While middle-class enterprise remained centred on large-scale urban shopkeeping, banking and the overseas trade, with some drift into the professions, new immigrant workers were attracted into either petty commerce or one of the small-scale industries chiefly tailoring and cabinet-making - with which they had some prior acquaintance in Eastern Europe.
In contrast to Manchester and Leeds, commerce appears to have predominated in Liverpool's new immigrant milieu. A majority of the newcomers took to some form of pedling, which underwent a marked revival in the city, to Scotch Drapery (that is, the sale of domestic textiles from house to house on a weekly-payment basis), or to itinerant glaziery, carrying panes of glass in frames strapped to their backs in search of broken windows. In the course of time, the more successful itinerant dealers, chiefly in drapery, crockery, furniture, tobacco, stationery or general domestic wares, established large city-centre shops and warehouses.
At the same time, Liverpool possessed its own small scale 'alien industrial economy' of small tailoring and cabinet-making workshops fulfilling contracts for city retailers and wholesale warehouses. Cabinet-making probably predominated, with many immigrants establishing miniature factories in their own homes. By 1890, however, there were in the city at least 56 tailoring workshops owned by Jewish masters, most of them small, cramped and shabby.
Fierce competition between workshops for contracts kept wages low and working conditions poor in a structure often summarized as 'sweating'. A twenty-seven year old immigrant who arrived in Liverpool in 1900 with minimal skills was given 5/- a week as an apprentice in a cabinet-making workshop, rising to 8/- a week after three months. A year later, classed now as a skilled worker, he was being paid 71/2d an hour.
In 1906 this same worker became secretary of the Jewish Cabinet Makers Union, which strove in adverse circumstances to maintain minimally adequate wages and which carried its disputes with intransient masters to the eve of the Second World War. Between the l890s and the First World War, union militancy spilled over into the kind of visionary Socialism propagated by the national Yiddish paper, Arbeiter Freindt (The Workers Friend). When N.I. Adler arrived in Liverpool in 1900 he found that a Jewish Young Mens' Club over Himmelfarb's tobacco shop at 147 Brownlow Hill was 'a socialist rendezvous'. Such clubs found little purchase in the largely commercial context of Liverpool's immigrant life, but they served to plant a left-wing Jewish tradition which was later to produce such figures as Sidney Silverman.
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