‘On the eighth day’: Jews and Manchester

ABSTRACT

This article explores the evolution of Manchester Jewry from the beginnings of the world’s first industrial town in the eighteenth century through to today. It shows how Jews have contributed to the idea of Manchester exceptionalism and been part of the city’s heritage and culture although not always regarded as ‘Manchester men’. The concept of cosmopolitanism is utilised to explore whether this was used to include or marginalise the Jews as people of migrant origin. Different waves of Jewish migration are charted and the relations between Jews of different origins and class explored to show both communal solidarity and conflict.

KEYWORDS:

• Manchester
• migration
• cosmopolitanism
• integration
• belonging
• antisemitism

Introduction: assumptions of ‘Manchester exceptionalism’, and where Jews might fit within it

‘On the eighth day, God created Manchester.’ Dating this somewhat sacrilegious slogan is not easy – a pioneer vegetarian restaurant with an abbreviated version of it opened in the 1970s, part of a longer counter-cultural movement or set of movements that has typified this city of protest as far back at least from the Peterloo Massacres in 1819 and the bloody battle for democracy and gender equality in Britain.¹ In the words of cultural critic, Stuart Maconie,

Manchester changed the world’s politics: from vegetarianism to feminism to trade unionism to communism, every upstart notion that ever got ideas above its station, every snotty street-fighter of a radical philosophy, was fostered brawling in Manchester’s streets, mills, pubs, churches and debating halls.²

But ‘On the Eighth Day’ also symbolises a strong self-identity, verging almost on arrogance about the city’s importance in modern history.³ The phrase ‘what Manchester does [or “thinks” in some versions] today, the world does tomorrow’ is attributed to Sir Robert Peel, controversial leader of the Conservatives and significantly a northern industrialist who pit himself against the agrarian, agricultural, protectionist heart of his party. In the less subtle expression of Noel Gallagher, the slightly more restrained member of the rock band, Oasis, this sentiment became articulated less politely in the late twentieth century as ‘We like annoying people. It’s a Manchester thing. It’s a trait. We just like pissing people off.’⁴ If we need to remember, as Liam remarked about his family traits, ‘We’re the Gallaghers. not the f***ing Waltons’,⁵ Noel’s comments still carry a wide currency and pedigree. Born of Irish Catholic migrant parents, the Gallaghers’ macho identity with Manchester (and its local football team, Manchester City) is profound and reflects how newcomers have quickly become part of the city’s powerful self-mythology. In the anthology of writing, Soul of Manchester, published in 1929, it was suggested by one writer that his fellow citizens suffered from a vast ‘superiority complex’ and a ‘colossal conviction of excellence’.⁶ Maconie, born in rival Merseyside, quips that ‘It was said of Humphrey Bogart that he was a hell of a nice bloke until 11pm. After that he thought he was Humphrey Bogart. Manchester is at its most unattractive when it thinks it’s Manchester.’⁷ In this light, if Manchester thinks of itself as ‘the first’ or as the ‘original modern’,⁸ it has taken until the third decade of the twenty-first century to recognise collectively its profound connections to being, at certain key points, on the wrong side of history and especially the profound links to the transatlantic slave trade.⁹

The author of this overview is a Mancunian, but even taking this into account, something remains underneath all the self-adulation. As its foremost modern historians, Alan Kidd and Terry Wyke note, who along with Bill Williams who will be introduced shortly, came out of Manchester Polytechnic, later Manchester Metropolitan University, ‘Manchester is one of a select band of cities that have left their mark on human history’. They add ‘Any account of the modern city must begin here… Every town and city has its story, but few have one that belongs to the world.’ It was the first industrial, modern city and its fame as a ‘place name’ by the mid-nineteenth century was truly international.

Kidd and Wyke state boldly that ‘It was a symbol of industrialism and modernity, soon to be emulated by dozens of “Manchesters”’. These ‘either called themselves the “Manchester” of their country or region or actually adopted the name directly themselves.’ Here, in the Jewish urban context, the city of Lodz, ‘the Polish Manchester’, immediately comes to mind. Manchester, conclude Kidd and Wyke, ‘was one of those iconic cities that came to stand for something more than itself’.¹⁰

Since the second half of the nineteenth century, Manchester Jewry has been the largest community outside the capital, a status it has since maintained with a large margin to spare. At 25,000 plus today according to the 2011 census, it is one of the few that is growing as British Jewry has shrunk, stabilising more recently at under 300,000. Indeed, the 2021 census confirmed that the Jewish population in Manchester had grown in ten years by a staggering 12 percent, a higher statistic than even the city itself, the recent expansion of which was remarkable enough.¹¹ It is the various Haredi communities that has been largely responsible for Manchester Jewry’s recent population rebirth, offering places of worship, communal structures, strictly kosher food, schools and economic networks, alongside in-migrations from other declining provincial communities, including Leeds to the east, Liverpool to the west, Glasgow to the north and even London to the south – as well as Jews from abroad, including Israel.¹² Whilst Manchester Jewry has been a place of fluidity of movements – in and out – since its beginnings, to and from other parts of the United Kingdom and all parts of the globe, the dominant trend has been to settle and grow rather than to move on and decline. The family of Hilda Cohen, who we shall return to later, typifies this pattern. Her immigrant parents were of German and Russian origin and came to Manchester before the First World War. The large majority of her father’s large number of siblings settled in the town, but others went to live in the wider Jewish diasporas – France, the USA and South Africa.¹³ In the twenty-first century, Manchester can still compete with the larger alternative of London, offering a variety of Jewish worlds that have the size and vibrancy to maintain themselves and expand. That rootedness and continuity has allowed Manchester Jewry to feel for the most part that it too is part and parcel of Manchester exceptionalism. This article will focus initially on the early days of Manchester Jewry from the early 1740s onwards, exploring what role it played in the creation of the spectacular ‘new’ urban phenomenon: ‘Cottonopolis’.

The roots of Manchester Jewry and its historiography

The British Jewish past, misleadingly but commonly referred to as Anglo-Jewish history, has been essentially London-centric. In the medieval period when the Jewish community was small (perhaps as few as 5000), there were settlements across England and possibly into Wales. The Jewry of the city of London was important but so were the communities of Norwich, York, Winchester and many others.¹⁴ Since the readmission of the Jews in the mid-seventeenth century, for the first fifty years, it was focused again on the City of London and largely eastwards from it, but by the 1740s important provincial communities emerged, almost exclusively as in the cases of Liverpool, Portsmouth and Plymouth, linked to the ports, including those with a strong naval presence.¹⁵ Since then from a quarter to a third of British Jewry has been located outside London, including its Celtic fringes, but this is hardly reflected in the historiography. In what remains the most authoritative overview, Todd Endelman states boldly that ‘The history of the Jews in Britain is overwhelmingly the history of Jews who lived in English cities, London in particular.’¹⁶

The one exception within British Jewish history writing is Manchester through Bill Williams’ pioneer work in both history and heritage.¹⁷ Williams was the key figure in founding the Manchester Studies Unit in the then Manchester Polytechnic. Influenced by the History Workshop Movement, this unit initially collected photographs and oral histories (some of which will be utilised later in this chapter) from first and second generation East European Jews who came to Manchester throughout the nineteenth century.¹⁸ Indeed, some of this movement predated the mass migration from the 1880s so that by 1875 ‘over half of Manchester’s Jewish population [of between 3 and 4,000] was of Russian or Polish origin’.¹⁹ Synagogue and other records were preserved as were artefacts leading in 1984 to the opening of the Manchester Jewish Museum. Through the work of Bill Williams and the team of talented scholars around him (especially Rickie Burman who was to co-found the Museum of the Jewish East End), historiography and heritage preservation emerged that has been unmatched in other provincial Jewish communities and indeed was more profound than that in the capital.²⁰

In 1976, Williams produced what remains a classic of Jewish and British urban/social history: The Making of Manchester Jewry. Rooted in the history of Manchester itself, Williams emphasised from the start of his narrative that because of its longstanding history, ‘in no sense can the Jewish community be regarded as “alien” to Manchester. It was not a late addition to an established pattern of urban life, but an integral part of the pattern itself.’²¹ This reflected a wider interpretation about the very nature of Manchester – past and present. The role of Manchester Jewry, Williams believed, ‘like that of other minorities – the Germans, the Italians, the Greeks, and, particularly, the Irish – was not peripheral and derivative, but central and creative, in a city which has always been cosmopolitan in character’.²² As will emerge, however, there is an ongoing debate about just how important cosmopolitanism was (and how this term is interpreted) in the self-identity and dynamics of Manchester.²³ It thus helps explain the emphasis placed by Williams on this concept.

