With the sudden outbreak of war in 1914, patriotic recruitment campaigns and sensationalist press stories emphasizing the “barbarism” of German troops encouraged the London public to draw lines between “ally,” “enemy,” and “neutral,” at the very least, and between “British” and “non-British,” if at all possible.Footnote 1 This public discourse was reinforced by official government policy that strengthened the legal boundary between citizens and aliens, giving the state unprecedented power to monitor and regulate the movement and behavior of the latter.Footnote 2 But how were Londoners, whether state officials or private citizens, to understand and employ such nationalist distinctions? In an ostensibly liberal state, one that defined itself in contrast to the conservative monarchies of the Central Powers, the British government could not expel foreign “undesirables” arbitrarily. Nor was it always easy to distinguish between those who “belonged” and those who did not. During World War I, an individual's willingness to serve in the armed forces was often seen by many as a key indicator of loyalty to the nation. The British government's introduction of conscription in 1916 made such service mandatory for young men who wished to be publicly recognized as full members of the nation. Even legal citizens could still be excluded from the “imagined community” of the nation if they refused, and aliens could sometimes be asked to justify their residence in the country by assuming the same duties expected of citizens.Footnote 3 Nowhere was the line between insider and outsider harder to distinguish than in the heterogeneous courts and alleys of London's East End, where many immigrants lived and worked.Footnote 4

London's status as “the Imperial Metropolis” and the diversity of its ethnic and social composition made such identifications more difficult than ever.Footnote 5 Germans, Jews, “Lascars,” Poles, Irish, Russians, and a host of other immigrant groups called London home either temporarily or permanently, though not all claimed to be legally or culturally British.Footnote 6 Some groups, like the Anglo-Jewry of East London, were established cohorts eager to affirm their integration into mainstream British society. Others, drawn by England's tradition as a haven for the socially and politically unwanted of continental Europe, had fled persecution in their own nations.Footnote 7 Members of this last group, lacking either the time or desire to adapt themselves fully to their new surroundings, were more likely to retain their own language, dress, and habits, and, thus, were more easily identifiable as “outsiders.” Finally, there were the legions of foreigners who were part and parcel of London's powerful and prolific linkages, via networks of trade and culture, with the rest of the world.

During a period of “total war,” in an era in which the state was establishing a prominent presence in everyday life, citizenship in Britain was increasingly defined by duties and responsibilities as much as it was by rights and privileges.Footnote 8 The Aliens Restriction Act of 1914 widened the legal distinction between citizens and resident aliens, regardless of the latter’s national origin, while the Military Service Act of 1916 made patriotic service compulsory for adult male citizens.Footnote 9 In the legal tribunals of wartime London, however, everyday negotiations expressed a more subtle and complex relationship between citizenship, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and duty. In these forums, the implementation of law and public policy was not a straightforward process. Rather, notions of ethnic identity, national belonging, gender roles, and patriotic duty were publicly deployed, contested, and refigured by both those with legal authority and by the individuals who came under their purview. The course of military conscription tribunals in East London demonstrated that the roles and identities of Londoners in wartime were not determined solely by the line between citizen and noncitizen. These tribunals allowed citizens to argue that their membership in the nation did not depend upon military service. Conversely, the tribunal members and the national government eventually insisted that even foreigners owed a debt of service, either to Britain or to their nation of origin. Those who appeared in these legal forums—on both sides of the bench—were defining the limits of state power, deploying and contesting tropes of nationalism and ethnicity, and negotiating the definitions and obligations of citizens and residents in wartime London.

At the outbreak of the war, British leaders hoped that duty and patriotism would sufficiently fill the ranks of the army, and the initial response to the call for volunteers was overwhelming.Footnote 10 But the war's demand for manpower in the trenches quickly outstripped the supply provided by voluntary recruitment. Britain's initial system of noncompulsory military conscription was called the “Derby Scheme” after one of its principal architects, Edward Stanley, the seventeenth earl of Derby. In the summer of 1915, Derby proposed a voluntary census and recruiting system that dramatically failed to address the nation's military needs and was abandoned in December of the same year. According to a white paper issued in early 1916, noncompulsory conscription had brought in only slightly more than half of the single men eligible for service.Footnote 11 On 27 January 1916, the Military Service Act was passed and was later revised and expanded in May of the same year. The Military Service Act of 1916 introduced compulsory mass conscription to Britain, mandating that all single male citizens between the ages of eighteen and forty-one engage in some form of military service.Footnote 12

Britain's first mechanism of military conscription operated within two parallel systems. The first was a bureaucratic structure that, through a system of national registration, determined who was eligible to serve in the armed forces and called them up accordingly. The second system, the appeals tribunals, operated largely at the local level. As a corollary to the Military Service Act, local tribunals were established to evaluate those who had been called into service (aka attested) but who claimed exemption due to special financial or domestic circumstances, such as their need to maintain dependent relatives with no other means of support or to sustain a business or lease. The local tribunals, if they supported the case made by an applicant, could grant him either a temporary exemption of a few weeks to a few months or, in rare cases, a permanent exemption from conscription.Footnote 13 Permanent exemptions were usually only granted in cases where an individual's departure would cause “serious hardship ‘owing to his exceptional financial or business obligations or domestic position,’” a circumstance that appellants found hard to prove to committees initially and even more difficult to do as time wore on.Footnote 14 Caroline Moorehead has described the local tribunals across England as consisting of “elderly local businessmen, former civil servants and policemen, clergymen, and the owners of large shops, all members of the middle classes.”Footnote 15 Arthur Marwick argues that it was partly in response to the No Conscription Fellowship (NCF), an anticonscription organization founded by pacifists Clifford Allen and Fenner Brockway, that the government empowered these appeals tribunals to hear cases based not only on economic and personal grounds but also on grounds of conscience.Footnote 16 For all the attention that conscientious objection received in public discourse and in the press, however, the evidence available suggests that it was, nationally, the least common ground for appealing a conscription order.Footnote 17

Despite the frequency of appeals against conscription by many otherwise loyal and law-abiding citizens, during the course of the war, both government leaders and the national press often equated “Britishness” with service in the armed forces or contribution to the war effort in general.Footnote 18 Many among London's established Anglo-Jewry were eager to prove their patriotism and saw Jewish service in the armed forces as a means to demonstrate visibly the commitment of Jews to the national cause.Footnote 19 During this period, military service was not merely a way of reaffirming one's membership in the national community but also a means by which young men could demonstrate their masculinity and their possession of manly virtues. Failure to do so left one open to accusations of cowardice and to public shaming.Footnote 20 Even before the advent of conscription, many East End Jews responded to these cultural expectations by answering their country's call, and organizations such as the Jewish Recruiting Committee led the charge.Footnote 21 But within a population as economically, socially, and culturally diverse as the Jews of East London, the overall response to conscription varied. Not only did many East London Jews object to compulsion on principle, but they openly contested local government officials—military and civilian—in their definitions of both “Britishness” and “manly duty.”

