When people ask writer Ashley Perry where his family is
from, he replies "Britain". If they ask where his
grandparents came from, he gives the same reply. When the
more persistent ask where his great-grandparents or
great-great-grandparents came from, the reply is still
"Britain".
"This answer is usually met with incredulity as most
assume that Anglo- Jewry is in the main no more than two or
three generations long and has its origins in Eastern
Europe," says Mr Perry. But those who assemble today at the
Bevis Marks Synagogue in the City of London know better. A
varied group - including the Lord Mayor of London, several
Government ministers, MPs, peers and representatives from a
wide spectrum of Britain's religious communities - are
gathering to celebrate the 350th Anniversary of the
Resettlement of Jews in England.
The first record of Jews living in England dates from
Norman times. Just after 1066, William the Conqueror invited
a group from Rouen to bring their commercial skills and
incoming capital to England. It was to become, to say the
least, an ambiguous relationship.
In the Middle Ages, lending money with interest - usury -
was considered a sin and forbidden to Christians. But
medieval monarchs found it useful that Jews were allowed to
engage in the practice. The outsiders financed royal
consumption, adventures and wars - and made themselves rich
in the process. By 1168, the value of the personal property
of the Jews (around £60,000) was regarded as a quarter of
the entire wealth of England. And when Aaron of Lincoln died
not long after - all property obtained by usury passing to
the king on the death of the usurer - Henry II inherited the
then massive sum of £15,000.
During Henry II's reign, Jews lived on good terms with
their Christian neighbours. They helped fund a large number
of the abbeys and monasteries and were allowed to take
refuge there in times of commotion which came from time to
time for religious or commercial reasons.
They needed the refuge. Clerics and Popes routinely
stirred up ill-feeling against the Jews as the "killers of
Christ". Ill will was fed by the Crusades, in which the Jews
were as much a target of the righteous sword-wielders as
were the infidel Saracens. One of the most popular - and
heinous - myths was that known by Jews as "the blood libel",
which appears to have originated in England in an accusation
against one William of Norwich in 1144.
It suggested that he and other Jews killed a young
Christian boy to use his blood in the ritual preparation of
unleavened bread for the Passover ritual - a claim which
spread from England to France and Spain and throughout
Europe in medieval times and which resurfaced in Nazi
propaganda in the 20th century.
In 1218, in what became the precursor of anti-Jewish laws
all over the world, Stephen Langton, Archbishop of
Canterbury, made Jews wear a badge - an oblong white patch
of two finger-lengths by four - to identify them. Barons, to
whom Jews lent money, encouraged the mob responses to such
claims, in which Jewish homes were ransacked and records of
their debts were destroyed.
At the end of the 12th century, as part of an epidemic of
religious fervour during preparations for Richard the
Lionheart's Third Crusade against the Saracens, massacres of
Jews were staged at Stamford fair, in Bury St Edmunds and,
most notoriously, in York. In 1190 the city's Jews were
given refuge in Clifford's Tower at York Castle only to be
besieged by a mob demanding they convert to Christianity.
Most of those inside committed suicide; those who
surrendered were slaughtered. By 1290 the inevitable
happened when Edward I - who had found an alternative source
of finance in the Italian merchants known as the "pope's
usurers" - banished the Jews from England.
For more than 300 years no Jew, officially, existed in
the country. It was not until Charles I was beheaded that
the Jews felt safe to return. Then, in 1656 a Dutch Jew
named Menasseh ben Israel, petitioned Oliver Cromwell to
allow his people to return.
Cromwell, a devout Puritan and a man of common sense,
could see the attraction of allowing them back. For a start,
there was the popular belief that the Second Coming of
Christ could not occur until Jews existed in all the lands
of the earth. And there was also a shattered national
economy to rebuild after a devastating Civil War.
But when he summoned a national conference of the most
eminent judges, divines, and merchants in the kingdom at
Whitehall, the debate was inconclusive. The lawyers were
happy. But the clerics and moneymen were opposed. To stop
them reaching the wrong decision, Cromwell dissolved the
meeting and gave the rich Jews of Amsterdam permission to
come to London and transfer their vital trade interests with
the Spanish Main from Holland to England.
