The history of the Gorbals district of Glasgow is of interest to both historians and social scientists for a number of reasons. In popular memory, the area is inextricably linked with ‘razor gangs’, crime, street violence and poverty – an association that has partly been shaped by Alexander McArthur and Herbert Kingsley Long's book No Mean City. First published in 1935, it depicts a poverty-stricken underworld, characterized by brutal encounters between rival gangs that has structured perceptions of the city ever since its publication.Footnote 1 Another aspect of life in the Gorbals, however, is less widely known, namely its ethnic and religious diversity. The area contained Catholic, Jewish and Protestant communities which interacted with each other in a variety of ways, and it thus offers a fascinating example of inter-ethnic relations.
Focusing on the inter-war years, this article examines the lived experience of the Jewish community in the Gorbals. It discusses its relationship with the Catholic and Protestant communities, and considers the ways in which sectarian tensions between the two larger communities predominated over anti-Semitism. To investigate these issues, it is necessary to look at the tactics that ensured daily co-existence, but also at the more exceptional violent expressions of religious and ethnic conflict. It will be seen that the residents of the district adopted patterns of behaviour that essentially allowed them to live side by side and interact with each other, but that the fabric of everyday life was subject to instances of violent rupture. The individual's experience of these divisions, however, was mediated by age, class, gender, ethnicity, religious affiliation, individual temperament and even the street they lived on.
Although historians of Anglo-Jewry have traditionally tended to neglect Scotland, this lacuna has been remedied in recent years. Whilst the primary focus of scholarship in this field has been on Edinburgh and Glasgow, Nathan Abrams’ recent study of seven small communities in Scotland outside the two major cities has offered a broader picture.Footnote 2 In regard to the history of Jews in Glasgow, studies have addressed various aspects of Jewish life in the city, including education, religion, health and welfare.Footnote 3 Relations between the Jewish and Irish communities in Glasgow have also been considered, notably by William Kenefick who argued that they provide ‘a clear example of good inter-ethnic relations and the identification of shared values and similarities’.Footnote 4
The focus of the current article is distinct, as it is both narrower – having an explicit focus on the Gorbals itself – and broader, inasmuch as it is a study of all three religious communities in the district. This piece draws on fresh primary materials, notably a set of 17 interviews with elderly members of the Jewish community in Glasgow, conducted by the author himself. The article represents the first sustained attempt at using oral testimony in order to offer an interpretation of the dynamics of inter-ethnic relations in the Gorbals from a Jewish perspective. Of course, any account of the past comes up against the limitations of the evidence and the partiality of the sources. These problems are particularly prominent when relying on memoirs – in this case autobiographical accounts by Jewish authors – and on oral testimony.Footnote 5 This article acknowledges that oral sources raise particular methodological challenges; in this context, it follows Alistair Thomson in recognizing that ‘oral history is not simply “the voice of the past”; it is a living record of the complex interaction between past and present within each individual and in society’.Footnote 6 There is no longer a Jewish community in the Gorbals, and none of the respondents currently live in the district. Their life experiences after leaving the Gorbals varied considerably as did their degree of social mobility. Thus, although their perceptions of the period of their lives that they were questioned about was obviously coloured by both their subsequent experiences and the way in which they wish to portray their own past, it is difficult to determine precisely how these influences shaped their responses. Finally, even if oral testimony reveals varying accounts of everyday life in the community, these contrasting voices alert us to the different experiences of religious and ethnic tensions.
This article makes use of a range of insights from other studies of immigration and ethnicity. As Maria Vassilikou has pointed out in her work on Greeks and Jews in Salonika and Odessa, the interaction between different ethnic groups should not be seen ‘solely through the lens of ethnic conflict and communal violence’.Footnote 7 She depicts a more complex set of relations between the two groups in her study in which ‘Contact ranged from mutual indifference, cooperation and tolerance to animosity.’Footnote 8 This sense of a continuum of prejudice has famously been outlined by Gordon W. Allport who identifies a spectrum of prejudice which ranged from antilocution, or expressing prejudice verbally, avoidance, discrimination, physical attack and finally extermination.Footnote 9 Allport's typology of prejudice is particularly useful in bringing out the hidden aspects of prejudice. As he says, ‘[w]hat people actually do in relation to groups they dislike is not always directly related to what they think or feel about them’.Footnote 10 This point is important to bear in mind when considering the relations between the Catholic, Jewish and Protestant communities in the Gorbals.
