‘The Stranger Within’: British-Jewish Identity in Contemporary
Literature
Ruth Gilbert
Abstract
In twenty-first century Britain, Jewishness is one difference among many, but
Jews have historically always been the ‘stranger within’, eternally homeless, alien,
wandering and thus profoundly ambivalent figures within the cultures through
which they have passed.
Many Jews in contemporary Britain are highly assimilated and are often
viewed as presenting a paradigm for acculturation. But, as a reading of
contemporary British-Jewish writing demonstrates, a repeated sense of dislocation
and disconnection is a recurring motif. Sometimes this sense of dislocation is
expressed as a yearning for wholeness. However, the awareness of not quite
belonging also generates a productive spirit of self-reflexive enquiry. For many
writers in Britain today Jewishness is a trope. It signifies a collective history that
has been marked by displacement and dispossession, but it also invokes a more
postmodern sense of identities that are provisional, partial and performative. In this
respect, the diasporic condition of the ‘stranger’ allows an interrogation of static
notions of home, belonging and collective subjectivity.
Key Words: Jewish, British, contemporary, literature, identity.
*****
In twenty-first century Britain, Jewishness is one difference among many, but
Jews have historically always been the ‘stranger within’,1eternally homeless, alien,
wandering and thus profoundly ambivalent figures within the cultures through
which they have passed.
Many Jews in contemporary Britain are highly assimilated and are often
viewed as presenting a paradigm for acculturation. But, as a reading of
contemporary British-Jewish writing demonstrates, a repeated sense of dislocation
and disconnection is a recurring motif. Sometimes this sense of dislocation is
expressed as a yearning for wholeness. However, the awareness of not quite
belonging also generates a productive spirit of self-reflexive enquiry. For many
writers in Britain today Jewishness is a trope. It signifies a collective history that
has been marked by displacement and dispossession, but it also invokes a more
postmodern sense of identities that are provisional, partial and performative. In this
respect, the diasporic condition of the ‘stranger’ allows an interrogation of static
notions of home, belonging and collective subjectivity.
‘A Light Sleeper’: The Ambivalent Context of British Jewish Culture
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Whilst, in many respects, the fate of Anglo-Jewry can be viewed as a success
story, and British Jews have indeed been comparatively fortunate, this is by no
means an unambiguous or straightforward tale. The story of Britain’s Jewish past is
a story that features acts of generosity and toleration and moments of remarkable
cruelty: it is a story of persecution and assimilation; prejudice and progressive
liberalism; quiet derision and singular opportunity.2 Antisemitism has been
described as a ‘light sleeper’.3 In the British context, it has rarely been wide awake,
but it has lingered like a half remembered dream in the national consciousness.
British Jews of the post-war generation describe an atmosphere of repression
which permeated the Anglo-Jewish consciousness resulting in what David Cesarani
has described as ‘a tradition of self-deprecation and a lack of collective selfesteem’.4 British Jews of this generation tended to negotiate a pervasive sense of
innate anxiety by, as one commentator recalls,
Being quiet, keeping a low profile, not wanting to be ruffled by anything,
not ruffling anything... I suppose we were colluding with each other to
disappear into England and lose our identity.5
Here the British Jew, is in Homi Bhabha’s terms, which relate to mimicry within
colonial discourse, ‘almost the same but not quite.’6 The stranger is thus
reconfigured as no longer just an outsider, an obvious object of difference, but
becomes also a self-estranged subject. And this is, inevitably, a complex process
involving a delicate renegotiation of the inner and outer self.
