Welsh Journals

THE ANTI-JEWISH RIOTS OF AUGUST 1911 IN SOUTH WALES SINCE the readmission of the Jews in 1656, anti-semitic violence in Great Britain has been a comparatively rare phenomenon. The two most notable instances, the 'Jew Bill' riots of 1753 and the Fascist- inspired outbreaks of the 1930s, can be explained partly in political terms, for in both cases there is evidence that popular anti-semitism and xenophobia were whipped up by disgruntled politicians for their own ends.1 In both these cases, moreover, events centred on London, not least because over half British Jewry was concentrated there.2 For this reason, too, no doubt, the anti-Jewish agitation of the 1880s and 1890s, which culminated in the appointment of the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration and the passing of the 1905 Aliens Act, was largely concerned with the London situation.3 In 1911, when the total Jewish population of the British Isles was about 240,000, approximately 150,000 Jews lived in the London area.4 It is little wonder, therefore, that those who engaged in the struggle over the 'Aliens Question' addressed themselves primarily to the citizens of the metropolis. Provincial anti-semitism, in fact, was conspicuous by its absence. Yet the growth of Jewish communities outside London was one of the most marked features of Jewish settlement in Britain after 1850. This was especially true of Welsh Jewry. In Wales, only the Swansea community had origins firmly rooted in the eighteenth century.5 Although there are instances of Jews living in Cardiff in the eighteenth century, a community was not established there until the 1840s. Jewish pedlars and tradesmen were naturally attracted to the Welsh mining centres. The Merthyr Tydfil community was founded in 1848; the Aberdare community dates from at least the 1860s, and that at Pontypridd can be traced back to 1867.6 The developing industrial areas situated in the Western Valleys of Monmouthshire formed a particular area of Jewish settlement. A synagogue was not opened at Newport till 1869, but the community 1 See T. W. Perry, Public Opinion, Propaganda, and Politics in Eighteenth-Century England. A Study of the Jew Bill of 1753 (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), and C. Cross, The Fascists in Britain (1961). 2 V. D. Lipman, Social History of the Jews in England, 1850-1950 (1954), pp. 166-71. J. A. Garrard, The English and Immigration, 1880-1910 (1971), pp. 23-47. Jewish Year Book, 1911, pp. 267, 273-74. C. Roth, The Rise of Provincial Jewry (1950), pp. 102-3. Ibid., pp. 24-25, 104; C. Roth (ed.), The Standard Jewish Encyclopedia (1959), p. 1884; H. E. Samuel, 'A Short History of the Aberdare Jewish Community', Cajex [Magazine of the Cardiff Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women], IX (June 1959), 88.