87

This article traces the fortunes of the family of the German political refugee Rudolf Rocker, the Russian-Jewish migrant Milly Witkop, and their sons during the two decades in which they lived in Britain. The family is a striking example of the cosmopolitan possibilities available in fin-de-siècle London and underpinned by Victorian Britain’s largely unrestricted “right of asylum”. From 1898 to 1914, the family became a staple of the East End’s Jewish anarchist community, together running two newspapers, founding a social and educational club, and engaging in trade union organization, all while maintaining links with the anarchists of all nationalities largely located in the West End’s Soho and Fitzrovia. Pulled apart by the First World War, the individual members of the family were successively ensnared by the restrictions on “aliens” issued by Britain’s wartime government, which affected them differently according to their age, gender, and national origins. Deported in 1918-19 and settling in Weimar Germany, the family were among thousands forced from Britain as a politics of xenophobia overtook the country, capped off by the onerous 1919 Aliens Act. The Rocker-Witkop family’s history was therefore intertwined with, and provides a microcosm of, the closing of the asylum available to foreign nationals through most of the nineteenth century and the birth of the restrictionism more characteristic of the twentieth and twenty-first.