical innovation.
This book re-examines slave trading in the early Middle Ages from a comparative perspective, situating it at the core of economic and political development in northern and eastern Europe. In focusing on the ‘slaving zones’ centred on the British Isles and the Czech lands, it traces the forced migration of enslaved people from the point of capture to their destinations across Europe, the North Atlantic, north Africa, and western Asia. At the crux of the book is the shift of the ninth and tenth centuries prompted by increased demand, principally in the Islamic world. The desire to source more and more slaves led to changes in the practice of warfare to maximise captive taking, the logistics of slave trading, and rulers’ legal and economic relationships with slavery. By spanning the seventh through the eleventh centuries, this study traces the growth, climax, and decline of slave trading in the early Middle Ages and establishes its role as a driver of connectivity.
This chapter examines the demand for slaves and unfree labour in the British Isles and the Czech lands, serving as an introduction to slavery in these areas by outlining the types of labour performed by slaves, and their presence in agricultural or domestic, rural or urban contexts. This chapter also highlights the types of source material in which slaves, especially foreign slaves, appear, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the source material for each region, which either enhance or skew our perceptions of slavery and its distribution. Source limitations ultimately mean that an assessment of changing demand for these regions is necessarily speculative, but the overall picture in both the British Isles and the Czech lands is one without any drastic shifts in the demand for slave labour between the seventh and eleventh centuries, though it is significant to note that slavery was present and accepted throughout this period.