The road to Gorbals Cross: the making of ‘A Scottish Shtetl’
Approximately 15,000 Jews lived in Glasgow during the inter-war years – considerably fewer than in Manchester and Leeds, which were the largest provincial communities in this period.Footnote 11 There was an established and affluent Jewish community in the Garnethill district of Glasgow before 1880, the date at which the main period of Jewish immigration from the Pale of Settlement began.Footnote 12 This small community was shaped by a broader transformation during which Eastern European Jews migrated westwards at the end of the nineteenth century as a result of their worsening position within Tsarist Russia.Footnote 13 Estimates suggest that between 120,000 and 150,000 East European Jews moved to Britain between 1881 and 1914.Footnote 14 The majority of these new arrivals to the country settled in the East End of London, although significant communities developed in some provincial cities.Footnote 15
Glasgow's East European Jewish migrants predominantly settled in the Gorbals, and by the 1880s the area had acquired a distinctively Jewish character.Footnote 16 As V.D. Lipman puts it, the Jewish community in the Gorbals became a ‘working-class, Yiddish-speaking community, orthodox in religious practice, and separate from the middle-class, acculturated Jewish community of the west end’.Footnote 17 Chaim Bermant describes how it felt to move from the small Latvian village of Barovke to Glasgow in 1937 in his autobiography:
Our first address was the Gorbals where Father had lodgings with distant relatives and the Gorbals, somehow, was less intimidating than other parts of the town for it reminded me vaguely of Dvinsk. There were Yiddish posters on the hoardings, Hebrew lettering on the shops, Jewish names, Jewish faces, Jewish butchers, Jewish bakers with Jewish bread, and Jewish grocers with barrels of herring in the doorway. The herrings in particular brought a strong whiff of home. One heard Yiddish in the streets – more so, in fact, than English – and one encountered figures who would not have been put of place in Barovke.Footnote 18
In his study of the 1901 census, Harvey L. Kaplan found that 75 per cent of the Jews of the Gorbals lived in 20 streets centred around Main Street.Footnote 19 It appears that these streets continued to be the main areas of Jewish occupation in the inter-war years. However, the centre of the community shifted to Abbotsford Place and its continuation into South Portland Street after the opening of the largest Synagogue in the south side of the city in 1901 in that street.Footnote 20 In addition, this street also housed two significant communal meeting places, Geneen's Kosher Hotel which opened in 1928 and the Jewish Institute which opened in 1935.Footnote 21 Although by far the greatest number of foreign-born Jews in the Gorbals were from the Russian Empire, this should not obscure the diversity in origin of the settlers. Kaplan found that, ‘The Jews of the Gorbals were born in no fewer than 16 countries. 28 per cent were born in Glasgow, and 30 per cent in Scotland as a whole. 56 per cent of Gorbals Jewry (2,578) are listed as having been born in the vast Russian Empire – most likely the Pale of Settlement (including Poland).’Footnote 22
Jewish immigrants settled in the Gorbals partly because of its growing community of people from a similar background, and partly because of the availability of cheap accommodation.Footnote 23 The accommodation was not cheap without reason: although the quality of the housing within the area varied, much of it could be justifiably be described as ‘slum’ property.Footnote 24 Official concern about the state of the housing in the Gorbals can be traced back to the 1860s, and by the middle of twentieth century the district had become the most notorious slum in Britain.Footnote 25 However, as J.G. Robb has shown, despite its reputation as a slum district, and a general lowering of social status in the area during the nineteenth century, there was a continued middle-class presence in the Gorbals until the 1940s.Footnote 26
Poverty in the Gorbals was partially ameliorated by the charitable organizations of the Jewish residents of the Gorbals, who recreated a rich associational life for themselves.Footnote 27 This extended beyond the various Synagogues housed by the district to encompass the political idealism of the Workers’ Circle, the Jewish Institute, which hosted a range of social activities, and youth groups like the Jewish Lads’ Brigade (JLB), which aimed to instil a degree of patriotism in its members, to give some notable examples.Footnote 28 It is also worth noting that the Glasgow division of the JLB included a Jewish pipe band complete with kilts and sporrans amongst its regular activities.Footnote 29
