Set in Liverpool, Grace Aguilar's 1843 novella The Perez Family is the story of a Jewish family. Though poor, the Perez family gives charitably to help others. They work in local trades, the men as watchmakers and silversmiths and the women as dressmakers and in domestic service. Their household includes an orphaned niece and numerous children and grandchildren. This story and others like it depict colorful scenes from Jewish provincial life in which family, industry, and charity loom large, and they sketch a modest rise to affluence in the face of a host of spiritual and economical challenges. But how representative are these literary accounts of Jewish life? Alysa Levene's meticulously researched book, Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Charity, Community and Religion, 1830–1880, goes a long way toward providing an answer.

Levene's project is centered on the 1851 decennial census, on which respondents declared their religious affiliation, household makeup, and occupation. The census also forms the basis of the magisterial 1851 Anglo-Jewry Database, a collaborative genealogical project conducted largely under the editorship of historian Petra Laidlaw. Since 2016, the database has been enriched by extensive cross-referencing, thus allowing researchers to trace individual lives through naturalization documents, synagogue records, and family papers across several decades. Levene uses this rich data to create a comparative study of seven distinct regional Jewish communities in Britain, looking first at patterns of residence and participation in the industrial economy in each location and then at the rise of local philanthropic organizations against a backdrop of contemporary ideas regarding charity. By presenting these Jewish communities in spatial, economic, and moral terms, Levene details both their many means of providing support to members and also the limits of their influence and charity. Levene's insistence on the importance of local contexts usefully moves the focus away from London, the primary locus studied in much literature in the field of Anglo-Jewish studies.

Levene reconstructs the Jewish communities of Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Hull, and Glasgow in part through tables and maps. This fascinating data shows that the balance of occupations among British Jewry did not conform to national patterns. Jewish participation in tertiary occupations, such as dealing and selling, dwarfed that of the general population. Where Jews did engage in manufacturing, there were significant regional differences: Jewish clock and watchmakers predominated in Liverpool (a detail noted in Aguilar's novella), and in Manchester—nicknamed Cottonopolis—tailoring was the most common trade. All this might seem like so much common sense, readily derived from a passing familiarity with Jewish life and British industrial towns. What Levene derives from this data, however, is often more surprising. Distinctive patterns of employment show that Jews adapted to available opportunities and deliberately matched their skills, often brought through immigration, to specific towns where work could be found. Internal migration and immigration from Europe caused households to shift and coalesce, and the census plainly shows that Jewish homes often accommodated non-kin as well as extended family. Plotting the sites of these dwellings on contemporaneous maps gives specificity to the vague sense of where Jewish neighborhoods once existed. Using the enriched 1851 Anglo-Jewry Database, Levene further creates map-based sociograms, or lines drawn between sites, which show the kinship networks linking households. As nodes take shape within patterns of settlement, the result is something like an analytical neighborhood walking tour, or a bird's eye view of a novel.

The greatest test of these networks was in how they provided aid to those in need. More than the challenge of raising funds, the distribution of welfare forced the question of who was part of the community and what their claims upon it might be. Much has been made of Jewish philanthropy in Britain, but Levene moves beyond current historiography by situating synagogue relief and regional Jewish philanthropic societies within national debates regarding religious and secular charity. Levene finds that the Jewish emphasis on self-help through free loans and apprenticeship schemes was in step with current thinking in Victorian Britain, while also adhering to centuries-old rabbinical teachings. Moreover, community leaders sought to keep Jews away from the care of Poor Law authorities. They felt that providing internal welfare without recourse to state resources was a precursor to obtaining greater civil liberties. Immense pressure, however, was placed upon communal resources by a sharp rise in Jewish immigration from Central and Eastern Europe beginning in the 1870s. Certainly these newcomers were co-religionists, but their very transience called into question the duty of local communities to support them, a problem felt most keenly in the port towns that were the sites of arrival or embarkation. This period saw the emergence of the Jewish Boards of Guardians, which consolidated local voluntary associations to provide relief while also expanding the investigation of recipients. The mixed success of these bodies shows, for Levene, that local bonds of residence and social capitol ultimately weighed against foreigners’ belonging to a transpatial religious community.

Levene's book is a further investigation of the nineteenth-century story in which immigration from the East threatened the civic gains of a more established, Western Jewish community. Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain is a much-needed contribution to this discourse, and Levene uses innovative methods to provide hyper-local analysis of community formation in British towns outside of London. Although census data and official records can only do so much, Levene is alert to these limitations and points to the voices and views that fall outside her scope. The richness and specificity of her book make it as compelling a source on British Jewry as the literary accounts like Aguilar's that imagined the Anglo-Jewish community during the nineteenth century.