In 1920, the philosopher, John Dewey, contrasted perspectives of the United States as an entity from the outside with that presented by an American small-town newspaper:

Then one gets a momentary shock. One is brought back to earth. And the earth is just what it used to be. It is a loose collection of houses, of streets, of neighborhoods, villages, farms, towns. Each of these has an intense consciousness of what is going on within itself in the way of fires, burglaries, murders, family jars, weddings, and banquets to esteemed fellow citizens, and a languid drooping interest in the rest...

In his general history of the county, published in the 1860s, B.B. Woodward pointed out that in its 1672 square miles, and bordered by Berkshire, Dorset, Surrey, Sussex and Wiltshire, ‘Hampshire has no natural boundaries except the sea-coast’.¹ Some thirty years earlier, in a multi-volume ‘historico-topographic’ survey, Robert Mudie warned more generally against county histories. ‘Hampshire especially,’ he suggested,

notwithstanding the very important place which it holds in the early history of England, and its modern beauty, agricultural richness, and salubrious climate, has no individual or detached history, even for a short period of time.

If ‘history’ was to be...

After the Norman invasion, an important and relatively sizeable Jewish community existed in Winchester until the nationwide expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. It was one of the earliest settlements, dating from at least the 1140s, and its size and significance grew thereafter, especially from the late twelfth century onwards when Jewish business activities had to be officially recorded inarchae(chests), leading to concentration in certain towns.¹ It was also one of the longest established Jewish presences in medieval England. Statistical evidence is partial and uncertain. Nevertheless, contemporary surveys, carried out essentially for fiscal purposes, placed Winchester...

Reference has already been made to Bill Williams’s portrayal of Manchester Jewry from the late 1820s as ‘two communities … the one increasingly anxious to live down the reputation of the other’. Williams eloquently explores the divide:

On one side, there was a settled community of shopkeepers, overseas merchants, share brokers, and professional men, anglicised in speech and custom, comfortably off (or reasonably so), generous to local causes, the providers of essential goods and services to the middle classes; on the other, a flotsam of pedlars and petty criminals, some of the unsuccessful residuum of eighteenth-century Jewry, other pauper immigrants...

David Katz has argued that the ‘gifted amateurs’ who dominated the writing of Anglo-Jewish history [until the late twentieth century] were motivated by a ‘dual wish to praise their people and their country’. He adds that ‘Almost any subject that was liable to place the Jewish community in a negative light was self-censored, and any twist of interpretation which might spark gentile anger was banished and buried.’ The result, he concludes, was that

Anglo-Jewish historiography has always been patriotic, conservative and Whig, that is, ends-oriented, written with one eye on the final destination of the history train, the End of...

From the mid-nineteenth century through to the First World War, the Jewish world was re-shaped by mass migration resulting from a combination of factors – demographic and economic as well as the impact of persecution and discrimination. It was a part of a wider global shift in population from south to north and east to west that reflected the (uneven) impact of a new economic age and the forces of modernity that accompanied it.

It is, however, especially the movement of Jews that has attracted the greatest attention and subsequent reflection. Not surprisingly, as so much emotion and experience has been...

By the First World War, Southampton was beginning to rival Liverpool as Britain’s leading transmigrant port.¹ It provided routes to north and south Atlantic destinations, especially, from the 1890s, to eastern (and, to a lesser extent, southern and northern) European migrants who had broken their journey in England. Transmigrancy was big business. It has been estimated that ‘The alien passenger, and in particular the transmigrant flows through Britain’ totalled one-third of all the passenger trade of British shipping companies.² The scale of this movement was immense. In less than a five-month period in 1905, for example, 37,285 transmigrants were inspected...

This melodramatic urban scene could have been drawn from a 1930s crime novel with a Sexton Blake-style hero ‘slumming it’ in the mean alleyways of the East End, uncovering the ethnic intrigue behind the brutal murder of a local girl of ‘low repute’. In fact, it is taken from Mark Lewisohn’sFunny Peculiar: The True Story of Benny Hill(2002) and describing an area in Southampton popularly known as the Ditches.

While it is possible to criticise Lewisohn for the overly lurid image he conjures up which, as will be shown, borrows heavily from earlier descriptions of Canal Walk, much...

Sander Gilman has asked us to

imagine a new Jewish history written as the history of the Jews at the frontier, a history with no center; a history marked by the dynamics of change, confrontation, and accommodation; a history which focuses on the present and in which all participants are given voice.¹

This study, covering the presence – in body or image – of Jews in a geographical area hardly touched by existing historiography, has attempted such a history, juxtaposing the past with the present through the processes of memory and forgetting. Gilman has in mind particular kinds of Zionist historiography and...