About Jewishness

The first written records of Jewish settlement in England date from the time of the Norman Conquest, mentioning Jews who arrived with William the Conqueror in 1066 although it is believed that there were Jews present in Great Britain since Roman times. The Jewish population lived in England from the Norman Conquest until they were expelled in 1290 by a decree of King Edward I.
After the failed experiments in legislation which Edward I made from 1269 onward, there was only one option left: If the Jews were not to have intercourse with their fellow citizens as artisans, merchants, or farmers, and were not to be allowed to take interest, the only alternative was for them to leave the country. He immediately expelled the Jews from Gascony, a province still held by England and in which he was traveling at the time; and on his return to England (July 18, 1290) he issued writs to the sheriffs of all the English counties ordering them to enforce a decree to the effect that all Jews should leave England before All Saints' Day of that year. They were allowed to carry their portable property; but their houses escheated to the king, except in the case of a few favoured persons who were allowed to sell theirs before they left. Between 4,000 and 16,000 Jews were expelled. They emigrated to countries such as Poland that protected them by law.
Between the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 and their formal return in 1655 there is no official trace of Jews as such on English soil except in connection with the Domus Conversorum, which kept a number of them within its precincts up to 1551 and even later.
In order to rearrange the national finances, Italians who had no religious difficulties were substituted for the Jews. Certain Jews, it is known, from time to time returned to London disguised as Italians, but it was not until the time of the Commonwealth, when Cromwell took a more tolerant view of the outcast Jews, and when the State recognised the legality of difference of creed, that the return of the Jews became possible. This event is fixed with some precision by the lease of the Spanish and Portuguese burial-ground at Stepney, which bears the date of February, 1657.
England had no official Jewish presence, save for isolated individuals who practiced Judaism secretly, until the reign of Oliver Cromwell. While Cromwell never officially readmitted Jews to Britain, the small colony of living in London was unmasked in 1656, and, because of Cromwell's need of their financial assistance, they were allowed to stay. While the Jewish community in Britain remained comparatively small until the late nineteenth century, there had long been efforts to integrate Jews into British life legally.
The Jewish Naturalisation Act of 1753 was in force for only a few months and would not have allowed for the naturalization of many, save a few wealthy businessmen. Historians commonly date Jewish Emancipation to 1858 when Jews were finally allowed to sit in Parliament though a few other minor pieces of legislation continued into the 1890s.
With Catholic Emancipation in 1829, the hopes of the Jews rose high; and the first step toward a similar alleviation in their case was taken in 1830 when William Huskisson presented a petition signed by 2,000 merchants and others of Liverpool. This was immediately followed by a bill presented by R. Grant on April 15 of that year which was destined to engage the Parliament in one form or another for the next thirty years.
In 1837, Queen Victoria knighted Moses Haim Montefiore; four years later, Isaac Lyon Goldsmid was made baronet, the first Jew to receive a hereditary title. The first Jewish Lord Mayor of London, Sir David Salomons, was elected in 1855, followed by the 1858 emancipation of the Jews. On July 26, 1858, Lionel de Rothschild was finally allowed to sit in the British House of Commons when the law restricting the oath of office to Christians was changed; Benjamin Disraeli, a baptised Christian of Jewish parentage, was already an MP.

Benjamin Disraeli

In 1868, Disraeli became Prime Minister having earlier been Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1884 became the first Jewish member of the British House of Lords; again Disraeli was already a member. (Though born a Jew, Disraeli's baptism as a child qualified him as eligible for political aspirations, presenting no restrictions regarding a mandated Christian oath of office.)
Native and immigrant Jews agreed that education was central to Jewish identity, but possessed conflicting ideas as to the kind of Jewish life it was meant to sustain. In the first half of the nineteenth century the Anglo-Jewish elite had developed an extensive Jewish school system primarily to improve the character of their poorer co-religionists and transform them into disciplined, self-reliant and useful members of society equipped with the marketable skills that would enable them to quit the street trades and secure wholesome employment as industrious artizans. The best known of their initiatives, the Jew's Free School in Bell Lane, London, was founded by Joshua Van Oven in 1817. At its peak it had 3,000 pupils and was the largest elementary school in the world. Similar, if less renowned, Jewish day schools were established in the early 1840s in Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester.

