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British Jewry's Family Newspaper:
A Century of the “Jewish Chronicle”
- Abstract
THE JEWISH CHRONICLE of London has published a centenary history of itself, celebrating its continuous publication since 1841. One senses in reading it not only a quiet satisfaction at the fact that, as it says, “no other Jewish periodical has celebrated its centenary,” but also a feeling that to achieve a dignified age in this way is somehow a very British kind of thing to have done, giving the paper a pleasant fellowship with the other British periodicals that have, in the cricket phrase, “scored a century.” Punch, for example, is an exact twin. The London News-Chronicle, five years younger, makes up for it through the fact that the first editor of its constituent Daily News was Charles Dickens. The Economist is but two years younger than the Jewish Chronicle, but had some mighty names to conjure with in its centenary volume, not least that of Walter Bagehot. A number of provincial papers have also passed the hundred-years mark. The Manchester Guardian, noblest of them all, is one hundred and twenty-nine years old as a continuous publication, though only ninety years old as a daily. It preferred to tell its history, when the time came, as the life of its great editor, C. P. Scott, who was in charge of the paper for the amazing period of fifty-eight years. All the big papers are, of course, junior to the Times, which appropriately took three solemn volumes to celebrate its 150th birthday in 1935. And the Times itself is a baby to the Spectator, founded in 1711 and still endeavoring to reflect in form and spirit the elegance of Addison and Steele.
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