Oral Histories: Nadia

My name is Nadia Valman and I work at Queen Mary, University of London. And this is where we are talking this afternoon. And Queen Mary is an extraordinarily interesting campus because it has a cemetery at the centre of it, which is where Mendoza was buried. And I've worked here since 2007 and it is particularly moving for me to work here, because across the road opposite Stepney Green Station is where my great grandfather had a salt beef cafe during the 1920s and his family emigrated here to the UK from Ukraine. And what the country that is now, Ukraine was, was part of Russia at the time. And so I grew up in North London. My family moved to North London during the 1960s, but I have returned to the East End, both in terms of where I work, but also in terms of my research. So my research is now on the culture and the history of the East End of London. There are two ethnicities of Jews. One is Ashkenazi, and those are people who originated in Central and Eastern Europe and Northern Europe. And my family comes from that area. So my family is an Ashkenazi family. And there is another ethnicity of Jews who are Sephardic. The Sephardic Jews come from the Ottoman Empire. They originally came from Spain and Portugal, and then they emigrated to the Ottoman Empire, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East. Jews were expelled from England in the Middle Ages, and they only returned in after 1656. And the people who returned to England were Sephardim. So the earliest immigrants to England and to London with the Sephardic Jews and in fact they were the earliest immigrant community in London and they were mainly merchants, people involved in trade in some way. And so there was an elite Sephardic group who lived in the eastern part of the city, and that was quite a small community. So by the early 19th century, by around 1800, I think there were about 15,000 Jews in London. So a very small community by that point, there were wealthy and established Jews, there was a merchant elite, some of whom were working in finance, advising the government, for example. But there was also a lower class of Jews who worked in the markets, trading in the markets, who were particularly in selling second-hand clothes and who were much, much poorer. It was really two quite different worlds in terms of class. The Ashkenazi immigrants arrived much later, mostly from the mid-19th century, in a very large wave in the late 19th century, when they were fleeing from persecution and various restrictions on their economic activities and just a general impoverishment from Eastern Europe and in the Russian Empire. So Ashkenazi Jews in general arrived into a London that had Jews already living there but were very, very different from them. When Jews first returned to Britain, there were very lots of restrictions on what they could do. So they couldn't own property, they couldn't participate in government or any of those things. So they didn't have much in the way of power. But of course that really only affected those who were the absolute elite. It didn't affect ordinary working people at all. So in some ways poor Jews were just the same, were really living cheek by jowl with non-Jews and were living very much with them as part of their lives, as part of the kind of popular class it was quite a violent and sectarian culture. So the lower class of London in that period was fighting all the time. There was prejudice against Jews. There was also extreme prejudice against Catholics and riots against Catholics. So there's a lot of ethnic or sectarian violence on the streets at this time. So people were really living with prejudice and with violence and they had to know how to stand up for themselves. In the late 18th and 19th century, there would be a combination of perceptions that people would have coming from places like the church, which was out to convert Jews. And so so Judaism itself was essentially illegitimate from elite literary sources like Shakespeare with Shylock and from popular sources as well. So the theatre that would very frequently represent Jewish stereotypes of the Jewish man as miserly, interested only in money, mean, cunning, and so on. But for a really long time in this country, Jews were not associated with anything physical. And that really comes from the fact that they were never allowed to own land, so they were never associated with farming, with manual labour, with any of those physical activities that traditionally men would have been associated with. And instead, they were required… they were forced to, in the Middle Ages, for example, to work in money lending. So they were required to work with money, with their brains. And I think a long term stereotype evolved from that where Jews were perceived to be. Weak. Un-physical. Overly concerned with brain activities. And that really became very strong in the 19th century. I mean, in many ways, the idea of a strong masculinity was something that was developed in the 19th century and later in the 19th century. And and it was associated in particular with nationalism. So the fact that Jews were a diasporic, people who didn't have a nation in the 19th century made them gave them that association with a kind of deficient masculinity.