Thus it was that in the middle of the 17th century,
around 300 Marano merchants - Spanish and Portuguese Jews -
settled in London. In 1701 they erected the country's first
purpose-built synagogue, Bevis Marks, the only building in
Europe where Jewish worship has continued without
interruption for more than 300 years.
Resettlement was not a smooth process. Just as the
relationship between Jew and Gentile had blown hot and cold
during the medieval settlement, so it was in the new
dispensation. Various coalitions of aristocrats, Christian
zealots and businessmen tried to re-expel the Jews. But the
new Jewish merchants were too useful. They had brought in
£1,500,000 in capital which had increased by the middle of
the century to £5,000,000. Marlborough's wars against the
Spanish were financed by them. During the Jacobite rising of
1745 they showed particular loyalty, offering finance and
volunteering for the corps raised to defend London. Their
investment provided one-twelfth of the nation's profits and
one-twentieth of its foreign trade.
As a reward, what was known as "The Jew Bill" was
introduced in 1753 to allow them to be naturalised as
British citizens. It was passed by the House of Lords,
though it fell in the Commons with the Tories making great
outcry against this "abandonment of Christianity".
The response of the Sephardic community was as nuanced.
Many prominent Jews - like the Disraelis - allowed their
children to grow up as Christians. Slowly acceptance came.
In 1837, Queen Victoria knighted Moses Haim Montefiore. Four
years later, Isaac Lyon Goldsmid became the first Jewish
hereditary peer. The first Jewish Lord Mayor of London, Sir
David Salomons, was elected in 1855, and the first Jewish
MP, Lionel de Rothschild, took his seat three years later
when the parliamentary oath was changed from an exclusively
Christian one.
By 1874, Benjamin Disraeli became Prime Minister. He had
been baptised a Christian but was open about his Judaic
inheritance, once needling a Commons opponent with the jibe
that "when the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman
were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests
in the temple of Solomon". Finally, by 1890, all
restrictions for every position in the British Empire,
except that of monarch, were removed to Jews, some 46,000 of
whom now lived in England.
It was at this point that the big influx of Jews into
this country occurred. From the 1880s onwards, the pogroms
in Germany, Poland and Russia caused many Jews to flee.
These were not Sephardim but Ashkenazi Jews with a more
distinct East European and Yiddish culture. They soon
outnumbered the Spanish and Portuguese.
By 1919, the Jewish population had increased to about
250,000 primarily in cities like London, Manchester and
Liverpool. But though their culture was more distinct - and
though they maintained it, building kosher businesses,
welfare networks, Jewish schools and cultural bodies -
unlike their fellows in places like Poland, the Jewish
community in England (apart from a handful of ultra-Orthodox
isolationists in places like Stamford Hill) generally
embraced their integration into wider English culture. And
unlike their American counterparts, British Jews anglicised
their names and their customs, starting youth movements like
the Jewish Lads Brigade in emulation of the British Scouts.
Families like the one which founded the jewellers, H
Samuel, in Liverpool attempted to overturn prejudice and
seek public office. In 1806 the city's Seel Street synagogue
became the first in England to deliver sermons in English.
In Manchester groups of Jewish intelligentsia were shaping
new expressions of Judaism, including the Reform Movement,
the political notion of Zionism and creating tools for
activism which made the Jewish community strong in the
traditions of British socialism and trade unionism. This in
part explains why anti-semitism, which in most of Europe is
most prevalent among the working classes, in Britain met
stout opposition from many ordinary people, as events such
as the Battle of Cable Street showed. Indeed anti-semitism
has been more common among the British upper, rather than
the lower, classes - a phenomenon which Ashley Perry puts
down to aristocratic resentment.
"The British consider themselves the height of
civilization, the founder of democracy and the force that
brought culture to much of the world," he says. But the Jews
remind them that "there is one people that has lived with
the British for many years which reminds them that their
'civilisation' is relatively new".
