“Preferring Death to the Embrace of a Strange Dancing Woman”: Jewish Dancers in Victorian Ballrooms

Dancing was perhaps the most universal and popular mixed-sex leisure pursuit in the nineteenth century. Yet dance was not purely a recreational activity. Ballroom etiquette demanded adherence to the rules of fashionable society, including precise rules for comportment, conversation, and choosing a dance partner. For upwardly mobile Jewish dancers, balls presented additional challenges. First of all, mixed-sex dancing was forbidden according to traditional Jewish law, which regarded men and women dancing together as a gateway to sexual impropriety. And while

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Ellen Ross, ‘Missionaries and Jews in Soho: “Strangers within Our Gates”‘

In JVC 15.2, Ellen Ross explores evidence about everyday life and social practices in Soho to reconstruct the extent and mode of religious conflict in a neighbourhood which historians have seen as an area of relative religious tolerance. It focuses on a weekly children’s prayer meeting conducted by Methodist missionaries in the summer of 1900 at the epicentre of the Soho Jewish community. For the Jews the meeting was an intrusion but nonetheless epitomized the tacit negotiations between Soho Jews

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