Evangelical Missionary Interventions in Immigrant Jewish Lives: Nineteenth-Century London

Over the nineteenth century, evangelical missionaries were actively engaged in working among the rapidly expanding immigrant Jewish population of the East End, and employed an impressive range of welfare-based interventions to create opportunities to interact and build connections with newly-arrived Jewish immigrants. The intention of the missionaries was to demonstrate to Jews the ‘true’ nature of Christianity through practical methods, including the provision of free health care, education, employment opportunities, and charitable aid. Significantly, in carrying out such work, evangelical missionaries can be seen as acting in ways that go contrary to the general direction of wider society; where attitudes towards the poor were hardening, and where anti-immigrant feeling was growing in intensity.

This paper will focus on the work of three, nineteenth-century, British missionary societies: London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel amongst the Jews, and Mildmay Mission to the Jews. It will highlight the primary interventions that these missions made into welfare provision for Jewish immigrants and the contextual background against which they were made, while also raising questions as to how these interventions were received, and the impact that they had on the lives of Jewish immigrants in London’s East End.