Introduction
FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS the inhabitants of the vast Australian continent marked the passage of life by their awareness of an intimate and spiritual identity with their environment. This sense was incomprehensible to the first European exiles who found themselves dumped on the edge of an alien world. On 26 January 1788 the great southern continent's destiny changed forever with the arrival at Sydney Cove of the First Fleet carrying 759 miserable convicts and an assorted contingent of officers, soldiers and marines. Among those first arrivals were Australia's first Jews. There is no other Jewish community in the Diaspora that can trace its origins back to its country's first day of European settlement.
This early colonial chapter of Australian history is the subject of this study. The period came to an abrupt end with the discovery of gold in 1850, after which the rapid increase in population transformed the Australian colonies. This biographical dictionary includes details of the lives of all the Jewish immigrants to Australia during the first sixty-two years of European settlement. It is therefore a portrait of an entire Jewish community in the latter decades of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. During that time a penal colony was dominated by a military clique with an agrarian population that clung to the south-eastern edge of a vast continent. Apart from the indigenous Australians, the Jews constituted the only non-Christian minority. They formed a small urban class of ‘outsiders’. They were the traders, auctioneers and dealers who made up a primitive, putative middle class.
Between 1788 and 1850 virtually half the almost 1500 Jews who arrived in Australia were convicts; only three or four individuals brought any financial capital with them. To succeed financially in the new Australian colonies took extraordinary skill and, of course, luck. Only in the final decade of the period would Jewish free settlers outnumber Jewish convicts and emancipists (former convicts) and their experiences provide us with illuminating contrasts.
It has been possible to collect the biographical data from a wide variety of sources. These details often begin with the printed records of trials conducted at the Old Bailey and the individuals reappear in the indents of the convict transport ships. For those who survived the long journey to the other side of the world, there are records of colonial musters, ration books and detailed police dossiers. The Australian convict system bred a complicated system of bureaucratic checks. The files of the governors, lieutenant governors and colonial secretaries in all the colonies are useful sources of information. Church records, cemetery registers, tombstone inscriptions, synagogue minute books and existing correspondence files yield valuable information. Official government gazettes grew into colonial newspapers and, especially in the earlier decades, kept track of births, deaths, executions, tickets of leave, certificates of freedom and pardons, departures from the colony, bankruptcies and criminal trials. Most biographies conclude with a basic list of references to assist further research.
The first Jews to arrive in Australia came with a cultural and historical background that was radically different from that of other exiles from the United Kingdom. Almost all were the children of Jewish families who were recent arrivals in England, having escaped from a deeply hostile continental European environment. By the conclusion of the eighteenth century, two million Jews, or four-fifths of all the Jews of the world, were to be found in Europe.1 Less than one-tenth of that number lived in the developing mercantile economies of Western Europe—England, the Netherlands, France and Italy. In the German-speaking states and principalities of central Europe there may have been half a million Jews whose origins extended back to the days of the Roman Empire.2
History and geography had shaped two distinct European Jewish worlds. The Jewish refugees from the Iberian Peninsula fled from the Inquisition and took with them a proud tradition of involvement with the culture of Spain and Portugal. Their sophisticated world had collapsed in 1492 when Ferdinand and Isabella signed the edict of expulsion that purged Spain of both Jews and Muslims. These Jews were known as Sephardim. Most European Jews described themselves as Ashkenazim and their ethnic origins could be traced back to a community of some ten thousand Jews who lived peacefully in the Rhineland until the onslaught of the Crusades.3 Suddenly the Jews found themselves victimised for being the nearest available infidels by those on their way to rescue the Holy Land from the Saracens. The centuries of persecution of the unbelievers who were close at hand had begun.4
The Jews of mediaeval Europe were only permitted to survive subject to complex legal restrictions imposed upon them by both secular and ecclesiastical authorities. The Jews of Europe could not own land, hire servants or employ serfs. They could not join trade guilds or become apprentices. They were permitted to be rag dealers and to purchase the noxious clothes of the dead. They could change and lend small amounts of money. Urban Jewish residence came to be strictly limited by law to the squalid sections of the town. Walls were built around these ghettos. When venturing beyond these restrictive walls and gates, Jews were forced to wear absurdly coloured clothes and hats and conspicuous badges on their outer garments. They were blamed for the Black Death, which they had caused by poisoning the wells. They were known to have desecrated the Host when the wafer on the altar became discoloured. The Jews were paying the price for having crucified the Lord.