The novelist Daniel Defoe in A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain notoriously dismissed Manchester in 1726 as ‘the greatest mere village’.²⁴ Defoe, however, is not the most reliable guide and he probably borrowed but distorted the description of Manchester by the antiquarian and travel writer William Stukeley four years earlier as ‘the largest, most rich, populous, and busy village in England’.²⁵ There is a wider significance to their different emphases. On the one hand, compared to its size just eighty years later, Manchester was relatively small, under-developed and semi-rural. On the other, it was growing and dynamic. In 1642, its population was estimated at over 3,000, an expansion itself ‘by at least a third between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries’.²⁶ By the time Stukeley had visited the population had grown to over 10,000, a result partly of in-migration from the countryside and other parts of the British Isles. It emphasises that as with all ‘new cities’, they are by nature essentially migrant in origin and dynamics. But Manchester’s initial growth, as Defoe’s sarcasm suggested, needs to be kept in perspective. It has been suggested that by the late seventeenth century that ‘while Manchester had achieved a degree of regional importance at this time, it had yet to attain significance at national level’.²⁷

Manchester’s remarkable expansion from the last quarter of the eighteenth century had yet to occur, but its regional importance was itself of great future import. In the surrounding countryside and smaller villages, textile production was increasing due to natural advantages – fast flowing rivers and streams and a favourable damp climate that enabled proto-industrialisation in textile production. The importance here is that whilst Manchester had a deep history – it was initially a Roman fort and then later developed as an Anglo-Saxon defence against the Vikings – what developed from the later eighteenth century was in stark contrast to its earlier, modest, origins that provided a necessary but certainly not sufficient foundation for what was to follow. The Jewish settlement during the 1740s (in what was now a town but was still yet to be a city) was thus, as Williams emphasised, part and parcel of its new history and global importance.

By the 1770s, Manchester’s population had more than doubled over the past half century and was over 22,000.²⁸ By 1800, astonishingly it had grown fivefold in a quarter of a century to around 110,000 making it the largest settlement in the British Isles outside London. By 1816 it had expanded further to 130,000.²⁹ Its Jewish population was also growing, albeit from a very small basis. A 1794 directory listed just eleven Jewish traders and businesses – its neighbouring town of Liverpool as a thriving port (not least because of its direct link to the triangular slave trade) had a much larger community at this point (over 400 by 1811) – and it was from there that these largely small traders emerged in Manchester.³⁰ With a functioning but very informal synagogue space, and greater economic opportunities Manchester Jewry slowly evolved to around 75 Jews in 1806 and then 125 in 1815. From its peddling and hawking origins, a settled community of shopkeepers, craftsmen, traders and merchants was developing, yet its limits at the end of the Napoleonic and French Wars should also be acknowledged. At this point, there were at most 25,000 Jews in Britain, 10000 in roughly 25 provincial settlements.³¹ In terms of the north of England, Liverpool would remain the largest Jewish community for the first half of the nineteenth century.³²

It is true that by the mid-1820s, the Manchester Jewish population – largely of German Jewish origin – had at least doubled in a decade, making it the fourth largest provincial community. Nevertheless, by then Liverpool’s had grown to over a thousand and Manchester was still not as numerous as its fellow industrial town of Birmingham.³³ Thus, Jews made a modest contribution to the first stages of modern, industrial Manchester, but not one without some future significance. Amongst those listed in the 1794 trade directory was a ‘dealer in cotton goods’.³⁴ More prominent and a sign that Manchester had come of age, was the arrival of Nathan Meyer Rothschild to the town at the turn of the nineteenth century. His father, Meyer Amschel, the founder of this iconic family ‘house’, had initially sent his son to London from Frankfurt with £20,000 capital. After just three months, Nathan moved to Manchester. It was ‘to circumvent [English agents on the continent with their high prices] and to acquire English textiles at source at the lowest possible price for the German market that the Manchester office was now established’.³⁵ Nathan left ten years later having ‘tripled his initial investment’, moving back to London where ‘he established the family’s merchant bank in New Court’.³⁶

Through the mid-nineteenth century, Jewish international merchants from central and eastern Europe were joined by a small but dynamic number of Sephardis from Constantinople, Cairo, Gibraltar, Syria and Corfu who sought to ‘breach the Greek monopoly of Manchester’s textile trade with the Mediterranean littoral by setting up agencies at the source of supply’.³⁷ Not without justification has Manchester Jewry by the 1870s been described as ‘more cosmopolitan than any other [Jewish] community in Western Europe’.³⁸ The Sephardis were numerous enough by the early 1870s to build their own synagogue in the Moorish style. Already by then, a newly emerging middle class had formed their own ‘New Synagogue’ in opposition to the socially restrictive membership and seat-holding arrangements of the original Great Synagogue.³⁹

More radical still in the religious sphere was the creation of Britain’s second Reform congregation in the late 1850s. It has been suggested by Bill Williams that ‘Reform in Manchester is perhaps best regarded as a foreign [ie German] import which subsequently gained adherents from local causes’,⁴⁰ others have argued for a stronger rooting in the locality.⁴¹ Indeed, Williams later nuanced his earlier assessment: ‘In Manchester, the leadership of the Reform Movement was made up both of those who had already had some experience of German Reform and those whose successful acculturation into Manchester society suggested to them that the synagogue, too, should be more English in style’.⁴² Some Mancunian Jewish merchants of German origin had opted earlier to join the Unitarian movement, but then readily joined the new Reform Synagogue when it opened. The appeal of Unitarianism reflected a strong social integration and acceptance of acculturated Jews in Manchester. Whilst some remained, the Reform synagogue, with its Gothic revival architecture most prominently later represented in the city’s landmark town hall, represented a form of Judaism which avoided what Todd Endelman has labelled ‘radical assimilation’.⁴³

Whilst it reflected similar tendencies to the reform movement in Germany and America, it also had its foundation in the liberal city par excellence of Manchester. This synagogue’s membership was drawn from the trading elite many of whom believed that a more anglicised form of worship would further aid the integration of the Jews at a point when the process of political emancipation had only recently been completed.⁴⁴ The creation of the Reform Synagogue in Manchester is thus perhaps best explained more as a social movement rather than theologically/intellectually inspired.⁴⁵

By the late 1850s, Manchester had two architecturally bold and prominent synagogues (a sign of self-confidence for its wealthier Jews, at least) and a Jewish population close to 2,000 making it now the largest provincial community in Britain.⁴⁶ As early as the 1830s, there were 28 Jewish cotton merchants in the city: ‘26 were from Germany and Holland and two from the Mediterranean world’.⁴⁷ They were part of a wider group of foreign merchants from 14 different countries who totalled just two firms in 1784 and 420 by 1870. There was also, amongst other foreign investments, the cotton factory owned by Friedrich Engels’ father and run by his socialist son for two decades from the early 1840s.⁴⁸ As the British economic historian, Sydney Chapman, noted in his 1904 study of the cotton industry, ‘Many travellers do not proceed from Lancashire to Greece and Spain and Germany because Greece and Spain and Germany have come, in a sense, into Manchester.’⁴⁹ If Manchester’s prosperity depended on cotton production, it was equally reliant on its foreign-origin merchants to sell the textiles across the globe. What partly distinguished the Jewish ones was the diversity and reach of their truly global connections. Even so, they were not unique in this respect – the Greeks and Armenians were not far behind with their transnational and diasporic connections. And with the emphasis on cotton production, Manchester was intimately linked to the slave trade and the American South.

Having outlined the origins of Manchester Jewry, the remainder of this chapter will focus on the acceptance, or otherwise, of Manchester Jewry and in turn, the identity, occupational structure and internal dynamics of this vibrant and diverse community in its later history.

