Jewish Households and Religious Identity in Mid-nineteenth-century Britain

Abstract

In the 1960s and 70s historians were exercised by the nature of the relationship between industrialisation and family life. In essence, they were starting to question the truth of the longstanding belief that the upheavals of migration, urban settlement and conversion to an industrial workforce had altered family forms and support networks in a way which promoted nuclearity and (relative) isolation. 1 Michael Anderson's famous study of Preston, published in 1971, was one of the first to challenge this 'master narrative', pointing out the continued importance of family ties in an industrial town, albeit overlain with a strong sense of instrumentality which he suggests may have arisen partly because of a breakdown in older systems of inheritance and network formation. 2 Households in Preston were thus not uncommonly extended by kin beyond the immediate nuclear family, but this often reflected a calculated and mutually beneficial relationship based on shared costs or childcare. Laslett et al also challenged the thesis that industrialisation disrupted earlier family patterns, by uncovering evidence that the small, nuclear family was a characteristic of British families for a very long period, and one which preceded the onset of industrialisation by several centuries. 3 The attack has continued: more recently Barry Reay pointed out that inter-relationships between households remained very strong through the nineteenth century, at least in rural Kent, while Tadmor and others have highlighted the fluidity of household forms over the course of the life cycle, making such apparently strict classifications as 'nuclear' and 'extended' rather unhelpful. 4 The present article very much supports this view. Nonetheless, space has remained in the historiography for the disruptive effects of industrialisation on family ties in a broader sense, and particularly the transition from an agricultural way of life to one based on waged labour. Emma Griffin's recent work on working-class autobiography, for example, has pointed out the freedom that a reliable industrial wage brought to young workers, enabling them to make marriages which would previously have been seen as improvident. 5 Yet there is still much that we don't know about the transition to the industrial setting, including the impact of urban migration on family structure, and its interactions with other cultural and social factors like religion and shared places of origin.This article aims to make its own contribution by drawing together three areas of potential change which were coalescing around the middle of the nineteenth century. The first is the form of the family in industrial and manufacturing towns; the second is the impact of migration on family and community cohesion; and thirdly and relatedly, is the role of shared religion in creating or cementing those bonds of family and community. By utilising household analysis of the Jewish population in a range of industrial towns in 1851 I aim to show both how fluid and varied household forms were, and also to highlight...