A New Wave of Migration

The censuses of the late nineteenth century show members of the Valentine Family moving around East London in the Aldgate, Bishopsgate, Mile End Town, Whitechapel and Spitalfields areas. 

From the Migration Museum Website

Spitalfields in particular was to become the centre of the Jewish community, though it should be stressed that the majority of the population was made up of new immigrants who were Ashkenazi Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe, and a world away in many respects from well-established British Sephardi like the Valentine family. Before long, there were to be over 40 synagogues in Spitalfields alone.

A BBC profile reports that more than 2 million Jews left Eastern Europe between 1881 and 1914, as a result of persecution, with about 120,000 staying in the UK. By 1900 they formed around 95% of the population in the Wentworth Street district of Spitalfields. 

As with all such mass migrations, the Jewish community not only presented a visibly exotic spectacle, but were an easy target for locals to vent their general dissatisfaction with their own lives upon. All the familiar rhetoric emerges concerning their failure to assimilate, to speak English, and their turning of areas of London into foreign ghettos. And all the same reasons for this happening were just as equally evident. They settled in the poorer areas as close as possible to their point of embarkation as they could, in this case right next to the London Docks, and close also to an already established Jewish community, which included Sephardis like the Valentines. As refugees, and as should hardly surprise any observer, they clung together, to their culture, their language and faith as they struggled to make sense of their new lives, and the often traumatic conclusion to their old lives in the East.