5 - Grass-roots Interactions in the Diasporic East End

Summary

Having considered the agency and actions of outsiders, be they socialist organisers, communal leaderships, minority nationalists, or missionaries, this book will conclude by examining the interactions on the ground between the men and women who had migrated from Eastern Europe or Ireland to the East End and their descendants. This was the grass roots for whom and on whose behalf the protagonists of this study, whether revolutionary firebrands, trade union officials, or conservative religious leaders, claimed to be speaking and working. The Irish and Jewish diasporic working class were not mere passive receptacles as portrayed on occasion by both the socialist movement and the communal leaderships. Instead, they took an active part in defining the relationships formed with the city around them and with their neighbours in the streets and courts in which they lived. Radical politics provided one sphere in which these interactions could take place. In describing these interactions there is a difficult path to be navigated. It is necessary to avoid the rose-tinted narrative that stresses unproblematic inter-ethnic cooperation under the influence of a benevolent progressive movement, and an unbroken line of East End solidarity from the Dock Strike in 1889 to Cable Street in 1936. We must also be wary of the counter-argument, an account focusing only on ethnic tensions, racism, exclusion, and violence. The reality lies somewhere in between, and it is on the complex and sometimes ambiguous personal relationships formed between individuals and communities that this chapter focuses. Violence and industrial unrest, as well as more peaceful facilitators of integration, could serve as a conduit for the creation of new East End identities, and shape Irish and Jewish communal and radical politics at a grass-roots level.

The Roles of the Priest and the Rabbi in East London

The perceived power of the priest in the working-class Catholic communities of London throughout the nineteenth century, and the influence supposedly wielded by these communal leaders when compared with their Anglican or Nonconformist counterparts, was a source both of grudging admiration and suspicion for contemporary commentators. The degree to which many Catholic priests involved themselves in their flocks’ day to day lives and shared in their hardships was compared favourably with the disconnection and indifference between those preaching and those being preached to felt by many in the Anglican Church.