It's a very good question as to whether Daniel Mendoza was a “good thing”. I think he was certainly somebody who was able to harness the power of his own inclination to be a thug, to make it work for him, at least some at some points in his life. And that coincided with a national interest in elevating the art of boxing. I think it's important, though, to emphasise the art of boxing because of course, Mendoza was a boxer who was not only interested in the power of the body. So his version of the masculine ideal of the boxer was someone who used strategy. So it was a cerebral kind of boxing as well as physical kind of boxing. So he did bring a different kind of a different dimension to boxing as well. The other thing it's important to say is, of course, women were actually involved in boxing and there were women boxers, there were Jewish women boxers. This was not entirely a masculine sport by any means at all. Whether it's a good thing that women were emulating male violence in this way is another question. And also, it's important to say that his own masculinity was quite toxic. He was also, in his later life, arrested for assault against a woman. He was violent as an individual. So aside from what he did as a minority boxer in raising the profile of a minority nationally, it is certainly true that his his kind of masculinity is not something that I think is heroic or that I think is ideal.

Well, I think that Mendoza attracted a great following because young Jewish men in the East and felt that he he was standing up for them and when he was fighting. But I think he was also very canny and understood that boxing was a show and that it was a performance and that he understood how to manipulate the media and how to manipulate his image within the media. And I think that's the reason why he became such a phenomenon, because you know, he would settle this merchandise with his face on it and he would hype up his fights in the press with his rival. So there would be a real sense of the cult, of the personality, of the sports personality. So I think he was the first to really understand that it was not just the fight itself and not just the moment of the fight. It was everything around that he was perhaps the first celebrity sportsman in this way who understood all that needed to go into success as a sportsman. And I think it's partly because Mendoza was a working class sportsman that ultimately that story is not one that's been told enough. It's not one that's taught. But I also think that Mendoza is a complicated figure, and that in general, the figures that are taught in history lessons are those that we feel fully we're fully able to embrace as heroes. And Mendoza is an ambivalent kind of character to to celebrate.

It's important, though, that Mendoza embraced the term the Jew. So the Jew would be something that would be bandied about on the street as an insult. And he used it as his moniker. So he really saw that as a way to build his brand and to to make himself significant. So I think although he was racialized and seen as black, seen as different, he also chose to make something of us and to use that to his advantage. And the the portraits of Mendoza are also very interesting because he he represented himself as a sort of romantic hero, which is the last thing you might expect from somebody who was boxing in an environment where there were no rules. It was extremely brutal. You had to fight until you were knocked out. You could do any kind of stuff, like pull it pulling hair or all kinds of things that would be absolutely against the rules. Now, there was no time limit. So the boxing itself was extremely brutal, also was illegal. It was not technically legal at all, even though royalty went to see it. He chose to represent himself publicly in this very different way as a sort of sensitive, thoughtful, romantic hero. And I think that's interesting, too, that he clearly saw that he there was there was a benefit to him in offering this quite nuanced and quite complex version of himself to the public. Well, in the centre of the campus of Queen Mary, there is a cemetery and it's the second oldest Jewish cemetery in the country, and it was established in 1724. And Mendoza was buried in this cemetery, although the part of the cemetery that he was buried in was later cleared to create the library for Queen Mary. So he is actually - his remains were - buried in Brentwood sometime later in the 1970s, but originally he was buried there. And it's really amazing to be here in this university and to think about the time when this cemetery was all that was here. It was surrounded by fields. It was originally a field itself. It was bought by the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue in Aldgate. And this is where they buried the members of their congregation. And it's a Sephardic cemetery. And the practise in Sephardic cemeteries is to is for all the gravestones to be flat. And one interpretation of that custom is that it really demonstrates the equality of everybody in death. So you can't tell when you look across that cemetery who was wealthy, who was poor, who was a factory owner, who was a factory worker. You may be able to tell whether they were a child or an adult, but there's very little that you can tell about about them. So in death, everyone is equal. Very interestingly, in the cemetery as well, you can see the range of places where Jews came from to emigrate to the East End. So the Sephardic community spread out really across the Mediterranean and then later across the British Empire. So they had trading links in many, many places. So there were Jews buried in this cemetery who lived in India, who lived in Morocco, who lived in