The disappointing results of voluntary recruitment were of particular concern to government authorities, both local and metropolitan, in London's East End. When the Stepney Borough tribunal held its first meeting, in March 1916, one member voiced his particular dismay at the poor showing of Stepney men in the drive to fill the ranks, claiming that “attestations had not been put in in such a large proportion as in other parts of the Metropolis.”Footnote 22 This argument echoed growing public concern, expressed by letters and editorials in local papers, that the Jewish population of the East End was particularly guilty of shirking their military obligations and even of stealing the jobs of those who had dutifully answered the call.Footnote 23

The implication that Jews were not fully enthusiastic members of the nation, not properly “English,” was hardly a new accusation, but the increased xenophobia and economic pressure caused by the war made their perceived difference an even greater offense than it had been in prewar years. Ann Dummett and Andrew Nicol have traced the rise of “modern” anti-Semitism in England to the late nineteenth century, finding its origins in a combination of racialist biological theory imported from Europe (especially Germany), perceived economic threat, association with Germany, and connections to both socialist and capitalist “internationalism.”Footnote 24 These interwoven strands of cultural, social, and intellectual prejudice culminated in a highly critical appraisal of Jews as “a nation within a nation” and a group that was not only alien but possessed “a special kind of alienness.”Footnote 25 Both the bias against Jews in London and tensions within the Jewish community itself were exacerbated by the demographic transformation of the Jewish population in Britain that began in the 1880s. In 1880, the Jewish population of Britain numbered merely sixty thousand, with the majority being members of an urbanized, Anglicanized middle class.Footnote 26 By 1914, however, the massive influx of eastern European Jews fleeing persecution in Russia and Poland had multiplied Britain's Jewish population fivefold, with the Jewish population in London alone swelling to one hundred thousand. The newcomers, in contrast to the established community of Anglo-Jewry, seemed to many observers—even Jewish ones—to be more distinctly “foreign” in both custom and appearance.Footnote 27

One of the initial meetings of the Bethnal Green Military Conscription tribunal in March 1916 witnessed the first application for exemption on the grounds of Jewish faith, a claim that would become common in the East London tribunals in the following months. The appellant's religion, however, was merely the official grounds for his claim of total exemption. He further justified his appeal by claiming that his departure would cause his parents economic hardship. The applicant argued that his parents, who had come to England from Russia twenty-six years previously, were both invalids who were dependent on him for support. The appellant even implied that both his parents’ country of origin, Russia, and the country he would fight against, Germany, were more compassionate toward their citizens than England was. “Even in Russia,” the young cabinetmaker argued, “he would be excused as being the sole breadwinner. If he was called up, his parents would starve.” Having established his duty to his parents as his primary motivation, the applicant made his official request for permanent exemption on the grounds that joining the army would prevent him from keeping kosher and from observing the Sabbath. “Sooner than that he would go to prison,” he declared. “If the Germans were here, he would be no worse off,” he further asserted, “because they allowed the Jewish prisoners to observe their faith.”Footnote 28 The aggressively unpatriotic stance that the applicant adopted and his proclaimed indifference toward the possibility of German victory were precisely the kind of sentiments that Anglo-Jewish “patriots,” such as those who organized the Jewish Recruiting Committee, had feared would emerge from the Jewish immigrants of East London.

Because of precedents set previously in other London tribunals, requests for exemption based on one's status as an Orthodox Jew, or on one's membership in the ultraorthodox sect of “Cohens,” aroused immediate suspicion among the members of the Stepney tribunal.Footnote 29 A previous investigation into the issue had revealed that many such claims were deceptive or, at the very least, exaggerated. According to the author of the regular “Ghetto Gossip” column in the East London Observer, “‘Cohen’ is one of the commonest pseudonyms of the aliens who have fled to this country during the Continental Judenhetze of the last forty years,” largely because, the editorial continued, so many of their original surnames had sounded “uncouth” and “awful” to Englishmen.Footnote 30 “When it comes to ‘Cohen’ being put forward as an excuse for evading combatant national service,” the author maintained, “the local Military Tribunals should deal faithfully with imposters who have no evidence to support their craven claim.” To counteract claims of “Cohainism” by tribunal applicants, the military representative of the London Appeals tribunal, Major Lionel de Rothschild, wrote to the Chief Rabbi of London concerning the matter.Footnote 31 The rabbi's response was unequivocal: “When the safety of the country is at stake no exemption from military service can be justly claimed by any person on the ground that he is a Cohen.”Footnote 32 After the rabbi's statement, it became almost impossible for even the most devout East London Jews to obtain an exemption on religious grounds. When a teacher of Hebrew was subsequently brought before the Hackney tribunal, he emphasized the Jewish obligation to serve but argued that his Cohainism forbade him to touch dead bodies or be near them. “Jews ought to fight for England in return for the freedom and protection they received, but not Cohanim,” he replied to the tribunal's questions.Footnote 33 The application for exemption was refused. The Stepney tribunal was equally skeptical of Jewish conscientious objectors (COs). In one case, the tribunal, responding to a Jewish appellant's claim for exemption on the grounds of religion, read aloud “a passage from the Bible … in which Jews were told to arm themselves for a war” and promptly dismissed the appeal.Footnote 34 Even God, the tribunal's response suggested, expected British Jews to fight for their country.

The image of immigrant Jews as unpatriotic and “alien,” and thus particularly unwelcome in wartime England, was a trope that consistently informed the attitude of the tribunals and the press reportage of their deliberations. The same “Ghetto Gossip” article that discussed the illegitimacy of the “Cohen” exemption targeted young Jewish men whose parents were recent immigrants as the cohort most likely to deceive the tribunals. “If all who figure in The Ghetto as ‘Cohens’ are to be exempted from British fighting forces,” the author wrote, “the hope of clearing Whitechapel of its corner boys must be abandoned.”Footnote 35 The behavior of young East End Jews as audience members in the tribunal venues did little to ameliorate this prejudice. These attendants were quick to express disapproval, indignation, or outright anger at tribunal members whom they thought had behaved in a high-handed or arbitrary manner. As the Stepney tribunal's deliberations progressed, the friction between the audience and the tribunal rapidly escalated, and by the 25 March meeting, the public had been ejected from the hearings three times. One particular member, Councillor Lardner, became a frequent target for derogatory remarks from Jewish audience members. At the 25 March sitting, the crowd repeatedly cried “sit down” every time Lardner rose to speak, and, in an attempt to restore order, the chairman ordered the venue to be cleared.Footnote 36 The reporter covering the East End tribunals for the Observer expressed considerable confusion over the motivation behind these protests. Describing the 31 March meeting as a “rowdy scene,” the author wrote that “shortly after the public had expressed their feelings against a decision of the Tribunal in which it appeared to them that severity had been shown to an applicant, they again gave vent to their feelings, but this time because they seemed to think the Court was too lenient.”Footnote 37 When the audience members were turned out of the venue, moreover, some criticized the hypocrisy they saw in the tribunal's actions by whistling “Britons never shall be slaves” as they left.Footnote 38

