Jeremy Rosen
The Jew Bill of 1753

No, they didn’t necessarily want to leave. They wanted to trade. And trade meant having your representative there. They wanted to trade all over the world. Remember at that time Holland was the richest and most powerful country, trading country, in the world. More than England, until eventually the English defeated them. More than France. More than Italy. More than Germany. Remember the East Indies, sorry, what now is called Indonesia was part of the Dutch, and the Philippines, the Dutch Empire. So it was very, very powerful from a trading point of view. Britain was up and coming, and although they were at war at various times they were still trying to compete and trade, and so they wanted to move there. But also the Amsterdam community was a very close community and it also didn’t like Ashkenazi coming from Germany, and so they were blocked from going to Amsterdam and therefore saw in London and Britain a better opportunity to thrive and do well in business.

Wow, that’s a very, very good question. I don’t think today anything on a mass level is going to breathe life into Conservative Judaism because after the time of Schechter, the Conservative movement, certainly in the last 50 years, has moved so far away from Orthodoxy to the left. Once upon a time it was very much closer. Now it’s moved further away, and the further you go away from Orthodoxy, the weaker it becomes. Having said that, there are still some very vibrant Conservative communities headed by great men. And not only that, but I think one of the most important features is that the Conservative movement has a yeshiva called Mechon Hadar, which is one of the most significant and important study centres in New York headed by rabbis who are scholars by any standard. And there is a shrinking division between the Orthodox wing of the Conservative movement and the Modern Orthodox wing of the Orthodox movement because within the Modern Orthodox there are some more radical movements now who ordain female rabbis, are much more open and flexible. We don’t want to go as far as the Conservative movement or identify with them, but are in that position. And in that position, that no man’s land, the overlap between Orthodox Conservative, traditional Conservative, and more progressive Orthodox is the area of growth. So I don’t write off the Conservative movement, but I do not believe the Conservative movement any more than the Reform movement will ever gain the numbers they once had simply because of the rate of intermarriage. I hope that answers it, but if not, by all means come back.

Because most Jews in the U.S. are much less religious than the Jews of England, but also because in England the government supports Jewish schools. So Jewish education is not as expensive as it is in the United States. In the United States, in New York, it’ll cost you $30,000 a year for one child in a Jewish school. A lot of people can’t afford that. In the Haredi world, education is free. So that’s the great strength of the Haredi world. They provide for their education, but outside of that they don’t. And so for that reason you can get a Jewish social education, not necessarily religious education, but a social education, in a Jewish school which is supported not exclusively but largely by the state. That’s the big plus of Jewish education in Britain. And it’s only happened relatively recently. It was never there before the 1950s, something like that.