LAUSR

The origins of this special thematic issue of Jewish Culture and History date back to September 2011, when a small group of scholars were invited to Ulster University’s campus in Belfast for a colloquium on ‘Jews on the “Celtic Fringe”’. Focusing on the three most populated Celtic nations – Ireland, Scotland and Wales – the colloquium brought researchers together for the purpose of sharing and comparing their research on Jewish experiences in the British Isles beyond England. The first gathering of its kind, it provided inspiration for other similar scholarly meetings later in the decade, such as the ‘Narrative Spaces in Scottish Jewish Culture: A Comparative Perspective’ colloquium, an international gathering held at the University of Glasgow in April 2017 that extended the ‘“Scottish” brief to other non-English Jewish identities’ across the British Isles. Some 7 years in the making, this special edition includes reworked versions of the contributions presented at the 2011 colloquium (not all presented papers are featured, however), as well as articles by two contributors who were not present in Belfast. Given the presence of Jews in Ireland, Scotland and Wales for centuries, readers may wonder why such a scholarly meeting only took place for the first time in recent years. Additionally, the absence of English Jewry from the Belfast gathering, as well as Glasgow, may strike some as peculiar, derogatory and exclusionary. The explanation is twofold. First, while every country’s situation is unique, the focus on Irish, Scottish and Welsh Jewry at both colloquiums provided an opportunity to compare and contrast Jewish experiences within a Celtic setting, as well as assess the peculiar idiosyncrasies that were unique to these Jewries such as engagement with Celtic languages. Second, the absence of English Jewry can be seen as a form of protest on behalf of a group of dissatisfied scholars of British and Irish-Jewish Studies who have become frustrated by the dominance of England in the study of Jews in Britain and Ireland. For some, particularly British-Jewish scholars, the discipline’s long overused name, ‘Anglo-Jewish History’, has been an irritant, with ‘Anglo’, that is English, being long overused as a collective noun for the Jews of the United Kingdom. Some scholars, including Todd Endelman and Harold Pollins, are satisfied with the term and have seen no need for change. For Endelman, the ‘usage’ of ‘Anglo’ ‘is too well established to be dropped’, while Pollins suggests that loosely referring to ‘Anglo-Jewry’ to describe the Jews of Great Britain and Ireland is justifiable as the term isn’t ‘clumsy’, even though he is ‘conscious that this is a dangerous step’. One cannot help feeling that the term is used out of indolence, with some scholars choosing to shy away from