Appellants who chose to openly defy or criticize the tribunal in the course of their hearing were particularly likely to receive support from vociferous audience members. When one young man sought exemption on the grounds that he was Austrian by descent and that his father was the first in his family to be naturalized as a citizen, the tribunal replied simply, “your father obtained naturalization for you as a British subject. Then, my boy, go and do your bit.” When the applicant protested, “what chance shall I have, I should be shot as a traitor to my country,” the audience rewarded his audacity with applause. The tribunal, in contrast, was unmoved. “Don’t get caught by the enemy,” one member quipped, “then you won’t be shot.” The failed appellant, undaunted by the tribunal's decision, “walked out of the room with considerable ‘swank.’”Footnote 39

In response to East End tribunal members who consistently articulated a vision of “Britishness” based on national obligation and manly duty in the armed forces, the Jewish applicants for exemption asserted an identity that rested on a contrasting set of beliefs and assumptions. In their counterclaims against the tribunals, the appellants found support in their fellow East Enders, who made up the daily audience. These young men both supported the applicants—with whom they found common cause—and enjoyed the opportunity to harass, embarrass, and aggravate a tribunal composed of men who were, in many ways, outsiders to their community. Whereas those who came before the East End tribunals were often Jewish and of working-class or lower-middle-class backgrounds, the tribunal members were, with some notable exceptions, Christian, middle class, and drawn from the world of business and local government. The twenty-three members of the Stepney tribunal included the mayor of the borough, seven borough councillors, two aldermen, two justices of the peace, and one minister.

The conflict between the tribunal members and the applicants, however, cannot be explained merely as a crude expression of class tension, particularly because the tribunals typically included representatives of organized labor.Footnote 40 Regardless of whether public opinion supported the tribunals (or at least opposed “shirking”), as it did in their initial months of operation, or criticized their inconsistencies, as was often the case later in the war, within the walls of the tribunal venues a sharp division prevailed. On one side stood the members of the tribunal, men who had volunteered to hear appeals but were often reluctant to grant them. To the applicants and to the audience, these men were the human face of an otherwise bureaucratic and impersonal process. Unlike a draft notice, these men could be bargained with, their sympathy could be sought, and, if the exemption was denied, they became the obvious targets for the hostility of men whose fate hung in the balance. On the other side stood the applicants themselves, their family and friends, and the audience members who supported them. The only tools at their disposal were their knowledge of the appeal process and their own interpretations of duty and justice.

The recording protocols suggested by the Stepney tribunal, and then replicated in the Observer's reportage, widened the dichotomy between appellants and tribunal members by reducing the former to an anonymous abstraction. At the initial meeting of the Stepney tribunal, the chairman suggested to the press that they omit the names of the applicants for exemption in order to protect their privacy.Footnote 41 Applicants were identified only by their age, occupation, and the character of the excuses they put forward. This convention, in conjunction with tribunal members’ tendency to make sweeping generalizations about the applicants’ characters, encouraged readers to see those who applied for exemption as representative archetypes (e.g., “a youth,” “a Jew,” “a tailor,” etc.) rather than as individuals.Footnote 42 Conversely, this practice reinforced the authority of the tribunal by identifying its members with either a title that conveyed their official position as a representative of the state—“a member” (of the tribunal), “the chairman,” the “military representative”—or by using their names. Intentionally or not, the tribunal members’ reporting protocols reduced the perceived differences between applicants in genuine economic distress or those in dire family circumstances and those who were “shamming,” “shirking,” or claiming “conscience.”Footnote 43 The closer the association between the general run of applicants and COs, or “shirkers,” the less likely the former would be to engage the sympathy of readers.Footnote 44 No group was more anonymous, and thus more vulnerable to being reduced to an abstraction (onto which the prejudices and preconceptions of the readers could be projected), than the audience of the tribunals. In the Observer's reports, they are a faceless chorus identified only by the emotions that they expressed (laughter, catcalls, groans, etc.) or by anonymous dialogue (“here, here,” “no,” “a great farce,” etc.). Even more so than the applicants themselves, all such men were merely “a crowd.”

Members of the Stepney tribunal widened the distance between themselves, the applicants, and the audience by propounding ultrapatriotic and promilitarist views even though it had been determined, on the very first day of their convening, that most were themselves ineligible to be called into service. Those who were eligible loudly proclaimed their willingness to serve but were hastily granted a public reprieve by the tribunal chairman and Captain Van Beurle, the military representative. “You will go when your time comes,” Van Beurle assured them, and the chairman added that “if the two gentlemen who had spoken chose to remain, they were entitled to do so.”Footnote 45 Another member declared that, although he was of military age, “he had not attested, but he was a trade union official and responsible for the wharves,” and, in any case, “the question did not arise … seeing he was married.”Footnote 46 With these comments, and others made later, the tribunal members were presenting their voluntary service on the tribunal itself as a fulfillment of their patriotic duty, regardless of whether or not some among them were eligible to serve in the army.

Conscription was a highly novel and often unwelcome form of compulsion in a nation that still held “liberty” to be one of its highest ideals, even if sometimes in rhetoric more than in practice.Footnote 47 The East End appeals tribunals were convened at a time when the fairness and impartiality of the London tribunals, in particular, and the tribunal system, more generally, were under considerable criticism from the general populace, the national press, and even the War Office itself. Conflicting opinions, both in the general public and within the tribunals themselves—over conscientious objectors, medical exemptions, exempted occupations, and the conscription of married men—fostered press articles, letters, and editorials all critical of the appeal process. An editor for The Times wrote in February 1916 that “the working of the … tribunals is still far from satisfactory. The War Office is displeased because it is not getting all the men it wants. The men of military age are in many cases displeased because they see numerous irregularities in the administration of the new scheme.”Footnote 48 In an affair symptomatic of the turmoil caused by conscription and the tribunals, a battle of words was waged at the London Military Appeals tribunal in April 1916. The altercation took place between the tribunal's military representative, Lionel de Rothschild, and George Lansbury, a leading socialist editor and politician, over the validity of conscientious objections on socialist principles. When de Rothschild, in response to one such appeal, argued that “purely moral” grounds were not a valid basis for conscientious objection, Lansbury exclaimed, “Shame on you, Rothschild. Herbert Samuel said that a moral objection is as good as a religious objection. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” Footnote 49

