How is it that a people marked out by their strong code of ethics could stray so far from the paths of righteousness?

Part of the answer must lie in the immigration experience itself. Most of the migrants in the 18th and early 19th centuries came from small, pre-industrialised communities that exercised tight restraint over the conduct of their inhabitants. The anonymity of a teeming metropolis like London must have been bewildering and disorienting.

In English cities, moreover, unlike those of the homeland, the Jews were never crowded into exclusively Jewish quarters. Even in the East End of London, the Jew always jostled with the native English poor, the Irish, and other immigrants from all over the globe. Poor immigrants who had to live by their wits would readily pick up the customs of the urban underworld around them.

The occupations open to Jews in this early period, furthermore, were limited. With guild-based trades and the professions - even retail trade in the City of London until 1830 - closed to them, Jews were more or less forced to cluster in insecure occupations where there was a narrow borderline between straight and improper practice.

Many Jews in the ports, for example, found work as slop-sellers and navy agents, selling goods and services to the fleet. This brought the temptation to engage in 'crimping'.

Inn-keeping, similarly, was a promising trade for people who could offer a warm welcome to travelling dealers who, like them, came from immigrant backgrounds. But it could easily evolve into brothel-keeping, where profit margins would be higher.

Many Jewish settlements were close to docks, where prostitution was rife in the host community. For immigrant women cut off from their roots, living in poverty - and all too often left helpless if circumstances took away the main breadwinner - occasional if not regular prostitution would be an all too easy solution.

Other occupations could entice the less scrupulous into full-blown crime. Dealers in second-hand goods could never know how all their supplies had been obtained, and might calculate that it did not pay to care. It was a small leap to encourage their suppliers to steal goods to order.

Intinerant salesmen could pass off trinkets as objects of value in the confidence that they would never see their customers again. From there it might be easy to move on to more serious crimes of deception.

Street-sellers, who were always handling change, could be all too tempted to make a better margin by passing bad coins. They could then graduate into the organised counterfeit money business.

Those who had any kind of regular occupation were in fact the lucky ones. The newly arrived immigrant often had nothing: no job, no skills, no knowledge of the language. If they picked up work as street-sellers or hawkers, it was always a dangerous and uncertain existence, and they were never far from destitution. At this point they would have little to fall back on but charity or an outright life of crime.

Some families would produce generations of criminals, sending their youngsters out at an early age on pick-pocketing or burglary ventures to which their small, nimble frames were well suited. It seems perfectly likely that at least some of the immigrants had come from such backgrounds in the homeland, and had moved to a new country to escape the authorities bearing down on them.

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