#kmii

Aleppo before war. -source; Wikimedia “Beruntunglah negeri Syam. Sahabat bertanya: mengapa? Jawab Nabi saw: Malaikat rahmat membentangkan sayapnya di atas negeri Syam.” (HR. Imam Ahmad) Kita yang hidup di negeri yang aman seringkali melupakan berbagai nikmat yang telah Allah berikan. Waktu seolah berlalu begitu saja, kejadiannya hampir sama; rutinitas bangun pagi, ke kantor atau kampus, makan,…

gestern Abend: Rote Flora, Skankshot Abschiedskonzert mit Papa

From around 1881, pogroms in the Russian Empire caused large-scale Jewish migration westwards.

A parliamentary committee reported in 1888 that these were ‘the poorest and worse’ of the immigrants. Fifteen years later, a Royal Commission recommended limited restrictions on immigration, and in 1905, the Aliens Act was passed which gave immigration officers the power to exclude ‘undesirable aliens’.

I wonder what people said about it:

They had, it was said, ‘no regard to any provision of sanitation, and scanty regard for cleanliness’. They ‘nearly approach the condition of animal life’.

‘Foreign-faced’ immigrants angered the people of the poor areas they moved into, the labour market was flooded, and “they worked on a Sunday, and then cheated by opening on Saturdays too”.

Lastly there was the ‘threat to the character of England’ argument. The slogans ‘Great Britain for the British’ and ‘England for the English’ were widely adopted.

Responding to criticism of his position by John A. Dyche, a Russian immigrant, [Arnold] White complained that this ‘guest’ wrote with ‘the air of a conqueror indifferent to the feelings of the vanquished’.

‘There is no end to them in Whitechapel and Mile End. It is Jerusalem.’ It is ‘a foreign country’, ‘Jew-town’. There was much talk of ‘invasion’, an aspect of a more general ‘reverse colonization’ – that is, a counter-exploitation of imperial Britain by subject or weaker races, and a certain perception of national decline or enervation. And contradictory objections were taken, on the one hand, to the Jews corrupting the nation’s ‘racial stock’ (expressed as ‘mongrelization’), and on the other, to the refusal of Jews to assimilate.

According to Joseph Banister’s England Under the Jews, these ‘Asiatics’ were an ‘alien invasion’, let in by England’s ‘cowardly, Jew-dominated rulers’.

There was "a public-order argument, which shaded into a political-order argument":

’A Judenhetz is brewing [in] East London’, it was said, owing to ‘the foreign Jews of no nationality’, who are ‘becoming a pest and a nuisance to the poor native-born East Ender’.

There were dangerous elements among these foreign Jews – criminals, radicals. They were ‘pro-Boer’, political ‘incendiarists’, ‘anarchists’. They were, at the very least, ‘politically unfit to be transplanted into democratic institutions’. Yiddish pamphlets circulating in the East End were said to contain ‘the vilest political sentiments’.

Was this actually racist though?

Trades unionists were mostly keen to insist that their objections were not to Jews ‘as Jews’, provoking one trades union leader to insist to the Royal Commission, in exasperation, ‘most of [the immigrants] are Jews, and we may as well speak of them as Jews, because it is known all over the country that this is a Jewish question’.

Most anti-alien campaigners sought to distinguish between immigrants and Jewish immigrants, and between Jewish immigrants and Jews in general. They hotly denied the charge of anti-Semitism, while worrying aloud, for example, that there might be ‘an outbreak of [anti-Semitic feeling] of very grave proportions’ unless something was done about ‘the influx of aliens’. The ‘uneducated classes’, one campaigner explained, ‘naturally take a hatred to the Jewish people. You ‘cannot persuade them it is not a racial question when they are being turned out of their homes’.

Were they faking though?

Even after the savage pogroms that followed upon the 1905 Revolution, there were anti-alien campaigners ready to argue that Jewish immigrants from Russia were not refugees from persecution.

Of course you can't say any of this publicly, even though it's definitely really true.

The Jews are usurers, perjurers, white-slave traffickers, obscene literature promoters, fraudulent bankrupts, receivers of stolen goods etc. Yet ‘they are forever whining about the wickedness and injustices of anti-Semitism’. Unless one praises the Jews, one risks ‘the grave charge of anti-Semitism, which brings down on [one’s] head the wrath of almost every daily journal in London.

(From Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, Anthony Julius (2010), pp276-84)