As Howard Jacobson puts it, recalling his experience of growing up in 1950s
Manchester:
You can’t exactly call this persecution…The worst we suffered were
sensations of ambiguity. We were and we weren’t. We were getting
somewhere and we weren’t. We were free of the ghetto and we weren’t…If
we had any identity at all, that was it; we countermanded ourselves, we
faced in opposite directions, we were our own antithesis.7
This internalized ambiguity is passed on in subtle ways to those born in the sixties
and seventies and beyond; those who became the writers we read today. As Anne
Karpf notes, ‘British anti-Semitism is particularly pernicious because for much of
the time it’s covert and based on the suppression of difference.’ 8 She quotes a
Jewish acquaintance who left Britain for America bemoaning the way in which
British Jews, in distinct contrast to their more assertive US counterparts, retreat
into invisibility:
As though living in a constant state of repressed anxiety…In that sense,
they are being very English –trapped in passivity, unwilling to react, rock
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the boat, make a fuss. After all, it’s only been 400 years since they were
allowed back into England.9
In many respects the contemporary moment is a time of unparalleled confidence
for British Jews; but it is also a period of transition and increasing insecurity. Even
now, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, we are not that far away from
the exclusions and ambiguities of the past. For today’s British Jews the challenge is
to balance self-definitions that move beyond blunt notions of the stranger, the alien
and the foreigner to encompass both the pleasures as well as the discomforts of
diffuse forms of identification.
2. British-Jewish: ‘A Category Error’
Linda Grant has recently described herself as ‘a category error.’ She notes that,
‘everyone knows that the British are tactful, decorous, well-mannered, prudent,
prone to meaningful silences, and Jews are – well, the opposite.’10 This ironic but
nonetheless seemingly impossible contradiction in British-Jewish identity is a
recurring theme in many recent memoirs and novels. There is a prevailing tone of
disconnection running through many of these texts.
In Jacob’s Gift: a Journey into the Heart of Belonging (2006), a family memoir
and thoughtful exploration of what it means to be both British and Jewish,
Jonathan Freedland recounts a story that exemplifies a typical experience for many
British Jews who descend from immigrants. ‘Once’, he writes of his early
schooldays, ‘there was a family tree project:
Each of us had to trace our ancestors back as far as we could. Boys with
names like Lowe, Sutherland and Blyth returned with hefty, parchmentstyle scrolls – unfurling forebears whose lives were etched on church
records stored since medieval times in villages in Suffolk or Cornwall. One
boy had gone all the way back to 1066; his scroll touched the floor. I held a
single sheet of A4 paper bearing the names of my great-grandparents and
the – estimated – date of 1880. That was as far back as I could go.11
The memory sums up a recognition of what it means to be a child, grandchild or
even great grandchild of immigrants in a country that has traditionally valued
continuity and longevity in lineage. This lack of rootedness, the flimsy connection
to the British past, symbolised by Freeland’s undersized family tree, is a repeated
preoccupation of other second and third generation Jewish memoirs.
As many theorists have observed, diasporic Jews have, inevitably, to rely on
memory rather than place in order to make and renew identities. Grant, writing
about her mother’s disintegrating memory makes the point that:
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If you lose your memory in Yorkshire, Yorkshire is all around you. You can
go to the parish church and there are the records of births and marriages and
deaths. That’s not to say your experiences are commonplace, it’s just that
they are easier to replicate…But what was particular in my mother’s case
was that in her brain resided the very last links with her generation. And
what a generation it was – those children of immigrants who had in their
heads two worlds, the one they lived in and a partial, incomplete place that
their parents had handed on to them.12
In some ways this typifies the immigrant experience in general. But for many
British Jews of Eastern European heritage, this is further complicated by the fact
that places of Jewish history and memory were brutally annihilated in the
Holocaust. The rupture from the past is in this respect deeply traumatic and
unnaturally abrupt.
Grant also recounts how her parents lived in post-war Britain ‘with divided
hearts.’ They were in many respects British patriots, but they also supported the
terrorist action that would drive the British out of Palestine and lead to the
establishment of Israel in 1948. For Grant this apparent contradiction was
formative. ‘While slavishly trying to imitate them, - the English’, she recalls, ‘I
also became self-divided’. The tensions inherent within the processes of mimicry
are both apparent and defining in this respect.
For many contemporary British Jews this sense of being split between different
worlds, the past and the present, the old world and new, Jewishness and
Britishness, is still highlighted by tensions that are evoked in reconciling
sometimes ambivalent feelings about the State of Israel to their everyday identities
as British Jews. Freedland eloquently articulates his own sense of split loyalties,
describing himself as occupying ‘a curious double role’, whilst working as a
journalist for the resolutely anti-Zionist newspaper, the Guardian, and also feeling
a long-standing deep connection to Israel, the country in which his mother was
born.13 The point of Jacob’s Gift is to face this tension which Freedland sees as
more than just a personal dilemma. Reflecting on how this predicament erupted for
him in 2002 he argues that British Jews, as a whole, were in the midst of ‘an
identity crisis’.14 Like Grant he detects ‘a category error’ at the heart of this crisis.