This, however, is not to say that participation in such groups precluded mixing with non-Jewish people. There was also a generational difference within the Jewish community as a whole in Britain, as the second generation tended to adopt different patterns of behaviour from their parents. As Todd L. Endelman points out, ‘The children of the immigrants were drawn to the popular culture of the non-Jewish population more than the Old World culture of their parents . . . They preferred to spend their leisure time at the billiard hall, the cinema, the theatre, the dance hall, the football stadium, the racetrack, and the boxing arena.’Footnote 30 As a case in point, two of my female respondents describe the social life of their older brothers as being characterized by a free movement between Jewish organizations and arenas where they associated with their non-Jewish contemporaries such as the cinema and the snooker hall. Although many young Jewish men regularly attended the Jewish Institute, the Workers’ Circle or the sports club, the Maccabi, this did not prevent them from also socializing with their non-Jewish peers.Footnote 31 Furthermore, as these organizations were not, in themselves, exclusive, social boundaries were generally porous. For example, some non-Jewish people joined the Workers’ Circle either as a result of their political sympathies, or simply so they could go dancing on Sundays.Footnote 32
Before the arrival of the Jews from Eastern Europe, the Gorbals was already host to two groups of incomers, Highlanders and Irish migrants. In fact, mid-nineteenth-century Glasgow drew its non-native population largely from Scotland and Ireland.Footnote 33 Highlanders made their way to Glasgow as a result of the Clearances in the early nineteenth century, recurring famines or the failure of the potato crop in 1845, although many were temporary migrants.Footnote 34 The Irish Catholic population of the city was greatly increased by the Famine of the 1840s, although Irish immigration gradually fell off during the second half of the century.Footnote 35 Glasgow's Irish migrants settled in particular areas – the Gorbals, but also Anderston and Bridgeton.Footnote 36
It would be difficult to make sense of Jewish community life in the Gorbals, without considering the ethnic tensions that preceded the arrival of Eastern European Jews. The violence and antipathy which Irish migrants in Britain faced is well known, and Glasgow was no exception. The poor state of health and extreme poverty of the migrants from the Famine did not generally lead to sympathy for their plight. The Glasgow Herald offers a typical example of the negative terms in which Catholics were portrayed: ‘The streets of Glasgow are at present literally swarming with poor vagrants from the sister kingdom, and the misery of these can scarcely be less than what they have fled or been driven from at home.’Footnote 37 Another Glasgow paper, the Witness, went as far as to blame the Famine itself on ‘a religion of dependency and indigence’.Footnote 38
The sectarian tension between the Protestant and Catholic populations, and the growth of Orangeism in Glasgow during the nineteenth century, was partially a reaction to the Irish immigration which followed the Famine, but primarily stimulated by the large number of Protestant migrants from the North of Ireland that settled in the city. In the years 1876–81, 83.2 per cent of the Irish immigrants to Scotland came from the North, and the majority of those from the most Protestant counties.Footnote 39 The annual Orange Walk in Glasgow was the scene of violent sectarian confrontations from its inception. The first recorded public procession in Scotland by the Orange Order on the ‘Twelfth’ was in Glasgow in 1821, and ended in a virtual riot.Footnote 40 After another major public disturbance at a Twelfth procession a year later, the city magistrates banned the Orangemen from holding further processions. However, 50 years later, a Twelfth procession was permitted in Glasgow, and thus the Orange Walk embedded itself in Scottish culture.Footnote 41 During the inter-war years, every Walk held in Scotland resulted in a violent conflict of some sort apart from that held in 1939.Footnote 42 The Orange processions of 8 July 1935 in Glasgow provide a good example of the disturbances and the Gorbals as a site for these clashes. The Glasgow Herald reported:
Disturbances broke out in several districts of Glasgow on Saturday night as Orange processionists, who had taken part in the celebrations at Johnstone to commemorate the Battle of the Boyne, were returning to their headquarters in the city. Over 50 arrests were made during the night . . . The most serious outbreak occurred in the Gorbals district following on the arrest of two young men. An attack was made upon the police, and in view of the large crowd it was considered necessary to send for aid . . . Two men were conveyed to the Royal Infirmary with wounds stated to have been inflicted by stabbing.Footnote 43
These violent instances suggest life in the district was subject to considerable divisions based on ethnicity and religion. As a result, Protestant and Catholic interactions with the Jewish community in the Gorbals were, to some extent, filtered through these existing tensions. One of my respondents, Mrs Abrahams (born in 1912), offered an example of how views on the Jewish community were shaped by the city's sectarian divide: ‘I've heard it so many times. A Protestant say, “I'd rather my child married a Jew than a Catholic.”’Footnote 44 Whilst relations between the three communities were complex and fraught with tension, the testimony we will consider in the following section suggests a picture that is characterized less by conflict than one might expect.
