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There has been a substantial contraction in the size of British Jewry since the Second World War. Very little of this contraction can be ascribed to emigration. In particular, emigration to Israel has remained small; at the end of the 1950s there were less than 3,000 Jews in Israel of British birth, though by 1972, under the impetus of the spur to aliyah generated by the Six Day War (1967), the number had more than doubled, and by the end of the following decade (1983) it exceeded 13,000. The Anglo–Jewish death rate has remained high as the population has contracted. During the period 1965–9 it averaged 4,751 annually; between 1975 and 1979 the average rose to 4,874; between 1980 and 1983 it fell, slightly, to 4,761. Overall, Anglo–Jewry has failed to reproduce itself in sufficient numbers to make good this shortfall, let alone provide for a net increase in population.

Both in numbers and in economic status the Jews of London exercised the preponderating influence in ordering the affairs of British Jewry. Until the very end of the 19th century provincial Jewries were not only small in absolute numbers, but much less well endowed in terms of infrastructure and personnel. Yet it was, perhaps, for this very reason that they could sometimes be fiercely independent, resisting subordination to the capital by refusing to bestow support — and hence legitimacy — upon the institutions and initiatives which emanated from their London coreligionists.

The period which began with the crisis triggered by the publication of Lord Passfield's White Paper on Palestine (October 1930) and which ended with British recognition of the State of Israel (April 1950) posed for the British Jewish communities problems of unprecedented complexity and severity. Against the background of Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany and later Austria, and then of the unassailable truth of the Final Solution, support for Zionism acquired a grim centrality — and urgency — in Anglo–Jewish affairs which at last made possible that which had not been achieved in 1917 (the Zionist conquest of the Board of Deputies). But it was acquired in an atmosphere in which it was difficult and finally impossible to sustain the myth that Zionism accorded with the interests of Jews as British citizens and as nothing else.

The underlying theme of the communal politics of British Jewry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the tension created by the desire of the established, Anglicized ruling elites to maintain their control of communal organization and leadership, and the determination of the newer arrivals that these should ultimately fall under their sway. Oligarchy was confronted by democracy; laxity by orthodoxy; political conservatism by social radicalism; synagogal centralism by the independency of the chevrot; the numerical dominance of London by the jealous independence of provincial Jewries; the institutionalized charity of the Boards of Guardians by the communal self-help of the friendly societies. At some times the drama was played out through explicit issues, such as kashrut. At others, issues of great importance in themselves were none the less used for ulterior purposes: everyone knew what was ultimately at stake, but it suited both sides not to say so. Of these, by far the most fundamental was that of Zionism, the movement having as its goal the national self-determination of the Jewish people, expressed through the re-establishment of the Jewish State.

In an economic sense, British Jews prospered during the 1980s; they were, in truth, little affected by the economic problems which beset the manufacturing industry during Mrs Thatcher's premiership. But the economic recession of the 1990s, in which the previously secure southeast of England and the professional classes experienced unemployment and economic insecurity, seems to have had a proportionately greater impact upon Anglo–Jewry than on any other ethnic minority. Jewish business people and professionals suffered bankruptcy and redundancy on a hitherto-unknown scale, an experience which may account in part for the move of Jewish voters back to Labour — or at least away from the Conservatives — in the May 1997 general election. Jewish charities and welfare organizations, themselves now short of funds, reported increasing poverty and hardship.

The issue of political emancipation dominated the communal agenda of the Anglo–Jewish leadership during the middle years of the 19th century. There was, however, no unanimity of view as to the strategy by which it might be attained, partly because those who ordered the affairs of the community were by no means united as to the degree of priority which it should be accorded. Nor was the issue one which agitated all — or even the majority — of Jews in Britain.

The world of emancipated British Jewry was turned upside down by the waves of immigration of Jews from Russia and eastern Europe that beat upon the shores of Britain in the quarter-century following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. There was no facet of Anglo–Jewish life which was not affected by this immigration, just as there was no communal institution which could avoid responding, positively or negatively, to its imperatives. Ultimately, the State itself was compelled to take notice. The Jewish immigrants changed the shape of the British polity as surely as they changed the structure of British Jewry: the Jewish experience and the British experience merged and affected each other in a manner far more central than that offered by emancipation itself.

The dislocation which the great immigration from eastern Europe caused to the established structures of British Jewry went beyond mere numbers and extended into areas far removed from those of religious observance and ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The immigrants, whether orthodox or not in the Judaism they practised, were practically without representation in the institutional framework of British Jewry. The participation of immigrant congregations in the supervision of shechita arrangements was a matter contentious on several grounds, touching as it did upon the authority of the Chief Rabbi, the presumed autonomy of local rabbinates, and the distribution of financial resources; for the fees customarily imposed by Jewish communities in respect of the slaughter of meat and poultry and the supervision of butchers' shops constituted a major form of communal taxation, the profits derived therefrom being distributed among the participating congregations.