Source 7

‘It was the bell of the great Ghetto school, summoning its pupils from the reeking courts and alleys, from the garrets and the cellars, calling them to come and be Anglicized. And they came in a great straggling procession recruited from every lane and by-way; big children and little children, boys in blackening corduroy, and girls in washed-out cotton; tidy children and ragged children; children in great shapeless boots gaping at the toes; sickly children, and sturdy children, and diseased children; quaint sallow foreign-looking children, and fresh-coloured English-looking children; with great pumpkin heads, with oval heads, with pear-shaped heads; with old men’s faces, with cherub’s faces, with monkeys’ faces; cold and famished children, and warm and well-fed children; children conning their lessons and children romping carelessly; the demure and the anaemic; the boisterous and the blackguardly, the insolent, the idiotic, the vicious, the intelligent, the exemplary, the dull — spawn of all countries — all hastening at the inexorable clang of the big school-bell to be ground in the same great, blind, inexorable Governmental machine.’

Israel Zangwill, Children of the Ghetto, 1892. 

Israel Zangwill writes here about the Jews Free School in Spitalfields in London. Zangwill was a student and, later, a teacher at the school. The Jews Free School believed that the Jewish students it educated, many of whom were recent migrants from Eastern Europe, would have an easier life if they focused on becoming good English boys and girls. For this reason, Yiddish, the language spoken by Eastern European Jews, was forbidden in the school and the focus was instead on turning the children into upstanding British citizens.

Questions to consider:

  1. Why do you think Zangwill describes the children of the school in the way he does?
  2. Zangwill refers to the Jews Free School as the ‘Ghetto school’. Why?
  3. Having experienced the school as both student and teacher, Zangwill has a unique insight. What do you think he means when he says the students come to school ‘to be ground in the same great, blind, inexorable Governmental machine?’