Abraham Minkin

Abraham Minkin (c.1884-?) was born in Odesa, which was then part of Russia. But we know very little else about him.

It is not clear when he arrived in Britain. He can be found in the 1911 census, living alone in Islington, at 21 Camden Passage. He was single, a compositor, and gave his nationality as ‘Jewish’. He would have been only about 21 when Britain introduced, with the 1905 Aliens Act, the first restrictions on immigration since the early 19th century.

The Act had been introduced in response to intense pressure from anti-immigration lobbyists, and in the face of strong opposition from more liberal-minded MPs, among them Winston Churchill. The legislation was designed to keep out would-be immigrants who were poor, diseased, mentally ill, or criminal. But it also provided that anyone escaping political or religious persecution should not be turned away for want of means.

If already a skilled worker at the point of entry, Minkin might have been allowed through without fuss. But any Jew arriving from Odessa in or around 1905, as he might well have done, would have a more compelling story. This was the year when anti-Jewish pogroms (or murderous riots) in Odesa, already notorious for such violence, reached new heights. Over a few days more than 400 Jews were killed.

It is often supposed that much of the Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe in the late-19th and early-20th centuries was driven by pogroms. In the areas from which most immigrants to Britain came – those parts of the Russian Empire close to the Baltic, today’s Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland – most Jews lived in grinding, rural poverty, with no chance of bettering themselves, always in fear of conscription into the hated Russian Army, and conscious of sporadic, if relatively small-scale violence against Jews that could break out at any time. That would be reason enough to join the huge, general movement westward to freer and more prosperous lands that all sorts of peoples were undertaking at the time. But for Jews living in lands closer to the Black Sea, the fear of losing everything you had, possibly your life, in a maelstrom of violence was much more real, having been repeatedly experienced over recent history. Who was Abraham Minkin, and what was his story? We do not know, but he might well have been a very traumatised refugee.