Everyday life with the Cohens, the Kellys and the Stewarts
Most historians seem to agree that anti-Semitism in Glasgow was comparatively rare. Kenneth Collins, for instance, has claimed that ‘[t]here was little serious anti-Semitism and the community was well tolerated, even in the Gorbals where the Jews formed a significant and visible minority’.Footnote 45 In his autobiography, Jack Caplan – a Jewish resident of the Gorbals – praised the relations between the different groups in his district:
In that small area, the Gorbals, a link was forged. Three races had united. Though belonging to different religions and coming from differing backgrounds, an affinity grew and developed. It was common for any one tenement to have Jews, Scots and Irish families living together. Verily the Cohens and Kellys, strengthened by the Stewarts or McDonalds.Footnote 46
In the interviews conducted for this article, six female respondents – Mrs Adler (born in 1917), Mrs Berkowitz (born in 1926), Mrs Danzig (born in 1931), Mrs Friedlander (born in 1926), Mrs Greenberg (born in 1918) and Mrs Solomons (born in 1926) – claimed that they had not experienced any anti-Semitism whilst growing up in the Gorbals.Footnote 47 Mrs Greenberg mentioned several non-Jewish residents of the Gorbals who learnt to speak Yiddish, ‘because they came into contact with Jewish people, and they were quick at picking up languages’.Footnote 48 Three of my male respondents also claimed that there was little anti-Semitism: as Mr Cowan (born in 1922) put it, ‘I can't say I recorded any discrimination at the time when I was growing up.’Footnote 49 Mr Sacks (born in 1931) stressed the mixing between the Jewish and non-Jewish communities, referring to his non-Jewish friends and the absence of problems with his non-Jewish friends or neighbours.Footnote 50 Similarly, Mr Goldman (born in 1923) said that he did not personally experience any anti-Semitism in the Gorbals, and that there were no tensions between Jewish and non-Jewish neighbours.Footnote 51 He did, however, add a caveat: ‘I think it varies, you know, different people, different circumstances, different schools. I mean I wouldn't say it [i.e. anti-Semitism] didn't exist but, as far as I was aware, I wasn't conscious of it.’Footnote 52
However, this picture of peaceful co-existence is rejected by other respondents. Speaking of her childhood experiences in the Gorbals during the 1930s, Mrs Rosenberg (born in 1932) disputed the accounts of those who claimed not to have experienced anti-Semitism in the district. As she put it, ‘some people have said to me they didn't come across anti-Semitism. I think they've forgotten. Certainly we did in the Gorbals.’Footnote 53 Another respondent, Mr Zuckerman (born in 1910), claimed not to have had any personal experiences of anti-Semitism, but used this as an argument for the uniqueness of his experience. He claims that, mostly due to his sporting prowess, he was accepted everywhere: ‘I was different. I had so many Gentile friends, I had open sesame anywhere. I had no problems at all.’Footnote 54 Beyond his personal experience, though, he felt that ‘Anti-Semitism was natural, it was a fact of life.’Footnote 55
How are we to reconcile the differing accounts of anti-Semitism in the district? First, one has to acknowledge the possibility that some individuals may have had an experience that was relatively free of prejudice as a result of their particular circumstances. For example, Mrs Adler spent much of her time within her extended family circle, and also happened to live in tenements that were solely occupied by Jewish residents. She said that she never had non-Jewish friends as a child and thus, apart from her time at school, had very little contact with people outside the Jewish community.Footnote 56 Secondly, it is important to consider the way that nostalgia may have shaped the memories of these respondents in such a way as to ‘edit out’ negative or painful experiences. One must also take into account the type of account that an individual wishes to give of themselves in an interview.Footnote 57
