There it hangs in the Jewish Museum, the proud banner of the Jewish Bakers’ Union. It shows two bakers shaking hands by their feet lies an ear of wheat, and a tinned loaf.

Why, you might ask, was there a separate Jewish union?

The Jewish bakers were among the Ashkenazi Jews who came to Whitechapel in the early 1880s in flight from pogroms. They settled in and opened the kinds of businesses they had owned in the Russian Pale, including bakeries.

Except they baked to a different timetable; Jewish bakers opened on Sundays, when other bakeries were shut. They needed their own union to defend them against the rage of gentile bakers.

And they survived. Jewish bread became a part of the London food world, culminating in the Brick Lane Bagel Bakery, beloved by clubbers to this day.

The story of Jewish food in England is a story of conflict and resolution. Sometimes, the conflicts have a body count.

The fact that the meat of England is pork, not beef, is bad news. Pig giving and sharing were especially important to the poor. If the Jews refused to eat delicious pig and tasty bacon, then what did they want?

The blood libel answer — that Jews sacrificed and ate Christian children — was one of England’s “gifts” to the world.

In 1190, tensions came to a boil in York on the Sabbath before Passover, which for urban Jews may have involved trading with the Christian community, and thus inadvertently reminding them of their difference.

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Threats of violence made the Jewish community in York ask for refuge in Clifford’s Tower. At once, the tower was besieged by a mob, demanding their conversion.

Rather than convert, the father of each Jewish family killed his wife and children, and then their rabbi stabbed them before killing himself. A handful who had not killed themselves surrendered only to be murdered.

Other peoples are what they eat, but the Jews are what they don’t eat to the Christian world.

There might be a worrying trace of antisemitism in the repugnance aroused by foie gras, which animal rights groups frequently seek to ban.

The first post-Roman foie gras was produced by the Jewish community, but Jews were also among the first to debate the morality of its production; the Rhineland Ashkenazi Jews of the 11th century debated the morality of force-feeding in a Talmudic commentary.

Yet Jewish suppliers were still the major source for top-quality foie gras as late as the 16th century, when Bartolomeo Scappi praised “the liver of the domestic goose raised by the Jews” in his 1570 recipe book.

Not surprisingly, foie gras was banned by Nazi Germany in November 1933. Foie gras — as its name suggests — has never really been assimilated into English food culture.

By contrast, if England has a national dish, it’s fish and chips, and yet it isn’t English at all but the product of immigrant communities.

The exact origin of fish and chips is disputed, and it is not clear which part of the country or which individuals deserve the credit for bringing chips together with fried fish.

We do know, however, that fried fish was street food for the Jewish communities of London, both Sephardi and Ashkenazi, and they joined forces to create a particular way of frying fish in batter, learned from the Portuguese Marranos, who came to England as refugees in the 16th century.

The fish was drenched in flour, dipped in egg and breadcrumbs and fried in olive oil. There is a reference to a fried fish warehouse in Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist, at the beginning of Victoria’s reign.

The fish was eaten cold, Jewish-style. Henry Mayhew claims there were more than 300 fish-frying street sellers in the middle of the 19th century, and they congregated in the streets around the Inns of Court and the Borough district near London Bridge.

Fish and chips made eating food cooked outside the home completely normal.

It came to be almost ubiquitous as the food of the urban poor. Its survival as one of our favourite national foods is an example of how English food culture can ultimately devour and delight in the food culture brought to England from beyond our shores.

‘English Food: A Social History of England Told Through the Food on Its Tables’ by Diane Purkiss is published by William Collins (£25)