As British as Fish and Chips

The antidote to rising ethno-nationalism? History, of course.

This has been a year in which terrible ideas buried and forgotten rose from the dead and ate many brains.

Tariffs-on-everything. Vaccines are poison. Fascism. Anti-Semitism. Hitler’s not so bad. And of course, ethnic nationalism, the idea that only people who share a common ancestry and culture can create a strong country. That particular zombie is even spreading across the United States, a country that never had a shared common ancestry and culture in its entire long, successful history.

Inevitably, I’ve found myself arguing with ethnic nationalists on social media, which is invariably a depressing experience. But the British zombies are the worst. “A thousand years of ethnic stability now destroyed by immigration,” is how one summed up British history to me.

I could write a long essay about how utterly stupid that is. I could detail how that reads “white” backwards in time, and explain that “white” is a relatively recent (and largely American) invention, with its most current form only dating from the mid-20th century. I would note that the concept “white” would be incomprehensible to Britons even a few hundred years ago. I would show how other ethnic identities (English, Scots, Welsh, Irish) long preceded “British,” how they mutated over time, and how they evolved out of a more complex patchwork quilt of local identities and cultures now largely forgotten (the last native speaker of Cornish, a Celtic language, died in 1777.) To call that swirling complexity and constant evolution a millennium of “ethnic stability” requires an almost heroic commitment to ignorance.

But I won’t. Instead, I’ll respond with a phrase: fish and chips.

It’s hard to imagine anything more British than good old fish and chips. Close your eyes and you can see Henry VIII loving his fish and chips. But, alas, all that is gone. Today Indian curry has taken over. Patriotic fans even sing about chicken vindaloo. A thousand years of ethnic stability lost!

Scratch all that.

The first problem is the most obvious. Chips are made from potatoes, a New World import. The earliest evidence of people frying potatoes to make chips dates from the late 18th century. In France. So the “chips” portion of “fish and chips” only came to Britain in the 19th century from the Americas via, ugh, the French.

And the fried fish portion? Sephardic Jewish refugees fleeing Spain brought that to Britain in the 16th century, but it continued to be seen as strange, foreign food for centuries. Thomas Jefferson noted that when he was in London he ate “fish in the Jewish fashion.”

What finally gave fish and chips the push it needed to become a paragon of Britishness was delivered by …

You probably can’t guess the word that ends that sentence.

It is “Russia.”

In 1881, the Russian Czar Alexander II, a liberal reformer, was assassinated. Anti-Semites blamed Jews, as always. In the brutal wave of repression that followed the murder, pogroms swept the western Russian Empire and Jews by the hundreds of thousands were driven out of present-day Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic countries. Something like 150,000 settled in Britain. Much larger numbers stayed at least temporarily in Britain as they made their way to the United States. The Jews clustered in poor neighbourhoods of the major cities, especially London’s East End.

Whitechapel, London, late 19th century.

The new arrivals ate fish and chips at home and — following the path of immigrants everywhere — opened shops to sell it. And that was when fish and chips really took off. By 1910, Britain was rife with fish and chip shops. (The steam engine also played critical roles. Trawlers with steam engines could scoop up fish far more efficiently, driving down the price of fish. And trains powered by steam engines were able to distribute fish rapidly throughout the country, which had previously been impossible for a food that went bad quickly.)

But fish and chips wasn’t the only phenomenon that saw explosive growth in the late 19th century.

So did anger toward the inscrutable foreigners with their alien religion and languages. That is why one of the major themes in the news furore around the Jack the Ripper murders in 1888 was anti-Semitism. The connection? The murders occurred in London’s impoverished Whitechapel and Spitalfields neighbourhoods. This was the heart of the enormous new community of Eastern European Jews, and by 1888 the trope of Jewish crime was well-established. So when bodies started to turn up, fingers immediately pointed at the Jews.

The hostility didn’t end with the Ripper murders. In 1905, Britain passed the Aliens Act, the first legislation restricting immigration in an effort to keep out the ignorant and the indigent.

So the same phenomenon that stirred hostility toward migrants also gave Britain the national dish that ultimately joined John Bull and gin as markers of eternal Britishness. (Incidentally, John Bull was only popularized in the mid-19th century. Gin was imported from the Netherlands in the late-17th century. Good luck finding a marker of Britishness that lasted even a single millennium.)

But what became of those Jewish hordes, you may ask? They mostly became skilled tradesmen and shopkeepers. In time, they fully integrated into British society.

One of the founders of Marks and Spencer — an institution almost as British as the Royal Family — was Michael Marks, a Jew born in 1859 in Belarus. Marks spoke no English when he arrived. He got his start as a street peddler.

Tesco founder Sir Jack Cohen was the son of a Russian Jew.

Sir Isaac Wolfson, a successful businessman and a great philanthropist, was the son of a Polish Jew.

Today, there is a long list of famous Brits who have Jewish refugees from the Russian Empire in their family trees. Amy Winehouse. Daniel Day-Lewis. Harold Pinter. Sacha Baron Cohen. Even Daniel Radcliffe, “Harry Potter” himself. All of them as British as fish and chips.

Stories like that — there are many more like it — are why I say the secret to becoming a fierce ethno-nationalist is amnesia.

Post-script for British readers

As you may know, I’m waist-deep in writing a social history of technology. To that end, I’ve identified a book I desperately need for my research. It is Broadcast Over Britain, published in 1924 by John Reith, the legendary founder of the BBC.

That’s the sort of thing I would ordinarily buy on Abebooks, the website that connects to the world’s used bookstores. (Paid subscribers: Every penny you give me gets passed on to used bookstores. Promise.) But the cheapest copy I can find is around $500 Canadian. Much as I love to share the wealth with used book stores, I just can’t bring myself to do that.

So, libraries? I found a copy at Library and Archives Canada, in Ottawa, where I live, but it seems to have vanished and is now officially declared “missing.” Other libraries? No luck.

I have to presume a copy would be a lot easier to find in Britain than anywhere else. So, my British friends, any suggestions? Know any book dealers who can help out a starving writer?

Or — if one of you can find a copy — I’d happily pay you to scan it and send a PDF.

Thoughts? I’m getting a little desperate here so my eternal gratitude to anyone who can help me out.

Now here’s a picture of the Queen. Just because.

Happy and glorious.