Therefore it came as a great surprise to him to find that what he had always taken for granted was no longer the case in New York. Being a Jew was none, or very few, of the mystical things he'd always supposed it to be, nor was it any longer the secret satisfaction, despite the eternal suffering of the Jews, to be gained from being one of the chosen people.

The New York Jews neglected the Sabbath and many of them were now taking their rest on Sundays without the slightest show of guilt. The lighting of Sabbath candles and the singing of the Sabbath song was seldom practised. Secular learning of a pragmatic nature was regarded as more important than the study of the Torah. Moreover, philosophical thinking, based on the precepts of freedom and emancipation, was being given precedence over rabbinical discussion. The rebbe was not the centre of the universe nor did he settle all the arguments on behalf of Jehovah. The new Bnai Jeshurun synagogue on Elm Street contained only a handful of worshippers on any given Sabbath morning.

However, if the loss of the rituals and strictures of orthodoxy defined the American Jews, it did not lead to a corresponding loss of ideals, moral misconduct and social irresponsibility. In all this secular speculation, they had not given up a belief in Jehovah or the responsibility of God's chosen people to behave in a moral and honest way. Instead they rejected meaningless ritual and accepted natural goodness as the central tenet of their faith.

To be a good Jew meant to be a good man. What all this amounted to was that Ikey could no longer hide behind his observance of Jewish ritual while continuing to behave in an altogether reprehensible manner. While he had determined to turn over a new leaf in America, this realisation nevertheless came as a profound shock to him.

Ikey was also astonished to find that New York had few poor Jews and that the Jewish community lived openly in the mid-town area spread on both sides of Broadway. New York contained only five hundred Jewish families. Most were American-born and had formed into a community over the past one hundred and fifty years. There was none of the frantic struggle to gain a foothold in a new society or the clash of contradictory cultures between the immigrant and native-born children. The Jews of New York were an established, sober, moral and well-integrated minority population, most of whom had been in America before the War of Independence. They all seemed to know or be on nodding terms with each other, and had excellent business and social relations with their gentile neighbours.

Ikey had timed his arrival badly, for if he had landed in New York ten years later he would have found some forty thousand European Jews in New York, and their numbers would continue to grow hugely for the remainder of the century. The dreadful slums, starvation, poverty and crime of the Lower East Side would come to exist as poor Jewish immigrants came to Goldeneh medina, 'The Golden country'. Alas, in Yiddish Goldeneh medina had a second meaning and was the name also given to a 'fool's paradise', a false gold, bright but worthless.

In this fool's paradise Ikey would have been completely at home. But he was totally at odds with the calm and ordered society he now found himself in, despite his determination to lead a sober and respectable life. Ikey's notoriety had not escaped the notice of the Jews of New York and the tight-knit community immediately closed ranks against him. England's most notorious Jewish criminal was not given a warm welcome. Ikey, despite his apparent wealth and appropriate philanthropy, found himself largely ostracised by his own kind.

Even those contacts to whom he had previously shipped stolen watches and silver objects had conveniently come to see these consignments as having been legitimised by the fact of arriving on American soil. They saw themselves as moral men, albeit practical, who had asked no questions of the origin of the merchandise and so heard no lies, their guilt assuaged.

But while they chose to believe that the stolen merchandise Ikey had sent them had somehow been 'washed' in the Atlantic crossing and thus transformed into honest goods, they were unwilling to accept that, by the act of the same crossing, Ikey had converted from being a criminal to an honest man. They felt morally obliged not to encourage a notorious criminal to establish himself in business in their own city or neighbourhood.

They would not recommend Ikey to wholesalers or to jewellery craftsmen, the greatest majority of whom were Jewish. Diamond merchants would not trade with him and the gold and silversmiths found themselves regrettably short of supplies or lamented that their consignment books were filled with orders beyond their expectations to complete. Despite his offer to pay them in cash, even in gold, their doors were closed to him. The few goods Ikey managed to assemble he sold only to gentiles. His poor selection, together with the used nature of his merchandise, attracted little attention and earned him a reputation not much beyond that of an enterprising pawnbroker.

The only respect Ikey commanded was from the First Manhattan Bank of New York where the manager, wreathed in unctuous smiles, would come out of his office to greet him personally. On the Sabbath, Ikey sat, a stranger in a strange land, alone in the bright new synagogue on Elm Street. The psalms the cantor sung were old, but the feeling of complete and abject loneliness was new.

Ikey had always thought of himself as a loner, a solitary soul who kept his own counsel. In his own eyes, but for his money, he was a worthless person. But now he began to realise that he had lost the human infrastructure, the supporting cast of thieves and shofulmen, card sharps, pimps, whores, actors, street urchins, his Academy of Light Fingers. How he missed the coarse company around a ratting circle, the hustle of Rosemary Lane, the rank humanity of the poor and hopeless, the tinsel and despair of the West End, the pickpockets and swells, beggars and noblemen who made up the street community of his native London.

America was proving completely alien to his past, his talents and to his very demeanour. Ikey's fortune and life had been developed on the mean dark streets and in the chop houses, taverns and thief dens of the grandest and most woebegone city on earth. He was by nature a creature of the night, wrapped in his familiar coat of secret pockets and accustomed to skulking within the dark shadow cast by a flat-topped, wide-brimmed hat.

Now all that had been forsaken for shopkeeping in daylight on Broadway, dressed in a suit of good American broadcloth which constantly scratched and itched. Ikey was a deeply unhappy man, but one determined to redeem himself in the eyes of his fellow Jews in his new country. Ikey was in search of personal redemption, but first he had to save himself from himself. He must separate from Hannah without losing the fortune contained in the Whitechapel safe. Four months after arriving in New York, he sat down to write to his wife in London.

My dear Wife,

America has proved a most pleasant place and the prospects for the advancement of our ambition is most encouraging. With the early summer come to us, at last the climate is most salubrious. You will take kindly to the air and space and the houses are of a solid brown stone and well proportioned. There is a spacious central park with room enough for children to play to their hearts content in safety. It is as though they should find themselves in some country dell. I have opened a jewellery establishment with excellent fittings on Broadway, a location which shows the promise of good trading if goods to the liking of the population can be offered at a price to be afforded. The craftsmen here are not of a sufficient standard to be desired, or of the same quality to be found in London, there being a notable shortage of finely made fashionable jewellery, the Americans being behind in what is of the latest mode in London and Paris. There is here also a great shortage of good watches of the medium quality variety and I beseech you to obtain quantities of the same. I have reason enough to believe I can turn these to good account, though I charge you to send me none but 'righteous' watches and not to touch even one what has been gained 'on the cross'. I shall require these to be of an assortment of nickel plate, sterling silver and gold. I believe these will here obtain up to six times the price of the watches purchased by you on the straight. My greetings to your children.