Uncertain how Trump’s tariffs might shake up the world in the future, but  sure know what globalisation did to my UK city  and its Jewish community.

By Jonny Gould

Credits: http://jonnygould.substack.com

It was never explained why Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool and Glasgow’s Jewish populations declined so fast because as a community, we surfed the free-trade revolution in the name of self-improvement.

I reflect back to Jack Rosenthal’s Bar Mitzvah Boy, a BBC ‘Play for Today’ in 1976:

“At this moment, on their way, are a hundred and seventeen guests. Sitting on the train, in cars, queuing for buses – all on their way. At half past six, Victor, a hundred and seventeen people from Bournemouth, from Manchester, Leeds and Glasgow, from Birmingham, everywhere… are going to turn up at the Reuben Shulman Hall expecting a dinner dance. All dressed up. Your Uncle Zalman, my cousin Freda. Your brother we don’t talk about from Cardiff.

That dialogue by Maria Charles playing harassed mother Rita Green is a verbal time capsule of the age. Elliot, the bar mitzvah boy, had bolted from synagogue just before his call up to read his portion of the Torah. They found him in the playground soon after.

Anyway.

I pick out those words from the television play because it really was like that. There were prosperous, longstanding Jewish communities spread right across the UK.

Because being British and Jewish was a distinct and robust identity, anchored as it was in the culture of the nation and unlike most of mainland Europe, unsullied by European persecution and destruction.

But these days the Anglo-Jewish community is increasingly polarised and relocated to one corner of the country. Three quarters of Britain’s Jews – numbering just over 300,000 according to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research – live in London and its suburbs.

As well as Jewish communities moving into the capital from other cities, a huge influx of young professionals from across the world were attracted by London’s preeminence as the leading financial centre post 9/11.

Sephardim left France for London at the start of the 21st century from the rise of Le Pen and Islamism, prompted by their parent’s North African stories of political uncertainty in the Arab countries they’d left a generation before.

The emergent cultural power of Israel has reduced Anglo-Jewish identity in favour of an international Israeli one and that’s sharpened even more since October 7th.

Yet from Wolverhampton to Westcliff, Bournemouth to Bristol, Merthyr Tydfil to Middlesbrough and Stoke-on-Trent to St Anne’s-on-Sea, British towns had their own synagogues with character and ambition.

Up to 40 years ago, the north boasted communities numbering five-figure populations in Manchester, Leeds and Glasgow. There were four-figure strongholds in Liverpool, Sheffield, Newcastle, Cardiff, Brighton and Hove and my city, Birmingham.

Household retail names were Jewish businesses in the regions like Marks and Spencer’s out of Leeds, Goldbergs of Glasgow, Burton’s Menswear of Chesterfield, Viner’s Cutlery from the Steel City, Sheffield, NEMS in Liverpool and Odeon Cinemas, founded by Jewish British entrepreneur Oscar Deutsch out of the “workshop of the world” -Birmingham. Plus, literally thousands of other self-starter businesses everywhere.

I’ll take this opportunity to pay tribute to our own “J. Gould, the smart man’s tailor”, at its height the family had dozens of shops across the Midlands. Clearly a commercial barrier to other big players, my grandfather and his brothers rejected a six-figure offer from Montague Burton to consolidate the menswear market in the early sixties.

Not to mention the emerging white-collar class of eminent professionals in medicine, law, accounting and banking, the children of immigrants and the first in their families to go to university.

The 1970’s was the last time being Jewish in the UK felt mainstream.

Who even remembers ‘12 Hours for Israel’,   an actual celebration of Anglo-Jewish life staged at Earls Court?

Back then, you could publicly enjoy being Jewish and Israeli without baying antisemitic wolves at the door.

It seemed the whole country converged on London to see exhibitors from El Al to Nefesh B’nefesh, youth groups and even a live stage show. There was Moshe Dayan, Israel’s foreign minister opening it and Eurovision celebrity, Esther Ofarim (born in Safed to a Syrian Jewish family), was the star attraction.

I remember Larry Adler warbling his harmonica through some kind of Fiddler on the Roof tribute.

