Leeds and its Jewish community

A history

Derek Fraser

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526123114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia británica

The book provides a comprehensive history of the third-largest Jewish community in Britain and fills an acknowledged gap in both Jewish and urban historiography. Bringing together the latest research and building on earlier local studies, the book provides an analysis of the special features which shaped the community in Leeds. Organised in three sections, Context, Chronology and Contours, the book demonstrates how Jews have influenced the city and how the city has influenced the community. A small community was transformed by the late Victorian influx of poor migrants from the Russian Empire and within two generations had become successfully integrated into the city's social and economic structure. More than a dozen authors contribute to this definitive history and the editor provides both an introductory and concluding overview which brings the story up to the present day. The book will be of interest to both historians and general readers.

Part I

The context

1

National: Jews in Britain – a historical overview

Geoffrey Alderman

Although it is possible that Jews – merchants, perhaps, purchasing Cornish tin – visited the British Isles before the eleventh century, there was no settled Jewish community in Britain until after the Norman Conquest. Following his victory at Hastings in 1066, Duke William of Normandy, anxious to establish strong financial and economic ties between his existing French territories and his newly-acquired English domains, invited and encouraged Jewish businessmen and their families then living in Rouen to cross the Channel and relocate themselves in England.

These were indeed ‘the king’s Jews’. That is to say, as the only residents of Norman England legally entitled to lend money upon interest, they enjoyed the full protection of the Crown, to which they could appeal if a debtor defaulted on her or his loan repayment. Repayment of the debts owed to them was in fact guaranteed by the Crown, which levied a fee per loan. A special department of government – the Exchequer of the Jews – was established for this purpose. In practice, it acted as a Ministry of Jewish Affairs.

But this royal protection was both a blessing and a curse. As the Jews of York were to discover in 1190, in troubled economic times those in debt to them did not take kindly to having the debts enforced by the king’s officers: extensive rioting, encouraged by a number of such individuals, resulted in virtually all of York’s 150 or so Jews being massacred ‘without [so recorded the chronicler William of Newburgh] any scruple of Christian conscientiousness’.

Although the Jews of medieval England (never numbering more than 5,000 souls) had originally settled in London, within a century they had established communities in most of England’s large towns, including York, Lincoln, Northampton, Winchester, Gloucester, Bristol, Norwich and Oxford. There were certainly periods of relative tranquillity when the Jews prospered and even enjoyed cordial relations with their Christian hosts. The reign of Henry II (1133–89) is in this respect regarded as a ‘golden age’. But with the spread of the Blood Libel (which originated in Norwich in 1144), and the deterioration of law and order during the reigns of Richard I (1189–99) and his brother John (1199–1216), the position of the Jews became ever more precarious. During the reign of Henry III (1216–72), the impoverished crown engaged in systematic spoliation of Jewish wealth, a policy which was enforced with even greater rigour by his son and successor Edward I. In desperation, some Jews undoubtedly engaged in coin-clipping: hundreds of Jews were consequently hanged. In 1290, in return for a parliamentary grant of £100,000, Edward bowed to popular demand and expelled England’s remaining Jews to Northern France.

Jews were not permitted to re-enter England until some 360 years later. But it is certain that early modern England was never entirely ‘Jew-free’. To begin with, Jews who agreed (however insincerely) to convert to Catholicism were spared the 1290 decree. Following the expulsion of Jews from Spain (1492), and the increasing hostility between Catholic Spain and Protestant England in the late sixteenth century, individual Jews travelled to and settled in England, often presenting themselves simply as refugees from Spanish and/or Catholic persecution. In 1581, a Bohemian mining engineer then living in Bristol, Joachim Ganz, admitted in public that he was Jewish. In the 1630s, there was certainly a small community of mainly Portuguese Jews living quite openly in that great port city; although nominally Christian they appear to have been leading a way of life that was recognisably Jewish. And by mid-century, a community of Jews was living quietly, but again relatively openly, in London.

The rise of Puritanism had certainly acted as a catalyst in this process of toleration. Puritans were not necessarily friendly to Jews. But the Puritan ethic was marked by a desire to understand – and even imitate – the ways of the Hebrews. In the 1650s, following the execution of King Charles I and the installation of a military dictatorship led by the Puritan commander Oliver Cromwell, the political climate became distinctly philosemitic. The Puritans who had abolished the monarchy had a great deal of sympathy with all things Jewish. Puritan divines read the ‘Old Testament’ in Hebrew. Some even circumcised themselves.

Cromwell agreed to consider a petition from the Amsterdam Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel that Jews be permitted to dwell once more in England. The precise circumstances surrounding this petition are unclear. Manasseh played on the Puritan conviction that the appearance or reappearance of the Messiah was at hand, but that this would not happen until Jews lived in England once more. But in the event, it was not Manasseh’s petition that was granted in 1656, but that of seven Marranos [crypto-Jews who had secretly practised their religion in post-expulsion Spain and Portugal, but who had later relocated in the Spanish Netherlands] already living in London. Furious with Manasseh for having poked his unwelcome nose into their business, they argued simply for the right of private worship for Jews already settled here, and for permission to purchase land for a cemetery outside the limits of the City of London. The last thing they wanted was the right of Jews to enter the country as they pleased. And they certainly did not relish the unwelcome publicity to which Manasseh’s melodramatic initiative had given rise.