Anglo-Jewry was increasingly middle class both in occupation and outlook. To the acculturated bourgeois who constituted the mainstay of the congregation, comparisons with the Church and its clergy appeared odious and demeaning. Ashkenazic prayer, by comparison with Christian worship, seemed ill-disciplined and incomprehensible. Long before the mass immigration of the 1880s, steps had been taken to beautify synagogue worship, curb congregational excess and generally render it more acceptable to an Anglican audience. The newcomers from Eastern Europe, accustomed to non-uniformed rabbis and teachers, were startled by the Anglicisation of the Jewish ministry. Native Jewry itself began to wonder whether the transformation of the rabbinical role had gone too far.
Equally shocking was the low level of Yiddishkeit to be found among English Jews.

Due to the lack of anti-Jewish violence in Britain in the nineteenth century, it acquired a reputation for religious tolerance.
From the 1880s through the early part of the 20th century, massive pogroms and the May Laws in Russia caused many Jews to flee the Pale of Settlement. By 1919, the Jewish population had increased from 60,000 in 1880 to about 250,000 Jews, who lived primarily in the large cities, especially London. Originally, the Jews lived primarily in the Spitalfields and Whitechapel areas, which made the East End a Jewish neighbourhood. Manchester, and neighbouring Salford, were also areas of heavy Jewish settlement—especially in the Strangeways, Cheetham and Broughton districts. Unlike much of the Jewish community in Poland, the Jewish community in England generally embraced assimilation into wider English culture. They started Yiddish and Hebrew newspapers and youth movements such as the Jewish Lads' Brigade.

Photo: Poor Jews Temporary Shelter in Leman Street, London

Chuts is the name applied to Jews who immigrated to London from The Netherlands during the latter part of the 19th century. They typically came from Amsterdam and practised trades they had already learned there, most notably cigar, cap and slipper making.
They settled mostly in a small system of streets in Spitalfields known as the Tenterground, formerly an enclosed area where Flemish weavers stretched and dried cloth on machines called tenters (hence the expression "on tenterhooks"). By the 19th century, the site had been built upon with housing, but remained an enclave where the Dutch immigrants lived as a close-knit and generally separate community. Demolished and rebuilt during the twentieth century, the area is now bounded by White's Row, Wentworth Street, Bell Lane and Toynbee Street (formerly Shepherd Street).
Following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II of Russia in 1881, many thousands of Jewish refugees, fleeing political unrest in Eastern Europe, arrived in the East End of London, including the Tenterground, by which time the Chuts had begun to disperse. Significantly, the successful introduction of machinery for the mass-production of cigarettes ultimately led to the collapse of the cigar-making economy on which the Chuts community depended. Many Chuts returned to improved conditions in Amsterdam, some emigrated further afield to places such as Australia and the USA, some assimilated into other Jewish families, and some eventually lost their Jewish identity altogether.
There was distinct rivalry between the Chuts and the later Jewish immigrants, not least because the Chuts had arrived as city-dwellers, with useful industrial skills, and by 1881 had already learned to speak English, whereas the later immigrants were generally impoverished rural workers who had to learn new trades in the notorious sweatshops and, arriving penniless and in great numbers, drew attention to the problem of immigration which resulted in the Aliens Act of 1905.
Furthermore, the Chuts were treated with suspicion by other Jews because the former had developed specific customs and practices, many of their families having lived in Amsterdam since the first synagogues were established there in the early years of the 17th century. Uniquely in Amsterdam, Ashkenazim (so-called "German Jews") and Sephardim (so-called "Spanish Jews") lived in close proximity for centuries, resulting in a cultural blend not found elsewhere. Most remarkably, the Dutch Jews were well accustomed to the sea, and ate seafoods considered not kosher by other Jewish communities.

Jewish East London, Spitalfield area at the beginning of the 20th century. The Jewish areas are in blue.

Immigration was eventually restricted by the Aliens Act 1905, following pressure from groups such as the British Brothers League.
About 50,000 Jews served in the British Armed Forces during World War I, and around 10,000 died on the battlefield, while Britain's first all-Jewish regiment, the Jewish Legion fought in Palestine. An important consequence of the war was the British conquest of the Palestinian Mandate, and the Balfour Declaration promising the area to a new Jewish nation.