The integration of Manchester Jewry

The ‘myth of fairness’⁵⁰ – that Britain is a uniquely tolerant and decent society with an absence of racism – has been articulated with particular intensity in Manchester. In a 1962 essay, local history lecturer, W.M.Crawford cautioned initially that it ‘would require long and careful investigation to establish the claim that Manchester has developed a rare tradition of tolerance towards strangers and foreigners consistent with the great liberal traditions in trade and politics of which nineteenth century Mancunians were so proud’. Even so, he then proceeded to argue that the ‘general treatment of immigrants seems to redound to the city’s credit’ before concluding that the arrival of African and West Indian migrants to the city since 1945 had ‘further increased the cosmopolitan nature of the city’s population’ (similar to the Jews, the African Caribbean community had its roots in Manchester from the late eighteenth century and had slowly grown to around 350 in 1951, rising to around 2,500 when Crawford wrote). These new arrivals were, however, simply a ‘new challenge to the liberal traditions, of which its citizens may be justly proud’.⁵¹ Manchester was so obsessed by its immigrant origins, it could be argued, that spurious chapters were added to give it an even longer pre-history. Migration became an invented tradition with the pre-Raphaelite artist Ford Madox Brown’s lavish mural in the impressive Town Hall eulogising the Flemish weavers’ role in bringing weaving to Manchester in 1363 – even though there is no evidence of their actual presence in the town.⁵²

Such mythology is persistent. Tony Wilson, the leading entrepreneurial force of pop culture in the city in the last decades of the twentieth century – from the early days of English punk to the creation of ‘Madchester’ and the ‘Happy Mondays’ – stated in 2004 that the two best things about the place were ‘one, its hospitality. This has always been Britain’s immigrant city, since the 14th century. It welcomes people. Secondly, its wilfulness which is its trademark.’⁵³ Wilson’s Factory Records which promoted this new music certainly reflected the city’s migrant roots – Wilson’s family had a mix of Irish Catholic and German Jewish origins and the co-founder, Alan Erasmus, was of African Caribbean heritage. It was also said of Wilson that he forged a link between the East European origin Jewish cultural entrepreneurs of north Manchester who had promoted British pop music from the 1950s, and the ‘hippies’ of trendier South Manchester.⁵⁴

Crawford’s call for more detailed and critical work on the nature of Manchester tolerance took thirty years to happen. In what remains a challenging and controversial intervention, Bill Williams ‘coined the striking term “the anti-Semitism of tolerance”’, a study of middle-class Manchester and its Jewish populations.⁵⁵ Williams highlighted that in contrast to the sweeping generalisations of acceptance, ‘Jews were validated not on the grounds of their Jewish identity, but on the basis of their conformity to the values and manners of bourgeois English society.’⁵⁶ For the Jewish elite, this meant relatively straightforward integration into the social, cultural and political heart of Victorian Manchester and adopting a strong commitment to its free trade ideals. Salis Schwabe who hailed from Westphalia was a prominent member of the Anti-Corn Law League and was a ‘close friend of [Richard] Cobden’.⁵⁷ Like Engels, the Behrens family with its origins in Hamburg joined the Cheshire Hunt.⁵⁸ Williams adds that since ‘Jews played no crucial or unique role in the developing Manchester economy, their admission into the ranks of the bourgeoisie posed no material threat which might have qualified middle-class liberalism’.⁵⁹ For the poorer, more ‘visible’ Jews who transformed Manchester Jewry in the second half of the nineteenth century, however, such acceptance was harder to achieve.

The ‘new’ town of Manchester was not free of xenophobia and specific animus against the Jews from its late eighteenth-century evolution. In 1774, a local newspaper, already creating an ‘us’ and ‘them’, accused ‘Jews and other foreigners’ of industrial espionage and in 1800 a Jew was deported from the town under the emergency war Alien Act which, given the community’s fledgling status, must have created deep unease.⁶⁰ There were some prominent Christians in Manchester who opposed Jewish emancipation although this ran against the general spirit of mid-nineteenth century tolerance and acceptance in the city typified by the stance of the Manchester Guardian - a newspaper whose influence was truly international, though not without prejudice when it came to defending the town’s link to the American South and the wealth source of some of its founders.⁶¹ When it came to the growing East European Jewish population, whilst the Manchester Guardian generally retained support for the newcomers, other, less secure, sections of middle-class Manchester expressed their strong disapproval.

Williams has analysed especially the more popular Manchester City News and the satirical journal Spy, both of which produced a virulent antisemitism against the less assimilated Jews from Eastern Europe and their visible presence in Red Bank and Strangeways areas immediately to the north of the city centre. Both publications were aimed at the emerging middle class in Manchester. In 1890, the Manchester City News referred to the East European Jews as an ‘invading force, foreign in race, speech, dress, ideas and religion’. According to Spy, these Jews were ‘just as desirable as rats’, ‘refuse’, ‘vermin’, ‘insectoria’, a ‘cancer eating away all that is noble in our national character’, ‘Yids’, ‘sheeneymen’ and perhaps even more original in terms of coining a local antisemitic discourse, ‘smogs’.⁶²

By 1889, the Jewish population of Manchester was estimated to have reached 14,000, most of Eastern European origin, reflecting their greater movement to the town since the American Civil War. In 1861, just over a quarter of the Jewish population was of Russian or Polish birth or parentage. As noted, by 1871 it was now over half.⁶³ Concentrated in a square mile area just to the north of the city centre – the districts of Redbank, Strangeways and Redbank in order of deprivation – they worked in the classic immigrant trades, especially tailoring. A study of the Jewish immigrants in Red Bank in 1881 found 26% were tailors, a further 4% cap makers, 2% waterproof garment makers and 1% cabinet makers. The last two categories would significantly increase in numbers during the next half century. Significantly, the roots of the community as pedlars and hawkers had not disappeared − 10% were travelling glaziers. But there were also those, perhaps another 10%, with emerging small businesses ranging from shop keepers, jewellers, pawnbrokers and travel agents.⁶⁴ For the majority, the East European Jewish immigrants combined religious orthodoxy with various forms of socialism. In 1889, the Manchester Jewish Machinists’, Tailors’ and Pressers’ Trade Union was formed which organised a successful strike of 1,500 male and female workers demanding better pay and conditions the following year.⁶⁵ For some, in the interwar period religion, but not ethnic identity was largely abandoned with membership of the Communist Party in the era of fascism at home (through the local branch of the British Union of Fascists) or abroad (including those Mancunian Jews who went to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War).⁶⁶

At the heart of Williams’ argument was that the acceptance of the middle-class Jews of Manchester was dependent on them conforming and looking after their poorer brethren. It was thus a form of conditional toleration which led, as in London and elsewhere, to the creation of a raft of religious and secular institutions created by the Jewish elite in Manchester to make the Jewish immigrants conform through schooling, clubs, and religious institutions and thus become less visible.⁶⁷ As early as 1826 a Manchester Hebrew Philanthropic Society was created to provide support for poorer, immigrant, Jews, at the same time discouraging any sense of generosity unless it encourage others to come to the town. As the century progressed, a range of Jewish organisation, including the Jews School from the 1840s and the Jewish Ladies Visiting Association (1884), was established in Manchester by the elite, with the aim of anglicisation and also based on Victorian ‘scientific’ approaches to philanthropy, helping only the ‘deserving’ poor.⁶⁸ In terms of a sense of ‘belonging’, the new immigrants, who by 1914 had increased the Jewish population of Manchester to 25,000, were clearly a dilemma for the elite. Even in the hands of a relatively sympathetic writer such as journalist Walter Tomlinson in his Bye-Ways of Manchester Life (1887), the Jews of Red Bank were ‘still a peculiar people… with us but not of us’.⁶⁹

The great German novelist in exile, W.G. Sebald, to whom the legacy of his country’s recent past was a burden not carried lightly, came to Manchester initially to teach at the University where he was befriended by a German Jewish refugee who had lost his parents to the Shoah. In The Emigrants (1993), the melancholic author/narrator comments that ‘Manchester reminded me of everything I was trying to forget. Manchester is an immigrant city, and for a hundred and fifty years, leaving aside the poor Irish, the immigrants were chiefly Germans and Jews’.⁷⁰

