2006 marks 350 years since Jews were readmitted to England. Having been expelled in 1290 by the crusading king Edward I, we were finally allowed back to these shores in 1656 by the revolutionary Protestant ruler Oliver Cromwell, who was a big believer in religious freedom (unless you happened to be Roman Catholic, of course).
These days, the Jewish community in the UK numbers some 250,000 souls. Most of us have made our homes in London, though there are also thriving communities in the North of England, in Manchester and Gateshead. At our disposal are numerous elementary and high schools, shuls both grand and homely, mikvaos, kosher stores and restaurants.
But it wasn’t always thus. Join me for a whistle stop tour of English Jewish history, from 1656 until the present day.
In 1650, a Portuguese-born rabbi and diplomat by the name of Menasseh Ben Israel approached Oliver Cromwell with the request that he allow the Jews to be readmitted to England. Cromwell evidently liked the idea, because while he did not formally consent to it, he made it known that Edward I’s ban would no longer be imposed. At the end of 1655, Jews began arriving back on the shores of England and the few who had been living in hiding were able to openly practice their Judaism. By the end of the century, a Jewish community of around 600 Sephardim and 300 Ashkenazim had been established in London.
The Sephardi community was extremely quick to open the doors of its first synagogue, in the city of London in 1656. The following year land for a cemetery was acquired in the Mile End area of town. Fascinatingly, early shul life in England was recorded for posterity by Samuel Pepys in his famous diary. Unfortunately, Mr. Pepys chose to pay his visit on Simchat Torah in 1663 and, not fully comprehending what he found there, was utterly horrified at the lack of decorum. He wrote in his diary: “To see the disorder, laughing, sporting and no attention, but confusion in all their servicecould make a man forswear ever seeing them more; indeed, I nevercould have imagined there had been any religion in the whole world so absurdly performed as this.”
The turn of the 18th century was marked by the inauguration of two imposing synagogues for the Jews of London – the Sephardi community’s beautiful edifice at Bevis Marks in the city, which is still in use today, and the Ashkenazi shul, The Great Synagogue in Dukes Place, which was destroyed by a German bomb in 1941. Indeed, this represented an auspicious beginning to a century that would see the Jews in the limelight once again – in 1753, a “Jew Bill” was passed in parliament allowing foreign-born residents to become naturalized. Unfortunately, the bill was repealed the following year, but the significance of the retraction was debatable – after all, Jews born in England became subjects of the Crown automatically.
By the beginning of the 1800’s, public feeling toward England’s Jews was settling down somewhat – in 1804, the London Board for Shechita was set up, followed in 1822 by the establishment of the Jews Free School (JFS) in the East End. In fact, the school had started life some 90 years earlier as the Talmud Torah of the Great Synagogue, but during the 19th century it absorbed thousands of immigrant children and at one point was the biggest Jewish school in the world. These days, JFS is a state-of-the-art Orthodox high school – the largest in Europe – and is situated in the heart of the community, in North West London.