As the Stepney tribunal continued its work, the confrontation escalated between tribunal members, Jewish appellants, and the “Jewish crowd at the back of the court,” as the Observer had dubbed the most vocal section of the tribunal audience.Footnote 50 At the 31 March meeting, one member derided an applicant's use of his status as an Orthodox Jew as grounds for exemption. “Do you mean to tell the Tribunal that all the Jews who have joined the Army are going to the lower regions because they have not carried out the Jewish faith?”Footnote 51 When the appellant tried to explain that not all Jews were Orthodox and that the same strictures did not apply to “modern” Jews, the tribunal promptly dismissed both the application for exemption and the possibility of noncombatant service. Shortly afterward, the chairman of the tribunal addressed the audience directly. “As there were so many young men among the public,” he declared, “if they had nothing else to do they might be well employed in going to the recruiting officer and attesting.”Footnote 52 When one member of the audience cried out “certainly not,” another tribunal member demanded that this dissenter be thrown out. But the tribunal's powers were limited to dealing with the applicants themselves, and the principles of public justice still applied. Although the chairman had ordered the chamber cleared on several previous occasions, it had only been when the audience grew so clamorous that the tribunal could not conduct business. “They had no power to order the man as one of the public to withdraw,” the chairman explained to his fellow members but then further scolded the speaker for his idleness and lack of patriotism. “If he was not serving his country,” the chairman insisted, “he should be doing something more useful than standing about there.” During a lull in the proceedings, the tribunal's military representative confronted the audience directly, picking up the argument where the chairman had left off:

As a coda to this exchange, another tribunal member declared that the young men his colleague had just confronted “want to make money, not claims.” The accusation implied in the tribunal member's comment was that London's Jews were more interested in profit than in serving their country.Footnote 54 This allegation would be repeated frequently across the course of the next few months. When a Jew applied to the Shoreditch tribunal in September 1916 on the grounds that he was a dock worker, one member of that tribunal delivered an extended diatribe on the “disgrace” of Jews’ abuse of occupational exemptions: “The enormous number of Jews who had managed to get into the docks was nothing short of a public scandal. There were bookmakers, bookmakers’ clerks, punters, and all the usual make-up of a racecourse there, all well known, and all young. The early train from Brick-lane Station to the Surrey Commercial Docks was just like a race train to Epsom, with the crowds of young fellows, the bookmakers, their clerks, and the punters.”Footnote 55 This “racialization” of criminality, particular as related to gambling and racecourse betting, would become a prominent feature in postwar discourse.Footnote 56

By spring 1916, some Jewish COs, drawing encouragement from the gallery and inspiration from the other COs (Jewish and gentile) who had preceded them, were openly defying the East End tribunals. In April one young man wrote to the Stepney tribunal explaining that he and his family were Jewish and “very religious” and argued that the tribunal had already demonstrated itself to be unsympathetic in such situations. This dearth of sympathy, the applicant explained, was due to a moral failing on the part of the tribunal members. “It was hard,” he wrote, “for the members of the Tribunal who had no conscience like his to understand conscience. Conscience could never be fully explained.”Footnote 57 The applicant became angry and defiant when he was brought before the tribunal and accused of previously making a public statement that “he has not the slightest intention of doing any service.” “It is a lie,” he shouted, “I want to say this, that you gentlemen have a spite against conscientious objectors.” The chairman reproved him for shouting, but the applicant continued both to defend his own views of duty and patriotism and to criticize the tribunal and the conscription process in general. “I can’t accept service with the military machine,” he insisted, and when the chairman once again asked him to lower his voice, he replied, “Pardon me. There are too many of you. I am only myself; I have no reinforcements. I have no Advisory Committee. What may seem cowardice to you is honour to me.” But he was not alone, and the audience was quick to support him against the tribunal's criticism. When one tribunal member derided his claim that it was an “honour to stay at home when your country needs you,” the applicant retorted, “I can only work for peace for the country, that is all,” and the gallery responded with enthusiastic cries of “hear, hear.” Whether the spectators were applauding his views on the war, supporting his public defiance of the tribunal's authority and their rigid definition of patriotic duty, or merely enjoying the drama of the scene is not clear. The tribunal could not silence them, just as they could not prevent the applicant from publicly speaking his mind. But they could insure that this was the last moment of freedom he would enjoy for a while. The tribunal refused his request for an exemption, and the tribunal's clerk added that “on the appeal form it will be stated that your conduct was impertinent.” Later that same month, a violent scuffle broke out during the tribunal proceedings, and a court officer was assaulted during the affray. When the next applicant to appear defiantly announced, “You don’t think I’m going to fight for a lot like you,” the military representative warned the crowd once again to forgo their demonstrations. The audience quieted, “but they could not refrain from laughter at the statements of some of the appellants.”Footnote 58 The vociferous and intentionally antagonistic tone adopted by some applicants for exemptions seems to indicate that they increasingly saw audience members as their natural allies and sometimes made comments more for the sympathy and amusement of audience members than to persuade the tribunal itself.

Prejudice against young East End Jews was not confined to tribunal members alone. By the summer of 1916, such biases were a visible element in the discourse of the London Jewish community itself. The “Jewish crowd at the back of the court” became a foil against which established Anglo-Jews could contrast their own staunch loyalty and justify their inclusion in the broader national community.Footnote 59 This rift was exacerbated by the Observer's publication of letters and editorials that sharply criticized the response of young Jews to conscription. One letter, written by a prominent member of London's Jewish community, blasted the “scandalous behavior” of “young blackguards” who attended the tribunals “only to interrupt the proceedings and to insult the authorities who were performing the duty cast upon them.” The author expressed particular anxiety that non-Jews would imagine that the “the class of young men from whom such as these are drawn” were “typical of Our people, typical young Jews.” But, the author lamented, “if only a considerable part of current rumor be the fact,” the agitators in court “do not constitute the worst element of disloyalty being manifested by Jews.” “It is common talk,” he claimed, “that shamming, malingering, bribery, corruption, and downright fraud are being resorted to in order to escape, or to obtain exemption from military service.” If this were indeed the case, the author warned, then the actions of these young men “would counter-balance heavily all the splendid proofs of loyalty and devotion on the part of the Jew which during this War has been the means of inducing [sic].”Footnote 60

The accusations that young Jews were “shirking” in greater numbers than the general populace, however, were based largely on rumor and anecdote rather than on any reliable statistics. The most common grounds claimed for exemption was economic hardship; this was as true in tribunals across the rest of England as it was in those of the East End, and the practice of exaggerating the desperation of a family's economic circumstances in hopes of gaining at least a temporary reprieve was hardly confined to the young Jews of East London.Footnote 61 But the economic and religious excuses made by East London Jews, the frequent outbursts by Jews in the tribunal audience, and letters and editorials penned by an Anglo-Jewry eager to disassociate themselves from “the Jewish crowd at the back of the court” and to assert their own patriotism in contrast exacerbated the public perception that the Jews of East London were not “doing their bit” to the same degree as the rest of England's young men were. Among British men as a whole, the reaction of East End Jews to conscription was more the norm than the exception. Adrian Gregory argues that a “conservative estimate” puts the number of cases nationwide at roughly one and a quarter million and, as a result, has concluded that a “perfectly normal response to conscription was not passive acceptance, but an appeal.”Footnote 62

