Spaces of Informal Learning and Cultures of Translation and Marginality in London’s Jewish East End

Abstract

This chapter examines some spaces of learning in inner London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These informal settings were brought into being by immigrant Jews to foster dialogue and exchange. The figure of the organic intellectual is, I will argue, an appropriate description of the role of the men and women who inhabited these spaces. The spaces they created enabled a proletarian pedagogical culture through which emerged a counterculture of modernity. The contemporary relevance of this historical case lies in its anticipation of features typical of the global city today: the dense web of interactions through within mobile, complex diverse populations.