JEWS

See Also: JEWISH FOOD; PEOPLES & CULTURES; MENU

The Saxon royal palace stood near the present Guildhall. A community of wealthy Jews enjoyed its protection. Jewry Street was once known as Poor Jewry Lane, from its having been the residence of a pre-Norman settlement of impecunious Jews.

In 1275 England's Jews were ordered to leave England by Queen Eleanor, the mother of King Edward II. Those who remained were subjected to systematic persecution. Those who survived this were expelled in 1290.

By the 16^thC a small underground Sephardic Jewish community had re-established itself in England. Its members portrayed themselves as being Portuguese or of Portuguese descent. The claim to be the UK's longest established Sephardic family has been disputed by the Cansinos and the Henriqueses.

Dr Roderigo Lopez was appointed as a physician at Bartholomew's Hospital in 1568. Lopez backed the attempt of Don Antonio of to claim the Portuguese throne. The plans unwound and Lopez lost 4000. The venture put him in a bad light with Queen Elizabeth I. He sought to recoup himself by trying to ingratiate himself with the Earl of Essex. Simultaneously, he tried to insert himself into the Cecils good graces. However, the Cecils came across a letter that revealed the physician's duplicity. They had a document altered so that it seemed to indicate that Lopez was an agent of King Philip II of Spain and that he was planning to poison the queen. She almost certainly knew that the accusation had been concocted. However, ultimately, she signed his death warrant. He was executed at Tyburn.

In 1650 Oliver Cromwell formally re-admitted the Jews. In the 17^thC Duke's Place became an area of Sephardic settlement. A synagogue was built in Creechurch Lane. It became one of the sights of London. Ashkenazim Jews began to settle in Duke Place. In 1692 the Great Synagogue in Duke's Place was built for them. In 1701 the Cree Church Lane congregation moved to Bevis Marks. The building was constructed by Joseph Avis, a Quaker. He chose not to make a profit on the project.

The expansion of the British Empire prompted a greater degree of tolerance on the part of the British state. It has been claimed that to give those Jews in newly acquired formerly Spanish and French West Indian islands an interest in preserving British rule was one of the factors that led to the passage of the Jewish Naturalisation Act of 1753.¹ (Following an orchestrated popular outcry, the Act was repealed the following year. An instance of shameful ministerial backtracking.) The Board of Deputies of British Jews was set up in 1760.

The size of Britain's Jewish community peaked after the Second World War. Subsequently, it diminished through people emigrating, marrying out, or leaving the faith.

In the 1990s two-thirds of Britain's Jews were linked to a mainstream orthodox synagogue.

In 2013 about half of Britain's Jews were linked to a mainstream orthodox synagogue. The faith's Reform, Liberal, and Masorti strands had grown.

In 2013 Britain had the second-largest Jewish population in Europe and the fifth-largest in the world. It was reported that a wave of educated French Jews had been emigrating to Britain. There was a view that the country had a less than anti-Semitic culture that France had. The Anshei Shalom Synagogue, which was associated with St John's Wood Synagogue, was conducting a Sephardic service that used French. Anti-Semitism in Britain had never had the intellectual; underpinning that it did in France. There was no counterpart to the Dreyfus Affair.

Location: Old Jewry, EC2R 8DU (red, brown)

¹. Originally, the Lindos had been Sephardic Jews who had fled from the Inquisition in Portugal. The family made their way to Jamaica where they had flourished, becoming one of the island s leading families. Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, is the son of a scion of the Lindo family.

Bevis Marks Synagogue

Location: 4 Heneage Lane, EC3A 5DQ (orange, purple)

Website: www.sephardi.org.uk

The British Association for Jewish Studies

The British Association for Jewish Studies was founded in 1975.

Website: https://britishjewishstudies.org

The Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain

Website: www.jgsgb.org.uk

The Jewish Historical Society of England

Website: https://jhse.org

The Jewish Museum

The Jewish Museum was founded in 1932. For many years it occupied a single room in a set of offices in Bloomsbury. In 1988 Raymond Burton (1917-2011), whose family wealth came from the Burton clothing business, bought a house in Camden Town to act as the Museum's home. Subsequently, he helped the institution to purchase a neighbouring building that had been the George Ajello & Sons piano factory. This acquisition trebled the Museum's size.

Location: Raymond Burton House, 129-131 Albert Street, NW1 7NB

Website: https://jewishmuseum.org.uk

JW3

The Jewish Community Centre for London

Location: 341-351 Finchley Road, NW3 6ET

Website: www.jw3.org.uk

The East End

See Also: THE EAST END

The Jewish East End Celebration Society

Location: P.O. Box 57317, E1 3WG

Website: www.jeecs.org.uk

Philanthropy

The Bernhard Baron-St George's Jewish Settlement was created through the cigarette derived wealth of Bernhard Baron (1850-1929) and the efforts of Sir Basil Henriques (1890-1961).

The Brady Working Lads Club was the oldest of the Jewish Lads Clubs.

The Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings Company

In the 1880s large numbers of Russian Jews began to arrive in Britain, having been driven from their homeland by pogroms. To try to help alleviate the conditions that these immigrants found themselves in upon their arrival, Lord Rothschild (1840-1915), the first Jew to be made a peer, set up the Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings Company.

Location: Charlotte de Rothschild Dwellings, Flower & Dean Street (now Walk), E1 6QT. Demolished. (red, brown)

Mocatta House, 80 Brady Street, E1 5DL (purple, red)

Website: www.ids.org.uk

Settlement In London and Politics

The politics of the old East End Jewish communities tended to be Socialist. During the 1930s the Communist Party was at the forefront of the opposition to Oswald Mosley's fascists. In 1936 his Black Shirts tried to march through one of the East End's heavily Jewish areas. The Communists co-ordinated the local opposition to the Mosleyites that led to the Battle of Cable Street.

In 1945 Mile End was one of two constituencies nationally to elect Communists as their M.P.s. Philip Piratin, the returned member, was the son of Orthodox Jews and was at ease with his Jewish heritage.

The aerial bombing of central London and the docks acted as a stimulus for those Jews who could afford to move to the edge of the city to do so. During the course of the war a Jewish population started to develop on the city's north-western and eastern edges. Some Jews became embourgeoised by their moving from East End to the suburbs. Finchley developed a large Jewish population. The area's M.P. was Margaret Thatcher. Under her leadership, the Conservative Party went through a phase during which several Jewish politicians held senior offices of state concurrently.¹

In 1975 the Brick Lane Synagogue building became a mosque.

Location: Brick Lane Mosque, 59 Brick Lane, E1 6QL (purple, blue)

¹. Under Tony Blair's leadership, the Cabinet went through a very Scottish phase.

Jew-ish

The polymathic opera director Jonathan Miller (1934-2019) addressed the combination of his Jewish ethnic heritage with his non-belief in Judaism by describing himself as Jew-ish.

Jews and Business

The Kindertransport

In October 1938 Germany occupied Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland.

In December 1938 Nicholas Winton (1909-2015), a young stockbroker, was preparing to go skiing. He was a Christian who had Jewish forebears. His friend Martin Blake told him that he was needed in Czechoslovakia. In Prague, he met a number of Jewish families who had already fled Germany and Austria. They were living in desperate conditions. Upon returning to London, he set about dealing with the authorities to enabled Jewish children to be extracted from the country.

Between March and August 1939 669 children were extracted on eight separate trains. In September a further 251 boarded a train. However, that day war broke out and the country's boarders were sealed. The Nazis intercepted the train and extracted the children from it. Most of them were to be murdered. The matter haunted Winton for decades.

In 1988 Winton attended an edition of the consumer-focussed magazine television show That s Life. During it, Esther Rantzen, the principal presenter, said to the audience anybody who owes their life to Nicky Winton, please stand up. The whole audience did so. They were the children of people who had been on the trains

In 2010 the film producers Iain Canning and Emile Sherman met Winton in order to ask whether they could make a movie about the Kindertransport. He stated to them that those who knew about it already knew.

In 2002 Winton was knighted.

The movie One Life, which about the Kindertransport, was released in 2023.

Location: The Kindertransport Memorial, Liverpool Street Railway Station, Liverpool Street, EC2M 7PY

See Also: CHILD WELFARE

Website: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/kindertransport

Masorti

In 1956 Dr Louis Jacobs (n Laible Jacobs) (1920-2006), the rabbi of New West End Synagogue in St Petersburgh Place Bayswater, published the book We Have Reason To Believe. In this he asserted that the Five Books of Moses that make up The Tioral were the work of several authors, a view that was in accord with Biblical scholarship. In 1962 Jacobs was about to be appointed the principal of Jews College, which was regarded as a stepping stone to the chief rabbinate. At that point, Chief Rabbi Israel Brodie, in response to an ultra-orthodox faction on the Beth Din, who disagreed with Dr Jacob's scholarship, barred the rabbi from officiating in United Synagogue synagogues. Older established families, such as the Mocattas and the Montagus, tended to support Jacobs, whereas more recent arrivals, such as Sir Isaac Wolfson Bt., opposed him. A number of Jacobs's Bayswater congregation bought a building on Abbey Road, St John s Wood, that the United Synagogues had just vacated and established the New London Synagogue, of which Jabobs became the rabbi. This became the kernel around which the Masorti movement sprang up.

The Assembly of Masorti Synagogues

Location: Alexander House, 3 Shakespeare Road, Finchley, N3 1XE

Website: https://masorti.org.uk

Transient Emigration

Abe Saperstein, the founder of the Haarlem Globe Trotters, was born in George Street.

In 1944 the television broadcaster Jerry Springer was born in Highgate Underground Station during an aircraft raid.

Location: Highgate Underground Station, Archway Road, N6 5UA

Lolesworth Close, E1 6LN (red, blue)

David Backhouse 2024