And though the nation did not open its arms unreservedly
to Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi regime in the 1930s, it
did allow some 40,000 Jews from Austria and Germany to
settle in Britain along with 50,000 Jews from Italy, Poland,
and elsewhere in Eastern Europe - and the 10,000
Kindertransport children rescued on the eve of war.
Today, when many fear that anti-semitism is on the rise
again, they acknowledge that, in the judgement of the Jewish
peer Lord Janner, "in the UK it's not as serious as it is in
France, Denmark, the Netherlands or Belgium." Instead Lord
Janner perceives a different threat. Today there are about
350,000 Jews in the UK - around two-thirds in London, with
around 40,000 in Manchester and significant communities in
Leeds, Glasgow, Brighton, Liverpool, Birmingham,
Bournemouth, Gateshead and Southend. That spreads the
community pretty thin.
"Not less than 30 per cent [marry outside the faith] and
that's really serious," Lord Janner says. They have,
perhaps, for some of their number, integrated and
assimilated just a little too well.
Men of influence
Menasseh Ben Israel
Friend of Rembrandt whose family suffered the full force
of 17th-century anti-semitism when they fled the Inquisition
in Portugal. Petitioned Oliver Cromwell for the readmission
of Jews to England. His campaign was eventually successful
after Cromwell ruled that a law banning Jews should no
longer be enforced.
Daniel Mendoza
Such was Mendoza's standing as a prize fighter in late
18th-century London, newspapers reported his latest
victorious bout ahead of the storming of the Bastille in
1789. The Jewish boxer from Aldgate, who learnt to use his
fists in fights over anti-semitic remarks, is regarded as
the father of scientific boxing and published The Art of
Boxing in 1789.
Benjamin Disraeli
Entered Downing Street in 1874 as Britain's first Jewish
prime minister. He was in fact baptised an Anglican after
his father, Isaac, a literary critic and historian, fell out
with the family synagogue. His most lasting achievement was
the creation of the modern Conservative Party.
Lionel de Rothschild
By the beginning of the 19th century, the De Rothschilds
were prominent members of society, bankrolling Britain in
the Napoleonic Wars. But when he was elected to the House of
Commons in 1847, Lionel was barred for his refusal to take
the Christian oath of allegiance. It took another decade of
red tape before Lionel became Britain's first Jewish MP.
Yehudi Menuhin
When his family were turned away by a landlady because
they were Jewish, his mother vowed her unborn son would be
called Yehudi, the Hebrew for Jew. He went on to become one
of the most famous violinists of the 20th century and
founded the Yehudi Menuhin School.
Harold Abrahams
After a lacklustre performance in the 1920 Olympics, the
Bedford-born sprinter and lawyer became the first British
athlete to hire a personal trainer. Four years later,
Abrahams won the 100 metres at the Paris Olympiad - the
first non-American to do so at a Games. His rivalry with
Eric Liddell became the subject of the film Chariots of
Fire.
Issy Smith
Born Ishroulch Shmeilowitz in 1890 in Egypt, his name was
anglicised to Issy Smith by a recruiting sergeant when he
enlisted in the Manchester Regiment at the age of 14. During
the second battle of Ypres in 1915 he ran towards German
lines carrying a wounded comrade 250 yards to safety before
repeating similar actions throughout the day. He was awarded
the Victoria Cross.
Ernst B Chain
The son of a Berlin industrialist, Chain fled the Nazis
in 1933 to work in Oxford. On the eve of the Second World
War, he rediscovered the work of Alexander Fleming and found
a way of mass-producing penicillin. Along with Fleming and
Howard Florey, Chain was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1945.
Moses Haim Montefiore
Mentioned in the diaries of Dickens and George Eliot, Sir
Moses was one of the Victorian era's most prominent Jews.
After a career in the City, during which he co-founded the
Alliance Life insurance giant, he devoted himself to a life
of philanthropy. A loan raised by Sir Moses helped the
British government abolish slavery.
