Little Jew Boys Made Good: Immigration, the South African War, and Anglo-Jewish Fiction

Abstract

Public debate about and among Jews in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century focused on two seemingly unrelated, even contradictory, phenomena — the influx of poor, ghetto-minded immigrants to the metropolitan centres, particularly the East End of London, and the rise of the Jewish plutocracy. Yet it was in these two developments that the hopes and fears invested in Jews during the second half of the nineteenth century converged, giving new urgency to the longstanding question of their capacity for improvement, integration, and national feeling. Jewish patriotism — always under scrutiny during wartime — was an object of especially charged discussion in this period, because the South African war of 1899–1902 directly implicated Jews.