The conflict between Stepney tribunal members and their audience reached a climax in July 1916, when one tribunal member announced that he was going to make a motion empowering the tribunal orderly “to examine the registration cards of all men of military age who entered that room.”Footnote 63 The member in question claimed that the Derby Military tribunal was already following this practice, though he was unable to produce any substantial evidence confirming this. Another member, supporting the measure, argued that “it was a disgrace to see the class of people who attended the hearings.” Worse yet, he continued, the lessons they learned by their observation impeded the conscription process itself. “The young fellows all came here with the one idea of learning how to answer questions at the Tribunal,” he claimed. The goal of the original motion, in this member's view, was not to seize more possible recruits for the army but rather to prevent the audience from interfering with the appeals and to insure that they did not gain foreknowledge and experience that would be useful in arguing their own cases. Other tribunal members responded to the original proposal with mixed emotions. One alderman argued that, though the measure was “no doubt desirable,” he did not think it was an appropriate course of action because “he had been told that what the Derby Tribunal did was absolutely wrong.” The staunchest opposition, however, came from the chairman of the tribunal, though he did voice his own dismay at the composition and character of the audience. In response to the member's declaration that the attendance of so many military-age men was “a disgrace,” the chairman spoke for the entire tribunal, affirming that “we are all agreed on that.” He concluded, nevertheless, that checking the registration papers of the audience members would be “unconstitutional” and that, if the Derby tribunal had adopted this practice, “they are doing something illegal.” The chairman argued that regardless of their personal feelings on the matter, and the possible disadvantage that foreknowledge and the presence of a large, disruptive, and often hostile audience represented, the rule and precedent of law still applied. The tribunal was “a public court … a judicial body doing a certain work, and he did not think they should go beyond that work.”Footnote 64

In the end, it was agreed that the tribunal would make inquiries on the matter to the War Office and to the Local Government Board. The response was unequivocal; both bodies declared that the acts that governed the tribunals did not authorize them to take any such measures.Footnote 65 Stubbornly refusing to admit defeat, the member who had made the original proposal suggested that “the hall keeper or someone could examine the cards,” but the chairman insisted “that would be illegal. We have no right to ask them to produce something from their own pockets.” Another member, himself a justice of the peace, turned the debate away from the audience and back to the issue of the tribunal's powers vis-à-vis those applying for exemptions. “You can ask the applicant [to produce his registration card],” he suggested. In response, another member closed the debate by neatly summing up the limits of the tribunal's authority. “You can ask the applicant a lot of things,” he explained, “but he is not bound to comply.”Footnote 66 The tribunal members were ultimately forced to acknowledge that, even in wartime, state authority had its limits.

Although the Stepney tribunal could do little to stanch the demonstrations of the audience or the public defiance of applicants, such displays had not prevented them from dealing harshly with conscientious objectors, be they Jewish (Orthodox/Cohen), socialists, or pacifist Christians. Of the twenty-nine COs that came before the tribunal in June, twenty-seven had been refused, and not a single recommendation for noncombatant service had been made. Those who appealed on other grounds (e.g., economic hardship), however, had a much higher rate of success. Of the 525 applications made in June, the tribunal granted “temporary” exemptions (two months being the typical length) in 282 cases.Footnote 67 This brought the grand total of decisions made by the tribunal since they first convened to 1,850. The level of dissatisfaction with these decisions was high, as evidenced by the 601 appeals to the higher authority of the London Appeals tribunal. But this second body had, in most cases, confirmed the findings of the Stepney tribunal, granting only 44 exemptions to the 252 appeals (of 601) that they had dealt with by June.

Just as the conflict between the “Jewish crowd at the back of the court” and the Stepney tribunal was resolving itself in favor of the former, the members of the Bethnal Green tribunal had decided to confront the broader issue of recent immigrants and their apparent lack of patriotism. Throughout the spring and early summer of 1916, the East End tribunals tried diligently, through a conservative interpretation of conscription appeals, to impose their own vision of national duty on the heterogeneous population of their boroughs. There and in other tribunals across London and the nation, naturalized immigrants from Russia, Poland, Germany, Austria, and other European nations were told, in no uncertain terms, that the price of their residence and shelter in Britain was service in the army.Footnote 68 But tribunals largely failed to convince the local immigrant Jewish population to adopt a vision of national identity predicated on patriotic and manly duty in the army. Many applicants had instead argued that their duty lay primarily to their family, or they had simply denied that the British state, incarnate in the tribunals, had the right to demand their military service at all. To compensate for this, tribunal members sought to bolster the tarnished nationalism of the East End by targeting the most obvious “outsiders” in the community for vilification. By midsummer 1916, the Bethnal Green and Stepney tribunals had begun to turn their attention to a group that did not enjoy the same legal protections as the naturalized citizens of immigrant background who had appeared before the tribunals in previous months. “Friendly” Russian aliens, most of them Jews, became an increasingly important feature in the discourse of the tribunals, even though these men, as noncitizens, were outside the legal purview of the tribunals’ authority. The tribunal members felt that they could safely excoriate this group of “aliens” without evoking undue protest from the citizenry of the East End. Tribunal members deployed popular tropes of anti-alien discourse and labeled these “friendly” aliens as morally degraded job stealers, who exploited the patriotism of East End citizens by robbing them of their livelihoods as they fought and died in the trenches. Just as the “white feather” campaigns had threatened to label men who did not fight as cowards, the public denouncement of East End “shirkers” could also serve as a warning of what lay in store for those who refused conscription or defied the tribunals.Footnote 69

At the end of June 1916, the Bethnal Green tribunal passed a resolution that discarded previous distinctions between “friendly” and “enemy” aliens in favor of a cruder metric that divided East End residents into either “aliens” or “citizens.” The tribunal expressed their “deep concern … that while our own men are fighting for their King and Country, male allied and enemy aliens of military age are allowed materially to strengthen their industrial position without any sacrifice. … This is now, and will be after the war,” the resolution continued, “a serious menace to the commercial interests of the British subjects in this Borough, who, having answered their Country's call, return to find the alien firmly established in all branches of the trades which were theirs.” The tribunal concluded the resolution by calling “on the grounds of justice,” for “equal sacrifice for all, who, domiciled in this country, enjoy its liberties and protection.” They then forwarded the document to the Prime Minister, Lord Kitchener, Bonar Law, Parliament, the local London Tribunals, and to the Bethnal Green Borough Council, in hopes that “the government will immediately take the necessary steps to remedy this obvious injustice.”Footnote 70

