| Sumario: | When Yiddish writers depicted London's Jewish East End in feuilleton urban sketches in the Yiddish press, they most often described a world made up solely of the Yiddish-speaking immigrant community. However, the East End was not an isolated ghetto, and there was significant contact with the non-Jewish authorities, neighbors, and fellow workers in the streets. Indeed, non-Jewish characters appear in around 20 percent of the local feuilletons written in London between the 1880s and the 1950s. This article analyzes the breadth and position of these non-Jewish characters. It subverts Bryan Cheyette's theory of how "the Jew" appears as "other" in English literature by arguing that the non-Jew is used as a stooge in order to critique Jewish immigrant life and as a contribution to local debate. The feuilleton was a perfect genre for this task. Through an analysis of a range of feuilletons from World War I and the interwar period, this article makes visible the discussions within a small immigrant community and considers the range of words used for non-Jewish characters, focusing on the word "goy" as a pivotal means of separating Jew from non-Jew. It explores how Jews capitalize on this use when they call each other "goy" in order to underline the breadth of debate and cultural difference that existed within London's Jewish community.
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