Regarding attitudes to the Jewish community in Glasgow, both historians and former residents have drawn particular attention to positive relations with Catholics in the district.Footnote 58 In his memoirs, the former Labour politician Manny Shinwell suggested that Jewish and Irish residents in the Gorbals were largely friendly, despite occasional outbreaks of anti-Semitism.Footnote 59 Two of my respondents, Mrs Berkowitz and Mrs Solomons, also testified to this affinity between Catholics and Jews. Describing her childhood in Thistle Street in the Gorbals, Mrs Berkowitz said that ‘there was a lot of Catholics, and the Jewish people and the Catholics got on very well. It was a lovely life I had there . . . The Catholics and the Jewish people seemed to understand each other, and I used to do the shopping for all of them.’Footnote 60 Mrs Solomons described her Catholic neighbours as ‘wonderful people’ and said that there was a good relationship between the Jewish and Catholic residents in her tenement.Footnote 61 In contrast to these accounts, Mrs Cohen (born in 1931) had the impression that there was little difference between the attitude of the Catholic and Protestant residents of the district towards the Jewish community. This view was also expressed by Mrs Danzig.Footnote 62 Similarly, Ralph Glasser wrote in his memoirs that members of the Irish Catholic community were ‘as ready as Protestants’ to shout out anti-Semitic insults in the street to Jews on their way to the Synagogue. At the same time, he suggested that Irish Catholics had a better relationship with the Jewish exiles than they did with the indigenous Protestants.Footnote 63
The testimony by Irish Catholic immigrants from Donegal, collected for BBC Scotland's Odyssey series, includes one example of an Irish Catholic interviewee discussing her interactions with a Jewish family in the Gorbals. Her testimony suggests a positive relationship that, however, was open to misunderstandings:
So I was lucky enough to get in with this lovely couple, they were very good to me. As a matter of fact she was an Irish woman she was from Dublin and they were Jews and I was a mother's help lookin’ after her wee girl. Now when I went to Scotland I was naïve and I thought everybody had the same religion and with me being Catholic I decided to teach the wee Jewish girl her prayers, and she picked it up very quick. She used to stand in her cot every morning and she would say Hail Mary and God bless this and that and I thought I was doin’ a wonderful job until I got a fortnight's holidays and the mother took over then.Footnote 64
When the girl's mother eventually found out about this, she took it in good humour, and it did not damage the relationship between them.
Growing up in the Gorbals
Overall, the picture that emerges of the Gorbals is of a community in which ethnic and religious tensions were largely kept in check. However, these tensions still simmered away below the surface and were acutely felt by children and adolescents. Parental attitudes on different sides of the ethnic divide could operate to put up barriers between the different sections of the community. Mrs Rosenberg recounted how a friend of hers stopped seeing her because she was Jewish.Footnote 65 Another interviewee, Mrs Abrahams, gave an example of how parental attitudes influenced the views of their children:
I had a very good friend [Peggy] . . . who was not Jewish . . . and we used to walk home [together] and we were having a lovely conversation, arm in arm [when Peggy said] ‘My Daddy said that you should go back to Jerusalem, to Palestine.’ I said, ‘What for?’ She said, ‘Because this isn't your country.’ . . . So I said to her, ‘I've got news for you, I'm every bit as Scottish as you are. So there.’ ‘Well my Daddy said you're not.’ And we were still walking arm in arm.’ ‘Cheerio, I'll see you tomorrow.’Footnote 66
Whilst the two girls did not fall out over this exchange, Mrs Abrahams’ father intervened soon afterwards to end the friendship:
I got ready to go out, and my father said, ‘Where are you going?’ I said, ‘I'm going to meet [Peggy].’ He said, ‘Oh no, you're not.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ He said, ‘Because she's not Yiddish, you're not going.’ I said, ‘But she's my best friend.’ ‘No, you're not going.’ And he was such a quiet, mild man, and he was insistent that I wouldn't go. So there you are.Footnote 67
Although parents could seek to limit the interactions between Jewish and non-Jewish children, this did not extend to schooling, as there was no Jewish day school in the Gorbals.Footnote 68 It seems that Jewish schoolchildren were not easily distinguishable by their dress which, had they tended towards a more Orthodox style of clothing, might have marked them out as ‘different’. This is a point that Mr Goldman felt was significant. He says that, ‘We [i.e. Jewish children] didn't stand out in any way. I don't remember any child at school ever wearing a yarmulke [i.e. skullcap].’Footnote 69 Mrs Rosenberg, however, suggested that it was at the schooling age that problems started:
Until we went to school, we played together all sorts of kids, but once you went to school, and they got older, they realised that you were Jewish, there was this enmity, there wasn't just separateness. I always used to dread going up the Close [i.e. tenement] because if there was a crowd of kids around they used to shout things like, ‘You're a dirty Jew!’ You know, and I used to say, ‘Well I'm cleaner than you’, because they were pretty dirty. It was quite nerve-racking to go up and down the stairs, you know.Footnote 70
How did sectarian tensions impact on the lives of Jewish children who went to school in the Gorbals? Kenefick argues that Jewish children were seen as essentially neutral in sectarian terms, yet he also suggests that they were targeted by Catholic children as they went to Protestant schools.Footnote 71 One of the interviewees, Mr Danzig, pointed to the predominance of sectarian rivalry, meaning that ‘no-one ever bothered with the Jews’.Footnote 72 At the same time, he acknowledged that Jewish children could be identified with the school or the neighbourhood that they lived in. Identifying oneself as Jewish was not always enough to escape a beating. Mr Danzig, Mrs Cohen and Mr Goldman all mentioned that they were sometimes asked whether they were ‘a Protestant Jew or a Catholic Jew’.Footnote 73 This theological non sequitur also features in other accounts of the period, and points at the way in which sectarian tensions informed attitudes towards the Jewish community.Footnote 74
As a result, the everyday experience of Jewish children was one in which sectarian tensions could be as prominent as (or even more prominent than) the encounter with anti-Semitic attitudes. This is exemplified by the recollections of Mrs Cohen, who grew up in a tenement that also housed a Catholic family (the Kellys) and a Protestant family (the Stewarts). She said that occasionally she would notice the word ‘Jews’ written on the wall outside her family's front door. Although Mrs Cohen did not know who wrote graffiti outside her own door, she was aware that the Stewart children were responsible for the frequent appearance of anti-Catholic slogans outside the Kellys’ door and that they would also shout abuse through the Kellys’ letterbox on occasion.Footnote 75Although Mr Stewart was, apparently, a generally even-tempered man, when he got drunk, he would hurl abuse at the Catholic family from the top floor of the tenement, and on one occasion, this got too much for Mrs Kelly:
One night Mrs Kelly, who was over 80, was asleep in bed, and Mr Stewart began shouting abuse down the stairs, and the woman was so frightened that she ran out in her nightgown and her bare feet. But she was very ill you see, and she got a lot worse, and they reckoned it hastened her death.Footnote 76
Violent ruptures and sectarian flashpoints
The examples discussed thus far indicate a somewhat uneasy co-existence between the different groups that lived in the Gorbals. Tensions may have been hidden at times, but they would periodically rise to the surface in open conflict. One phrase that looms large in this context is the challenge ‘Are you a Billy or a Dan, or an old tin can’. Evelyn Cowan explains this phrase in her autobiography:
A Billy was a Protestant and a Dan was a Catholic. And an old tin can was a Jew. So if you admitted you were an old tin can, you got kicked around the street just like that piece of metal. Vaguely, we always knew of someone who got beaten up by the gangs. But it was never one of our immediate circle.Footnote 77
In my interviews, Mr Zuckermann quoted the phrase ‘a Billy or a Dan, or an old tin can’ to demonstrate that Jews were ‘despised’ by the non-Jews in the district.Footnote 78 Furthermore, despite stressing their own positive experiences with regard to inter-community relations, both Mr Lipman (born in 1923) and Mrs Laski (born in 1929) also mentioned being confronted with this phrase at school or on the way to school.Footnote 79 The rhyme could be a prelude to violent confrontations: Glasser describes facing the same question with his friend as a small boy, but only being offered the alternatives of Billy or Dan, and not understanding the meaning of either term. In this instance, the boys managed to diffuse the situation through simple questioning.Footnote 80 Caplan, on the other hand, describes a boyhood encounter with a Catholic gang that did result in a physical confrontation:
Sometimes the juvenile gangs from Coburg Street (the ‘Coburg Erin‘) who were Catholics or the ‘Young Cumbies’ from the Cumberland Street, Protestants, would invade South Portland Street, a mainly Jewish section, with synagogue and Jewish Institute. When this occurred we usually dived into the nearest tenement to hide. On one memorable day, with Jerry and two other ‘stalwarts’ to back me up with moral support, I decided that a stand had to be made.Footnote 81