The introduction of compulsory military service at the beginning of 1916 made the position of Jewish immigrants untenable. Increasingly the "foreign Jew" was presented as a parasite and predator, snatching the jobs and comforts of the indigenous population while Britannia's sons sacrificed all for freedom, democracy and decency. The government, fearing public disorder, took powers to deport or conscript the resistant Russians. It made no difference.
On 29 June 1916 the Home Secretary released a statement that Russian Jews who refused to serve in the British Army would be repatriated. The Foreign Jews' Protection Committee organised resistance, because the repratriation didn't include the wives and children of these Russian Jews between the age of 18 and 41. The Anglo-Russian Military Service Convention passed by Order in Council in August 1917. After the Russian Revolution in November 1917 the barely closed question of the Russian Jews and military services was re-opened. The War Cabinet's conclusions were: "The Military Service Acts should continue to be applied to Russian subjects in this country, and that, in the event of it being impossible to get all of them into the army, they should be sent to camps, as suggested by Lord Derby, and be made to understand that their return would not be permitted." (The Military Service Act mentioned "British subjects resident in Russia, and Russian subjects resident in Britain." Of course there were none of the former.)
The alien population, perceived as a threat to national security and public order, became subject to registration, enumeration, classification and continuous observation by the police and intelligence services. Demand for further restrictions, as voiced in the press, were widely supported.
The government succumbed. The Aliens Restriction Act of 1919, and the deportations that accompanied it, east a long shadow over a Jewish community which included large numbers of long-settled immigrants whose status was no longer assured.

The Herald, 31 March 1917
News of the collapse of the Tsarist autocracy was received with extraordinary enthusiasm in the Jewish East End. The Russian Revolution brought together libertarians concerned to uphold the right of asylum, socialist revolutionaries, pacifists and progressive dissidents in a series of public celebrations to welcome the opening of a new era for humanity in general and the Russian Jew in particular.

Though there was some growing anti-semitism during the 1930s, this was counterbalanced by strong support for British Jews in their local communities leading to events such as the Battle of Cable Street where anti-semitism was strongly resisted. There was never wholesale persecution of the Jews before or during World War II in Britain. At the same time, however, Britain was not particularly receptive to Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi regime in Germany, and the other fascist states of Europe. Approximately 40,000 Jews from Austria and Germany were eventually allowed to settle in Britain before the War, in addition to 50,000 Jews from Italy, Poland, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Despite the increasingly dire warnings coming from Germany, at the Evian Conference of 1938, Britain refused to allow further Jewish refugees into the country. The notable exception allowed by Parliament was the Kindertransport, an effort on the eve of war to transport Jewish children (their parents were not given visas) from Germany to Britain. Around 10,000 children were saved by the Kindertransport, out of a plan to rescue five times that number.
With the declaration of war, 74,000 German, Austrian and Italian citizens in the UK were interned as enemy aliens. After individual consideration by tribunal, the majority, largely made up of Jewish and other refugees, were released within six months.
Even more important to many Jews was the permission to settle in the British-controlled Mandate of Palestine. In order to try to maintain peace between the Jewish and Arab populations, especially after the 1936-1939 Arab revolt in Palestine of the 1930s, Britain strictly limited immigration. This limitation became nearly absolute after the White Paper of 1939 all but stopped legal immigration. During the War, Zionists organised an illegal immigration effort, conducted by "Hamossad Le'aliyah Bet" (the precursor of the Mossad) that rescued tens of thousands of European Jews from the Nazis by shipping them to Palestine in rickety boats. Many of these boats were intercepted and some sank with great loss of life. The efforts began in 1939, and the last immigrant boat to try to enter Palestine before the end of the war was the Struma, torpedoed in the Black Sea by a Soviet submarine in February 1942. The boat sank with the loss of nearly 800 lives.
Many Jews joined the British Armed Forces, including some 30,000 Jewish volunteers from Palestine alone, some of whom fought in the Jewish Brigade. Many formed the core of the Haganah after the war.
By July 1945 228,000 troops of the Polish Armed Forces in the West, including Polish Jews, were serving under the high command of the British Army. Many of these men and women were originally from the Kresy region of eastern Poland and were deported by Stalin to Siberia 1939–1941. They were then released from the Soviet Gulags to form the Anders Army and marched to Persia to form the II Corps (Poland). The Polish II Corps then advanced to the British Mandate of Palestine, where many Polish Jews, including as Menachem Begin, deserted to work on forming the state of Israel, in a process known as the 'Anders Aliyah'. Other Polish Jews remained in the Polish Army to fight alongside the British in the North Africa and Italy campaigns. Around 10,000 Polish Jews fought under the Polish flag—and British High Command—at the Battle of Monte Cassino. All of them were eligible to settle in the UK after the Polish Resettlement Act 1947, Britain's first mass immigration law.
The experience of the Second World War and the foundation of Israel made Zionism the civil religion of British Jews. Before the First World War, however, Zionism was less a secular faith and more an additional source of differentiation between the native and immigrant Jews. To the grandees, the idea of a Jewish national home appeared dangerous and divisive and incosistent with their self-image as Englishmen of the Jewish persuasion; to the immigrants, by contrast, Zionism seemed as the saviour of a Judaism threatened by assimilation. As with Reform Judaism, so with Zionism - it was the peculiarities of the environment which separated the Jewish experience in Britain from that of Germany or the United States.