The squalor of the ghetto generated both isolation and corporate autonomy. The compensation for daily humiliation was the Jewish conviction that they were God's witnesses and guardians of the sacred texts. They had stood at Mt Sinai. Their humiliation was proof of the truth of the new Israel that had superseded the old stock of Abraham. A biblical calendar governed their lives and sustained the dream that one day they would return to the Holy Land and rebuild the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a mercantile revolution swept through Europe. The gold and silver of the New World fed the development of capitalism, and wealth could no longer be measured only by the accumulated ownership of land. In a world in which status and rank came through financial success, it became increasingly impractical to suppress a religious community for theological reasons. The era of mercantilism or capitalism ushered in a new age of grudging tolerance for some of the Jews of Western Europe, who were catapulted into a new world of business and finance.5
Through long centuries of mediaeval darkness the Jews had become experts in surviving in hostile urban environments. In contrast to most of their contemporaries they were literate. Even the poorest boy could read his Hebrew bible and prayer book and conduct a service of worship. The stringent restrictions that had been placed upon the number of Jews who could live in any particular town or village meant that members of the same family were scattered geographically, allowing the creation of a rudimentary commercial network. (The Rothschild family of the Frankfurt Ghetto is the most impressive example of the utilisation of family networking that functioned above and beyond national and linguistic boundaries.)
The first members of the Jewish community of London were Sephardim who had settled in England unobtrusively during the first half of the sixteenth century. Communal and commercial ties linked these refugees to the flourishing Jewish community that had emerged in the Netherlands. The pace of Jewish emancipation in Europe began to accelerate, and its impact was felt in England.6
In 1657 in London a rented house was adapted for use as a synagogue. In 1701 the Spanish and Portuguese Jews dedicated the Bevis Marks Synagogue, which is carefully located beyond the boundary of the City of London. Timidly and cautiously the Jews of England emerged from obscurity. Following the precedent set by the Sephardim, in Duke's Place, just around the corner from Bevis Marks, the Ashkenazi Jews built their own synagogue. As several other smaller congregations existed, its rabbi came to be called the Chief Rabbi of the Great Synagogue. The statutes of the City of London demanded that the owners of retail businesses take up the freedom of the city ‘upon the true faith of a Christian’, which effectively excluded Jews. Up to 1830, Jews in England were barred from Parliament, from high rank in the navy and army, from membership of the University of Oxford and from degrees and fellowships at the University of Cambridge. It was not until 1831 that the restrictions imposed by the City of London were removed, after which other barriers rapidly fell. In 1833 Lincoln's Inn called Francis Goldsmid to the Bar and, in 1835, David Salomons was elected Sheriff of London and Middlesex.
By the end of the eighteenth century the Jewish community of England had grown to number some ten thousand individuals, most of whom were of Ashkenazi descent. They chose to dress distinctively. The men were bearded, adorned with large black hats that crowned their gaberdine cloaks, and they spoke Yiddish or Judeo-German, the Jewish dialects of central Europe. They settled in London's squalid East End, close to the docks and near the markets and fairs that flourished near the waterways. Imbued with an unquenchable optimism, they had dreamed that somewhere in the world they would find a safe haven. They were not the merchants and the financiers who were easily accepted by the English. They were penniless migrants who brought very few skills and no money with them. The Jewish pedlars, dressed in clothes that seemed bizarre, carried their meagre stock into the lanes of rural England in search of customers. Both in London and in the countryside they were walking targets for taunts and violence. The impression they unwittingly created was so outlandish that, in 1786, when the infamous Lord George Gordon of the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots converted to Judaism, it was assumed he was insane.
The Jews constituted an alien, poverty-stricken and puzzling presence and so it appeared as though London's East End was awash with Jews who overflowed the courts, the gaols and the prison hulks. Exaggerated as this picture may be, an anonymous essay on The Commercial Habits of the Jews, published in London in 1809, clearly describes a community in crisis:
The number of intricate lanes and alleys near Whitechapel and other parts of the town entirely occupied by these [Jewish] miscreants and their associates, render them formidable to the officers of justice, and at the same time impervious to the public eye. From these depositors of filth and iniquity, the approach of morning sends them in herds over the whole face of the capital … the baneful and immoral effects upon society with such a race of men need not be insisted upon.
In 1796 the Police Magistrate Patrick Colquhoun believed that 20 000 Jews lived in the metropolis.7 This figure was an exaggerated one, and would not be reached until the mid-1840s. Colquhoun estimated that there were 100 000 criminals in London out of a total population of 640 000, of whom 2000 (or 10 per cent of the total Jewish population) were ‘itinerant Jews, wandering from street to street, holding out temptation to pilfer and to steal, and Jew Boys carrying bad shillings, who purchase items stolen by Servants, Stable boys etc. etc. generally paying in base money’.
