Welsh Journals

[In this eighth volume in a successful series of essays on various aspects of Welsh history, six broad topics are examined. Professor J. E. Williams expertly traces the growth of 'national feeling' in medieval Wales, and Dr. R. T. Jones examines central features in the career of John Penry, the quartercentenary of whose death was commemorated in 1993. Dr. Eryn White gives a detailed survey of the Methodist society in eighteenth-century Wales, and Dr. Rhidian Griffiths provides an informative study of the Welsh musical scene in the Victorian age. The last two contributions consider the background to two distinct anthracite communities: the first, by loan Matthews, examines the social and political scene in south-west Wales in the period 1872-1925, and the second, by Dr. W. D. Jones, discusses the evolution of a Welsh community in Scranton, Pennsylvania, between 1850 and 1920. This volume has a common theme, the emergence of national awareness among the Welsh in different periods and circumstances. The editor and publishers are to be warmly congratulated for providing a substantial addition to this most welcome series of essays.] THE JEWS OF SOUTH WALES: HISTORICAL STUDIES. Edited by Ursula R. Q. Henriques. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1993. Pp. xi, 238. £ 25.00. Jews have been the quintessential outsiders in Europe for many centuries, for much of the time deprived of political and other civil rights and compelled to a large extent to exist in the interstices of public and commercial life. The desire of middle-class Jews in nineteenth-century Britain to be accommodated by the major institutions of the host society can be interpreted as the result of such systematic marginalization. However, the anglicization of British Jewry was challenged by the immigration of Ashkenazi Jews from the 1890s, a group whose identity was based as much on ethnicity as religion. This and other aspects of Jewish settlement are explored in this collection of essays-including four previously unpublished contributions-dealing with the Jews in south Wales in the century after 1850. Ursula Henriques estimates the numbers of Jews in the region up to 1914 as being somewhere between 4,500 and 6,000. Jewish settlement was dispersed, the biggest concentration occurring in Cardiff with a smaller, but older, settlement in Swansea. Otherwise, the Jews formed small, and sometimes isolated, groupings in the coal- mining or iron-producing towns and villages of the coalfield; this pattern of dispersal meant that there were no ghettoes, unlike those in Leeds and London. Chapters by Henriques on Cardiff and Swansea, and a joint contribution by her and Anthony Glaser on the Valleys communities demonstrate that the Jews were also dispersed occupationally and on the whole did not compete for the same jobs as the Welsh, establishing themselves instead in a variety of trades, including shopkeeping, clothing and furniture manufacture, and pawnbroking. Pawnbroking in Wales was dominated by the Jews and most well-established Jewish families in the region had connections with the trade. Despite small numbers, bitter internal divisions could occur in these communities, principally between the more anglicized established families and the