JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

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East End to live in the suburbs. There they often attended local
synagogues but retained membership in the federation for
sentiment and burial rights. The old-fashioned minister (and
even his clerical collar) had disappeared in the United Synagogue
in favor of younger rabbis, often pupils of Jews’ College
under the direction of Isidore *Epstein, who strove to remodel
it as a rabbinical seminary. The bet din, under the influence
above all of the great scholar Yehezkel *Abramsky, steadily
kept the religious orientation of the United Synagogue to the
right; at the same time, however, the old lay leadership, under
the presidency of Frank Samuel and Ewen Montagu, tended
toward religious flexibility. The influence of members of the
older families must not be exaggerated, however. As early as
the 1950s, a new generation of laymen – second-generation
citizens, Zionist, and traditionally Orthodox – was maturing
in the United Synagogue.
In all these changes lay the seeds of conflict, which crystallized
around Louis *Jacobs, a rabbi of Orthodox practice
who held certain modernist views. Minister of the fashionable
New West End Synagogue (London), Jacobs was appointed tutor
of Jews’ College in 1959 with the consent of the chief rabbi.
The latter, however, vetoed Jacobs’ appointment as college
principal and then in 1964 his reappointment to his former
synagogue, because he held that Jacobs maintained parts of
the Torah were not of divine origin and human reason should
select which parts were divine. The local management of the
synagogue persisted in their desire to have Jacobs as minister
and permitted him to preach, although the requisite certificate
or special sanction had not been issued by the chief rabbi. The
central body of the United Synagogue then constitutionally
deposed Jacobs’ supporters, who founded a new congregation
in another area with Jacobs as minister. The “Jacobs Affair”
received wide publicity in the non-Jewish press, but its
significance may have been exaggerated. Since the formation
of the Reform Synagogue in 1840, Anglo-Jewry has not been
very interested in theology or biblical criticism, as distinct
from ritual or liturgy. There were personal and social factors
underlying the controversy, and a shift took place in the leadership
of the United Synagogue in 1962, when the presidency
was first filled from outside the circle of older families by the
financier and industrialist Sir Isaac *Wolfson. The incident
that led to the formation of a new synagogue was over a disciplinary
issue, not a theological one (preaching without the
chief rabbi’s certificate), and the new congregation has not yet
inspired a wider movement. The issues involved in the “Jacobs
Affair” and its consequences could, however, be regarded as
marginal to the much more important problem of Jewish religious
life, i.e., the progressive alienation of growing sections
of the Anglo-Jewish community from Jewish religious affiliation
of any kind.
The main countervailing factor to the trend away from
Jewish identification was the influence of the State of Israel.
Mobilizing support for Israel was a major communal and social
activity and, to some extent, a substitute for the organized
religious life of earlier times. But it actively affected only a mi-
nority of the community until the *Six-Day War (1967), when
the danger to and triumph of Israel produced an emotional
reaction unprecedented in intensity and affecting even many
who were previously estranged from Jewish life. It was not
clear, however, how lasting the effect would be or whether it
might weaken Anglo-Jewry still further by adding to those
numbers, previously inconsiderable, who have gone to settle
in Israel. Anglo-Jewry made little impact on world scholarship
in the second third of the 20th century.
[Vivian David Lipman]
DEMOGRAPHY. The number of Jews in Britain, which was estimated
to be 410,000 in 1967, is declining in absolute terms.
World Jewish population figures show that during the 1960s
Britain’s Jewish community has slipped numerically from
fourth to sixth place. This decline is being felt acutely in the
provinces, in both very small communities and larger centers.
Greater London, on the other hand, has maintained its level
of 280,000 Jewish inhabitants (61% of the total Jewish population
of the country). Close to 75% of the Jewish population
of Britain is concentrated in the country’s five largest cities.
The most significant trend in the last two decades has been
the migration of the Jewish population from the urban central
areas – the old ghetto quarters – to the new suburban districts
surrounding big conurbations. The exodus from the older districts
has not, however, been characterized as a transplantation
of old communities in new areas. A concomitant phenomenon
has been the wider distribution of the Jewish population
in places more distant from urban centers and settlement in
a more scattered fashion among a predominantly non-Jewish
population. In these areas Jews lack effective community organization
and are isolated from the more developed forms of
Jewish life found nearer the cities, exposing them to the potent
forces of assimilation. The influence of assimilation must
be regarded as one of the factors contributing to the numerical
decline of the community. In purely demographic terms,
the most visible symptom of this decline, and one reflecting
the speed with which it is taking place, is the drop in Jewish
marriages, and the intermarriage rate has been estimated to
be between 12% and 25%. The drastic change can be seen when
the synagogue marriage rate of 4.0 per thousand in the period
1961–65 is compared with the marriage rate in the general population,
which was 7.5 in the same period. This very substantial
difference may be attributed to two main causes:
(a) the rise in the number of Jews who marry by civil ceremony
only, a phenomenon which might also signify a rise in
the rate of intermarriage;
(b) the decline in the Jewish birthrate over the last few
decades. In the second half of the 20th century a strong tendency
had set in among Jews in Britain not to go through a religious
ceremony in the synagogue, the causal factor for which
might be the increase in the intermarriage rate.
OCCUPATIONS. The occupational trends in the second quarter
of the 20th century (up to the 1960s) have been as follows:
420 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6