Extract from papers on
Provincial Jewry in Victorian Britain

Papers prepared by Dr. (later Prof.) Aubrey Newman for a conference at University College, London, convened on 6 July 1975 by the Jewish Historical Society of England
Reproduced here with Prof. Newman's kind consent)

  

Page created: 18 October 2016
Latest revision: 11 December 2016

INTRODUCTION
to the Book of Conference Papers

by I. Finestein

The history of the Jews of the United Kingdom is part of British history. It is also part of the history of the Jewish people. Nowhere are those self-evident truths more clearly seen than in the provincial Jewish communities, with their deep local associations and their ever changing Jewish patterns.

In his Presidential Addresses to the Jewish Historical Society of England in 1941 and 1942, the late Cecil Roth took provincial Anglo-Jewry as his theme. Those lectures were the basis of his later articles in The Jewish Monthly, which in 1950 appeared in the form of his well-known and important book The Rise of Provincial Jewry. That work was concerned with the period 1740-1840. He referred in his Introduction to the publications which had already been produced on the history of provincial communities. Since his lectures, as may be seen, for example, from the programmes and Transactions of the Society, much additional original work has been done in that field, including the period since 1840.

The conference convened by the Society on 6th July 1975 at University College, London, is intended to stimulate further serious interest in the provincial Jewish history of the Victorian Age. It was an epoch of transformations. Part of the interest in the history of provincial Anglo- Jewry in that era is that this fact is so graphically demonstrated therein. This book, prepared for the conference, is in a sense a successor volume to that of Cecil Roth. It is hoped that it will prove an added spur to research for some, and in any event a source of instructive and pleasurable reading for all.

The Society is most grateful to the authors of the papers contained in this work, and to all the contributors to the conference. In particular, we are all obliged to Dr Aubrey Newman, who has given so much of his time, energy and expertise in the planning of the conference and in the preparation of this book.

London
8th May 1975