liv | (Reply)

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liv

All interesting comments, thank you for responding.

The established Anglo-Jewish families intermarrying is why I'm related to just about everybody ;-)

I don't think there's a big difference between people deliberately choosing to settle in port cities, and people ending up there because there was already an established Jewish community there and they never quite made it any further (lots of them were trying to get to America, after all, not Liverpool!) A bit of a mix of both, I think.

I agree that there were likely some Orthodox Jews who fled Germany and Nazi Europe in the middle of the century, as you say Germany Orthodoxy didn't die just because the Reform movement was flourishing. But in terms of the demographics of Anglo-Jewry, it was immigration from Europe in this era that boosted both the numbers and the intellectual basis of Reform Judaism over here.

Were Jews killed in substantial numbers in WW1? I don't know for sure, it's a guess. Most of my 1890s immigrant ancestors were naturalized by then, it's interesting that yours weren't. I know there are always graves with the magen david symbol in any given war cemetery, and that synagogues have plaques with lists of WW1 dead. I don't know for a fact that this contributed to the loss of Jewish knowledge and connection by the middle of the 20^th century, that was mostly speculative.