Published: 22 March 2022
Last updated: 4 March 2024
British novelist Will Self strolls through London’s once-thriving Jewish quarter
I DON'T KNOW what you want from me, I’m so fucking deracinated,” says Will Self, standing at the foot of the early-18th-century Christ Church Spitalfields, east London.
It is a warm late afternoon early last July that follows days of torrential rain. Self, dressed in a navy-blue cotton blazer and sky-blue slacks, smokes lumpy, hand-rolled cigarettes with no filter.
We move from the front of the church to a pocket park next to it. After taking our seats on a bench, we observe the relentless bidirectional flow of the nearly four-km-long Commercial Street, with its four busy lanes carrying traffic across east London.
Over 120,000 Jews, fleeing persecution in Russia and Eastern Europe, settled in the streets surrounding us in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They established a Jewish area that, by the turn of the century, became the area of England with the most foreign-born inhabitants. Across the following generations, the Jewish population departed gradually, as has almost every trace of their presence. We are preparing to visit the ghost landmarks of this vanished world.
The decline of the Jewish East End has an odd place in the annals of Jewish migration. This micro-exodus was not a tragedy. Jews were not compelled to flee by a central authority or a mob; suffering was not inflicted upon them in the process. Instead, it was a quiet story of upwardly mobile assimilation into a strategically inclusive English society.
Jewish movement away from the East End was gradual, and seemingly began as soon as the means for it became available. The most lasting and consequential movement of the Jews who left the East End was to north and northwest London: Hampstead, Golders Green, Hendon, Barnet.