the Caribbean, and who wanted to be buried in the East End. And if you look at their names, you can see the Spanish names, the Portuguese names, the Arabic names. They represent that very, very wide diaspora from which the East and immigrant Jews came. I. Strongly identify as Jewish. And I feel very rooted in East London in the East End. And I, I feel extremely proud to have come here for a come from here. I feel extremely proud to work here now. I think that I am endlessly fascinated in the history of this area that goes back so many centuries, in which people were constantly interacting with others who, unlike themselves. And I think I feel that's my sensibility, is to love that experience. I feel that's a great privilege of growing up in London, is that you constantly get to interact with people who are not like yourself. And that's most true of any place in London here in the East End, because that has been going on for centuries. And that is also why I feel very strong vocations teaching university, because I feel that's also what's happening in a university is that people are engaging the people that are very enlightened cells, that engaging with texts that are very unfamiliar and really stretching their own sense of their self. So I feel that that's what the East End represents to me. That's what being Jewish represents to me. That's also what being a scholar and an academic and a teacher represents to me that the other thing that I feel strongly about the East End and that I identify with the East End is that it's been a place of political struggle for a very long time and that it's been the place in which collisions between people have has happened. So alongside encounters with difference that have been happening all that time, there's also been a strong pushback against newcomers. And for those newcomers also to have to fight for that place and for this place to be defended by the community as a whole, as a place of difference. So I feel that the political heritage of the East End is really particular and really important and a very important part of the history of this country as a whole and at various points a real example of life. So one of the one of the most important moments in the history of the East End was a struggle against the British Union of Fascists. This was in the 1930s when fascism was on the rise across Europe more generally, and there was a real prospect that it might take root in this country, too. And that was something that was felt especially acutely by Jewish refugees who'd come from Europe and many fleeing from fascism in Europe. But it was something that was also felt by many other communities in the East End. And in 1936, the British Union of Fascist proposed a march through the East End through the particular Jewish area of the East, and to intimidate the Jewish residents there. And the whole community came together, thousands and thousands of them, to demonstrate against that. They ended up in a battle with the police who were there to defend the British Union fascist right to march. But eventually the police gave up and they made the fascists reroute their march. So this neighbourhood was defended as a place of tolerance by a coalition of communities showing solidarity at that moment. And I think it's it's still celebrated every year. And I think the reason for that is that people do understand that this was a really remarkable moment of people coming together to defend a place and to see that as a place of coexistence and of mutuality and solidarity. And and I think we feel a nostalgia for that now, but we feel that trying to figure out how to, um, how to support and how to enact solidarity is, is difficult. And so looking to that moment is something that is, is very valuable and very moving. The history of Jewish immigration to the East End, both in the 18th century and in the 19th century, was essentially the history of very poor people immigrating to a new country where they didn't know the language. Where they had to struggle from the beginning. Really, the only resources were each other. And the competition for livelihood and for accommodation was incredibly intense. So I think that story is something it's very important to remember because that is still the story for immigrants arriving in our countries today. That is the story of being a migrant. It is the story of struggle. It is a story of putting your children before yourself and of imagining a future that is better for them than it was for you. Despite in many ways, Mendoza's dubiousness a character. I think it's… I think his story is really important and the interest in his story is really important for the reason that immigrants often feel a compulsion to tell their story as one of success, as one of struggling from the beginnings to prosperity, and that they often represent the community as a whole. As doing that, you can understand why this is true also. But I think that's what Mendoza story is valuable for, is that it's also telling us a different story of the migrant experience, which is one of a man who struggled very hard, who was successful for a while, who lost all his money, who ended up in a very bad way. It's not only a story of success, and it's not only a story that is a story of heroism. So I think it's important that migrants can tell those stories, too, if they're of their communities and of their history, because it isn't all progress, it isn't all success. And there are reasons in particular why members of migrant communities and members of minority communities find it a struggle to sustain the kind of success, a sudden success that Mendoza had thrust upon him. So I think his story is really valuable in reminding us of that.