Sebald’s fitting in/not fitting in to a city whose essence he believed was the migrant and refugee, is an outsider perspective that remains challenging to the city’s self-image of openness and welcome. In his study of Manchester’s identity, cultural historian Gary Messinger highlights how the city’s Irish-origin population, which for much of the second half of the nineteenth century was a quarter of its total (rising from around 32,500 or just over one in ten of the population in 1841), ‘were perceived as Manchester men only gradually’. For other migrant groups, this was even more marked. The commonly used term ‘Manchester men’ was, with the ‘large foreign element in the city’s population’ all ‘but seldom embodied’. There was often ‘friendly, productive interaction’ and ‘yet the curious fact remained. No one thought of Greeks or Italians or other minorities when speaking of “Manchester men”’, a term that was gender specific – indeed, blatantly exclusionary – but used to define a local sense of belonging/not belonging for the whole of the city’s population.⁷¹ Emmanuel Levy, a north Manchester born son of East European Jewish immigrants, was a contemporary and friend of L.S.Lowry – they both studied at the Manchester School of Art under Adolphe Valette.⁷² Levy was, according to Lord Ardwick, a ‘Manchester man through and through’.⁷³ It is a description unusual through its certainty. Few Jews, especially those of such immediate immigrant origin, were given that honoured and exclusive status.

One can go further and suggest that the readily embraced term ‘cosmopolitanism’ by writers about Manchester reveals only a surface acceptance of diversity. Migrant Manchester is thus relegated to a separate chapter or section – often presented very positively – but with a sense that it is apart from the main narrative thrust. The most prolific modern historian of Manchester, Alan Kidd, reveals the limitations of this approach in the various versions of his chronologically comprehensive and accessible histories of the city from the 1990s to date. Whilst acknowledging the economic and cultural input of immigrants such as Charles Hallé who founded the world famous orchestra and Hans Richter, its conductor, there is a sting in the tail of Kidd’s analysis: ‘The cosmopolitan character of Manchester’s cultural life can be overdrawn. Whilst the Hallé was “German”, Manchester’s corresponding contribution to the history of the theatre could be classed as “Lancastrian”’.⁷⁴ This is far removed from Sebald’s notion of an ‘immigrant city’, suggesting insiders and outsiders in the construction of the Mancunian and a hierarchy of belonging. The reality is that all Mancunians were at some stage in the not-too-distant past newcomers, ranging from local rural areas, farther afield in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and then from outside the British Isles. It queries the reputation for peculiar tolerance posited by those who rarely explore the inner lives of its migrant-origin populations and how they constructed their identities.

Manchester Jewish identities: cultural, economic and other

From this, how did the Jewish community of Manchester – diverse in so many different ways – define itself, collectively and individually? To start with the elite, and the figure who for half a century was regarded by many as the leader of Manchester Jewry, Nathan Laski. Despite, or perhaps better because he was born in Poland in 1863, it has been noted that he ‘was keen to distance himself from migrant culture’.⁷⁵ The company he helped further exported cotton goods to India and he was thus part of the mercantile elite in Manchester, and living a respectable life in then leafy and suburban Cheetham Hill. 1967 marked the centenary of the Manchester Jewish Board of Guardians (a body that gave relief in an austere and discriminating manner only to the ‘deserving’ poor, its foundation in 1867 reflecting the growing influx of East European Jews to the town) of which Nathan Laski was its leading force for so long – investigating literally tens of thousands of cases. For this anniversary a commemorative volume was published, and Nathan’s granddaughter wrote a revealingly honest tribute to him within it.

Marghanita Laski was a subtle and now perhaps unfairly neglected writer of mid-twentieth century Britain. Jewish themes were largely absent from her varied writing, perhaps again because of her family background. She remembers how ‘On Sundays they would send the Daimler for us children’ to take them to their grandparents’ grand house where they were first sent to say hello to the maids. ‘Looking back, there are certain words one would never have associated with my grandparents [Nathan’s wife Sarah was also a communal figure and was born in England of German migrant parentage] - words like gaiety and jollity and fun.’ Instead, formality and duty were what defined this leading Jewish communal family.⁷⁶

All the charitable work of the Laskis was linked to the Jewish community but their granddaughter concluded that ‘It strikes me forcefully that Grandpa and Grandma never seemed to me distinctively Jewish, not in the way my London grandfather, Dr Moses Gaster [the spiritual leader of the Sephardi community] did, or the people among whom we lived at Didsbury [a prosperous and fashionable suburb in the south of the city, nicknamed “Yidsbury” by local antisemitic wags].’ She concluded that ‘Certainly they were religious people, people to whose lives religion was the inalienable background, but first and foremost, it seems to me, they were Manchester people, and the religion that informed their lives just happened to be Jewish, but might just as well have been say, Congregationalist or Unitarian.’ They were thus best defined as Victorian-inspired Manchester philanthropists, living ‘decent, useful middle-class lives in the city they had grown up in and prospered.’⁷⁷

The power of such philanthropy was such, argued Bill Williams, that it ‘successfully undermined a rich immigrant culture, eradicated Yiddish in a single generation and pushed religion and Socialism to the periphery of Jewish working-class life’.⁷⁸ This forceful condemnation of the Jewish elite and its financial and societal power cannot be dismissed. As late as the 1920s, children’s writer Leila Berg remembers her teacher at the Jews School in Derby Road, Miss Rose. In her re-living her childhood, Berg remembers Miss Rose not liking the way some of the pupils spoke: ‘They’re really used to talking Yiddish. They don’t talk English very well. I think it drives her mad the way they talk, because she wants everyone to be better educated, so she hits them.’⁷⁹ Miss Rose used both physical and verbal punishments to shame and intimate her pupils into linguistic assimilation. It is perhaps too sweeping to regard this abuse of communal authority too simplistically. First, it overstates the impact of anglicisation policies and resistance to them. Second, and linked, the agency of the East European immigrants is downplayed in this formulation. Reflecting in the 1980s on his childhood, a second-generation Mancunian of East European origin emphasised that ‘We hadn’t got that liking for the past that seems to be so common nowadays. We wanted to emancipate ourselves and to become more modern … In those days your whole idea was to get rid of all these old things.’⁸⁰ Others were caught between two worlds. Leila Berg was both fascinated by her grandmother who sold pickled herrings and cucumbers from her sitting room and the culinary and commercial immigrant world that represented. Berg was also alienated by Yiddish which she did not understand: ‘When people speak Yiddish, it means they are not talking to me. I’m not there.’⁸¹ Even that was not enough for her upwardly social mother: ‘she wants me to speak nicely. Not so Lancashire. So I have to take speech lessons from Miss Shaw.’⁸²

Hilda Cohen was brought up in a Manchester suburb along with other upwardly mobile immigrant-origin Jewish families. On a Sunday, she would go to the immigrant quarter to see her Russian Jewish grandmother and her bachelor son who played cards ‘right through Saturday night’. To her ‘English’ eyes, Hilda saw her grandmother’s house as ‘untidy and shabby’, yet she retained a deep affection for her Yiddish speaking relatives, recalling especially the ritual of their breakfast: ‘strong tea, thickly buttered black bread and salt herrings’. Hilda was sent by her ‘babushka’ to go to ‘one of the little immigrant shops’ where they ‘sold delicacies like smetana and kess … Barrels of pickled cucumbers and brine-soaked herrings stood on the floor’. Her toothless grandmother still ‘enjoyed her bagels, dipping them in her tea’ To Hilda, these were precious memories of her childhood.⁸³

For many, some form of integration into wider local life was welcomed and although there was understandable resentment and hurt at the way official Jewish charity was delivered (or not) with cold Victorian morality, there was also the possibility of re-shaping the philanthropy on offer. Indeed, the existence of an organised Jewish community was one of a variety of reasons why Manchester became an attractive location for so many East European Jews.