Caplan goes on to describe the fight that ensued between himself and the gang leader. His account of this incident is interesting for several reasons. First, he leaves us in no doubt that the attack was motivated by anti-Semitism, which he explains with reference to the views of the children's parents.Footnote 82 Secondly, it reinforces Glasser's point that, despite the relative harmony between Jews and Catholics, anti-Semitic views were present within both the Catholic and the Protestant communities. Finally, it demonstrates that members of the Jewish community were also capable of defending themselves, and were not just passive victims of prejudice.
The testimony of Mr Levy (born in 1923) seems to confirm these observations. He encountered quite a lot of verbal abuse from non-Jewish boys, but said that there were very few actual fights. As he put it, ‘there were a few minor clashes, but there was a lot of Jewish boys able to handle themselves too’.Footnote 83 He elaborated on one alternative way in which these encounters might unfold:
You walk along, especially with the Irish, they see you when they're drunk, and they say, ‘You're a dirty Jew.’ You just walked on. You had the odd cases where some of the hooligans would come up, especially the Catholic boys, to where we played in the back yards looking for trouble. When we saw them coming, we just disappeared.Footnote 84
Based on his experiences, Mr Levy rejected notions about a close relationship between Jews and Irish Catholics, claiming that ‘the Catholics were more anti-Semitic than the Protestants’.Footnote 85
The street fighting encountered by the Gorbals’ young residents was only one type of violent encounter in the district. The most well-known manifestation of sectarian violence in Glasgow was linked to the rivalry between the city's two principal football teams, Rangers and Celtic, representing Protestant and Catholic allegiances respectively.Footnote 86 As Doctor Stane, who worked in the Gorbals and Bridgeton district during this period said, ‘[a]nd believe you me, on a Saturday night after a Celtic and Rangers match you didn't have to look too far for trouble’.Footnote 87 One of my interviewees, Mr Danzig, described this phenomenon in more dramatic terms: ‘There was blood everywhere when Rangers played Celtic, and the police couldn't handle it.’Footnote 88 At the same time, he stressed that ‘when the match wasn't on they [i.e. Catholics and Protestants] stayed in their own territories’.Footnote 89
There were, indeed, routine clashes between Rangers and Celtic supporters on match days in various parts of the city as each group sought to provoke the other by invading their rivals’ territory, as Andrew Davies’ research has shown.Footnote 90 For example, in April 1930, a group of 40 to 50 Billy Boys paraded through the Gorbals carrying banners, flags and a replica of the Scottish Cup on their way back from a match. Their presence attracted the attention of the, predominantly Catholic, South Side Stickers, resulting in a violent confrontation between the two gangs.Footnote 91
However, violent confrontations between Catholics and Protestants were not just confined to Old Firm matches. Not only did the Protestants also tend to march on every Catholic holiday as an act of provocation, the Billy Boys even had a church parade every Sunday, during which they deliberately marched through Catholic streets.Footnote 92 We have already seen that the annual celebration of the Battle of the Boyne on the Twelfth of July was another obvious sectarian flashpoint. Two of my respondents mentioned St Patrick's Day as another time when these tensions rose to the surface.Footnote 93 Mrs Abrahams said that when she was at school St Patrick's Day was invariably an occasion when children would gang together according to their religious affiliation and target other children in order to ask, ‘Are you a Billy or a Dan, or an old tin can?’Footnote 94 Kenefick quotes a respondent, born in the Gorbals in 1912, who offers a similar childhood account:
You don't encounter anti-Semitism from children, you get that from adults . . . [there was] one day a year – St. Patrick's Day when the Roman Catholics came about and they got at the Protestants. When they were going up to the school, you heard them shouting out, are you a Billy or a Dan? If you say the wrong thing, you get hit on the head. But in those days – you didn't – I don't think at school I ever experienced any anti-Semitism.Footnote 95
