Bizarrely, this worked rather well. Britain accepted its newcomers, the first non-Christians since the Vikings. Not without resistance or racism. This was not a love match. There were Aliens Acts and vicious editorials and occasional riots. But ultimately the Jews were accepted. In time, they were admitted into Oxbridge, the House of Commons, the aristocracy, even the Bullingdon Club. A man called D’Israeli became Queen Victoria’s favourite prime minister. The major influx of the 1880s, tens of thousands of poor, Yiddish-speaking, gefilte-fish eating foreigners, was a stern test of whether this hitherto white Christian nation could stomach ethnic difference without...