THE READMISSION OF JEWS TO BRITAIN
The Jews were a small but important community in early medieval England. They dominated finance because the Church’s stance on usury – charging interest on credit – effectively prohibited Christians from being moneylenders, a position that lasted, with various qualifications and exceptions, until the Reformation. This made Jews both indispensable sources of credit and easy targets for abuse from those struggling to pay their debts. Subject to increasing restrictions and periodic violence, Jews were banned from practising usury by King Edward I in 1275. Worse was to follow. In 1290, having first granted them a compensatory pay-out, the king expelled them from the kingdom.
During the following 350 years, there were officially no Jews in England or Wales. (They were never formally banned from Scotland, although there is scant evidence of them residing there in any numbers.) In truth, a few Sephardic (Spanish and Portuguese) Jews were, unofficially, living and working in seventeenth-century London. The pretence was maintained that they were ‘Marrano’ Jews, those who had converted to Christianity, but the reality was that in 1657 they opened a secret synagogue in Creechurch Lane. Nonetheless, their numbers were tiny and their status precarious.
This might have remained the situation had not a strand of Puritan thought, British economic self-interest and the theological views of a Dutch rabbi coincided in 1655. With the title ‘Lord Protector’, the British republic’s head of state was Oliver Cromwell. The government executive was the Council of State with John Thurloe as its secretary. Both Cromwell and Thurloe favoured readmitting the Jews, partly as an issue of religious toleration and also as a means of tapping into the financial acumen that Amsterdam’s Jews were providing for the Dutch Republic.
Believing it imminent, Puritan millenarians eagerly anticipated the Second Coming which they thought would be prefaced by the conversion of the Jews and their return to Zion. Their arrival, first, in Britain would be a step along this path. Meanwhile, Menasseh Ben Israel (1604–57), an Amsterdam rabbi and publisher, believed that the Messiah would come when Jewish populations could be found in every country of the world. Thus he too wanted them to settle in Britain (he was already under the impression that some American Indians were, in fact, the lost ten tribes of Israel).
THE JEWISH POPULATION IN BRITAIN 1070–1900
1070 William the Conqueror invites Jewish merchants from Rouen to lend money and settle in England.
1144 In Norwich, the first ‘blood libel’ charge is made against Jews for ritual sacrifice.
1194 Richard the Lionheart orders the Ordinance of the Jewry, a record of all Jewish money transactions.
1218 Pope Innocent III’s instruction that all Jews should wear identifying badges is instituted.
1253 Jews are prevented from moving to towns where they are not already established.
1255 The ‘Hugh of Lincoln’ blood libel gains popular credence.
1264 York’s Jewish community is massacred by a mob.
1265 The Crown starts transferring its financial business from Jewish to Italian bankers.
1269 Jews are denied the right to hold property or inherit money.
1275 Edward I’s Statutum de Judaismo forbids Jews to loan money with interest.
1290 Edward I expels Jews from England in perpetuity. Between 4,000 and 16,000 are forced into exile.
1494 There is evidence of small numbers of Portuguese Jews, nominally converted Christians, privately practising their true faith in England.
1655 The readmission of Jews is debated by the Whitehall Conference.
1657 A synagogue is opened in Creechurch Lane in the City of London.
1664 Charles II promises his protection to English Jews.
1698 The Act of Suppressing Blasphemy confirms that practising the Jewish faith is legal. There are believed to be about 400 Jews in Britain.
1701 Bevis Marks Synagogue is opened in the City of London.
1809 George III’s sons, the dukes of Cambridge, Cumberland and Sussex attend a service in the Great Synagogue in Duke’s Place, London.
1858 Jews are permitted to take their seats in the Houses of Parliament.
1881 The Jewish population of 48,000 swells to 250,000 by 1914, due largely to Ashkenazi Jews emigrating from Russia and Eastern Europe.
In 1655, Menasseh Ben Israel arrived in London and was granted an audience with Cromwell. Sympathetic to his cause, Cromwell convened the Whitehall Conference, made up of lawyers, theologians and merchants, to discuss Jewish readmittance. In December, the conference broke up without agreement. The theologians were divided and the merchants – fearful of competition – hostile. The legal opinion, however, was favourable. John Glynne, lord chief justice of the Upper Bench, and William Steele, chief baron of the Exchequer, maintained that Edward I’s royal edict of expulsion not only had no legislative force but had never been ratified by Parliament. Historians are unclear as to exactly what was agreed. John Evelyn was certain that it meant Jews had legal protection to settle, writing in his diary for 14 December 1655, ‘Now were the Jews admitted.’
