Late in 1938, by the prompting of its secretary, Morris Feinmann, the Home for Aged, Needy and Incurable Jews and Temporary Shelter in Cheetham Hill, decided to offer accommodation to thirty German Jewish refugees. With the purchase of a house next to its existing buildings and adjacent to the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, the Home's Board of Management believed that its facilities now made it possible to ‘undertake this humanitarian work both efficiently and economically’, that the gesture would receive the good will of the community, and that the necessary financial support would be readily raised.

This chapter seeks to take seriously the fact that the initial response in cases of hermaphroditism was not to disclose the sexual body to a physician in order to have it examined objectively. The cases of Anna Barbara Meier, Finon D. and Elisabetha Holzheid are first discussed. All of them had to reach the ages of 49, 72 and 77 respectively before their sex was physically checked by a doctor. It is shown that cases of doubtful sex often were ignored, even if the ambiguity was publicly observable. There was clearly a generally supported restraint in physically exposing a (female) body to a (male) physician. The reasons for disclosure in cases where lay people were aware of irregularities concerning someone's genitals or sexual function and (eventually) decided to consult a doctor are elaborated. Doubts about someone's sex not only involved the person concerned, but the entire community surrounding this person.

Building on the theme of imagination, this chapter further explores tensions between how the migrants had imagined their post-migration lives and their lived experiences. It questions the applicability of the concept of liminality, arguing instead that ambivalence is a more useful analytical concept for understanding the lives of the respondents. Through the examination of various sources of ambivalence in the migrants' lives — their status as intra-European migrants and their social relationships — the chapter demonstrates that migration is just one of a number of creative ways in which these people strived to resolve their feelings of ambivalence and take greater control over their lives.

The same meeting of the MJRC on 6 December 1938 to which Arthur Kershaw had been invited to outline his plans for a hostel in south Manchester was attended by another group of friends, this one led by Eli Fox, with proposals for the creation of a hostel to the north of the city. They had links to Chief Rabbi's Religious Emergency Council which was the organisational base for the ‘manifold activities’ of the ‘inspired idealist’ and maverick British orthodox rabbi, Dr Solomon Schonfeld. Whether by design or by the chance circumstances of their origins, the two hostels created came to represent the two poles of Manchester orthodox observance.

This chapter explains the historical notion of the self in relation to Herculine Barbin's autobiographic text. It specifically investigates the memoirs of Barbin in order to elaborate on the problem of the (absence of) the sexed self. The content of Barbin's writing might not have linked sex to a modern sense of self, but its form certainly opened a passageway to a more personalized understanding of sex. Barbin considered his feelings as a young man for young women to be natural. It shows Barbin's moral doubts because he felt himself to betray her environment, and moral disruption of all his previous social relations tormented his conscience. It is concluded that sex is a social, economic and moral position in Barbin's autobiographic writing. Barbin's text created the first truly ‘humanitarian narrative’ about the troubles of an ambiguous sex.

This chapter notes that, as many actors in the contemporary world, the migrants remain in a constant state of movement and change; they perform a variety of identities on a daily basis, their tastes change and adapt, and they build new relationships while maintaining old ones. The ethnography presented in this book demonstrates the complexity of the lives they lead following migration. While they had understood their move to France as heralding a new way of life, the examination of post-migration lives presented here demonstrates that, instead, the migrants had taken just one small step in realizing their imaginings. The British migrants of today are the latest in a long line of Britons who have fallen for the charms of rural France.

This chapter presents the central argument of the book,jointly written by Mark Harvey and Norman Geras. Itdevelops a systematic critique of Marx’sfoundational theory of class division andinequality, the Labour Theory of Value. It presentsan alternative, neo-Polanyian, framework foranalysing inequalities and how they are generated atdifferent times in different societies. It arguesfor a broader concept of just distribution toinclude both market and public goods.

This chapter describes the self of hermaphrodites as it appears in cases of sex reassignment following medical examinations. It introduces the historiography of sex and self. It also discusses how the selves of hermaphrodites were envisioned in German and French medical case histories. Dror Wahrman's theory is very helpful in making a distinction between different ways in which the self has been conceptualized throughout history. He shows a distinct shift in the appreciation of women playing men's roles. The self was not conceived of as a distinct entity, but presented in its connection to either the outside world or to the body. Sex is an indication of someone's proper place in society. It is a location and reassigning it uproots a person. It is noted that a reassignment of sex or an annulment of marriage deeply affected the lives of the people involved in hermaphrodite.

