This book explores how fin de siecle Britain and Britons displaced spatially-charged apprehensions about imperial decline, urban decay and unpoliced borders onto Jews from Eastern Europe migrating westwards. The myriad of representations of the 'alien Jew' that emerged were the product of, but also a catalyst for, a decisive moment in Britain's legal history: the fight for the 1905 Aliens Act. Drawing upon a richly diverse collection of social and political commentary, including fiction, political testimony, ethnography, travel writing, journalism and cartography, this volume traces the shifting rhetoric around alien Jews as they journeyed from the Russian Pale of Settlement to London's East End. By employing a unique and innovative reading of both the aliens debate and racialized discourse concerned with 'the Jew', Hannah Ewence demonstrates that ideas about 'space' and 'place' critically informed how migrants were viewed; an argument which remains valid in today's world.

This book examines the particular experience of ethnic, religious and national minorities who participated in the First World War as members of the main belligerent powers: Britain, France, Germany and Russia. Individual chapters explore themes including contested loyalties, internment, refugees, racial violence, genocide and disputed memories from 1914 through into the interwar years to explore how minorities made the transition from war to peace at the end of the First World War. The first section discusses so-called 'friendly minorities', considering the way in which Jews, Muslims and refugees lived through the war and its aftermath. Section two looks at fears of 'enemy aliens', which prompted not only widespread internment, but also violence and genocide. The third section considers how the wartime experience of minorities played out in interwar Europe, exploring debates over political representation and remembrance. Bridging the gap between war and peace, this is the ideal book for all those interested in both First World War and minority histories.

This volume explores literary and material representations of Jews, Jewishness and Judaism from antiquity to the twenty-first century. Gathering leading scholars from within the field of Jewish Studies, it investigates how the debates surrounding literary and material images within Judaism and in Jewish life are part of an on-going strategy of image management - the urge to shape, direct, authorize and contain Jewish literary and material images and encounters with those images - a strategy both consciously and unconsciously undertaken within multifarious arenas of Jewish life from early modern German lands to late twentieth-century North London, late Antique Byzantium to the curation of contemporary Holocaust exhibitions.

This volume explores literary and material representations of Jews, Jewishness and Judaism from antiquity to the twenty-first century. Gathering leading scholars from within the field of Jewish Studies, it investigates how the debates surrounding literary and material images within Judaism and in Jewish life are part of an on-going strategy of image management - the urge to shape, direct, authorise and contain Jewish literary and material images and encounters with those images - a strategy both consciously and unconsciously undertaken within multifarious arenas of Jewish life from early modern German lands to late twentieth-century North London, late Antique Byzantium to the curation of contemporary Holocaust exhibitions.

This book explores how fin de siecle Britain and Britons displaced spatially-charged apprehensions about imperial decline, urban decay and unpoliced borders onto Jews from Eastern Europe migrating westwards. The myriad of representations of the 'alien Jew' that emerged were the product of, but also a catalyst for, a decisive moment in Britain's legal history: the fight for the 1905 Aliens Act. Drawing upon a richly diverse collection of social and political commentary, including fiction, political testimony, ethnography, travel writing, journalism and cartography, this volume traces the shifting rhetoric around alien Jews as they journeyed from the Russian Pale of Settlement to London's East End. By employing a unique and innovative reading of both the aliens debate and racialized discourse concerned with 'the Jew', Hannah Ewence demonstrates that ideas about 'space' and 'place' critically informed how migrants were viewed; an argument which remains valid in today's world.