The Migration Cycle

1871 census for Christchurch, Spitalfields. Benjamin Valentine is at the bottom of this page. Jacob Valentine, then aged ten appears on the following page. The return provides a snapshot of the Jewish community and their professions.

As time went on, the Jewish community began to make their way up the economic ladder, spreading out into areas such as Golders Green, and forming new vibrant communities that contributed at all levels of society, just as Oliver Cromwell had been advised all those years before by Menasseh ben Israel. From the outset of the Tsarist inspired pogroms to the dispersal of the East London communities, in other words from arrival to integration, hence took around three to four generations. It is an instructive case.

As the Jews moved out of Spitalfields, they were replaced by a new generation of immigrants, this time from Bangladesh, and the area has become ‘Banglatown’. All the same old arguments and rhetoric were then dusted off and tossed back into the mainstream political debate with wearisome repetition. 

But if the case of the Jewish community provides any lessons, it is that assimilating large migrant communities probably takes not very much less than a century, and even then does not actually require any extinguishing of prior historical and cultural identity. Multiculturalism is a much maligned term but the Jewish community remain an exemplar of how individuals and groups can mediate between different identities in precisely the way that multilinguals switch between languages. 

So when Jacob Valentine married Amelia Gertrude Wombwell, whatever scandalised reactions they may or may not have provoked in their own family circles, what was happening was an entirely natural evolution, in which a member of the Sephardi community as part of this process of assimilation took a further step down the road and married into a local English family. This might be seen as an instance of how cultural enrichment.  For Jacob and Amelia and their families, life was however most likely far too full of challenges and obstacles for them to reflect on such abstract matters.