In the debates that ensued within and beyond the Council of State a great deal was said about the role that Jews might play in the economic development of the country. But the truth probably was that Cromwell and his Puritan allies hoped that by inviting the Jews to live in England they might be all the more easily converted to Christianity. There were clearly sharp differences of opinion within the Council of State. The actual page which – it is said – recorded the decision to readmit the Jews was torn out of the Minute Book and does not survive. Perhaps there was no such decision. There was certainly no Act of Parliament, or even a public proclamation.

The community of the Cromwellian Resettlement was a Sephardic community. Many of the Jews who took advantage of Cromwell’s generosity were Marranos and were, on the whole, well-to-do merchants and tradesmen. They lived in a very small area of the City of London, establishing a synagogue which was rebuilt in 1701 in a courtyard in the City known as Bevis Marks. This synagogue, a replica of the Great Synagogue in Amsterdam, is still standing and in regular use – the oldest surviving synagogue in Britain.

Cromwell died in 1658. Two years later the English monarchy was restored. For a moment it was unclear whether the Jews of the Resettlement would be permitted to remain in the country. But the tolerant outlook of Charles II seems to have protected them from the ambitions of those who hoped to expel them once more. The famous Restoration diarist and gossip Samuel Pepys recorded a visit to Bevis Marks on Simchat Torah [‘Rejoicing of the Law’]: he compared the noisy service to a mad-house. Clearly the Jews practised their religion openly and without hindrance.

In time, the Sephardim were joined by Ashkenazic, Yiddish-speaking Jews from Germany – wealthy merchants, jewellers and craftsmen. Soon, Ashkenazim outnumbered Sephardim, a situation which intensified during the early Hanoverian years. Several large and imposing Ashkenazic synagogues were built in the City of London, which by the mid-eighteenth century also boasted a number of smaller houses of worship – shtiebls – established by less wealthy Jews of German and, significantly, Polish origin.

During the course of the century, large numbers of Polish Jews settled in England – small tradesmen and itinerant peddlers. Jewish communities began to thrive in the large provincial towns, such as Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, as well as in Scotland (Glasgow and Edinburgh) and Wales (Cardiff and Swansea). Most of these congregations were too small to afford to appoint a full-time rabbi. Instead, they looked to the rabbi of the oldest Ashkenazic synagogue in England, the Great Synagogue (also in the City of London), as their religious leader. And successive rabbis of the Great Synagogue came to be regarded as the ‘chief rabbis’ of the German and Polish Jews of Britain.

The community of Spanish and Portuguese Jews languished. At the beginning of the eighteenth century there were some 2,000 Spanish and Portuguese Jews in England. The number had not grown significantly by the end of the century. The major reasons for this state of affairs were inter-marriage and assimilation. One the one hand this demonstrates how well these Jews socialised with the host society. Wealthy Sephardim seem to have mingled easily with the social and political elites of Hanoverian England; a good number married their daughters into the English landed aristocracy. Several Sephardi converts to Christianity became Members of Parliament.

On the other hand, we should not underestimate the intensity of populist Judeophobia or the ease with which it could be exploited by unscrupulous politicians of the period. In 1753, the government of George II agreed to sponsor legislation to make it easier for foreign-born Jews to become naturalised British citizens. This concession was a sort of ‘thank you’ for the financial support which Jews had given to the government a few years earlier, during the attempt by the Jacobite pretender to the throne – ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ – to invade England and oust the Hanoverians (1745). No sooner had the legislation been passed than a vicious agitation was whipped up against it by opposition politicians. In 1754, following these ‘Jew Bill’ riots, the Act was quickly repealed.

The need for concerted action on occasions such as these led the two communities, or ‘nations’ as they called themselves – the Spanish and Portuguese Jews and the German and Polish congregations – to consider ways in which they might cooperate, even though on a day-to-day basis they had little to do with each other. In 1760, their leaders agreed to form a ‘London Committee of Deputies of British Jews’, so called because each participating congregation elected representatives (‘Deputies’) to it. Meeting infrequently at first, the Board of Deputies (as it was subsequently known) had by the early nineteenth century come to be regarded as the official representative body of British Jewry, and its President as the acknowledged lay leader of the Jewish communities of the British Isles.

The period of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars marked a watershed in the history of British Jewry. Further immigration of foreign-born Jews to Britain all but ceased. In the turmoil of war – and in the midst of the Industrial Revolution – there was a great deal of popular xenophobia. At the same time Jewish financiers entered into lucrative partnerships with the government, being especially helpful in financing the war effort. When the army of the Duke of Wellington needed to be paid in gold, in Spain, the only banking house in London that could guarantee to facilitate such payments was the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• List of Hebrew/Yiddish terms used in the text
• Introduction
• Part I The context
• Part II The chronology
• Part III The contours of the Leeds Jewish community
• Index