When people ask writer Ashley Perry where his family is
from, he replies "Britain". If they ask where his
grandparents came from, he gives the same reply. When the
more persistent ask where his great-grandparents or
great-great-grandparents came from, the reply is still
"Britain".
"This answer is usually met with incredulity as most
assume that Anglo- Jewry is in the main no more than two or
three generations long and has its origins in Eastern
Europe," says Mr Perry. But those who assemble today at the
Bevis Marks Synagogue in the City of London know better. A
varied group - including the Lord Mayor of London, several
Government ministers, MPs, peers and representatives from a
wide spectrum of Britain's religious communities - are
gathering to celebrate the 350th Anniversary of the
Resettlement of Jews in England.
The first record of Jews living in England dates from
Norman times. Just after 1066, William the Conqueror invited
a group from Rouen to bring their commercial skills and
incoming capital to England. It was to become, to say the
least, an ambiguous relationship.
In the Middle Ages, lending money with interest - usury -
was considered a sin and forbidden to Christians. But
medieval monarchs found it useful that Jews were allowed to
engage in the practice. The outsiders financed royal
consumption, adventures and wars - and made themselves rich
in the process. By 1168, the value of the personal property
of the Jews (around £60,000) was regarded as a quarter of
the entire wealth of England. And when Aaron of Lincoln died
not long after - all property obtained by usury passing to
the king on the death of the usurer - Henry II inherited the
then massive sum of £15,000.
During Henry II's reign, Jews lived on good terms with
their Christian neighbours. They helped fund a large number
of the abbeys and monasteries and were allowed to take
refuge there in times of commotion which came from time to
time for religious or commercial reasons.
They needed the refuge. Clerics and Popes routinely
stirred up ill-feeling against the Jews as the "killers of
Christ". Ill will was fed by the Crusades, in which the Jews
were as much a target of the righteous sword-wielders as
were the infidel Saracens. One of the most popular - and
heinous - myths was that known by Jews as "the blood libel",
which appears to have originated in England in an accusation
against one William of Norwich in 1144.
It suggested that he and other Jews killed a young
Christian boy to use his blood in the ritual preparation of
unleavened bread for the Passover ritual - a claim which
spread from England to France and Spain and throughout
Europe in medieval times and which resurfaced in Nazi
propaganda in the 20th century.
In 1218, in what became the precursor of anti-Jewish laws
all over the world, Stephen Langton, Archbishop of
Canterbury, made Jews wear a badge - an oblong white patch
of two finger-lengths by four - to identify them. Barons, to
whom Jews lent money, encouraged the mob responses to such
claims, in which Jewish homes were ransacked and records of
their debts were destroyed.
At the end of the 12th century, as part of an epidemic of
religious fervour during preparations for Richard the
Lionheart's Third Crusade against the Saracens, massacres of
Jews were staged at Stamford fair, in Bury St Edmunds and,
most notoriously, in York. In 1190 the city's Jews were
given refuge in Clifford's Tower at York Castle only to be
besieged by a mob demanding they convert to Christianity.
Most of those inside committed suicide; those who
surrendered were slaughtered. By 1290 the inevitable
happened when Edward I - who had found an alternative source
of finance in the Italian merchants known as the "pope's
usurers" - banished the Jews from England.
For more than 300 years no Jew, officially, existed in
the country. It was not until Charles I was beheaded that
the Jews felt safe to return. Then, in 1656 a Dutch Jew
named Menasseh ben Israel, petitioned Oliver Cromwell to
allow his people to return.
Cromwell, a devout Puritan and a man of common sense,
could see the attraction of allowing them back. For a start,
there was the popular belief that the Second Coming of
Christ could not occur until Jews existed in all the lands
of the earth. And there was also a shattered national
economy to rebuild after a devastating Civil War.
But when he summoned a national conference of the most
eminent judges, divines, and merchants in the kingdom at
Whitehall, the debate was inconclusive. The lawyers were
happy. But the clerics and moneymen were opposed. To stop
them reaching the wrong decision, Cromwell dissolved the
meeting and gave the rich Jews of Amsterdam permission to
come to London and transfer their vital trade interests with
the Spanish Main from Holland to England.
