Despite London’s racial, cultural, and religious diversity, many elements of “traditional English” heritage remain aggressively dominant. For example, the seemingly national status of Easter, a holiday that, though widely celebrated in the United States, seems to be much more prevalent in the UK. I was initially surprised to see posters around the city advertising the upcoming “Easter holidays,” Sainsbury’s all around the city packed with signs advertising Easter recipes, and huge chocolate eggs. Even the Monday after Easter is a national Bank Holiday. Despite huge populations of non-Christians within the city, Christianity, specifically, the Church of England remains unambiguously dominant.
With these issues in mind, I took a 45-minute bus ride to Stamford Hill, a North London neighborhood with a large Hasidic Jewish population, a deeply insular and highly observant religious community. I came to Stamford Hill hoping to find some of the Jewish foods I had grown up around in preparation for the Jewish holiday of Passover that I couldn’t find in any of the downtown grocery stores. Beyond hoping to do some holiday grocery shopping, I was interested in checking out this community that had built itself, in many ways, around a refusal to assimilate to the dominant British culture.
Walking around Stamford Hill, it was hard not to feel like an obvious outsider. My clothing and hair style, that elsewhere in London would not mark me as anything other than a typical millennial, marked me as an obvious foreigner in this Hasidic enclave, where women and girls dress according to religious laws of modesty, and Ashkenazic traditions, displaying many elements of their identity, including their age, marital status, and Hasidic denomination in their dress.
Even the seemingly simple fact that I was by myself, without a relative or friend in sight, was clearly out of the ordinary. It was a beautiful Sunday, and the streets were crowded with families doing shopping before Passover (which began Monday night), socializing, and enjoying the good weather. Unlike much of London, where people mostly walk alone or in groups of twos, quickly traveling to their destination without stopping to say hello to passersby, this was clearly a community where everyone seemed to know their neighbors, and where huge families were the norm. Infants and toddlers were often accompanied by older siblings, laughing young children rode scooters down the street or played tag without any obvious parental supervision. Family life was powerfully on display in a way that I had not yet seen in any other part of London, I rarely saw an adult without, at least, a child holding each of their hands, though many families traveled with five or six children in tow. Though the crowded streets and the busy hum of traffic made it clear that I was still in a major city, the neighborhood often had the feel of a small town.
However, in many other ways, Stamford Hill had a familiarity that many other areas of London lacked, perhaps because it seemed, at some points, distinctly un-British. Rather than overhearing a chorus of English-accented voices, and unfamiliar British slang; I spent the afternoon catching snippets of Yiddish conversation, peppered with familiar words and phrases, or a Yiddish-accented English that, to be honest, sounded a lot more Brooklyn than London. Storefronts and advertisements focused on specifically Jewish products and information, many aspects of British popular culture and politics that seemed so pervasive in Bloomsbury suddenly felt very far away. This sometimes “un-British” aspect of Stamford Hill relates strongly to many of the underlying philosophies of Hasidic Judaism, which teach that every element of life has the potential for holiness, and that preaches the importance of keeping Jewish traditions and observances intact, made especially important amidst the realities of the post-holocaust diaspora.
This is not to say, however, that this, or any London immigrant community is “wholly foreign” or has somehow totally evaded assimilation. To say so would be to assert that there is something inherently un-English in observant Judaism, or to set apart the Hasidic community as being somehow “out of time” or otherwise “exotic.”
Assimilation, ultimately, is both a central desire and anxiety of many immigrant experiences. As I explored the neighborhood of Stamford Hill, I thought about what is both gained and lost through assimilation and acceptance into “mainstream British culture.” I could see the virtue in arguments about maintaining strict cultural continuity despite having immigrated to a new country, especially when taking into account that Jewish immigration to Britain was predominantly motivated by forcible and violent displacement. For example, Hasidic communities retain many of the foods, songs, traditions, and even the Yiddish language that, for many “assimilated Jews” have largely been lost through the generations. At the same time, I see intense value in the ideals of a “global city,” (no matter how messy it may be in practice) which encourages people of different racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds to interact with other beliefs and lifestyles and to forge connections across beyond narrow identity-based lines.
Though these questions are currently being hotly debated across London (and the world), especially in the wake of Brexit, they also feature prominently in Sam Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners, which deals with the struggles faced by Caribbean immigrants in post-war London, and which we have been reading in our English class this week. So far my time in London, both inside and outside of the classroom, has been dominated by similar questions, how is national identity forged in a city filled with such disparate and distinct communities? And what are the consequences of claiming (or rejecting) that identity, especially amongst immigrant groups?
-Maggie Goldberger, ’19
