Adam Mendelsohn Ethnics and Empire: Jewish Colonials in the mid-19th century As befits a nation birthed from a penal colony, Australia and its Jews celebrate Moses Joseph, a convict transported in 1827 for theft, as one of the founding fathers of the Jewish community of Sydney. Within a handful of years of his arrival in the antipodes, Joseph had amassed enough money to open a tobacconist shop – his wife, a free settler who followed him to Australia, was, for legal reasons, his nominal employer – and began a meteoric rise that left him a substantial landowner, pioneering industrialist, shipping tycoon, and leading gold buyer by the early 1850s. Chained migration spurred the un-manacled variety: his success enticed a flotilla of family members to sail for Australia and New Zealand. The fledgling Jewish community in Sydney depended on his energy and largesse, as did a variety of other causes. (His fanciful coat of arms – with “Jerusalem” in Hebrew at its center – appears in stained glass at the University of Sydney flanked by those of colonial luminaries and Queen Victoria.) He was instrumental in creating and supporting several Jewish institutions in the colonial port town, including its first permanent synagogue and Jewish school. Joseph returned to England as a prosperous merchant – he was granted an absolute pardon in 1848 – with his once-sullied image burnished by success. In London he became a patron of Jewish causes, donating money to schools and other institutions in the capital that sought to uplift and modernize Jewish life.1 Moses Joseph was not the only Jew who returned to England reinvented as a colonial gentleman and with the newfound means to influence metropolitan Jewish life. He was part of a small cohort of Jewish return migrants who, though now ostensibly men of leisure, were generally not the retiring kind. Elevated in status and sought after for wealth earned under a colonial sun, some became advocates of communal modernization and religious reform in the middle decades of the 19th century. Within a Jewish community still dominated by an entrenched 1 Lawrence Nathan, As Old As Auckland: The History of LD Nathan & Co. Ltd and of the David Nathan family 1840-1980 (Auckland, 1984), 17; John Levi and George Bergman, Australian Genesis: Jewish Convicts and Settlers 1788-1850 (London, 1974), 226-227; Hilary Rubinstein, The Jews in Australia: A Thematic History. Volume One: 1788–1945 (Port Melbourne, Victoria, 1991), 413-414; John Levi, These are the Names: Jewish Lives in Australia, 1788-1850 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006): 371; Journal of the Legislative Council of New South Wales, Session 1872 vol. xxi (Sydney: Thomas Richards, 1872); 746. 1 communal aristocracy whose authority rested on long-held wealth, prestige, and traditions of noblesse oblige, some of these newly-wealthy colonials threw their weight behind efforts to remake the community and its leadership. They were not alone in returning from the colonies with firm ideas about the need for political and social change. Similar patterns were evident among non-Jewish colonials who returned to the metropole. Yet in spite of the high rate of return – by one estimate forty percent of all emigrants from England, two million in total, returned between 1860 and 1914 – and the assertiveness of some of these returnees, relatively little work has systematically assessed their influence.2 The impact of members of the new Jewish colonial elite who returned to Albion from the settlement colonies is particularly striking when compared with that of Jews who rose to positions of prominence in the Empire’s possessions in Asia. With a handful of important exceptions, Jews of Asian origin were more notable for their absence from London society than for their presence. Why did relatively few Jews from Britain’s empire in the East decamp to London in the middle decades of the century? The answer is less obvious than it might at first seem. For though Jews who returned from the settlement colonies were generally native-born Englishmen and those who migrated from Asia to Albion were not, the latter were part of a small stream of Indian subjects of the Crown who settled in England.3 It was not for want of attachment to the Empire. In Burma, Aden, and India, Jews embraced the trappings of imperial culture and in many cases sought an education in English for their children. It was not because the colonial elite could ill-afford to settle in England. Several Jewish families in India attained wealth unimaginable to the likes of Moses Joseph and his ilk, and sent their sons to the imperial capital to establish branches of their expansive enterprises. Nor was it because they feared rejection by London society. Some achieved a social rank far higher than all but the best of the Anglo-Jewish elite – attaining a status far exceeding that of those who returned from Australia – 2 For an important exception see Marjory Harper, ed., Emigrant