No group of Londoners has been as romanticised as its East Enders. Apparently, there’s a soap opera of that name on television. Every city has its East End. Like Dublin’s Liberties or Waterford’s Ballybricken, it’s the oldest industrial suburb, and traditionally regarded as the repository of the city’s character, as well as its characters. More recently, the Cockney image has yielded to the East End’s perception as the first rung on the ladder for successive waves of immigrants, a theme treated in the controversial and arguably racist play England people very nice. In Labour folklore it’s remembered, inter alia, for the role of the Irish in the London dock strike of 1889 and the Jews in the ‘Battle of Cable Street’ against Britain’s fascists in 1936. Since the late nineteenth century it has generated a substantial literature on aspects of labour, radicalism, ethnicity, and migration. As David Renshaw’s cerebral title suggests, Socialism and the diasporic ‘other’ is based on his Ph.D., with some of the advantages and disadvantages that that usually entails. In other words, it’s well researched and cross-referenced, but a dry read.

Renshaw sets himself three aims: to assess the importance of ethnicity or ‘othering’ in the development of socialism; to compare the agendas of the local Jewish and Catholic religious agencies; and to examine the neglected topic of Irish–Jewish relations. Each is given scrupulously equal treatment – for fear of being politically incorrect? – in five chapters looking at the origins of immigration to the East End, socialism and ethnicity, socialism and Catholicism and Judaism, communal leaderships, and grass-roots activity. The challenges involved are compounded by the methodological difficulties inherent in comparing the hierarchical and centralised Catholic church with the more diverse structures and theology of Judaism. In the process Renshaw unearths plenty of socialist comment on immigration, which is difficult to read without being mindful of the current debate in Britain. Sometimes it’s just difficult to read. Most people held a racist view of the world before the opening of the Nazi concentration camps, and immigrants were commonly seen as a threat. In London, between the two big dock strikes of 1889 and 1912, they came chiefly from Poland, Italy, Ireland, China, and the ghettos of Tsarist Russia, but, Renshaw argues, the discourse on the East End concentrated on the Irish and the Jews. What is more surprising is Renshaw’s evidence that immigration was regarded as a threat to the social cohesion of the working class and the socialist project itself by what he calls ‘insular’ socialists. There were, of course, international socialists too. Yet even a great humanitarian like Michael Davitt would distinguish between ‘good’ anti-semitism, again the big financiers, and ‘bad’ anti-semitism, against ordinary Jews.

While Labour myth has lionised the positive interactions of socialists, Jews, and Irish, and there were precious moments, like Cardinal Manning’s support for the dockers in 1889, the overriding conclusion to be drawn from this study is that the three went their separate ways. Numerous socialists would admire the social concern of parish priests for their poverty-stricken congregations, but the predominant attitude on the left was one of suspicion of Roman clericalism. Similarly, the Catholic church combined a broad sympathy for labour (evident in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum) with resolute anti-socialism and renewed anti-modernism under the pontificate of Pius X. The ground for an overlap between the church and organised Judaism was even narrower. At grass-roots level, the few heart-warming stories of Jews and Irish helping one another highlighted by Renshaw are overshadowed by Irish fear of Jewish encroachment, which was advancing street by street as Jews fled pogroms in Russia. The Limerick incident in 1904, correctly called a ‘boycott’ rather than a pogrom, also gets a mention. One is struck by how discrete the two communities were, and how different their situations were. Jews clustered in the rag trade – and competition from the sweatshops of London was a major concern at this time in Derry’s shirt factories – and most worked for Jewish employers. Irishmen were more likely to work on the waterfront or the building line, for English employers. Irishwomen had few employment options outside cleaning or domestic service. The Irish had an ambiguous attitude towards the host country and its empire. Jews wanted to be good Englishmen. And yet the Irish were more proximate, culturally, and more likely to be assimilated in the second generation of settlement, while Jews were ‘exotic’ and unlikely ever to become fully assimilated if they wished to stay Jews. Perhaps the remarkable thing is that conflict between them was so limited. Renshaw’s subject is fascinating, with an endless relevance to the currently fashionable fields of historical enquiry into transnationalism, migration, and ethnicity. The critique is objective and rigorous. The style is academic, but enlivened with lots of choice quotations. Liverpool University Press might have improved the dull production with a few illustrations, but they deserve credit for choosing footnotes over endnotes.