Join author Tony Kushner as he presents his new book, “The Jewish Pedlar – An Untold Criminal History”. An imaginative investigation into a historical crime that sheds new light on Jewish history.
In 1734, a man named Jacob Harris, a pedlar turned smuggler, was convicted of a brutal triple murder in a Sussex pub. Hanged and gibbeted, his crime remains the most violent ever committed by a British Jew. Yet today it is all but forgotten.
In The Jewish pedlar, Tony Kushner goes in search of the enigmatic Harris. Digging into a remarkable range of sources, from law records and newspaper reports to ballads and folktales, he follows the traces of Harris’s legend across three hundred years of British history. In doing so, he reconstructs the world of Jewish pedlars and criminals across many continents. The lives these figures eked out at the margins of society paint a picture of persistent antisemitism – but also of remarkable integration.
Intellectually bold and deeply humane, The Jewish pedlar takes a new, grassroots approach to the history of Jews in the modern world, shedding light on everyday lives from the Enlightenment to the Holocaust and beyond.
The event will also be an opportunity to learn more about the services of Jewish Historical Society of England (JHSE) and their membership scheme.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Tony Kushner is James Parkes Professor of Jewish/Non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton. He is the author of numerous books, including Journeys from the Abyss: The Holocaust and Forced Migration from the 1880s to the Present (2017) and Anglo-Jewry since 1066: Place, Memory and Locality (2009).
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