The following year, Britain went to war with Spain. One of those whose goods were impounded as a result was the Jewish merchant Antonio Rodrigues Robles. Actually of Portuguese descent, he took the matter to court, claiming he was Jewish not Spanish. For some of London’s covert Jewish community, the case was a source of unwelcome publicity. There was, however, no further hiding place when, in March 1656, Menasseh headed a list of Jewish signatories in a formal petition, requesting protection and a place to bury their dead. While Cromwell referred the petition to the Council of State, the court delivered an ambiguous verdict that, nevertheless, returned Robles’s possessions to him.
The combined effect of these developments was to demonstrate that London’s Jewish community openly existed and was not prosecuted for doing so. No formal statement of readmittance was issued and Menasseh returned to Amsterdam, believing that his mission had been a failure (he was so poor that he had to beg Cromwell for the money to travel home with the body of his son who had passed away in London). He was given an annual £100 state pension but died on his way back to Amsterdam. The legality of Jewish settlement in Britain was affirmed by Charles II. Turning down appeals to have them formally banished again, he promised them his protection. They began worshipping openly, in 1701 opening the Bevis Marks synagogue. Nor were they slow in demonstrating their loyalty to their adopted home. During both the American War of Independence and the Napoleonic Wars, London’s Jewish community fasted for British victory.
They also assisted Britain in more practical ways, making an incalculable contribution towards establishing the dominance of the City of London as the world’s financial centre. In the panic of 1745, London’s Jews enlisted for the capital’s military defence against the expected Jacobite attack and Samson Gideon provided valuable funds to shore up Hanoverian rule. Adopting his mother’s Christian religion, his son became an MP and in 1789 was rewarded with an Irish peerage.
Despite these services to the state, the path to full acceptance was not a smooth one. In 1754 popular disapproval forced Parliament to scrap new legislation allowing Jews to seek British naturalization. Many Jewish fathers opted to have their children christened, among them the twelve-year-old Benjamin Disraeli, subsequently leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister in 1868 and 1874–80.
Ben Israel’s humble petition on behalf of his fellow Jews. Cromwell has signed it ‘Oliver P’, the initial standing for his title, ‘Protector’.
The first practising Jew to be given a baronetcy was the financier and promoter of University College London, Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, in 1841. David Salomons became lord mayor of London in 1855. Despite the election of Lionel Rothschild in 1847 and David Salomons in 1851, the parliamentary oath required members to profess the Christian faith and therefore prevented Jews from taking up their seats in the House of Commons. They were finally allowed to do so in 1858. The first practising Jewish government minister was appointed in 1871 and the first judge in 1873.
By this time, the Jewish population of Britain was around 50,000, heavily concentrated in London. Eight years later there began the wide-scale migration of Ashkenazi Jews, fleeing the poverty and pogroms of Eastern Europe and Russia. Between 1881 and 1914, about 150,000 of them arrived in Britain, soon forming a distinctive community in Stepney in the capital’s East End, where a disproportionate number worked as tailors.
This influx quickly became contentious, not only among anti-Semites but also among many settled Jews who looked down upon the far poorer Lithuanian, Polish or Russian new arrivals. Legislation in 1905 barred a right of entry to immigrants with criminal records or a history of destitution, while further measures in 1919 and 1920 prevented them settling if they could not prove they had the means of support. Some who did not want Jewish immigration in large numbers in Britain made common cause with the Zionist movement in hoping Jews would instead settle in Palestine. However, by the end of the 1930s the British government (which held the League of Nations Mandate to administer Palestine) curtailed the flow of settlers there in the face of mounting Arab opposition.
Meanwhile, the Cabinet had responded to Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 by a gentle relaxation of the rules governing entry to Britain after the leaders of the Jewish community agreed to shoulder the financial responsibility of those arriving without jobs. About 30,000 came from Central and Eastern Europe over the following five years. Neville Chamberlain’s government loosened the criteria again in 1938, to the particular benefit of those aged under seventeen who were allowed to enter the country without visas or parents. Even with these concessions in place, only a further 25,000 Jews (9,000 of them, children) were able to flee to Britain in 1939, before the outbreak of the calamitous war that annihilated around 6 million of those they had left behind.