🎶“When things are not so good, when things are not so nice, I write a little letter to the rabbi for advice!”

Bar Mitzvah Boy heralded a host of stereotypical characters, played mostly in comedies, of East End tailors and the like.

Robin’s Nest, set in a restaurant in the London suburbs took a booking from a local Jewish family.

Richard O’Sullivan playing Robin, sourced salt beef for his customers in a frenzied panic of British tolerance. As if Shirley and Irving would take their family out for what they could have at home! What those diners demanded or the kitchen staff prepared for in terms of Kashrut wasn’t covered in the storyline.

“My boy”, “my life” and “oy vey” have been thrown at me as banter from older non-Jewish colleagues who mean no harm by it, but no one in my family spoke remotely like that being descended as I am from Viennese and Brummie (Birmingham) Jewish stock.

Not to mention my colourful post-Holocaust surviving family who jetted in for my own barmitzvah from Vancouver, Chicago, Haifa, Sunderland and Nottingham.

And heading up to Liverpool for barmitzvahs and staying in kosher hotels was a near annual event.

After the service, everyone would go back to the family home down Queens Drive for a Shabbos lunch of chopped liver, lockshen and kneidlach soup, roast chicken and apple strudel.

Go back still further and there were synagogue communities in scores of far-flung British outposts, reflecting the long and continuous Jewish presence in Britain. Count in Llandudno, Worcester, Blackpool, Reading and Swansea among them. Burnley synagogue is now a Dial-a-Pizza.

Some of those communities survived into the 1970s and 80s.

I’m still a member in Eastbourne, which despite the sale of the synagogue building shortly after its post-Covid centenary, they still hold Shabbat and High Holiday services in rented rooms in town. The Exeter synagogue located in Synagogue Place in the old city built in 1763 by Dutch Sephardi traders, still exists to this day. In the 19th century, there was a marriage between two members of Walsall’s community. Walsall is a market town in the West Midlands 9 miles north-west of Birmingham. 

So why the demise of Anglo-Jewry beyond London? Why did the nation’s capital become such a honeypot for smaller communities?

The untold reality of the demise of every Jewish community in the UK but for one is economic.

It’s globalisation.

Globalisation affected every single one of us born in the sixties and beyond. Everyone. Our parents have been forced into change in their older age too.

Jews accepted the prevailing orthodoxy of globalisation imposed on us because it matched our longing for respectability and progress, to shift from peddlers and market traders to become doctors and lawyers.

Globalisation shut down industries for good and obliterated support businesses around them. It triggered mass Jewish migration, not just across the UK but right around the world too.

I discuss living through this revolution as a teenage Birmingham school leaver at the beginning of this article.

Most of us Jews emerged winners out of the total upheaval.

Some who lost out, assimilated into the non-Jewish working class of their towns, assimilated and intermarried. Yet many have consolidated into smaller-scale, well-organised Jewish life.

We’re unclear how Donald Trump’s protectionist tariffs might shake up the world in future, but I sure know what globalisation did to my city – and by extension my Jewish community.

It ravaged it.

So next time you’re soaked in the prevailing narrative of Trump’s “self-injury”, reflect on why you might agree with it.

Is it because you were born and brought up in prosperous London which completely rode the 80s recession – or were sheltered from it as part of your parent’s professional class or the financial comforts and social bubble you bounced around?

It’s a tough old world out there and I fear fewer of us are free of the consequences of the big economic and societal changes which are coming this time around. 

About the writer:

Jonny Gould is a television and radio presenter on Talk and host and producer of Jonny Gould’s Jewish State podcast.
At the end of 2018, he launched a podcast in response to the unchecked and sudden rise of UK antisemitism. In a short time, “Jonny Gould’s Jewish State” (on Apple, Spotify and elsewhere) has grown into both a snapshot and library of the changing temperature for one of the west’s oldest and continuous Jewish communities.
As a board member of the Israel Diaspora Trust, Jonny’s also regularly briefed off-the-record by influencers and decision-makers across the US, Israel and the UK.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).