Between religion and ethnicity: How Jews navigated race relations in postwar Britain

Abstract

This thesis explores the varying ways in which British Jews responded to, shaped and were impacted by race relations in the postwar period, focussing largely on the period from the late-1950s until the millennium. It traces how the ‘organised Jewish community’ initially avoided involvement due to assimilatory attitudes and fear of racialisation, how Powellism led to a range of liberal paternalist initiatives in the late 1960s and early 1970s and how the rise of the National Front in the mid-1970s resulted in a form of Jewish opposition that portrayed anti-fascism as at moderate, patriotic cause that all Britons, rather than specifically minorities, should support. The charged climate of the 1980s saw the organised community retreat from progressive race relations activism in part due to the close connection of some Jewish figures to the Thatcher project and the rise of the politics of security. The Jewish response to race relations became polarised between Jewish Conservatives who presented Jews as a model of successful assimilation from which Blacks and Asians should learn, and Jewish radicals who saw Jewish well-being as being intimately connected with that of other minorities. The 1990s saw a new generation of Jewish leaders who brought a willingness for Jews to engage in anti-racist politics and be counted in the national census for the first time.
The thesis simultaneously tracks Jewish public engagement with race relations and internal Jewish debates over the nature of Jewish identity in Britain. It suggests that the traditional British-Jewish preference to understand Jews as essentially members of a religious group persisted through the 1960s and 1970s, despite the popularity of diaspora Zionism after 1967. It argues that this identity constituted a form of whiteness, which was strengthened by the contrast with New Commonwealth migrants. It argues that despite the 1983 ruling that Jews should be considered an ethnic group under the Race Relations Act this form of identification was largely confined to Jewish radicals in the 1980s. Only in the early 1990s did the presentation of Jews as an ethnic minority gain popularity, although it remained a contested issue up to the millennium. Finally, it argues that only under New Labour did the organised Jewish community feel safe enough to abandon the prism of whiteness and instead present Jews as a distinct ethno-cultural group who could make a discrete contribution to multicultural Britain.

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ORCID for Joseph William Finlay: orcid.org/0000-0003-3749-174X

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