The legacy of persecution

As the world marks Holocaust Memorial Day, Alan Crosby pauses to reflect on the impact of persecution and oppression across Britain.

Wednesday 27 January 2010
Alan Crosby, editor of The Local Historian
Read more from Alan's blog

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day. It’s essential that we have such a commemoration, reminding us of the unspeakable horrors perpetrated during the Second World War and of man’s inhumanity to man on so many subsequent occasions. As the first-hand memories of the Holocaust fade, with the passing of elderly survivors, it’s ever more important that those terrible truths are not lost.

I was thinking of how persecution and oppression have had such a deep impact on local communities in Britain, and their local history. My mother grew up in Manchester in the 1930s. The city then, as now, had the second largest Jewish population in Britain, one which long pre-dated the Holocaust. Many of the Jewish families in inter-war Manchester were there because for over a century waves of migrants had settled in the city. Mum had quite a few Jewish friends, many of whose parents and grandparents arrived in the 1880s and 1890s from the Russian Empire – the lands of modern-day Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus.

They had fled the vicious pogroms unleashed by the Tsarist authorities and enthusiastically taken up by official and civilians alike. Many communities in those areas had large Jewish populations, living in the shtetls, separate communities which flourished alongside the ‘native’ towns and villages (the Yiddish word is a derived from the old German for town, the modern ‘stadt’). Faced with brutal treatment, perhaps death, many fled westwards, towards new lives and new opportunities, but primarily seeking sanctuary from an endless cycle of violence.

In Manchester they encountered Jews already resident in the city – there had been a growing community since the 18th century, with some famous names among them (perhaps the most familiar being the Rothschilds, who had strong Mancunian connections). The older-established and more prosperous group was Sephardic, originally the Jews from southern Europe, especially Spain and Portugal. The newer (and desperately impoverished) migrants were Ashkenazim. They had contrasting ways of life, worshipped at different synagogues, observed different traditions and spoke different languages. But both enriched and diversified the melting-pot that was 19th and early 20th century Manchester – her Jewish friends delighted my mum, who loved their delicious food and their warmly welcoming family life. And she, only a girl, fortunately did not yet realise what lay behind their presence in her city.