A New Life for the Ashkenazis

Some things never seem to change.
From The Migration Museum Website.

For the new wave of Ashkenazi migrants, their new home, truth be told, cannot have been a very welcoming one. They were now living in the poorest, most insalubrious, unhygienic areas of London surrounded by the high crime rates, and generally riotous life of the London Docklands. 

It was in this very part of the East End that Jack the Ripper plied his gruesome trade between 1888 and 1891, and there were plenty who were prepared to point the finger of blame for the murders at the mysterious and closed-off community of the East London Jews.

Eventually, the Government responded with new laws like the 1905 Aliens Act, restricting further immigration. Racial tension though was never far away, not least when Oswald Mosley’s black-shirted acolytes took to the streets in the nineteen thirties to further inflame community relations and strike fear into the hearts of the immigrant community. Government restrictions and attempts to limit Jewish immigration to Britain continued, regardless of Hitler, both before and after the Second World War. 

This then was the world in which Jacob Valentine and Amelia Gertrude Wombwell moved, their children inhabiting a strange grey area of identity, half-Sephardi, half English living in the midst of the Ashkenazi community.