Thus it was that in the middle of the 17th century,
around 300 Marano merchants - Spanish and Portuguese Jews -
settled in London. In 1701 they erected the country's first
purpose-built synagogue, Bevis Marks, the only building in
Europe where Jewish worship has continued without
interruption for more than 300 years.
Resettlement was not a smooth process. Just as the
relationship between Jew and Gentile had blown hot and cold
during the medieval settlement, so it was in the new
dispensation. Various coalitions of aristocrats, Christian
zealots and businessmen tried to re-expel the Jews. But the
new Jewish merchants were too useful. They had brought in
£1,500,000 in capital which had increased by the middle of
the century to £5,000,000. Marlborough's wars against the
Spanish were financed by them. During the Jacobite rising of
1745 they showed particular loyalty, offering finance and
volunteering for the corps raised to defend London. Their
investment provided one-twelfth of the nation's profits and
one-twentieth of its foreign trade.
As a reward, what was known as "The Jew Bill" was
introduced in 1753 to allow them to be naturalised as
British citizens. It was passed by the House of Lords,
though it fell in the Commons with the Tories making great
outcry against this "abandonment of Christianity".
The response of the Sephardic community was as nuanced.
Many prominent Jews - like the Disraelis - allowed their
children to grow up as Christians. Slowly acceptance came.
In 1837, Queen Victoria knighted Moses Haim Montefiore. Four
years later, Isaac Lyon Goldsmid became the first Jewish
hereditary peer. The first Jewish Lord Mayor of London, Sir
David Salomons, was elected in 1855, and the first Jewish
MP, Lionel de Rothschild, took his seat three years later
when the parliamentary oath was changed from an exclusively
Christian one.
By 1874, Benjamin Disraeli became Prime Minister. He had
been baptised a Christian but was open about his Judaic
inheritance, once needling a Commons opponent with the jibe
that "when the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman
were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests
in the temple of Solomon". Finally, by 1890, all
restrictions for every position in the British Empire,
except that of monarch, were removed to Jews, some 46,000 of
whom now lived in England.
It was at this point that the big influx of Jews into this
country occurred. From the 1880s onwards, the pogroms in
Germany, Poland and Russia caused many Jews to flee. These
were not Sephardim but Ashkenazi Jews with a more distinct
East European and Yiddish culture. They soon outnumbered the
Spanish and Portuguese.By 1919, the Jewish population had
increased to about 250,000 primarily in cities like London,
Manchester and Liverpool. But though their culture was more
distinct - and though they maintained it, building kosher
businesses, welfare networks, Jewish schools and cultural
bodies - unlike their fellows in places like Poland, the
Jewish community in England (apart from a handful of
ultra-Orthodox isolationists in places like Stamford Hill)
generally embraced their integration into wider English
culture. And unlike their American counterparts, British
Jews anglicised their names and their customs, starting
youth movements like the Jewish Lads Brigade in emulation of
the British Scouts.
Families like the one which founded the jewellers, H
Samuel, in Liverpool attempted to overturn prejudice and
seek public office. In 1806 the city's Seel Street synagogue
became the first in England to deliver sermons in English.
In Manchester groups of Jewish intelligentsia were shaping
new expressions of Judaism, including the Reform Movement,
the political notion of Zionism and creating tools for
activism which made the Jewish community strong in the
traditions of British socialism and trade unionism. This in
part explains why anti-semitism, which in most of Europe is
most prevalent among the working classes, in Britain met
stout opposition from many ordinary people, as events such
as the Battle of Cable Street showed. Indeed anti-semitism
has been more common among the British upper, rather than
the lower, classes - a phenomenon which Ashley Perry puts
down to aristocratic resentment.
"The British consider themselves the height of
civilization, the founder of democracy and the force that
brought culture to much of the world," he says. But the Jews
remind them that "there is one people that has lived with
the British for many years which reminds them that their
'civilisation' is relatively new".