One of my respondents, Mr Levy, referred to Easter as a particular flashpoint, especially with regard to relations with Catholics in the district:
We got it when it came to Easter. ‘You Jews killed Christ.’ It was always the Catholics. We killed Christ. ‘Go back to Palestine,’ they kept telling us . . . They were taught in the Catholic Church that the Jews killed Christ. So we used to get that, these verbal things. It was all shouting and bawling at each other. We answered back with some cheeky remarks about Christ and the Pope and all the usual stuff. But I never really had a fight with any non-Jewish boys. In fact, I palled up with a few of them.Footnote 96
Conclusion
This article has explored the complexities of inter-ethnic relations in the Gorbals during the inter-war period. It has considered the variety of individual experiences within the Jewish community of the Gorbals in this period which were shaped by the diversity of their encounters with Catholic and Protestant neighbours. On the other hand, it has also demonstrated that there are particular occasions where inter-ethnic relations are all too predictable, almost following a ‘calendar of conflict’. Thus, while the focus on individual testimony foregrounds the agency of the individual, and the significance of personal characteristics and circumstances in determining the lived experience of a community, the recurrence of particular moments of conflict on particular occasions illustrates the manner in which social structures almost seem to compel individuals to act in particular manners associated with their group identity. This is in accordance with the theory of structuration as outlined by Anthony Giddens which holds that ‘Structure is not to be equated with constraint, but is always both constraining and enabling.’Footnote 97 Thus, this approach views ethnicity as forming structures of action that makes certain forms of behaviour more likely than others, but also views individuals as knowledgeable social actors who can also transcend the expectations created by their ‘ethnic belonging’.Footnote 98
Oral testimony reveals the way in which the divisions within the community were, to some extent, suppressed in daily life, but rose to the surface on particular occasions and also within the semi-private space of the tenement itself, where the proximity of those from different faiths did periodically result in open conflict. Thus, Caplan's description of the harmonious relationship between Catholics, Jews and Protestants in the Gorbals is partially contradicted by the testimony considered here. Although there is some evidence of harmonious inter-ethnic relations in the district, the testimony cited in this article points at fairly persistent tensions. Some respondents testify to the warmth of the relationship between Irish Catholic and Jewish residents, yet others claim that there was little difference in the attitudes of the two groups. A third group of respondents points at particular conflicts with Catholic residents of the district.
Most of the interviewees claimed not to have experienced any anti-Semitism. Integration between the Jewish and non-Jewish residents of the district was facilitated by several factors. First, the fact that Jewish and non-Jewish children were schooled together, and Jewish children were also not easily distinguishable by their dress. The children of the Jewish immigrants to the area also seemed to have embraced their dual identity as both Scottish and Jewish. In addition, we have seen that social boundaries in the district were often porous as Jewish organizations were not exclusive, and young Jewish people in particular moved freely between Jewish institutions and the wider community. One respondent, Mr Levy, suggested that such interactions did not necessarily testify to a warm relationship: ‘We mixed a lot with the Goyim, but not as friendly, you tolerated each other at times.’Footnote 99
While some individuals may indeed have had an experience that was relatively free of anti-Semitism, Jewish residents in the Gorbals were, on occasion, subject to verbal and physical attacks. However, violent confrontation seems to have been comparatively rare and in no way equalled the severity and frequency of sectarian violence in the city. Jewish shops were not subject to attack, and there was no regular organized demonstration of hostility to the Jewish presence in the city comparable to the Billy Boys’ regular raids on Catholic districts. Anti-Semitism in the Gorbals was mediated through the sectarian rivalry, which was the dominant religious conflict in the city.
