Down and Out in London

...Life in England differed so greatly from the life in Eastern Europe that they simply could not conceive of a situation that would cause any one to leave his place of birth...

...The closest U.S...

...The names may differ," he writes in his Preface, but beyond that pretty much everything "remains the same.' Fishman is wrong...

...the copy-editing and proofreading leave much to be desired...

...It was the Jewish Anarchists who founded the Yiddish labor publications, Germinal and Arbeter Fraint, and who set up what was to become the headquarters of the Jewish trade unions...

...Especially in the garment industry, which took on the majority of the new arrivals, there soon emerged the sweatshop system-with its unsanitary factories, extremely poor pay and seemingly endless hours...

...The fact is, of course, that the Jews happened to appear on the scene at a time when the method of apparel production was changing, when ready-to-wear garments were beginning to replace made-to-measure clothing...

...In the United States, Canada, South Africa, and Argentina great store was placed on upward mobility, providing ready avenues of escape for the newcomers...

...most had been semiskilled artisans or small, and invariably unsuccessful, businessmen...

...And nowhere is an effort made to explain the ideological conflicts that caused the stormy Anarchist-Syndicalist-Socialist alliance to collapse...

...the British situation was unique...

...Had the immigrants not come at the moment they did, the growing acceptance of ready-to-wear clothing, a marginal economic operation at best in those days, would have given rise to the sweatshop anyway and dealt the very same blows to the tailoring craft...

...for 25-year stints, often destroying families in the process...

...Although the leaders of the early London movement included such major writers as Morris Winchevsky, as well as Anarchist activists like S. Yanovsky, no one influenced the immigrant Jewish workers more than Rocker...

...Yet despite the privations they suffered and the working-class animosity that greeted them, the East European Jews who migrated to London managed in a relatively brief time to form an aggressive and, above all, effective network of their own labor groups-a remarkable accomplishment when one further takes into account their history of subservience and total lack of previous knowledge about trade unions...

...This is not to suggest that all was peace and goodwill among the most prominent radicals...

...parallel to the British reaction against the Jews was the workers' attitude here toward the Chinese in the 1870s-80s...

...the German Socialist party is abbreviated SDP instead of SPD...

...Finally, the publisher hasn't helped much either...

...The notion that loyalty is a two-way affair, involving the allegiance of the citizen to the state and the state to the citizen-and that without the second the first is impossible-was one the super-Empirists could not understand...

...In South Africa, meanwhile, the Afrikaaner nationalists charged that the Jews were being sent in with the encouragement of the British government as part of its effort to gain hegemony over the region...

...In the U.S., in short, and practically everywhere else outside of England that the Jews went to, anti-Semitism was rooted more in ethnic and religious bigotry than in economic concerns...

...Some examples: the word "presupposed" is used where the word "predisposed" is meant...

...the Socialist Labor party (of America) is called the Socialist Workers party...

...The language, the religion, the mores of the Jews were strange, argued the jingoists, and what is more they had been disloyal to their own "King...

...Some were Socialists (Bundists, Labor Zionists, Territorialists) and others were Anarchists (terrorists, antiterrorists, syndicalists...

...Fishman rightly maintains that the credit for this must go to a small group of philosophic anarchists, led by Rudolf Rocker...

...The immigrants' predicament was completely different in England because the British already had a mature industrial economy, with an established, socially immobile working class that was organized into trade unions and friendship societies...

...There are also some distracting Britishisms-for example, placing the initials P.C...

...And they depressed the British labor market...

...The Colonel Blimps and their followers constituted a second center of English nativism-cum-anti-Semitism...

...Fishman underplays their interminable disputes...

...To further complicate matters, they had no experience with trade-union organization, necessarily a wholly new phenomenon to them...

...Consequently, in addition to missing the crucial difference between the Jewish immigrant experience in England as compared to the rest of the world, Fishman fails to give us the complete story...

...For the entrepreneurs, who might otherwise have been the targets of discontent, this was fortuitous...

