This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures.

This lecture in the series The Persistence of Faith given by Jonathan Sacks

was originally broadcast in 1990.

Religions, it said, are always dying,

but they never quite seem to die.

Faith confounds prediction.

One of our most tenacious beliefs these past two centuries has been that modern society would be the stage of religion's final last performance. Against that,

I've suggested another phenomenon, the surprising persistence of faith. It's been an unlikely and by no

mean simple story. Let's take an example. A hundred years ago, we could have walked through the

Jewish communities of London and seen a process in the making. We'd begin in the East End in White Chapel,

and we'd find ourselves deep in the atmosphere of Eastern Europe.

It's here that the Jewish immigrants arrived in the wake of the Russian pogroms of the 1880s.

It's overcrowded, bustling, noisy, poor, an ethnic ghetto full of strange accents and smells.

There are Jewish businesses everywhere, tailors and bootmakers, and every few hundred yards a little synagogue.

There's no doubt that we're in Jewish London.

A few miles to the west, in the synagogue in Duke's place,

we'd find an altogether different kind of community, Jews who'd been in England long enough

to have established themselves economically and to some extent socially as well. They've combined

their religious orthodoxy with a decidedly Victorian manner.

The men wear top hats and frock coats. The synagogue is decorous and ornate. The sermon will

quote Shakespeare rather than the Talmud and will be delivered in grandiloquent prose.

Anglo-Jews, conscious of the novelty of emancipation,

...