The Stepney tribunal supported the resolution, which was read aloud at their next meeting. Although the resolution did not expressly mention the defiant Jewish applicants of the East End tribunals and the audience that had supported them, one member's comments made the association clear. This tribunal member, emphasizing the distinction between the Jews who had demonstrated sufficient patriotism in the eyes of the tribunals and those who had not, “wanted to guard against [the resolution] being misinterpreted into meaning that it was the Jewish race that was at fault. There were certainly a lot of Russian and other Jews in that quarter who were trying to evade service, but there were many Jews who were serving.”Footnote 71 In July, the issue of friendly aliens, their immoral economic practices, and their reported lack of patriotism arose again in the Stepney tribunal. One member reported that two Stepney men of Russian origin had been arrested for selling cocaine to soldiers. He suggested that, once they were released from prison in two or three months’ time, either the military authorities or the tribunal itself should take up the matter and “watch the men so that they did not carry on their nefarious business. … They should either be sent to Russia or made to join the Army,” the tribunal member concluded.Footnote 72 Conscription or repatriation, in this member's eyes, could transform immoral or criminal elements into useful, contributing citizens of one country or another. By November 1916, the issue of supposed “job stealing” by Jewish immigrants in the East End was being openly discussed in Parliament. In a House of Commons debate over the recruitment of friendly aliens into the British forces, the MP from Bethnal Green asked David Lloyd George, the Secretary of State for War, if he “was aware that there are 20,000 of these men in the East end [sic] of London who are taking up the employment of British subjects. … How long is that to continue?” the MP demanded, “What is going to be done?”Footnote 73 Lloyd George, who became the prime minister a few weeks later, equivocated, replying that “there are difficulties … of foreign relations which have to be taken into account very carefully.”Footnote 74 This was clearly an issue of politics, international diplomacy, local sentiment, and bias rather than one of military exigency, since the number of men who would actually fall under any act mandating service by friendly aliens was tiny when compared to the rapacious manpower demands of the British Army.Footnote 75

It is hardly surprising that immigrant Russian Jews expressed little desire to fight for a government that had been so complicit in their persecution. Even the police themselves recognized that Russian émigrés had legitimate reasons for resisting repatriation.Footnote 76 Such arguments did not hold against their service in the British military, however, and any resistance on that score would require a more thorough and systematic justification.Footnote 77 In summer 1916, London Jews who opposed the conscription of their foreign coreligionists formed the Foreign Jews Protection Committee against Deportation to Russia and Compulsion (FJPC).Footnote 78 The FJPC's first major act was to compose a petition to the British government outlining their position on Russian aliens in England and what, if any, their role should be in the current conflict. In the petition, the FJPC argued that the Russian Jews were neither Russian nor British but Jewish first and foremost. Their treatment at the hands of the Russian and British governments, the former having persecuted them and the later proposing to enlist or deport them, highlighted their vulnerability and the desperation of their plight. In a time of conflict between nations, the authors of the petition wrote, those without a nation were at the greatest risk. These men were not citizens but “refugees,” “not subjects, but … guests, men entitled, if only by their sufferings, to live as free men in a free country.” In response to tribunal members and MPs who had claimed that all who resided in England were obliged to defend it with arms and had propounded a vision of national membership defined by military duty, the members of the FJPC offered a counterdefinition of England as a place of refuge and asylum for those who were hounded and persecuted elsewhere. The petition asserted it was England's reputation as a haven for the “political and religious outlaws of other countries” that had drawn Russian Jews to England in the first place. This reputation was so established that “the oppressed peoples of the world” had come to look upon it “as one of the safeguards of civilization.” In light of England's status as the guardian of the persecuted, the petitioners argued, the government's proposal to return Russian Jews to the authority of the very government from which they had sought refuge was “a terrible irony” and a “shadow” that further darkened the “bitter tragedy” of their lives. The FJPC's petition also directly addressed the issue of alleged “job stealing” by Russian immigrants, claiming that the committee could prove such allegations false.Footnote 79 Even if the assertions held some truth, the petition continued, they offered scant justification for a government to dishonor its reputation for tolerance toward those displaced by political or religious persecution.

The efforts of the FJPC, however, proved of little avail against the increasing determination of many in Parliament to see foreign Jews fight for either Russia or Britain. Those in the Jewish community who resisted the conscription of Russian Jews were outnumbered by others in the same community who fully subscribed to the notion that Russian Jews in England must serve.Footnote 80 By February 1917, Parliament had committed itself to compelling Russian Jews into service one way or another, though the final resolution of the issue was not reached until the summer.Footnote 81 By then, the success of the March Revolution had removed what was for many the most convincing argument against repatriating England's Russian Jewish population. The MP from Somerset claimed that several Russian Jews had since sought him out personally to say that, with the removal of the autocracy, they were eager to return home. “If you send us back to Russia under the old regime it would have been sending us to hell,” he conveyed the sentiment as it had been expressed to him, “if you send us back to Russia under the Revolution it will be sending us to heaven.”Footnote 82 Whether or not this conversation was genuine, it accurately conveys the opinion of many in the established Anglo-Jewish community of London in the wake of the momentous events of March. “We can only hope,” one editor of the Jewish Chronicle wrote, “that the Russian Jews in the United Kingdom will now, if only as a means of showing their oneness with the great new Russian movement and their hearty sympathy with three democratic states fighting for the principles of freedom and humanity play a man's part in the final stages of the war and throw in their lot, enthusiastically and without more ado, either with the British or the Russian wings of the great Army of Liberty.”Footnote 83

Not all members of the established Anglo-Jewish community, however, were so quick to voice their support of the new measure without casting back some of the stones hurled at their Russian coreligionists. The Grand Order of Israel (GOI), one of the most prominent Jewish societies in London, announced at its annual meeting in August 1917 that it had contributed over £22,000 in war loans, had 657 members on active service, and, finally, that fifteen of their number, “all sons of Russian parents,” had died in battle so far. In announcing their contributions, the order also defended the patriotism of their Russian members and sharply rebuked government officials for making derogatory statements about Russian Jews. The order protested strongly “against the condemnation of Russians as shirkers, cowards, and job snatchers.” The chief officer of the organization declared it hypocritical to cast aspersions on Russians’ patriotism when the commitment of many Englishmen to the cause was also in doubt. “The British government introduced compulsion because Englishmen did not come forward as they were expected to,” he argued, “and why should they expect of the Russian what the Englishmen has not done?” As evidence of his own personal involvement in the war, the grand master of the order proclaimed that “he himself had five brothers on active service and two brothers-in-law (one brother had been wounded twice), in addition to other relatives.” He was equally acerbic toward the press, whom he accused of “slanderous statements,” and he even criticized the tribunals, insisting that Russians “must see that they received fair play” before them and that “[Russians] should not be condemned as shirkers.” Finally, the grand master, to avoid his criticisms being misunderstood as opposition to compulsory service in general, rejected both the use of conscientious objection and the segregation of Jews into a separate regiment.Footnote 84

The champions of the all-Jewish regiment, however, received a boost in August 1917, when the government announced the formation of the first all-Jewish army unit, the Thirty-eighth Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers.Footnote 85 After marching through the East End, the unit was sent to fight against Turkish troops north of Jerusalem. The number of Jews enlisted in the army continued to expand during the course of the war, eventually comprising five battalions (the Thirty-eighth through the Forty-second of the Royal Fusiliers), which became known collectively (but not officially) as “the Jewish Legion.”Footnote 86 Notable members included David Ben Gurion, later the first prime minister of Israel, and Edwin Herbert Samuel, son of the noted politician Herbert Samuel. In contrast to the varieties of Jewish-British patriotism embodied in the campaigns by the GOI and the service of the Jewish Legion, however, the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 and the encouragement it gave to supporters of a Jewish state in Palestine seemed to have little impact on Jewish attitudes toward military recruitment in East London.Footnote 87 The leaders of the Jewish socialist union movement, on the contrary, expressed derision for renewed proposals for the Jewish homeland, decrying them as false promises.Footnote 88

