Synagogues and Mosques - fried fish and curries:<br /> the experience of Jews and Muslims in Spitalfields, London

Abstract

The central focus of the paper will be a comparison of the experience of settlement, acclimatisation and integration of Eastern European Jews and Bangladeshis in the Spitalfields district of London in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will seek to identify the role played by religion in those processes, particularly within the contexts of communal cohesion, welfare provision and social control. The paper will then proceed to explore the way in which the two immigrant groups have negotiated their cultural identity - by means of fusion and separation, acceptance and rejection. It will also seek to locate points at which the two groups (in some cases the children and grandchildren of the first generation immigrants) have interfaced socially and in commerce. Finally, the paper will evaluate the importance of location in the Muslim/Jewish integration process by evaluating the role played Spitalfields, a first point of immigrant settlement and home to religious dissidence since the seventeenth century.