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*Migration Histories > Jewish > Jewish Migration Histories - Working Lives
* A Case Study 
 
Life in mid-19th century London was hardly secure, however, as Dickens and other writers like Henry Mayhew made graphically clear. A turn in business fortunes could all too readily throw a family into ruin, and the temptations of crime would soon beckon.

This may be what happened to Moses Barnett. A second-generation immigrant born in London around 1795, Barnett had a fruit-selling business just outside the boundary of the City of London, off the Minories, for some 20 years.

Fruit-selling was a trade largely cornered by Jews at the time. The wholesale market in nearby Duke Street, the centre of the Jewish community, supplied fresh oranges and lemons throughout the city and beyond. It was a trade, coincidentally, that was strongly associated with practices like counterfeiting and passing bad coins, presumably because of the mobility of the street-sellers.

Whether in his youth Barnett had been involved in activities of this sort is not known. By the 1820s, however, he was well established, advertising his business at an address where he lived with his wife, family and servants for 20 years, and maintaining religious observance at the New Synagogue.

What happened in the late-1840s is not clear, but his fruiterer's business appears to have collapsed, and he moved to an address in the docklands - then a place famous for squalor and crime - where he started to trade in second-hand clothes. This was unquestionably a step down.

It might have resulted more or less directly from the recession in 1848-49 caused by the collapse of railway stocks, or it might be that he was caught out in dishonest dealings in his fruit business and forced to close down and move away. At all events, January 1851 saw him brought before the *Old Bailey on a charge of receiving stolen goods. Worse, he was accused of having induced a young lad - one Henry Sellers - to steal them for him.

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The caption to this cartoon, when it appeared in Punch in 1851, was 'The dealer in old clothes teaching the young how to steal'
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The caption to this cartoon, when it appeared in Punch in 1851, was 'The dealer in old clothes teaching the young how to steal'
This was the archetypal Jewish crime of early-19th century London. By coincidence, another Jew, one Henry Hart, was being tried for a similar offence in another courtroom the same week. He too was accused of having corrupted a young boy to steal for him. The press weighed in, prejudging both of them guilty before their trials were complete, with headlines about the 'Jew promoters of crime', 'the Jew Thief Taker', and 'Another Fagin'.

The Daily News thundered:

Of all the numerous family to which Mr. DICKENS stands in the relation of spiritual father, none is, perhaps, more vigorous in its lineaments, or more lifelike in its repulsiveness, than that squalid Israelite who plays the part of the arch-tempter in the Pandemonium of low vice revealed in 'Oliver Twist'.
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Extract from the Times report of Moses Barnett's trial
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Extract from the Times report of Moses Barnett's trial
Other newspapers were as bad. The Jewish Chronicle protested:

The Times ... in the article we now complain of, and in which the word Jew appears twenty-one times, has most foully made it appear that Mr. Charles Dickens was right when he, also pandering to a vitiated taste, dressed up the character of 'FAGIN' as that of a Jew.
Henry Hart was in fact found not guilty, and the Times at least apologised for having presumed him guilty beforehand. Moses Barnett, though, was convicted, and the Jewish Chronicle was quick to distance itself from him:

Now we are not, and do not pretend to be, the apologists of Barnett; we consider he was most properly convicted and justly punished; his was an individual crime, and not the crime of the religion which he professed to follow. Let him then, we say, be punished; but it becomes a vile slander to make it appear that it is the inherent vice of a community and not of an isolated individual, outraging every moral and religious principle of that faith of which he has proved himself so unworthy a member.
Thus the Anglo-Jewish establishment quickly closed ranks against one whose conviction had brought back to the surface all the old stereotypes of Jewish involvement in crime. Were they satisfied from the evidence presented in court that he was in fact guilty? Or did they have other intelligence supporting the conviction? It is very hard to tell.

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The boy Sellers' account of how Moses Barnett induced him to steal, from the contemporary court notes
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The boy Sellers' account of how Moses Barnett induced him to steal, from the contemporary court notes
* Moving Here catalogue reference (PRO) HO 18/296/33
Barnett was sentenced to 10 years' transportation for the four pounds by weight of *indigo that he had apparently persuaded the lad Sellers to steal for him.

Whether, as charged, he really did induce Sellers will never be known. Sellers himself was the chief witness, and, as the presiding judge acknowledged when later asked to review the papers:

The boy was very artful and wicked, and I had great doubts of the extent of his seduction by the prisoner as described by him, with respect to which his evidence evinced no confirmation from other witnesses.
The use of the word 'artful' is interesting here: did the judge have the Artful Dodger in mind?

Barnett was not in the end transported. Like many of those sentenced to transportation - and especially older convicts like him - he passed his sentence on prison hulks moored off Woolwich and Portsmouth, doing hard labour.

His family petitioned the Home Secretary several times for his release on humanitarian grounds: he was nearly 60, he was unwell, and his still young family had lost their mother. He was, it seems, released about five years into the sentence, and after that disappeared into obscurity.

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Barnett's children petitioning the Home Secretary for his release in 1854
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Barnett's children petitioning the Home Secretary for his release in 1854
* Moving Here catalogue reference (PRO) HO 18/296/33
He does not appear to have received a Jewish burial, a prospect that may well have induced remorse in a man who, from the evidence, was quite religious. The mainstream Jewish community would have shunned him completely. His worst crime may have been to resurrect the ghost of Jewish criminality. It was a sign, however, of the growing maturity and confidence of the Jewish community that they felt able to take on the Times and others for their racist accounts of the affair.

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Creators: Petra Laidlaw

 
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