Whether fully justified, Manchester’s reputation for liberal tolerance was another factor bringing Jews to the town. Wolf Benninson’s parents came from Mariampol in Lithuania because ‘they imagined it was a paradise compared to Russia where there were so many restrictions against Jews’.⁸⁴ Size and location were important – psychologically as well as geographically it was closer than America, cheaper to get to through the Libau transmigrant route but also less anonymous than London. Miriam Field’s grandmother, already a young widow, came to Manchester from Riga with the aim of retrieving her young children later: ‘she was afraid to go to America which was just this great big country and you had to be tough… to make your way there’.⁸⁵ And the existence of not just an elite, but a fast established East European presence with new organisations as early as the 1860s reflecting local origins such as the Brody Shul, the Chevra Walkawishk and the Romanian Synagogue, encouraged others to come to the now famous city.⁸⁶ But underneath all these factors was the pull of Manchester’s still growing economy – even when compared to the golden medinah. Jack Goldstone’s father ‘went to America for six weeks and he didn’t like it because he found as a machiner he had to work harder in America for less money than he could make in Manchester’.⁸⁷ It was a reflection too of the fluidity of Jewish migratory journeys of which Manchester was a hub itself, including the creation of Jewish travel agencies.⁸⁸

The tendency to present East European Jewish migration as an immigrant success story extolling the values of self-help is an understandable one. It is a usable past especially in the current climate of xenophobia and restrictionism where those of migrant origin are denigrated. In Manchester, it is articulated as the rise up Cheetham Hill Road from the slums to the suburbs – Cheadle, in the southern half of the city, providing an alliterative alternative and apparent progress from Cheetham Hill.⁸⁹ Indeed, the list of immigrant ‘firsts’ is impressive. The cap trade was essentially developed in the immigrant quarters as was the production of waterproof garments, a necessity perhaps of responding to the ‘moist’ climate of the town. Michael Marks had his first ‘Penny Bazaar’ stall in Leeds (the slogan was ‘no need to ask the price’). It soon became Marks & Spencer (Tom Spencer was non-Jewish and a sleeping partner, but his name gave the company a less ‘foreign’ feel), but it was in north Manchester that the first shops, warehouses and headquarters were located in what became a national treasure by the interwar period. Michael Marks was part of the alrightnik class of more prosperous east European Jewish immigrants to Britain and he, and his fellow successful entrepreneurs set up their own Jewish charities in Manchester which were more empathetic and less judgmental than the communal elite as represented by the Laski family. Again, with its roots in Jewish Manchester was Britain’s first major department store, Lewis’s, and the mail order company, Universal Stores. Taken together, these three entrepreneurial triumphs transformed the nature of British commerce and shopping. It remains, of course, especially as the British economy faced more and more foreign competition in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and beyond, that there were far more Jewish business failures than successes. Other Penny Bazaars sunk without leaving much trace in the historical record.⁹⁰ Focusing too much on the stories of immigrant attainment such as Michael Marks and his company distorts the picture. For most East European immigrants in Manchester, the wise crack of Groucho Marx: ‘I worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty’, sadly was closer to the truth.

There was thus an economic dynamism and boldness in the slums of Strangeways and Red Bank at the heart of the immigrant quarter of north Manchester, even if most remained in lives defined by deprivation and limited education. For a small number of this immigrant population, however, the liberal city provided an opportunity to better themselves through scholarships offered by its two leading secondary schools – Manchester Grammar School for boys and the High School for girls. Leila Berg went to the latter on a scholarship – one of two Jewish students in her year – and as a ferociously bright but independently minded girl it was not an easy experience – it was her enquiring mind and non-conformity, perhaps linked to her Jewishness, that led to constantly being told off at the High School.⁹¹ More blatantly, Louis Rich, the son of East European Jews, who later became a doctor, remembered being being called ‘Jewboy’ and treated with contempt because of his poverty as Manchester Grammar School at the same time.⁹² Yet in spite of this social snobbery and ambivalence towards Jewish success, the progressive heads of both schools encouraged the most talented from the ghetto to apply and many did. It was a relative openness, if not full welcome, that continued through the twentieth century allowing for speedy social advancement into the liberal professions for a significant number.⁹³ It was quipped that Manchester Grammar School after 1945 had an informal quota against the Jews, but that it was set at 50% lest its intake became totally one religion! The acceptance of Jews at Manchester Grammar School during the 1960s is well told by Nicholas Hytner, son of a south Manchester Jewish solicitor and a key player in the world of British theatre, first at the Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre, and then as director of the National Theatre. Reflecting on his school days, Hytner remembers that he was not in the least concerned about his Jewishness as a source of marginality. In contrast, he lived a hidden life in terms of his sexuality. ‘Manchester was a fine place to grow up Jewish in the sixties and seventies, but for me at least it was not a place to be gay.’⁹⁴ The formation of the Jewish Gay and Lesbian Alliance in Manchester would have to wait another generation.⁹⁵

A generation earlier, one beneficiary of the chance of upward mobility provided by Manchester Grammar School was Louis Golding whose parents came from the Ukraine. Born in 1895, he attended MGS (as it is widely known) and then Queen’s College, Cambridge. In the interwar years, he was one of the most commercially successful and prolific novelists in Britain, producing easily consumed family narratives focusing on the Jewish Emmanuel family from Doomington, a thinly disguised Manchester. His most famous novel was Magnolia Street which reflected an integrationist philosophy where even intermarriage was acceptable. Whilst largely sanitised and unthreatening, Golding was presenting East European Jewish immigrant life in Manchester to a wide audience. In its quiet way, it challenged the more assertive assimilationist outlook of the ‘King of Manchester Jewry’, Nathan Laski.⁹⁶ Although their style is totally different, Golding paved the way for his post-war successor, Howard Jacobson. Reflecting on his life and family influences, Jacobson recalled that Magnolia Street, ‘a lovely book’, was one of the few books on his parents’ shelves when he was a teenager.⁹⁷ Jacobson, a Booker Prize winning author, has returned again and again to his Manchester Jewish roots as the ‘British Philip Roth’ – a title he firmly rejects as he sees his writing as being firmly in an English literary tradition of Jane Austin.⁹⁸ That domestic influence, melded with an unashamed rootedness in the north Manchester Jewish suburbs, is reflected in his memoir, Mother’s Boy (2022). Here, the now octogenarian Jacobson recalled the lasting Yiddishisms of his grandparents and ‘the tics and shrugs that accompanied it’, as well as the Jewish food shops ‘that sold that soft, seemingly pre-digested baby bread we call challah, bagels, chopped and fried fish balls, herring, liver and tasteless cheese’ of his youth.⁹⁹ The memoir softens the presence in some of his work of a virile masculinity, one that makes him a ‘Manchester man’- with all the limitations in that respect reflected less eloquently and without self-awareness in the pop music world inhabited by the Gallagher brothers and beyond.

Bolder still in the interwar years were the Jewish communists such as Benny Rothman who went beyond reclaiming the immigrant quarters as quintessentially Mancunian and ventured into the neighbouring countryside. Rothman in 1932 was the most prominent of those who through mass trespass successfully opened up the Peak District – where the industrial revolution had its origins – to working class people who wanted the right and freedom to ramble through its rugged beauty.¹⁰⁰ In spite of imprisonment, this was Rothman and other second generation working class Jews from Cheetham Hill Road taking ownership of the English pastoral.

If those who attempted to define who was, and was not, a ‘Manchester man’, had problems fully accepting the migrant as ‘one of their own’, and likewise the Jewish elite wanted to ‘straighten out the ghetto bend’ of their poorer co-religionists, it did not fully stop the East European Jews and their children from creating exciting new local identities. The self-confidence verging on arrogance of the city found a fresh expression in the Jewish immigrant quarters. And although Nathan Laski and his son Neville remained staunch in their opposition, one area which developed a particular distinctive and global importance was in what became known as ‘Manchester Zionism’.¹⁰¹

There was an element of accident about this particular species of Zionism – Chaim Weitzmann, future first President of the State of Israel, came to Manchester University as lecturer in Chemistry in 1904. But before then there were both settled and more recent Jewish immigrants who were setting up a variety of Zionist organisations. They had non-Jewish supporters including local MP Arthur Balfour and most significantly, the Manchester Guardian all of which combined to provide a self-confident assertion of the Zionist cause and played an important role in the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

Within the immigrant community, it was especially the alrightnik class of East European – those who had advanced quickly – who were most prominent, including the Sieff family of Marks & Spencer fame. Women’s Zionism, especially through the work of Rebecca Sieff, eldest daughter of Michael Marks, had its roots in Manchester. There were those such as Balfour and some communal figures who supported Zionism as a way of ridding Britain of its ‘undesirable’ alien community. But more dominant was a typically self-confident Mancunian form of Zionism adopted to local circumstances.

