This week’s episode of Casualty 1909 — the BBC’s medical drama set in The London Hospital 100 years ago — focuses on the Jewish patients.
Recently arrived Eastern European immigrants and more assimilated Cockney Jews muck in together in the hospital’s male “Hebrew ward”, where, separated from other patients (at their request), they can talk Yiddish, eat kosher and pray together.
They are painted as a tight-knit East End group who look out for each other. And even if they communicate by shrugging and “oy vey-ing”, here it less a cliché and more a believably authentic depiction of Jews of the period.
Into the mix is thrust the charismatic but dangerously ill Saul Landau (Aiden McArdle) — a radical who has rejected Judaism in favour of “universal justice”. The other patients, all observant Jews, are not pleased to see him. But while they mutter and kvetch, Nurse Goodley (Lydia Leonard) takes more than a professional interest in him.