As the war dragged on, the military tribunals remained at the center of the debate over the role of Jews in the national community and their obligations to that community in wartime. In April 1917, representatives of the East London Borough councils and military tribunals, along with members of the London County Council, sent a large deputation to Parliament in order to address the issue of Russian Jews and national service.Footnote 89 One member raised the specter of widespread civil disorder as a likely outcome if the government did not take immediate steps to prevent foreign Jews from avoiding the obligations of service. “In Bethnal Green and East London, there was the strongest possible resentment,” he claimed, “and he should not be surprised if they had riots and outbreaks if that kind of thing went on.” “That kind of thing,” which had so incensed this member of the deputation, was the greed, profiteering, and legalistic deception he saw among Russian and Polish Jews in their attempts to avoid conscription. In his capacity as chairman of the bench for the Tower Division, “he was astounded at the number of Jews who were in this country and who had got hold of public houses, making the plea before the Tribunal that they had got their money in the business.”Footnote 90 In response, he had refused to grant any more public house licenses to Russian or Polish Jews. “It was all humbug,” the chairman declared; “These men were not political refugees, though their parents might have been.” Such sentiments were echoed by some members in Parliament when the practicalities of repatriation were discussed in June 1917. While MPs such as Herbert Samuel and Philip Snowden counseled patience in the process of recruiting and repatriating Russian immigrants, Herbert Dalziel (MP, Kirckaldy), owner of Reynolds's News, expressed his hope that “there would be no undue delicacy as to how the subjects of foreign countries were treated under the [Military Service Act]. Many of them had made a great deal of money,” he declared, “and had held aloof for three years whilst the country that was protecting them struggled for its existence.” His colleague, William Crooks (MP, Woolwich), a pioneer of the Labour movement in Poplar, was even more scathing toward the perceived shirking by immigrant Jews of the East End. Crooks, refuting the FJPC's argument that the persecution of Russian Jews had entitled them to peaceful “asylum” in England, declared that “the conduct of the refugees in this matter was like that of a man who, having gone into a house and enjoyed its owners hospitality, walked out when there was a fire, and, on being asked to carry a bucket of water, answered ‘not me. I’m a refugee.’” Following cheers from his colleagues, Crooks said “he could not understand why time should be wasted in defence of such men.” Such statements by tribunal members and parliamentarians no doubt only fanned the fire of public resentment against immigrant Jews in the East End.Footnote 91

In June 1917, Parliament passed the Military Service (Conventions with Allied States) Act of 1917, which specified that Russian subjects resident in Britain must report to the local police station and register either to join the British Army or to be repatriated back to Russia. In addition to motivating outright avoidance, this act also provoked several serious legal challenges. The most prominent was a case brought before the King's Bench in October 1918 by Abraham Spolansky, a Russian subject who had been living in England for nine years.Footnote 92 Spolansky, who had engaged solicitors to prosecute his case, argued that he did not understand English when he registered at the local police station for repatriation. The situation having now been made clear to him, he did not wish to return to Russia, “owing to the unsettled state of that country.” In the parliamentary debate over the 1917 Military Service Act, one MP had expressed exactly the same concern, fearing that “many [Russians] could not do themselves justice owing to their poor knowledge of the English language or their total ignorance of it.”Footnote 93 Regardless, the presiding chief magistrate dismissed Spolansky's claims out of hand and accused him instead of willful deception. Justice Darling argued that Spolansky had well understood the situation all along and had chosen repatriation rather than service merely to avoid conscription altogether. “At the time,” he declared, “[Spolansky] must have been aware that there was no transport [to Russia] ready, and that it was very problematical whether there ever would be.”

In a similar case at Old-Street Police Court, David Cohen, age 36, was charged with being an absentee from the military.Footnote 94 Cohen had already secured an extension on his conscription order and had subsequently appealed twice more before finally claiming to be a Russian subject. His father testified that his son had been born in Russia and brought to England at the age of four. The witness, when questioned by the magistrate as to why his son had registered Stepney as his place of birth, pleaded ignorance. The defendant asserted that, despite his claim to Russian nationality, “he did not want to go back to Russia.” Whereas Spolansky's motivations were unclear, if observers had any doubt in the Cohen case that the defendant was trying to use his somewhat ambiguous national origin to avoid service, they were put to rest by the court lieutenant's description of his behavior. “The prisoner was so anxious to get exemption [from service],” he explained, “that he applied for exemption even before he really came under the [Military Services] Act.” The magistrate, clearly incensed by the defendant's stratagems, declared, “We do not want you here if you are not going to do your duty. If you succeed in proving that you are of Russian nationality I shall do my best to get you sent back.” He then fined Cohen £10 and turned him over to the military authorities. The court lieutenant stated that the court had to deal with another twenty cases similar to Cohen’s.Footnote 95

Some East End men took a more direct path of resistance to conscription and simply refused to obey their notices. In such circumstances, local constables made every effort to apprehend them, and police court magistrates turned them over to the military authorities.Footnote 96 The police court magistrate H. L. Cancellor wrote that he took little satisfaction in his daily prosecution of recalcitrant recruits, although he supported the conscription measures themselves. “Day after day we had to listen to their pleas of conscience and tell them that we had no power to deal with a ground of exemption which should only be determined by the tribunals,” he wrote.Footnote 97 “It was a hateful task to hand those fellows over to the military authorities when I saw the looks of agony on their faces and heard the cries of woe from their womenfolk at the back of the court.” Cancellor and his colleagues on the bench may have felt sympathy for these men, but they did not hesitate to serve on the conscription appeals tribunals themselves.Footnote 98

Whether serving in their capacity as magistrates rounding up draft avoiders, or in their roles as members of tribunals, Cancellor and his fellow East End magistrates severely criticized the alleged lack of patriotism on the part of many East End Jews. Cancellor described the archetypical East End “shirkers” as being “young Russian Jews and Poles born of alien parents on British soil.”Footnote 99 The magistrate, emphasizing his view that the fault was common among those of Jewish background, argued that not only were these men unpatriotic cowards but that their ancestors had demonstrated the same lack of both patriotism and martial ardor. Cancellor, either ignorant or dismissive of the history of czarist conscription, argued that the failure of East End Jews was one of blood rather than conscience and wrote: “These young men had no stomach for fighting and loathed the prospect of military discipline. Their fathers had come to this country to avoid conscription; they had enjoyed prosperity and freedom in England; trade and civil employment were good; by hook or by crook they meant to let British soldiers fight for them and stick to their soft jobs in the markets of East London.”Footnote 100 The magistrate J. A. R. Cairns, in a similar attack on the patriotism of London's Jews, argued that “they are not loyal in the sense that sacrifice for a political ideal or a national tradition appeals to them. … There were thousands during the war who had reaped a rich harvest from British freedom and English institutions who demurred to undertake the burden of arms for her welfare and who deserve a graver censure than do those alien denizens who dwell within her shores.”Footnote 101

