Old Prejudices and New Prejudices: State Surveillance and Harassment of Irish and Jewish Communities in London – 1800-1930

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between the ‘othering’ of Irish and Jewish communities in London up to the end of the 1920s, and punitive action and harassment against these minorities on the part of the British state. Beginning by looking at early articulations of antisemitic and anti-Irish prejudice, it will consider how the associations of both groups with radical politics and transgressive behaviour led to the negative involvement of the Metropolitan Police in the lives of Jewish and Irish Londoners on a day-to-day level at the end of the Victorian era and into the Edwardian period. The situation was then exacerbated through the experience of war, and the revolutionary events in Dublin in 1916 and Petrograd in 1917. Irish and Jewish communities, as transnational diasporas, were associated with international subversion, and militant action in London itself. The article will discuss the campaign waged by the state in its various manifestations between 1918 and 1922, including arrest and imprisonment without trial and deportation to Ireland and Eastern Europe. It will conclude by identifying how the actions of the state against Irish and Jewish communities anticipated action against other minorities over the course of the twentieth century.