An emergency organization had been formed during the war to control the education of children dispersed by evacuations. In 1945, a central council for education in England was founded that represented the United Synagogue and other Orthodox institutions. It reopened three schools that had been closed during the war. One, a secondary school, had 1,500 students.
In the 1950s, many Jews began moving from closed Jewish communities into the suburbs. The United Synagogue started hiring younger rabbis who tended toward religious flexibility. Conflicts arose between different segments of the community.
In some areas, mobilizing support for Israel was a major communal and social activity. Increased involvement and support of Israel took place after the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel’s triumph affected many Anglo-Jews, even those who were not previously committed to Jewish life.

Modern England
The Jewish community has split into different groups. The largest body is the United Synagogue with more than 35,000 families. On the right are the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations (founded in 1926 and dominated by Hasidic immigrants) and the Federation of Synagogues (founded in 1887 by Russian-Polish immigrants). On the left are the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain (1840) and a Union of Liberal and Progressive Synagogues (1902).
The Board of Deputies of British Jews currently has more than 500 members representing synagogues in London and the provinces. It brings together delegates of all shades of religious and political opinion and is considered the governing body of Anglo-Jewry. It is also taken seriously by the British government. For a long time, it mostly acted to protect Jewish political and civil rights. In the 1930s, with the growth of the British Union of Fascists, it fought fascism. In 1965, it was successful in getting incitement to racial hatred considered an indictable offense. Since 1943, it has remained active in matters concerning Israel. It monitors anti-Semitism and works with other groups to safeguard minority rights. It also supports other commonwealth countries.
One of the world’s top institutions for talmudic learning is the yeshiva at Gateshead. The Conference of European Rabbis is an Orthodox forum that is based in London and is presided over by the British chief rabbi. The Reform movement set up its own rabbinical seminary in 1956, the Leo Baeck College, which attracts students from all over Europe. Significant numbers of Jewish students attend England’s two largest universities Cambridge and Oxford.
Approximately two-thirds of Great Britain’s 350,000 Jews currently live in London. There are large communities in St. Johns Wood (genteel/establishment), Hampstead (intellectual/arty), Golders Green (professional/religious) and Hendon (serious/scholastic). Outside the London borders, suburban communities include Edgware, Stanmore and Ilford, the last of which has the largest Jewish concentration in Europe. Nearby Stamford Hill contains Hasidic groups and immigrants from India, Iran, Yemen and North Africa. Other major Jewish centers are Manchester, with 30,000 Jews, Leeds, with 10,000 Jews, and Glasgow, with 6,500 Jews.
While England's Jewish community has been in decline in recent years due to a low birth rate, intermarriage, and emigration, the 2001 census indicated that there were more Jews than previously thought.
Hampstead is home to Jewish artists, writers and actors. Sigmund Freud’s last house is located at 20 Maresfield Garden in Hampstead. Walking down Hampstead Heath, one passes the homes of various personalities such as Erich Segal, author of Love Story, and the deposed King Constantine of Greece.
Golders Green is the heart of Jewish London with kosher restaurants, bakeries, butchers and supermarkets. Golders Green Road contains Jewish bookstores and gift shops. In the area are dozens of synagogues, temples and shtiebels. Golders Green has the Orthodox Menorah boys school, but most educational institutions are in nearby Hendon. Hendon boasts the Hasmonean and Independent schools, as well as the Jews College and Yakar, a synagogue known for its lecture series.
Finchley is home to the Sternberg Centre, the largest Jewish community center in Europe. It offers Reform religious services, and adult education classes ranging from Jewish walking tours to art classes. The center is also home to the London Museum of Jewish Life, which reflects community life in England since 1656 through documents, photographs and objects. It includes a biblical garden and a Holocaust memorial.
The Board of Jewish Deputies headquarters is in northern London, as are the Jewish Museum, which contains Jewish art and artifacts, and Adler House, seat of the Chief Rabbi and London Bet Din (Jewish court).

Jewish Soup Kitchen in Brune Street, E1. Built in 1902, now luxury flats

London is home to many old synagogues. The Central Synagogue on Great Portland Street is a modern structure with 26 stained glass windows representing the Jewish holidays. The Marble Arch Synagogue at 32 Great Cumberland Place is the successor to London’s first Ashkenazic congregation (the original building was destroyed by a German bombardment in 1941). West London Synagogue at 34 Upper Berkeley Street is the oldest Reform congregation in London. It has gothic features and a Byzantine-style sanctuary.