God's Square Mile
the untold history of Whitechapel

(This article originally appeared in Israel and the Church Today newspaper)

There is a square mile of real estate that lays claim to being the trading capital of the world. It is said to have more Japanese banks than Tokyo and more American banks than New York. It is known as the City of London, or simply 'The Square Mile'. Directly to the east of the City is another Square Mile. It is an unsung place, more vilified than acclaimed. Its associations with poverty, deprivation and crime has made it a by-word for the darker side of human existence and, if it's a clincher you want, just say the words Jack the Ripper! No other area in Britain has seen more comings or goings. It has been at times a melting pot, other times a scalding kettle. It has provided a place of refuge - from persecution and worse poverty - for hundreds of thousands of people. It has inspired great works of fiction by such writers as Charles Dickens and Jack London. It has witnessed the plotting of revolutions and has nurtured the formative years of statesmen. It has produced captains of industry, giants of the entertainment world and of science. It has given birth to Christian missions that have swept the world and are still doing so.

This is God's Square Mile. It is a truly heroic place. It's a place of a thousand stories, but its story needs to be told. It is also my story, because of the safe haven it provided for over 100,000 Jews, at least three of whom were my forbears.

If you travel up the River Thames from the U-bend of the Isle of Dogs, your first sight of the City of London is the magnificent Tower Bridge. It's hard to imagine any representation of the metropolis that fails to include it, yet it was only built in 1894. For thousands of immigrants to these shores, their first experience of London would not be the bridge, but its predecessor, the less impressive rusty metal Irongate Steps that bridged the murky waters and the safety of Tower Hill. They would arrive by boat, either by steamship from Hamburg and the North Sea ports, or by cattle boat from the Baltic ports, to escape from the persecution of the pogroms in Russia and eastern Europe.

Around 100,000 Jews found themselves in our already overcrowded Square Mile. How they, and the existing population, co-existed and survived is a mystery to me but a major factor of this triumph over adversity was the philanthropy of others, mostly rich and influential Jews, who felt morally obliged to help their poorer brethren. Here is one such story.

Wandering down Wentworth Street and looking northwards at the bland modern housing estate, it's hard to believe, that, casting your mind back a century and a half or so, you'd be looking at one of the most notorious and crime-ridden streets in Victorian England, "perhaps the foulest and most dangerous street in the whole metropolis", according to one commentator. It was Flower and Dean street, a short road but bursting with over a thousand occupants, crammed mainly into lodging houses. A "blot on the landscape" for the middle-classes of the time, they eventually got their own way when, in 1883, a large part of it was knocked down by the authorities.

There was now a huge hole to fill and, bearing in mind that this part of the East End was bursting with an enormous swell of displaced humanity, shoe-horned into unsuitable and unhygienic dwellings, a solution seemed to be obvious. Put up more houses! Yes, but who pays? The civil authorities were hesitant. The initiative was grabbed by Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild, head of the Jewish 'Royal Family' in London. Moved by the tens of thousands of Eastern European Jews living in poverty in houses unfit for a healthy life, and urged on by his mother's demands on her deathbed, he created the Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings Company, providing investors with the barest dividend in return for funds to build solid, functional housing.

In 1887 the Rothschild Buildings were opened in the Flower and Dean street area. Grim, grey and unwelcoming to modern eyes, the buildings were a literal godsend to the two hundred, predominantly Jewish, families who were given this lifeline for a life lived with dignity, gas lights and an inside toilet. Pretty to the eye they weren't, particularly in their latter years, when they were put out of their misery in the 1970s, demolished as an empty derelict slum.

But in the years between, a community grew, nurturing and churning out good citizens who would eventually emigrate to the leafy paradises of Finchley, Ilford and Golders Green. Folk from Poland, Ukraine, Holland, Russia, Rumania, Germany and Lithuania gossiped in the gated balconies, overlooking their children playing in the courtyard. Tailors mixed with cabinet makers, cooks with seamstresses, the impoverished with the upwardly mobile, united by a common language of Yiddish and the Jewish customs brought over from the 'old country', observed with enthusiasm in public, but less so behind closed doors. Abe Saperstein lived here. The founder of the Harlem Globetrotters in Chicago, he spent the first five years of his life here. So did the Kaplans, the Katchinskys, the Solomons and the Hyams and hundreds of other immigrant families, each with a unique story of triumph over hardship, of survival against the odds.

Now all that is left is a solitary arch. If you stand under it for long enough it is said you could hear the faintest cadences of a Russian folk song rising on a chilly breeze and an even fainter whiff of borscht steaming in a cracked pot.

God's Square Mile is still truly a fascinating place.