These were the first Jews in Australia. As the years passed they would be joined by their cousins and brothers and sometimes by their parents and members of their extended families. First cousin married first cousin. Men found wives among their sisters-in-law. Intercolonial marriages were common and miniature commercial dynasties came into being.
The Jews of Australia have rarely numbered more that half of 1 per cent of the country's population. Their heritage differed radically from the rest of the population. We can now ask whether the Jews constituted a distinct segment of the community in colonial Australia and whether their religious and ethnic identity remained viable in an entirely new social environment. Are we describing the lives of hundreds of unconnected individuals who have nothing in common with each other, or was there a sense of corporate identity that survived the long journey from England?
The answers to these questions can be found within these pages, in the stories of the people. Briefly, the first Jews of colonial Australia did not leave their Judaism behind in London or in Amsterdam. They struggled, at great cost, to maintain their identity. They had no clear precedent to prepare themselves for life in a new and open society and they lacked an understanding of their own history. When they built Australia's first synagogues they saw no need to provide space for communal interaction or for the education of their children. They had no trained spiritual leadership throughout the entire period. The imbalanced ratio of men to women made it impossible for the early Jewish arrivals to find a Jewish partner. A lack of religious leadership and knowledge, exacerbated by intermarriage, and residual social prejudice ravaged the first Australian-born Jewish generation. However, looking back, it may well have been the contrast with the painful memories of Jewish life in Europe that gave these new Australians some hope that the community would survive and be treated with dignity. They clearly constituted a distinct segment of colonial society and became a tightly knit community that developed a mechanism for survival.
Jewish status is a complicated matter. Being a Jew is not primarily determined by belief. According to rabbinic tradition Jewish identity is matrilineal. In the new Australian colonies this definition was often dealt with pragmatically, and the earliest Jewish congregations recognised as Jews the children of Jewish fathers. A convert to Judaism is required to be immersed in a ritual bath (mikveh) and to be accepted by a rabbinical court. This procedure could not be followed in Australia. Somehow or other, the wives of Jewish men were accepted by the congregations. Women changed their first names to those with a biblical resonance and were permitted to join the synagogue. Practical considerations won the day.
Given the paucity of direct data, how is it possible to identify the Jews of colonial Australia? ‘Jewish’ surnames provide a start. In Europe the Jews of the period of political emancipation were often forced to purchase surnames in place of the traditional Hebrew name system, which identified individuals as the son or daughter of their father. Upon arrival in England these German, Polish or Russian surnames were dropped in favour of English biblical names, such as Abrahams, Benjamin, Jacobs and Solomon. Other migrants translated their Hebrew or Yiddish name into English, while some became integrated with adopted names, such as Anderson, David or Brown. Surnames (and first names) are therefore a useful but not infallible guide to Jewish identity. There were many Elijahs, Zadoks, Cowens and Jacobs who were good and pious churchmen.
In London the transcripts of trials frequently identify who was Jewish by their place of residence, their (alleged) trade, by their place of birth and by the names of those friends and relatives who came to court to beg for mercy on behalf of the accused. In Australia Jews went to great lengths to ensure that they would not be buried as Christians. Jewish cemeteries were established in all the colonial centres before synagogues were built. The existing synagogue records provide us with basic data while letter books, marriage documents and birth books (which include the names of parents) supplement the list of names. Beginning in the 1820s parents registered their children at birth and recorded their religion. In some cases the choice of the description ‘Hebrew’ or ‘Israelite’ had nothing to do with the Jewish community but reflected membership of a Protestant sect. Nevertheless, it is clear that a number of Jewish women insisted on registering their newborn children as Jews even though the children, in later life, would have no association with the community. Trades and professions are also useful indicators of Jewish identity. Not every dealer was Jewish, but many were. George Street in Sydney came to be lined with the shops of Jewish dealers, drapers, pawnbrokers and auctioneers. Long before the search for gold opened up the outback, Jews set up general stores and pubs on country tracks and in rural villages. Those families who remained Jewish would, in time, drift back to the metropolis for social and family reasons, and during the early colonial period as many Jews lived in the rural districts as in the towns.
The British defeat of the French in 1815 led to widespread social unrest and unemployment in the United Kingdom, and consequently to a dramatic increase in the number of convicts sent to Australia. From 1816 to 1825 the average number of those sentenced to transportation was 2000 each year. From 1826 to 1836 it was 4900.8 The colonial authorities began to pay attention to their ratio of Catholics and Protestants who were being sent to the Antipodes. The crimes of the Irish were nearly all related to poverty and hunger, and these convicts had no reason to love the Crown or to respect the British military. The need to identify convicts according to their religious affiliation was certainly not a theological necessity but constituted political caution, lest republicanism lead to an Australian colonial rebellion that would mimic the American War of Independence. In addition, as the population increased so too did the need for the accumulation of personal data on the convict population. Convict escapees needed to be identified by their physical characteristics. We therefore know how tall the convicts were, the colour of their eyes, the shape of their face, what tattoos they had, what trades or skills they said they possessed, details about family, education, literacy, marital status, nicknames, behaviour in prison, in the hulks and on board ship, the number of children, place of birth, length of sentence and subsequent behaviour in gaol, and time of release.