...The Chinese therefore depressed the American labor market.'' So were the Jews looked upon as having been brought into England to do the work that no self-respecting Englishman would do...

...In the United States this found expression in the activities of a variety of local organizations, culminating with the widespread Ku Klux Klan hate campaigns of the 1920s...

...August Sartorious, the Alsatian economist, made note of this in 1886: "The Chinese have been brought into California to do the dirty work no self-respecting American will do...

...For not only were jobs scarce, but what little labor demand existed was for experienced factory hands-the kind of work Jews were barred from in Russia...

...But nowhere was the plight of the hapless emigres worse than in England, where the hostility encountered was deeply rooted in the working class...

...Born a Catholic in Mainz, Germany, in 1873, he joined the Social Democrats at 18, but was soon converted to anarcho-socialism...

...Reviewed by Bernard K. Johnpoll Professor of political science, State University of New York at Albany In the last quarter of the 19th century, East European Jews began an exodus that was to last for almost 40 years...

...And, indeed, the Jews did have to accept any employment they could find at whatever wages they were being offered, the only alternative being starvation...

...Most critically, in the United States the labor unions exhibited scant hostility toward the "greenhorns...

...This, in turn, resulted in a sharp decline of needle-trades' jobs for Britons, accomplished by an even more rapid deterioration of compensation standards and working conditions...

...No matter if that King had ordered pogroms against them or had forced literally thousands of their male children into the Army (at age 12...

...Fleeing from the barbaric persecution and the economic degradation that was their lot under the Tsars, thousands upon thousands of them made the long, arduous trek from the shtetlach of Russia to such civilized cities as London, Leeds, Johannesburg, Montreal, Toronto, New York, and Chicago...

...Chaim Zhitlowsky emerges as Zhedlowski...

...To the north, in the Anglo-Saxon Protestant areas of Canada, the situation mirrored that of the U.S., and in the country's French-speaking areas prejudice was wrapped in a clerical cloak...

...When he came to London in 1895, he joined the then heavily Jewish local Anarchist group, learned Yiddish and began a life as organizer and editor of the Arbeter Fraint...

...Nor does he attempt any serious examination of the lasting contributions of the Jewish radicals in London to the lives of the immigrants they led, or to the life of their adopted city...

...They were not, however, warmly welcomed upon reaching their destinations...

...Before his internment during World War I, Rocker had built a significant nonterrorist Anarchist cadre in Whitechapel, in London's East End...

...Virtually everywhere, in fact, their arrival brought to the surface strong currents of a nativism that was little more than thinly-veiled anti-Semitism...

...They were seen, therefore, as cheap rivals for the meager number of unskilled positions that were available...

...Inexplicably, he has ignored the more than ample data documenting the role these controversies played in bringing about the eventual decline of the Anglo-Jewish movement immediately prior to World War I. (It lived a half-life during the inter-war years and vanished during World War II...

...it provided them with easy scapegoats for the effects of the change that was taking place...

...The threatened native workers thus began to chant, "Out with the Alien Jews.' Theirs was not a lonely cry, though...

...In his new study of all this William J. Fishman, a Senior Research Fellow at London University's Queens College, declares at the outset that the experience of the Jews who settled on New York's Lower East Side and of those who put down in London's East End was strikingly similar...

...It was there, too, that workers of the sweatshops organized their union and planned the struggles that would ultimately make their lives economically bearable...

...But the chief-and probably the fatal-flaw of Jewish Radicals is its analytical void...

...Understandably, albeit with limited justification, they blamed the strange new immigrants for their troubles...

...for Police Constable) before the name of every patrolman that is listed...

...But the reality was beyond the comprehension of those who suddenly found that their considerable ability no longer assured them a livelihood, as it once did...

...In these circumstances, achieving acceptance posed special problems that tend to be obscured by the superficial truth that the immigrants who landed in New York or Montreal also began their existence in the sweatshops...

...Its center was the Jubilee Street Club, a fabled building where many a future Jewish lawyer or doctor or writer received his first training in the English language and his first introduction to English literary masterpieces...