The Catholic religious hierarchy and the Ashkenazi Jewish secular and denominational leaderships shared common concerns and apprehensions over the direction that communal politics in the East End was taking. These fears were accentuated by the strikes of 1889 and the corresponding growth in working-class militancy. However, distrust of socialism was not the only concern that the two leaderships had in common. With respect to education, to dealing with wayward youth, to language, and to the preservation of a minority culture, the issues confronting the upper echelons of the Catholic Church and the Jewish authorities were strikingly similar. Both were aware of their vulnerable positions in wider English society, and the dual imperative simultaneously to maintain a minority religious faith whilst encouraging social integration in other fields. The hierarchies were conscious that socialism was not the only distraction. As well as the lure of the political left, evangelical Protestantism was seen as a threat, as was, conversely, the overt religious orthodoxy and decentralised forms of worship that Jewish and Irish immigrants had brought from the countries they had left.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for the hierarchies, more so than either Protestantism or left-wing political involvement, was religious apathy and assimilation of the young into a wider working-class culture with the pleasures and the temptations that that society presented. As Andrew Godley wrote, referring to Jewish youth in an East End context: ‘The younger immigrants … rather looked at the world around them and, not surprisingly … they liked what they saw.’ This book will now examine the efforts of the Catholic and Jewish leaderships to maintain control, facilitate cohesion, and promote a particular form of anglicisation and approved acculturation within East End communities. There were multiple confluences between two hierarchies that were separated by religious profession and practice. These communal bodies differed radically in organisational structure, but their attitudes towards working-class migrant co-religionists were similar. Indeed, the ways in which the Jewish metropolitan leadership attempted to maintain influence over the new East End Jewish populations from 1881 onwards followed closely the strategies adopted by the Catholic Church regarding the presence of the Irish diaspora of the generation before.