To illustrate this confidence and sense of belonging, it is helpful to introduce a photographic image of Bertha Claff (see Figure 1), wife of Samuel Claff, another alrightnik who, as a moneylender, was rejected by the Jewish elite in Manchester (including barring office holding in the Great Synagogue by those of that profession). In protest, Claff and others of that background went on to form their own ‘new’ synagogue in Cheetham Hill and provided, like the Marks/Sieff family, their alternative, less Victorian version of Jewish philanthropy. Samuel and Bertha were active Zionists from the 1900s through the interwar period, developing what has become known as ‘patriotic Zionism’ with the hope that Palestine could become a Jewish country within the British Empire. Here is Bertha, circa 1920, at a fancy-dress party in Manchester.

Figure 1. Berta Claff in fancy dress. MANJM : PD3010.79.

In 2007 to mark the bi-centenary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain, a set of events took place. An alternative, grassroots event was a carnival parade past the Houses of Parliament (see Figure 2). An African Caribbean woman carries a ship that is both the slave ship Brookes and the Empire Windrush which has come to represent postwar Caribbean migration to Britain. Art historian Marcus Wood exclaims ‘What a joyful reinvention of a very bleak image, what a complicated metaphor, what imagination’.¹⁰²

Figure 2. YAA carnival village parade, 6 October 2007. Photo: Marcus Wood.

The same praise, including regarding body positivity, is due to the performativity behind the self-image of Bertha Claff. It is one which both celebrates and parodies the Patriotic Zionism of the 1920s.¹⁰³

Conclusion

This article has shown the strengths and limitations of fully accepting the myths associated with the concept of ‘cosmopolitan Manchester’. At the same time, Manchester has been invented and reinvented by its migrant population including its diverse Jewish communities, one which expanded again from the 1930s with a series of refugee movements from those escaping Nazi tyranny through to Hungarians in 1956 and then beyond which added further to its size (around 5–6,000 for the former and, including other young survivors who settled after 1945, another 1000, with smaller numbers coming from the Arab world).¹⁰⁴

In the case of Jews escaping Nazism, there is a certain irony that the tables were turned and it was largely those of ostjuden origin who now held the power over those Jews from central Europe. Inger Ader (20) and Marta Hertz (25) came to Manchester in 1939 to work as domestics in the household of a north Manchester Jewish family and were treated appallingly, including escaping unwanted attentions from the father of the family.¹⁰⁵ Those running the Manchester Jewish Refugee Committee were pragmatic, telling the young women that they knew this family were ‘awful’ but their goal was to ‘give more permits to Jewish girls’ and thereby saving more lives. Their exploitation was of secondary concern.¹⁰⁶ Women were prominent in running this committee, including Margaret Langdon whose mother, of German Jewish origin, had been one of the founders of the Jewish Ladies Visiting Association, and Rae Barash, whose East European parents were of the alrightnik class.¹⁰⁷ After the war, these refugees in turn played a major role in the communal life of Manchester Jewry, including Henry Guterman, President of the Manchester Jewish Representative Council and founder of the Jewish-Black Forum and then the Indian-Jewish Association.¹⁰⁸

Taken in the whole, Manchester is perhaps best to be understood it as a port city, especially so after the completion of the Manchester Ship Canal linking it to Liverpool some forty miles away. The Jewish elite were leading financial backers of the Manchester Ship Canal, completed in the early 1890s, which put the city in the top five of all British ports thereafter.¹⁰⁹ Manchester, as the Stone Roses front man, Ian Brown, extolled, has ‘got everything except a beach’.¹¹⁰ But whilst port cities may often be cosmopolitan, that does not mean they have been free of racisms, including between migrant groups. Manchester was no exception. In 1947, there were antisemitic riots in Manchester and Liverpool, the result of tensions in Palestine after acts of Jewish terrorism and more local domestic problems linked to deprivation. Prominent amongst the rioters who attacked Jewish shops and homes and gathered in large demonstrations were those of Irish origin. A century earlier, Friedrich Engels as a recent German migrant to Manchester had described the Irish of the city in derogatory terms in his Condition of the Working Class in England which drew heavily on biological racism and sheer prejudice (though at the same time meeting his life partner, Mary Brown, who was a poor Irish migrant).¹¹¹

A telling later example of integration of those of migrant origin into the dominant (but not necessarily tolerant) culture of Manchester is provided by the controversial comedian Bernard Manning. Manning was proud of his father’s Russian Jewish heritage but was brought up a strict Catholic by his Irish mother. Manning’s humour knew no bounds and was marked especially by racist, misogynistic, and disablist jokes.¹¹² Manning ran and owned the Embassy Club a few miles north of the city centre. Showing a greater tolerance than his own humour suggested (it has been suggested he was a ‘self-made hate figure who over time achieved the status of folk devil’), it was Manning that mentored and gave a space at the Embassy Club for the north Manchester (in fact the linked city of Salford) punk poet, John Cooper Clarke whose work was strongly anti-racist and politically progressive. Again reflecting the diversity and interconnectedness of Manchester as migrant city, Clarke himself revels in his autobiography on both his strong local rootedness and the vagueness of where ‘anyone in my large and neglected family came from: County Tyrone, Vilnius, Krakow, Oldham, possibly even Wales!’.¹¹³

Tony Wilson, Bernard Manning and John Cooper Clarke all show how at a basic level Jews and others of migrant origin in Manchester have, in the spirit of Louis Golding’s Magnolia Street, inter-married. It reflects a wider integration. A file in the British National Archives shows that process at work even before the First World War in the East European Jewish community. Abraham (Abe) Kushner (no relative of the author as far as I know) was granted naturalisation on 15 July 1919. He was a Russian citizen but served for the British army in the First World War which facilitated his speedy naturalisation after the conflict. His application emphasised his rootedness in Manchester, including his marriage to a local woman of Irish Catholic origin.¹¹⁴

If these intimate relationships showed a basic commonality, they were often disapproved of strongly by other Jews. One second generation Mancunian Jew recalls growing up in his working class street and how his next door neighbour was ‘a Jewish woman who was living with a coloured man … an African coloured man off a ship and those coloured men were the lowest of people that was coming to England and there were three Jewish women in that street playing around with coloured men.’ Whilst on reflection he regarded these women as ‘instigators of integration without knowing it’, he remembers his mother being ‘disgusted’ by them and ‘she instilled that into us quite a lot’.¹¹⁵

Jewish Mancunians were thus not immune from intolerance, or at least ambivalence towards other minorities, and the case of Bernard Manning (whose line on Englishness with regard to non-white minorities, especially Pakistanis, mirrored that of Enoch Powell: ‘They actually think they’re English because they’re born here. That means if a dog’s born in a stable, it’s a horse’ – a ‘joke’ he told at a police charity event in 1995) revealed how this could be exploited viciously against those who were even more marginal and under constant attack.¹¹⁶ Indeed, the ‘different worlds’ occupied by established/establishment Jews and more recent migrants was exposed in 1981,¹¹⁷ when major inner city disturbances occurred in Manchester. It was marked by white and black rioters attacking symbols of authority such as the police, but also inflicting damage on the neighbouring and prominently South Asian area of Rusholme. The ‘official’ enquiry on the riots, which showed a fundamental lack of engagement and understanding of the African Caribbean community, was headed by Benet Hytner, QC father of Nicholas.¹¹⁸ Yet, as the theatre director later related, ‘I was brought up by well-meaning liberal parents and I was suffocated by what they thought was their tolerance’.¹¹⁹ Migrant origin did not always lead to understanding of and empathy with other people’s differences beyond the superficial. Yet again, however, Jewish Mancunians were not of one voice and one of the leading anti-racists in Manchester in the late twentieth century was Steve Cohen, a key figure in the legal struggle to defend asylum seekers and promoting radical dialogue with various ethnic minority organisations.¹²⁰ Similarly, the example of former refugee, Henry Guterman, in working for better inter-minority relations, has already been referenced.

