1936 Cable Street Riots

Writer: David Rosenberg

4 October 1936 |  Working Class Jews |  Political Radicals  |  Jewish Class war |  How fascism came to Britain |  Mosley's movement |  Media stereotypes |  Police protection? |  Trouble brewing |  Fighting anti-Semitism |  The Battle of Cable Street |  After Cable Street |  Resources

Working Class Jews

The East End of London has long been an immigrant area, because it is close to the London Docks. Today the colours, tastes and smells of Bangladesh permeate through sari shops, minicab firms and curry houses along its best known street, Brick Lane. Historically associated with Bow Bells, the local community now resonates to the muezzin's prayer call above the grand mosque on Whitechapel Road. In basements and in houses converted into factories, sewing machines work round the clock continuing a long tradition of sweatshop labour.

However, in the 1930s these sweatshops contained impoverished Yiddish–speaking Jews – the children of immigrants, or immigrants themselves who had fled poverty and persecution in Eastern Europe. They had found sanctuary in the crowded tenements of the East End, creating the synagogues, ritual baths, kosher butchers, and the grocery shops whose pungent barrels of herrings and pickles occupied the pavements too.

The long-established Jewish community in London's East End increased in the 1920s and 30s by immigrants fleeing from poverty and persecution in Eastern Europe. (LP Pictures)

An East End Jew then would typically be a shnayder (tailor), a shuster (boot/shoe manufacturer) or a stoller (cabinet maker). Others were bakers, market traders and small shopkeepers. And a determined minority were battling through a hostile education system to be the first in their families to go to university and enter the professions.

80 years ago London had 183,000 Jews. The majority lived in a stretch of East London from Aldgate to Forest Gate. More than half of these East London Jews lived tightly condensed within a square kilometre of Spitalfields, centred on Brick Lane.

Even though the beautiful white spire of 17th century Christ Church towered incongruously over this Jewish ghetto, the religious centre of this community was the Spitalfields Great Synagogue. This had gone through several incarnations: as a Methodist chapel and before that a Huguenot church. This synagogue was the home of working class, religiously orthodox Jews. It fell into disuse as Jews moved out and up and the growing Bangladeshi community purchased it in the 1970s. Today it is the Jamme Masjid Mosque

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