Not all colonial documents agree with one another and not all colonial records still exist. Nevertheless an immense amount of information does exist and every attempt has been made to record these sources. The biographical material is biased in favour of men. Women were often treated as chattels, and children received even less attention. Even free female migrants were simply recorded as ‘Mrs So and So’, and when they died they were known as ‘relict’ of their husband with no mention of their first name.
New South Wales eventually became ‘too settled’ and ‘too civilised’ for transportation to be an effective punishment.9 The last convict transport ship to New South Wales arrived in Sydney Harbour on 18 November 1840. The ratio of convicts to free settlers quickly altered, so that convicts and emancipists were outnumbered by free settlers and their families who had chosen to try their luck in a new world. In Van Diemen's Land the transportation of prisoners lingered until the discovery of gold on the mainland made a mockery of transportation. By that time very few Jews were being transported to Australia as the Jewish community of London had begun to educate its own children, care for the poverty-stricken immigrants and ease a great deal of the sense of alienation that had led its young people into a life of crime. As the Cumberland Times of Parramatta reported on 1 November 1845:
The Hebrews of the colony, as of every other locality in the British dominions, have established for themselves as a body a reputation of general morality, integrity and munificent generosity … We conscientiously opine the Hebrew to be in error; but wherever the gift of the religion is guaranteed by the morality of its professors we can see no reason why they should suffer disabilities.
The Jews of early Australia were not paragons of religious virtue but they defined themselves through consistent acts of self-identification. So synagogues were built, children were named and registered, and funerals were arranged even when there was no synagogue. Poverty, inexperience and one colonial economic recession after another deeply affected this small and exposed group of entrepreneurs, most of whom could only accumulate meagre assets. In colonial Australia, Jews were often damned if they succeeded and damned when they failed. Wealthy Jewish free immigrants, such as Michael Phillips, Walter Levi and Joseph Barrow Montefiore, who brought sufficient capital with them to warrant grants of land, were ignored or denied their rights. Officialdom could not believe that a Jew could own land and cultivate crops. In London the emancipist Solomon Levey bankrolled and encouraged Thomas Peel's plans to settle at Swan River but was kept out of public view as much because of his Jewish identity as because of his convict past.
Australia rapidly engendered a sense of security and identity within the newly evolving society. On 2 December 1835 the Sydney Herald drew the attention of the public to the number of Jewish stall-holders at the newly built town market. The wealthy emancipist Samuel Lyons thundered: ‘Why have Gentiles a deed of settlement more than infidels, or do they pay more taxes, are they more patriotic? But those days of religious persecution belong to the last century, the banner of religious toleration floats triumphantly and the Hebrew ranks with his fellow citizen in spite of a bigoted clergy’.
The ‘bigoted clergy’ were the Anglican bishops of the House of Lords in Westminster who, for one hundred years, had blocked every parliamentary move towards Jewish political emancipation. Far away from Europe a new social reality was being created in which the Jewish community instinctively felt they would play a full and equal part. They knew that Jews had been part of Australia since the arrival of the First Fleet.
Fifteen Jews sailed with the First Fleet in 1788. Their names should be recorded at the beginning of this book. There were seven men, seven women and one child.
Henry Abrahams, Daniel Daniels, John Harris, John Hart, David Jacobs, Joseph Levy and Peter Opley.
Esther Abrahams and her infant daughter Rosanna, Sarah Burdo, Rebecca Davison, Frances Hart, Flora Larah, Amelia Levy and Leah (Mary) Levy.
1 H. M. Sachar, The Course of Modern Jewish History, p. 33f.
2 R. Mahler, A History of Modern Jewry 1780–1815, p. xv.
3 I. A. Agus, Urban Civilization in Pre-Crusade Europe, p. 9.
4 H. H. Ben-Sasson (ed.), A History of the Jewish People, p. 477f.
5 E. Rivkin, The Shaping of Jewish History, p. 140.
6 T. M. Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, p. 2f.
7 R. D. Barnett, ‘Anglo-Jewry in the Eighteenth Century’, in V. D. Lipman (ed.), Three Centuries of Anglo-Jewish History, p. 61.
8 A. G. L. Shaw, Convicts and the Colonies, p. 147.
9 ibid., p. 275.