3. ‘It Isn’t Ours’: Belonging and Difference
This is not say that all Jews today feel entirely connected to their Jewishness or
entirely disconnected from their Britishness. Clearly this is not the case. What I am
suggesting is that whilst some sense of exclusion might still exist, it is increasingly
likely to be developed in response to and alongside a range of other differences.
The writer Tamar Yellin provides an interesting example. She has written recently
about her Jewishness and her relationship to Englishness. In particular she has
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reflected on her experience of reading within the traditions of English literature and
her intense identification with the novels and landscape of the Brontës. Yellin was
born in northern England and has made her home in Yorkshire today. But in an
article in 2007Yellin describes an awareness that as the Jewish daughter of a Polish
immigrant and a third generation Jerusamalite she was also in some ways excluded
from the traditions of what she terms Brontëland. She recounts a conversation she
had with her Polish born mother on a visit to the Yorkshire Moors as a teenager. ‘I
sat gazing at the moors’ she writes, ‘and turning to my mother, cried: ‘isn’t it
beautiful!’ and my mother, the Zionist, mournfully replied, ‘…But it isn’t ours.’
Her words ran me through the heart. It was intensely painful to be denied a
sense of belonging in the countryside I loved. At worst I was a traitor; at
best an oddity. In that moment I realised that to be a Jew in the English
landscape was no less anomalous than to be a Jewish writer in the landscape
of English literature. Yet it was in that moment that I began to find myself.
To be a writer is to be an outsider.15
For Yellin, her anomalous connection to the English landscape brings about a
moment of creative tension, a point of self-discovery. Although she romanticises
the position of the artist and the Jew (both cast as eternal outsiders) her identity is
reformed rather than deformed identity in this anecdote of dispossession.
She explores these themes in her story ‘Kafka in Brontëland’ a tale in which a
Jewish woman living alone in a Yorkshire village becomes fascinated by an
enigmatic stranger of uncertain origins whom the locals call Kafka. ‘Kafka the
outcast, Kafka the Jew’ the narrator comments.16 By the end of the story she has
found a way to belong. From the Irish backgrounds of some village families, to the
half-Jewish shop owner and the south-east Asians who live down the valley, this is,
Yellin suggests a landscape populated by Kafkas. The fact is that the Brontëland
that Yellin has fetishised is itself nostalgic, an idea that does not reflect the
diversity of contemporary Yorkshire, or the possibilities of living as a Jew within
the social, cultural and literary topographies of England today. So, in her
mythologisation of place and history Yellin initially constructed her own exclusion,
only to resignify her identity within an ever changing landscape.
Towards the end of her article Yellin mentions that her sense of her own
Jewishness had been further complicated by the recent discovery that her greatgrandmother was in fact an Irish Catholic. So, what we see here is that it is not just
that the Yorkshire community is ethnically and culturally mixed but that plurality
exists within the genealogy of most identities, including Jewishness.
4. Conclusion: Generative Tensions
In many respects, the Jewish experience in Britain can be seen as a success
story, offering a model of immigrant integration. But the nature of integration and
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assimilation is that distinct identities become absorbed into the majority. In Todd
Endelman’s terms, a process of growing ‘drift, defection and indifference’17 has
created a concern that British Jews are assimilating to the extent that there is a real
possibility that Jews could become extinct in contemporary Britain. Anxieties
about the dwindling population of Anglo-Jewry, in particular, have exercised the
leadership of Anglo-Jewry in recent years. In 1994 the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan
Sacks, asked the provocative question, ‘will we have Jewish grandchildren?’.18
British Jews today often have ethnically and religiously mixed backgrounds
and increasingly they will create more diverse new families. How Jewishness
evolves within such a context is yet to be seen. Although orthodox Jews tend to
live within largely Jewish communities and retain obvious distinction in their
attire, diet, and so on, many Jews in Britain who might identify with Jewishness in
broad cultural terms, are largely secular and are incrementally marrying non-Jews
and bringing up children who do not necessarily identify as Jewish themselves.