Of all the reversals of attitude which followed the changing international situation after March 1938, the most dramatic was that of the Manchester Yeshiva. The admission of refugees contributed to an already critical financial deficit and was accompanied by fresh campaigns against such long-term latitudinarian opponents as the Talmud Torah. The explanation lies rather in the Yeshiva's open and unapologetic defiance of financial logic, communal policy and Home Office regulations, even of what might have seemed the reasonable caution of some of its own committee men, to pursue a campaign of rescue based as much on the humanitarian dictates of Jewish orthodoxy as its more routine battles for the religious integrity of the community.

This chapter notes the need to restore a sense of balance to Manchester's role in refugee history: to assess the degree to which the people and institutions of a supposedly liberal British city like Manchester actually reached beyond everyday concerns to help the victims of European Fascism find a haven of safety. It throws questions around the view of Manchester as a ‘liberal city’. It asks what it was about those who did reach out which caused them to do so; which differentiated them from an indifferent majority. In Holocaust history, the Manchester population might have been designated ‘bystanders’ to the unfolding tragedy wished by the Nazis upon those judged to have been unworthy of membership of the Third Reich.

In taking responsibility for refugees from Czechoslovakia, the Quakers were brought into contact with political refugees, Communists and Social Democrats, brought to Britain by the Czech Refugee Trust Fund. Some of them were experienced members of the German KPD who, following the emergence of the Nazi regime, had taken refuge in Prague. Some had been sent on what turned out to be unproductive missions to Germany for just this purpose. Arriving in Britain in 1938, their political skills enabled them to re-group and to work for the rescue of their comrades still trapped in Czechoslovakia. One such group of KPD members, helped by the Quakers, found its way to Manchester, where it sought to provide their comrades with a means of escape. In doing so, they concealed their Communist identities in the hope of enlisting the support of the Quakers and of influential Manchester liberals.

This chapter covers those case histories in which the sex of self was made into a serious object of psychological-medical investigation for the first time in history. Franz Ludwig von Neugebauer's attempts to find statistical links between a person's own sense of sex and gonadal sex are reported. The chapter then argues that the sex of self appeared as a phantom limb, as the projection of the severed moral and social order of sex on to the screen of an imagined self. The difference between Heinrich Zangger's and Magnus Hirschfeld's way of making the sex of self into an object of enquiry shows a particular aspect of the crucial shift Freudian psychoanalysis entailed. The concept of the subconscious helped psychiatrists to enact a (sex of) self already detached from these. In the case of hermaphrodites, not many physicians proved to have initiated techniques necessary for mapping an interior sex of self.

This chapter gives an account of how the perspectivesof a political philosopher and an economicsociologist are brought to bear on how thecontemporary extremes of inequality are generated insociety. It explains why Marx remains a major focusof interest. It then sets the book within thecontemporary debates and approaches to inequality,both national and global. It argues that inimportant ways the latter are a regression fromMarx, whereas this book represents an attempt to gobeyond Marx, by exploring deeper and broaderanalysis of the processes generating inequalities toboth market and public goods.

This chapter explores how the migrants' imaginings of community life and local belonging shape and influence their social relationships within their new surroundings. In particular, it examines the migrants' efforts to become part of the local community and demonstrates that success in this area of their lives is by no means predictable. Becoming part of the local community, being socially integrated, is predicated unequally upon diverse factors that include linguistic capability, common interests, possibilities for social interaction and the reception of the local community. Their relationships with local French actors served as measures of the migrants' success at developing a distinctly local subjectivity, an effort that was inherent to their claims to a distinctive way of life.

This chapter discusses the mechanisms by which the migrants distinguished themselves from others — their compatriots in Spain and the Dordogne and tourists — through these processes laying claim to particular identities and ways of living. Through the recourse to stereotypes, the migrants revealed more about themselves than these others, drawing boundaries of inclusion and exclusion around an imagined community of others like them — the British of the Lot — who held in common the desire for a way of life that was uniquely available in the Lot. Furthermore, their discussions of these others focused attention on their unique understandings of a better way of life, highlighting once more the process of self-realization that lay at the core of their pursuit of this goal.