To bring this to a close: new, migrant populated cities are not always easy places to negotiate, but Jewish Manchester amongst others shows the vibrancy and energy that is always generated when movement of people is treated as a virtue and not a crime. It is fitting, therefore, to finish with Howard Bernstein, a Cheetham Hill Jewish lad of East European origins, a school leaver at just seventeen and whose father sold raincoats (as mentioned, the waterproof clothing industry was a major innovation created by the ostjuden in the city’s sweatshops). It was Bernstein who led the city’s revival after the 1500 kilogram IRA bomb destroyed its city centre in June 1996 and thereafter ‘reinvented Manchester’ from its decaying post-industrial state to a place of innovation in technology and the service and creative industries.¹²¹ As a reflection of that growth and Bernstein’s influence, census figures show the population of the city itself grew from 432,700 in 1991 to around 503,000 in 2011 (many of these moving in to repurposed cotton and other warehouse developments). At the same time, Greater Manchester recovered to what had been in 1951 its largest postwar size – around 2.7 million. Manchester and Greater Manchester then grew a fraction under ten percent by 2021.¹²² Beyond London, it is the second largest urban conurbation in the UK, a fraction smaller than Birmingham. Bernstein was the Chief Executive of Manchester City Council from 1998 through to his retirement in 2017. In his outline of the ‘Resurgent Entrepreneurial City’ in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries, urban studies scholar Brian Robson refers to Bernstein as ‘the city’s eminence grise’.¹²³ Indeed, Sir Howard Bernstein is simply known as ‘Mr Manchester’.¹²⁴

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner is Professor in the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations and History Department at the University of Southampton. He has written widely on the British Jewish experience, especially social history and comparative migration and on the Holocaust. His most recent books are The Battle of Britishness: Migrant Journeys since 1685 (Manchester University Press, 2012), Journeys from the Abyss: The Holocaust and Forced Migration from the 1880s to the Present (Liverpool University Press, 2017) and Southampton’s Migrant Past and Present (Parkes Institute, 2021). He has recently finished a study of an eighteenth-century Jewish triple murderer and, with Dr Aimee Bunting, is working on a joint book, Co-Presents to the Holocaust. He is co-editor of the journal Patterns of Prejudice and deputy editor of Jewish Culture and History.

Notes

1. Dave Haslam, Manchester, England. The Story of the Pop Cult City (London: HarperCollins, 2000 [1999]).

2. Stuart Maconie, Pies and Prejudice: In Search of the North (London: Ebury Press, 2008 [2007], p.113.

3. Ibid, p.112 for the mosaic with that message outside the iconic Afflecks Palace which was at the heart of counter-culturalism.

4. Louise Rhind-Tutt, “16 Memorable quotes about Manchester”, The i, 15 March 2017.

5. Liam Gallagher on Twitter, 19 June 2019.

6. Gordon Phillips, “Manchester and Its Critics: An Anatomy of Abuses”, in W.H.Brindley (ed.), The Soul of Manchester (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1929), p.264.

7. Maconie, Pies and Prejudice, p.112.

8. Original Modern (Manchester: Manchester City Council, 2009). This was an attempt at rebranding the city.

9. https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2023/apr/03/cotton-capital-how-slavery-made-manchester-the-worlds-first-industrial-city, accessed 19 September 2023.

10. Alan Kidd and Terry Wyke, “Introduction: Making the Modern City” in idem (eds), Manchester. Making the Modern City (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), pp.1–5.

11. https://www.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk/media/8079/census-2021-briefing_religion_final_so.pdf, accessed 19 September 2023.

12. David Graham, Jonathan Boyd and Daniel Vulkan, 2011 Census: Initial insights about the UK Jewish Population (London: JPR, 2012), p.2.

13. Hilda Cohen, Bagels with Babushka (Manchester: Gatehouse, 1989), p.10.

14. Patricia Skinner (ed), Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary and Archaeological Perspectives (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003).

15. Todd Endelman, The Jews of Britain 1656 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Geoffrey Green, The Royal Navy & Anglo-Jewry 1740–1820 (London: Geoffrey Green, 1989).

16. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, p.12.

17. Tony Kushner, “Bill Williams and Jewish Historiography: Past, Present and Future”, Melilah vol.1 (2006), pp.1–14.

18. Bill Williams, “Heritage and Community: The Rescue of Manchester’s Jewish Past”, in Tony Kushner (ed.), The Jewish Heritage in British History: Englishness and Jewishness (London: Frank Cass, 1992), pp.128–146.

19. Bill Williams, The Making of Manchester Jewry 1740–1875 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985 [1976]), p.vii.

20. Williams, “Heritage and Community”.

21. Williams, The Making of Manchester Jewry, pp.vii-iii.

22. Ibid, p.viii.

23. See Cathy Gelbin and Sander Gilman, Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017) on how the term is constructed and disputed through the modern era – hence their use of the plural.

24. Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971 [1726]), pp.544–5.

25. William Stukeley, Itinerarium Curiosum (London: Baker and Leigh, 1776 [1724]), p.58.

26. Geoff Timmins, “Roots of Industrial Revolution”, in Kidd and Wyke, Manchester, pp.32–3.

27. Ibid, p.34.

28. Ibid, p.35.

29. Williams, The Making of Manchester Jewry, p.16.

30. Ibid, p.28.

31. Cecil Roth, The Rise of Provincial Jewry (London: JHSE, 1950).

32. Williams, The Making of Manchester Jewry, pp.12, 16, 28.

33. Ibid, pp.38–9.

34. Ibid, p.12.

35. Ibid, pp.17–18. More generally see Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild: Money’s Prophets, 1798–1848 (New York: Viking, 1998).

36. Bill Williams, Jewish Manchester. An Illustrated History (Derby: Breedon Books, 2008), p.16.

37. Williams, The Making of Manchester Jewry, p.320.

38. Bill Williams, Manchester Jewry: A pictorial history 1788–1988 (Manchester: Archive Publications, 1988), p.4.

39. Ibid, Chapter 12.

40. Ibid, p.261.

41. Daniel Langton, “A Question of Backbone: Contrasting Christian Influences upon the Origins of Reform and Liberal Judaism in England”, Melillah vol.3 (2004), pp.1–47 provides a useful summary of the debate.

42. Williams, Jewish Manchester, p.25.

43. Todd Endelman, Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History, 1656–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

44. Williams, Jewish Manchester, p.27.

45. Langton, “A Question of Backbone”.

46. Ibid, p.28.

47. Ibid, p.19.

48. J. Scholes, “Lists of foreign merchant firms in Manchester, 1784–1870”, quoted by W.M.Crawford, “A Cosmopolitan City”, in N.J. Frangopulo (ed.), Rich Inheritance: A Guide to the History of Manchester (Wakefield: S.R.Publishers, 1969 [1962]), p.113; Tristram Hunt, The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (London: Allen Lane, 2009).

49. S.J. Chapman, The Lancashire Cotton Industry: A Study in Economic Development (Manchester: Manchester University, 1904), p.141.

50. Colin Holmes, A Tolerant Country? Immigrants, Refugees and Minorities in Britain (London: Faber & Faber, 1991).

51. Crawford, “A Cosmopolitan City”, pp.110, 121. See Mervyn Busteed, “A Cosmopolitan City”, in Kidd and Wyke, Manchester, p.246.

52. Ibid, p.110.

53. ”Tony Wilson’s Manchester”, Virgin Hotline Magazine, February–March 2004, p.45.

54. Haslam, Manchester, England, chapter 7, on the origins of Factory Records. On the North Manchester Jewish link, see https://www.theregister.com/2007/08/11/wilson_obit/accessed 30 June 2021.