Jewishness in this way becomes a trace, an increasingly diluted, almost
homeopathic, element of identity.
So although it is useful to read Jewishness within a wider ethnic setting and
place it within debates about multiculturalism today, it is also important to retain a
sense of its particular flavour in the past and present of British culture. Whilst a
younger generation of Jews in Britain today may well have a diluted or
disconnected sense of their own Jewishness, in many ways and for many reasons
(political and cultural as well as historical and religious) Jewishness is still a
defining mark of identity. It is this reconnection to strangeness that creates a sense
of distinctiveness and in contemporary British-Jewish writing there is an acute
understanding of the generative tension that resides in the gaps between different
forms of identification.
Giles Coren’s novel, Winkler (2006) exemplifies this point. As it debunks any
facile or sentimental connection to the past it presents a dark, witty and potentially
offensive exploration of what it means to be a British Jew today
The book begins with a cricket match and the line; ‘Winkler is an Englishman’. 19
By the end of the story Winkler’s grandfather comments:
‘But they didn’t really make an Englishman of you, did they?’
‘Didn’t they?’
‘Oh come on. You’re a Jew who plays cricket. That’s not the same thing at
all’.20
In the end, ‘strangers’, ‘aliens’ and ‘foreigners’ are just ideas, shifting positional
relationships based on an on-going dialectic between of self and other. As such,
they are fluid and can be endlessly reconfigured. In looking briefly at the ways in
which these ideas are constructed within recent British-Jewish writing we can see
that identity is a work in progress and belonging is a never complete. The stranger
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within, might be figured as an eternal outsider, passing as ‘almost the same’ but
never ‘quite’ belonging; but the stranger is also something we might all know and
see within the mirror of ourselves.
Notes
1 Tamar Garb, ‘Introduction’, in The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of identity, eds.
Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 20.
2 For discussions of Anglo-Jewish history in these terms see, Tony Kushner, The Jewish Heritage in
British History: Englishness and Jewishness (London: Frank Cass, 1992), Tony Kushner, Anglo-Jewry
Since 1066 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), Todd Endelman, The Jews of Britain
1656 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) and Anthony Julius, Trials of the
Diaspora: a History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
3 Conor Cruise O’Brien. For a discussion of antisemitism in contemporary Britain see Denis Mcshane, Globalizing Hatred:
the New Antisemitism (London: Phoenix, 2010).
4 David Cesarani, The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1994), 2.
5 Howard Cooper and Paul Morrison, A Sense of Belonging: Dilemmas of British Jewish Identity
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson), 90.
6 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (London: Routledge, 1994), 127.
7 Howard Jacobson, Roots Schmoots: Journeys Among Jews (London: Penguin, 1993), 3.
8 Anne Karpf, The War After: Living with the Holocaust (London, Minerva, 1997), 215.
9 Karpf, 216.
1 Linda Grant, The People on the Street: a Writer’s View of Israel (London: Virago, 2006), 5.
10
111 Jonathan Freedland, Jacob’s Gift: a Journey into the Heart of Belonging (London: Penguin,
2006).14.
1 Grant, Remind Me Who I Am Again (London: Granta, 1998), 31.
12
1 Freedland, 25.
13
1 Freeedland, 29
14
1 Tamar Yellin, ‘A Jew in Brontëland’, Jewish Quarterly, 208 (Winter 2007), 68–9 (69).
15
116 Tamar Yellin, ‘Kafka in Brontëland’, Kafka in Brontëland and Other Stories (London: The Toby
Press, 2006), 14.
1 Endelman, 231.
17
118 Jonathan Sacks, Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It
(London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1994). In 1993 Sacks was instrumental in establishing the Jewish
Continuity organisation in Britain. This was a proactive attempt to move Anglo-Jewry beyond its
earlier preoccupation with sustaining security to confront and challenge the perceived dilution of
Jewish identity in 1990s Britain.
1 Giles Coren, Winkler (London: Vintage, 2006), 3.
19
2 Coren, 368.
20
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