Victorian poetry and religious diversityobserves, were "anti-Irish immigrant prejudice, traditional doubts about
the compatibility of loyalty and Catholicism, the vitality of converts and
the unfamiliarity of their devotional life, and the internal disarray of
English Protestantism." 8 Nevertheless, despite a prejudice against "Popery"
in Anglican culture, Roman Catholicism "achieved the status of principal
religious alternative to the established church." 9
In the national debates about Jewish identity, the question that was
repeatedly asked focused on whether Jews could be full citizens in an
explicitly Christian nation. The Anglo-Jewish community had also grown
significantly since readmission under Cromwell. In 1800, the Jewish
population was estimated at 25,000, growing to 35,000 in 1850, and
expanding to 60,000 by 1880 (the latter increase mostly coming from
immigration from Eastern Europe). Indeed, these late-century immigrants
had an important effect in changing certain aspects of Anglo-Jewry. The
earliest generations of Jewish people to resettle in England in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries had been Sephardic Jews who traced their
roots to Portugal and Spain. It was primarily these earlier Sephardic
families who also emerged in the nineteenth century as highly successful in
English economic, political, and social life, as the history of families such as
the Montefiores and the Disraelis demonstrated. Despite the fact that he
was baptized in the Anglican Church as a child, Benjamin Disraeli was
constantly referred to as the "Hebrew premier" and contributed greatly to
the general population's awareness of Jewish identity in the nation. While
the Sephardic community grew in cultural authority and economic prestige,
later waves of immigrants in the latter part of the nineteenth century came
from primarily from poorer Ashkenazi (Eastern European) backgrounds
and were often associated, in the dominant English cultural consciousness,
with poverty, crime, and disease. Israel Zangwill's novel Children of the
Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People (1892) offers a unique glimpse into
the distinctions between the lives of the Ashkenazic and Sephardic commu-
nities and cultures of late-nineteenth-century London. 10
It was not only non-Anglican groups and institutions that underwent
change in the nineteenth century. The Anglican Church itself was also
deeply influenced by the broad spectrum of religious life in Victorian
England. By the mid-century three different brands of Anglicanism - Broad
(or Liberal); High (Anglo-Catholic); and Low (Evangelical) - had emerged
as distinct groups within the Church of England. High Church Angli-
canism, often termed Anglo-Catholicism, maintained the most complex
rituals and adherence to Church hierarchy. Supported by the Oxford
Movement - an influential group of clerics and scholars who from 1833
onward argued that the Anglican Church, rather than Roman Catholic
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