55. Bill Williams, “The Anti-Semitism of Tolerance: Middle-Class Manchester and the Jews, 1870–1900”, in A.J. Kidd and K.W. Roberts (eds), City, Class and Culture: Studies of Cultural Production and Social Policy in Manchester (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp.74–102. For a critique, see David Feldman, ‘Jews in the East End, Jews in the Polity, “The Jew” in the Text’, Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century no.13 (2011), p.5 (paragraph 4).

56. Williams, “The Anti-Semitism of Tolerance”, p.94.

57. Williams, The Making of Manchester Jewry, p.93.

58. Williams, Jewish Manchester, p.22.

59. Williams, “The Anti-Semitism of Tolerance”, p.75.

60. Williams, Jewish Manchester, pp.12–3; Williams, The Making of Manchester Jewry, p.16. For more detail of the implementation of the Alien Act in Manchester, see Jeremy Smilg, The Jews of England and the Revolutionary Era 1789–1815 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2021), p.92.

61. Williams, Jewish Manchester, pp.23, 27; Cassandra Gooptar (ed.), Cotton Capital. How Slavery Shaped the Guardian, Britain & the World (Manchester: The Guardian, 2023).

62. Ibid, pp.45–6. Spy was founded in 1891. A full run is located in Manchester Central Reference Library.

63. Busteed, “A Cosmopolitan City”, p.232; Williams, The Making of Manchester Jewry, p.270.

64. Laura Vaughan and Alan Penn, “Jewish Immigrant Settlement Patterns in Manchester and Leeds, 1881”, Urban Studies vol.43 no.3 (2006), p.662. Alysa Levene, Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), p.87 estimates that 35% of Jewish traders in Manchester in 1851 were still pedlars, showing the persistence of this occupation.

65. Williams, Jewish Manchester, p.53.

66. Rosalyn Livshin, “Nonconformity in the Manchester Jewish Community: The Case of Political Radicalism, 1889–1939” (unpublished PhD, University of Manchester, 2015).

67. Williams, “The Anti-Semitism of Tolerance”.

68. Williams, The Making of Manchester Jewry, p.51. More generally, see Rainer Liedtke, Jewish Welfare in Hamburg and Manchester, c1850–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

69. Walter Tomlinson, Bye-Ways of Manchester Life (Manchester: Butterworth & Nodal, 1887).

70. W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants (London: Harvill Press, 1997 [originally in German 1993]), p.191.

71. Gary Messinger, Manchester in the Victorian Age: The Half-Known City (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp.179–80.

72. ”Emmanuel Levy 1900–1986”, Jewish Chronicle, 16 June 2023.

73. Quoted in an exhibition on Levy in Manchester Jewish Museum. See https://lady.co.uk/made-manchester-art-emmanuel-levy-1900–1986.

74. Alan Kidd, Manchester (Keele: Keele University Press, 1993); idem, Manchester: A History (Lancaster: Carnegie, 2011), p.163.

75. ”Nathan Laski”, Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Manchester, www.manchesterjewishstudies.org, accessed 14 July 2019.

76. Marghanita Laski, “My Grandfather, Nathan Laski”, in H.R.Gouldman and J.B.Morgan (eds), The Manchester Jewish Board of Guardians 1867–1967: The Story of One Hundred Years (Manchester: Manchester Jewish Board of Guardians, 1967).

77. Ibid. On use of “Yidsbury”, see Howard Spring’s novel, Shabby Tiger (London: Collins, 1934).

78. Williams, “The Anti-Semitism of Tolerance”, p.94.

79. Leila Berg, Flickerbook (London: Granta, 1997), p.39.

80. Anonymous testimony from the Manchester Jewish Museum, oral history collection. Manchester Jewish Museum educational handout.

81. Berg, Flickerbook, pp.23, 41.

82. Ibid, p.133.

83. Cohen, Bagels with Babushka, p.9.

84. Manchester Jewish Museum, oral history interviews J24.

85. Manchester Jewish Museum, oral history interviews J84.

86. Williams, Jewish Manchester, chapter 5.

87. Manchester Jewish Museum, oral history interviews J102.

88. One of the most important of these was the Farber steamship and railway ticket office. See the Manchester Jewish Museum oral history collection J82, testimony of Jack Harber, grandson of the founder of the company.

89. ”From Cheetham to Cheadle” was a 1960s play by Hymie Gouldman, a major force in the Manchester Jewish theatre movement. The play was later put to music by his son, Graham, founder member of 10CC, a largely Jewish band. See https://guestpectacular.com/artists/graham-gouldman/events/164104/song/from-cheetham-hill-to-cheadle, accessed 19 September 2023.

90. Williams, Jewish Manchester, pp.48–50.

91. Berg, Flickerbook, p.145.

92. Louis Rich interview, J273, Manchester Jewish Museum.

93. Williams, Jewish Manchester, p.100.

94. http://www.jglg.org.uk/nicholas-hytner.html, accessed 30 June 2021.

95. Williams, Jewish Manchester, p.177.

96. Louis Golding, Magnolia Street (London: Gollancz, 1932).

97. Howard Jacobson interviewed by Bryan Cheyette, Parkes Lecture, University of Southampton, 27 April 2023.

98. See Jacobson’s The Mighty Walzer (1999) and Kalooki Nights (2006); Nicholas Lezard, “Is Howard Jacobson the only person writing British Jewish novels?”, Guardian, 15 October 2010; David Brauner, Howard Jacobson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).

99. Howard Jacobson, Mother’s Boy (London: Vintage, 2023 [2022]), p.40.

100. Benny Rothman, The 1932 Kinder Trespass: a personal view of the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass (Altrincham: Willow Publishers, 1982). Leila Berg was also part of this mass trespass.

101. Williams, Jewish Manchester, chapter 9.

102. Marcus Wood, “Significant Silence: Where was Slave Agency in the Popular Imagery of 2007?”, in Cora Kaplan and John Oldfield (eds), Imagining Transatlantic Slavery (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p.187.

103. Manchester Jewish Museum, image PD30110.79, with thanks to Alexandra Cropper.

104. Bill Williams, Jews and Other Foreigners (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011).

105. Joint letter to their mothers, 22 May 1939 in the possession of the author.

106. Testimony of Inge Adler in the Association of Jewish Refugees “Refugee Voices Audio-Visual Teaching Archive”.

107. Williams, Jews and Other Foreigners, pp.150–2. See also the records of the Manchester Jewish Refugee Committee, Manchester Central Reference Library, M102.

108. Williams, Jewish Manchester, p.181.

109. Williams, “The Anti-Semitism of Tolerance”, p.90.

110. Quoted by Maconie, Pies and Prejudice, p.122.

111. See Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), originally published in German in 1845.

112. Allison Pearson, “Welcome to my insulting room”, Daily Telegraph, 10 January 1998.

113. John Cooper Clarke, I Wanna Be Yours (London: Picador, 2020), pp.3–4.

114. The National Archives, HO 441/1503/370373 and HO 334/84/4271 for the naturalisation certificate.

115. Manchester Jewish Museum interview, J94.

116. Nitin Sahney, “Whose Country is it anyway?”, Observer, 26 October 2003.

117. This phrase was used by Salman Rushdie in a 1982 essay. See Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta, 1991).

118. “Report of the Moss Side Enquiry Panel to the Leader of the Greater Manchester Council”, Manchester, 30 September 1981. For a critique, see Simon Peplow, Race and Riots in Thatcher’s Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), chapter 6.

119. http://www.jglg.org.uk/nicholas-hytner.html, accessed 30 June 2021.

120. The archive of Steve Cohen is an important part of the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Research Centre, GB 3228/28, Manchester Central Reference Library..

121. John Harris, “Sir Howard Bernstein on Reinventing Manchester”, Guardian, 18 April 2017

122. https://www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/censuspopulationchange/E08000003, accessed 19 September 2023.

123. Brian Robson, “The Resurgent Entrepreneurial City”, in Kidd and Wyke, Manchester, pp.351–2. The census figure for 1931 was the highest for the city centre population at roughly three quarters of a million.

124. Manchester Jewish Museum, spring 2017 exhibition, “Sir Howard: the story of Mr Manchester”.