Aliens, immigrants, religion, and the health service in Britain | Vanessa Heggie

Immigration was a serious issue for the Victorians - like modern Britons they worried about migrants from eastern Europe, but unlike them the people they thought 'didn't identify with Britain' were Jews, not Muslims. Vanessa Heggie looks at how these fears drove the founding, and location, of the first Jewish Hospital in Britain.

Some Victorian anxieties about immigration would look very familiar to us today: politicians, newspapers and the (wo)man in the street were worried by both new immigrants and by second or third generation citizens who they feared were 'unassimilated' and perhaps - to use David Cameron's phrase - 'did not really identify with Britain'. These worries included the fear of violence and terrorism: not from Muslims, but from Jews, who came to Britain in increasing numbers after 1880 fleeing pogroms in the Russian empire. Although it was probably Irish Fenians that British people most associated with violent attacks, in the popular imagination Jews were linked to anarchists, who also appeared to pose a threat to social stability. On a smaller scale, popular belief linked Jews with anti-social petty crime, and with larger criminal gangs (Fagin is just one of many literary representations of this stereotype).

Immigration, particularly from eastern Europe, was blamed for high unemployment rates and low wages, as British trade unions (and others) claimed Jews had lower standards of living and would therefore work for lower wages, and in worse conditions. At the same time, even with a very limited welfare system, there were fears that immigrants would also 'swamp' or 'overwhelm' workhouses, hospitals, soup kitchens, and other forms of state assistance or private charity. The result of these fears was the Aliens Act of 1905, the first piece of legislation controlling immigration to Britain, which basically banned the immigration of poor people, or those deemed 'undesirable' because of ill-health, criminal records, and so on.