And though the nation did not open its arms unreservedly
to Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi regime in the 1930s, it
did allow some 40,000 Jews from Austria and Germany to
settle in Britain along with 50,000 Jews from Italy, Poland,
and elsewhere in Eastern Europe - and the 10,000
Kindertransport children rescued on the eve of war.
Today, when many fear that anti-semitism is on the rise
again, they acknowledge that, in the judgement of the Jewish
peer Lord Janner, "in the UK it's not as serious as it is in
France, Denmark, the Netherlands or Belgium." Instead Lord
Janner perceives a different threat. Today there are about
350,000 Jews in the UK - around two-thirds in London, with
around 40,000 in Manchester and significant communities in
Leeds, Glasgow, Brighton, Liverpool, Birmingham,
Bournemouth, Gateshead and Southend. That spreads the
community pretty thin.
"Not less than 30 per cent [marry outside the faith] and
that's really serious," Lord Janner says. They have,
perhaps, for some of their number, integrated and
assimilated just a little too well.
Men of influence
Menasseh Ben Israel
Friend of Rembrandt whose family suffered the full force
of 17th-century anti-semitism when they fled the Inquisition
in Portugal. Petitioned Oliver Cromwell for the readmission
of Jews to England. His campaign was eventually successful
after Cromwell ruled that a law banning Jews should no
longer be enforced.
Daniel Mendoza
Such was Mendoza's standing as a prize fighter in late
18th-century London, newspapers reported his latest
victorious bout ahead of the storming of the Bastille in
1789. The Jewish boxer from Aldgate, who learnt to use his
fists in fights over anti-semitic remarks, is regarded as
the father of scientific boxing and published The Art of
Boxing in 1789.
Benjamin Disraeli
Entered Downing Street in 1874 as Britain's first Jewish
prime minister. He was in fact baptised an Anglican after
his father, Isaac, a literary critic and historian, fell out
with the family synagogue. His most lasting achievement was
the creation of the modern Conservative Party.
Lionel de Rothschild
By the beginning of the 19th century, the De Rothschilds
were prominent members of society, bankrolling Britain in
the Napoleonic Wars. But when he was elected to the House of
Commons in 1847, Lionel was barred for his refusal to take
the Christian oath of allegiance. It took another decade of
red tape before Lionel became Britain's first Jewish MP.
Yehudi Menuhin
When his family were turned away by a landlady because
they were Jewish, his mother vowed her unborn son would be
called Yehudi, the Hebrew for Jew. He went on to become one
of the most famous violinists of the 20th century and
founded the Yehudi Menuhin School.
Harold Abrahams
After a lacklustre performance in the 1920 Olympics, the
Bedford-born sprinter and lawyer became the first British
athlete to hire a personal trainer. Four years later,
Abrahams won the 100 metres at the Paris Olympiad - the
first non-American to do so at a Games. His rivalry with
Eric Liddell became the subject of the film Chariots of
Fire.
Issy Smith
Born Ishroulch Shmeilowitz in 1890 in Egypt, his name was
anglicised to Issy Smith by a recruiting sergeant when he
enlisted in the Manchester Regiment at the age of 14. During
the second battle of Ypres in 1915 he ran towards German
lines carrying a wounded comrade 250 yards to safety before
repeating similar actions throughout the day. He was awarded
the Victoria Cross.
Ernst B Chain
The son of a Berlin industrialist, Chain fled the Nazis
in 1933 to work in Oxford. On the eve of the Second World
War, he rediscovered the work of Alexander Fleming and found
a way of mass-producing penicillin. Along with Fleming and
Howard Florey, Chain was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1945.
Moses Haim Montefiore
Mentioned in the diaries of Dickens and George Eliot, Sir
Moses was one of the Victorian era's most prominent Jews.
After a career in the City, during which he co-founded the
Alliance Life insurance giant, he devoted himself to a life
of philanthropy. A loan raised by Sir Moses helped the
British government abolish slavery.