In his memoirs, Cancellor claimed that Russian Jews had commonly chosen repatriation over service in the British Army in hopes of avoiding military service altogether. “Many of them fancied there would be no ships to take them to Russia,” he wrote, “and that they would be taking a safe course in stating their intention to return to their own country.” Cancellor described how local magistrates and constables had cooperated with the military authorities as they attempted to round up absentees following the expiration of the 7 August 1917 deadline for registration. “Consequently for many weeks we had a busy time at Thames Police Court,” the magistrate wrote. “Special motorvans were daily in the yard of the police station, and went away fully loaded with aliens who had tried to avoid military service either in the Russian or British Army.” Once caught, however, the Russians employed a new defense by claiming that their earlier official declarations of age were false and that they were actually beyond the maximum conscription age of forty-one. The claimants, in support of these statements, produced “wonderful documents in foreign characters,” and, to add dramatic emphasis, “aged patriarchs covered their heads and swear that they had been present at the rite of circumcision at places in Russia and Poland over forty years ago.” Defendants even brought in their mothers to corroborate their testimony, according to the magistrate. Cancellor and his colleagues were highly skeptical of the sudden transformation of David into Methuselah and rejected most of these claims. “At the police court we did not take much notice of this evidence which we believed to have been invented and faked to meet the needs of the defendants,” he wrote in his memoirs. “So the statements of the patriarchs and aged ladies were rejected, and many stalwart men of Russian and Polish nationality were handed over to military escorts to be taken into the army.”Footnote 102 By the end of the war, some three thousand Russian émigrés would be repatriated back to their country of origin.Footnote 103

The magistrate's assumption that alien Jews were more than willing to lie and deceive officials in order to avoid the obligations of service, an image perpetuated by earlier press coverage of the Jewish response to conscription, turned out to be woefully inaccurate in many cases. But the mistake was discovered too late to do anything for the Russians and Poles who had been sent to their fates. In the end, it turned out that many such men had other causes for underreporting their age, causes that were entirely unrelated to military service. Cancellor later realized that Russian Jews had adopted this practice for two reasons: The first was to get cheaper life insurance premiums. The second, far more common, reason was that they had hoped to obtain a higher dowry by convincing their prospective fathers-in-law that they were young enough to produce sons.Footnote 104 Cancellor's conclusion, holding true to his original bias toward the Russian Jews in his district, was that they were indeed deceptive and greedy, but, at least in this case, they had told the truth to government officials, even if they had lied to them initially and were now being honest only because it was to their advantage.

The final chapter in the saga of East End conscription, acted out on the stage of the Old-Street Police Court in August 1918, seemed to affirm the anxieties already expressed in a number of quarters about the fairness and impartiality of the tribunal system. In a scandal that cast serious doubts on both the competence of the Stepney tribunal members and the legitimacy of the appeals mechanism itself, a clerk working for the tribunal was charged with violations of the Defense of the Realm regulations. The defendant, a girl aged nineteen, admitted to accepting gifts of chocolates, sweets, and money from young men in return for giving them stamped exemption forms.Footnote 105 The sequence of events leading up to the charge against her began with the determination of two Stepney policemen to crack down on “shirking” in their borough. They had conducted an investigation “to see if they could obtain any explanation of the enormous number of men of good physique and apparent good health in the district who appeared to have been exempted from military service.” In the course of the inquiry, the policemen had challenged eight thousand men on the streets to explain why they were not in the military. Of that eight thousand, 8 percent (640) held forged papers, and 5 percent (400) possessed papers stolen from the Stepney tribunal office.Footnote 106 After tracing the source of the stolen paperwork, the magistrate found the young clerk guilty, but on account of her “good character” and “respectable parentage,” she received a sentence of only one month's imprisonment. The trial prompted a flurry of denials and counteraccusations from the members of the Stepney tribunal. At the 27 August meeting, the presiding officer proposed that the tribunal engage counsel to determine the accuracy of the statistics cited in the course of the clerk's trial.Footnote 107 He was also quick to assert that forty thousand Stepney men had enlisted in the forces, “a record which was not equaled by any other industrial district in the kingdom.”Footnote 108 Considering the dire statements tribunal members made in 1916 about the failure of Stepney men to attest, this last declaration seems ironic.

On 12 November 1918, amid fireworks and the bright glow of newly relit street lamps, the government terminated all recruiting and suspended “all cases pending before the Tribunals.”Footnote 109 The doors to the tribunal rooms closed, and the members resumed their ordinary jobs and duties, but the legacy left by their work, the press reportage of their proceedings, and the public contestation of the tribunals’ methods and authority lived on into the postwar years. Popular tropes of Jews as unpatriotic and of the Jewish East End's ambivalent position in the national community had been exacerbated by the behavior of Jewish applicants for conscription exemption and the demonstrations of “the Jewish crowd at the back of the court.” The controversy over the role of Russian Jews in the conscription scheme had also heightened fears that they were “outsiders” in the nation and, worse yet, that they represented a substantial threat to the economic position of “English” workers. As British soldiers mustered out of the army and returned to London seeking work and resumption of “normal” life, these tensions, far from abating, would become a central concern of law and public policy in the postwar era.

The heightened concerns over patriotism and national belonging expressed in these legal forums were mapped onto preexisting economic tensions and anti-alien sentiment in London's East End. These economic tensions themselves were exacerbated by wartime conditions that simultaneously drove up prices and created a demand for cheap, unskilled labor. Those fighting in the trenches could not take advantage of the economic windfalls of war, but foreign residents, initially free from military obligation, often could.Footnote 110 The relationship between the “outside world” and legal forums, however, was bidirectional. Statements and behavior in courtrooms and tribunals, disseminated later by audience members and reported in the local and national press, could either heighten or alleviate tensions both between different social groups and within those groups themselves. The appeals tribunals gave tribunal members the opportunity to insist to the appellants, to the court audience, and to the broader community that during wartime, manly duty and membership in the nation required military service. But it also gave residents of East London a public forum where they could offer competing definitions of masculinity that revolved around familial obligation or could contest the state's legal or moral authority to insist that they go to war. Russian immigrant Jews and those who supported them similarly argued that residence in England did not have to be justified by service in the trenches, particularly for a cohort that had already been the victims of brutal compulsion at the hands of an autocratic state in Russia. For the British state to act otherwise, they maintained, contradicted the fundamental principles of British society and government. Such public contestations of compulsory service and the right of the British state to demand it, when declared by those whose ethnicity already made their national loyalty suspect in the eyes of many observers, had significant consequences. The behavior of young Jewish men in conscription tribunals drove a wedge between immigrant Jews and London's established Anglo-Jewry, and the trope of Jewish immigrants as “job stealers” progressed from the street to tribunal rooms to Parliament. Ethnicity, masculinity, and nationalism reshaped negotiations in courts and tribunals, but negotiations in courts and tribunals also reshaped the discourses of ethnicity, masculinity, and nationalism in wartime London.