Homecomings: The Return Movement of Emigrants, 1600-2000 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). Note, however, that this volume focuses less on the impact of returnees than on the motives and mechanisms of return. See also James Smithies, “Return Migration and the Mechanical Age: Samuel Butler in New Zealand 1860-1864,” Journal of Victorian Culture 12: 12 (Autumn 2007): 203-224; Eric Richards, Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1600 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 169; John Darwin, “Imperialism and the Victorians: The Dynamics of Territorial Expansion,” The English Historical Review, 112 ( June 1997), 169; Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation (Cambridge, UK, 2010), 31, 64. 3 See Michael H. Fischer, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain 1600-1857 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), particularly chapters 7-10. 2 and were quickly incorporated into the inner circle of the Jewish aristocracy. Yet for all their prosperity and prestige those who swapped humid Bombay for dank London appear to have been less inclined to press for change within the Anglo-Jewish community than were the returnees from the settlement colonies. So if money, culture, and their potential reception were seemingly not insurmountable obstacles, why did comparatively few Jews from Britain’s colonial possessions in Asia resettle in England? And why were they comparatively quiet when it came to promoting reform in the religious and social life of Anglo-Jewry? Until recently, historians were reticent on the reciprocal influences of empire on Jewish life and Jews on the empire.4 Although Jews in the British Empire were only a tiny minority, their experience can add to our understanding of several subjects that have attracted considerable notice among those who study the Empire.5 Attention to Jews aids the efforts of those who have pointed to the heterogeneity of the imperial project by identifying the ethnic and religious diversity of the traders, missionaries, officials, and farmers who settled the Empire. Recognition of the cultural, religious, familial, and mercantile connections that bound Jews in the metropole to those in the colonies augments the arguments of those attuned to the operation of networks within the imperial realm.6 And the careers of Moses Joseph and other colonial Jewish returnees offers fresh perspective on the much-debated relationship between Britain and its colonies. Far from being passive carriers of a metropolitan Jewish culture transplanted to distant shores, Joseph and his fellow Jews in the settlement colonies were forced to adapt to the particular challenges of being Jewish in colonial environments distant from major centers of Jewish life. As 4 This still applies, for the most part, to studies of the early Victorian period. Neither of the two best recent reevaluations of Anglo-Jewish history—Todd Endelman’s The Jews of Britain, 1650 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) and David Feldman’s Englishmen and Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994)— makes any reference to South Africa, Jamaica or Australia in its index. The latter discusses the importance of Empire—but only in the period following 1880. 5 At mid-century there were roughly 35,000 Jews in England, fewer than five hundred in British Canada, and around 100 in New Zealand, five and a half thousand in Australia in 1861, approximately 1,800 in Jamaica in 1871, and 375 in the Cape Colony in 1875. 6 On the heterogeneity of the imperial project see T.M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire: 1600-1815 (London: Penguin, 2004); John M. Mackenzie and T.M. Devine, eds., Scotland and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Keith Jeffery, ed., ‘An Irish Empire’?: Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation (Cambridge, UK, 2010), 135-136. On networks see Zoë Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, 1815-1845: patronage, the information revolution and colonial government (New York, 2005); Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: creating identities in nineteenth-century South Africa and Britain (New York, 2001); Kirsten McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town, 1820-1850 (Melbourne, 2005); Simon Potter, ed., Imperial Communication: Australia, Britain and the British Empire (London, 2005). 3 we will see, this in turn shaped how they approached Anglo-Jewish society when they returned to England after successful colonial careers. Anglo-Jewry had already partaken in colonial commerce well before the Victorian age. For more than a century prior, members of the Anglo-Jewish elite made and bolstered fortunes in trading with India, North Africa, the Levant, the Mediterranean and the Caribbean.7 Such opportunities required capital and connections; most Jews in England struggled to make ends meet as peddlers, artisans and petty shopkeepers.