 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(September 2017) |
By the end of 18th century, the rapidly growing town of Manchester, England, had a small Jewish community, some of whose members had set up businesses, and a place of worship. The history of Manchester's Jewish community is told at the Manchester Jewish Museum in Cheetham. The Jewish community in Manchester is the second largest in Britain; the first being in Greater London. [1]
In the 1750s, Jews had no political rights in England, and in particular were not allowed to purchase property. As country members of the Great Synagogue, they traded as pedlars and hawkers. Small groups coalesced around safe Jew-friendly lodging houses where they organised temporary minyanim to observe the Shabbat. Liverpool was a focus for the first Jewish settlement in the North West of England, with communities in Cumberland Street who moved in 1775 to a room in Turton Court. Manchester was expanding rapidly, and in 1758 one family in trade became prosperous enough to acquire a private carriage. Manchester became an increasing important market, and Liverpool-based Jewish hawkers worked in Manchester in the week, returning to Liverpool to celebrate Sabbath.
The Manchester press was anti-Semitic. Jews traditionally traded in slop, jewellery and calligraphy and became pawnbrokers, quack doctors, seal cutters, engravers, watchmakers and miniature painters. The trades were profitable, but a miscreant could use the same skills for forgery, lockpicking and fencing stolen goods. In Manchester, there was a fear of travelling plagiarists who could reveal the profitable secrets of the cotton industry to foreign rivals and seduce cotton workers to take their skills abroad. Prescott's Manchester Journal of 1774 warned:
No Jew was ever convicted. The presence of increasingly wealthy slop dealers and hawkers was noted, and in 1788 jeweller Simon Solomon and flower dealer Hamilton Levi took shops in Long Millgate and Shudehill. [2]
About fourteen Jewish families settled in Manchester in 1786; their first synagogue was a rented room at Ainsworth Court, Long Millgate. [3] Lemon and Jacob Nathan, Aaron Jacob, Isaac Franks, Abraham Isaac Cohen and his son Philip and Henry Isaacs and his sons formed the nucleus of group who leased a burial ground in 1794 and by 1796 had begun worshipping in an upper chamber room on Garden Street at Withy Grove. Aaron Jacob was the reader and shochet and Jacob Nathan was the overseer. Jews settled in streets around the synagogue. The wars against the French caused difficulties for them, particularly the Aliens Act 1793 which restricted their movement. Wolf Polack, a pawnbroker of Shudehill, was deported for undisclosed breaches of the Act in 1800. Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle supported the Act and encouraged readers to inform on them. The community was generally stable.
Samuel Solomon, who bought a plot at the burial ground, marketed the miracle cure Balm of Gilead and Solomon's Drops for curing imperfections of the skin caused by an impure state of the blood. He purchased a mansion in Kensington, Liverpool, which he called Gilead House, and an estate on Mossley Hill for a family mausoleum.
Nathan Meyer Rothschild of Frankfurt was sent to Manchester by his father in August 1800. He had spent three months in London with Levi Barent Cohen to learn English commercial practice. He arrived with £20,000 and took offices in Brown Street to circumvent English agents on the continent and obtain English textiles at source at the lowest prices. He identified three profitable areas: raw materials, dyeing, and manufacturing. He traded dye and cotton for the finished product which was shipped via Hull, Leith and London to Hamburg. Blockading by the French when the war recommenced made this task increasingly difficult. Rothschild had a house in Downing Street, Ardwick, a neat suburb favoured by the merchants of the town. At least fifteen German merchants moved to Manchester between 1800 and 1806, eight of whom were Jewish, but Rothschild was the only one to take a seat at the synagogue and conform to all its rites and ceremonies. Rothschild's money was probably responsible for securing Rabbi Joseph Crool and the walling of the burial ground. In 1805, he obtained a London office and spent less time in Manchester, as the family business shifted from trading towards finance. He married Levi Barent Cohen's daughter and through her sister established links with Moses Montefiore and the Sephardi banking and finance community in Amsterdam. He moved in 1809 to a spacious town house on Mosley Street, with a large warehouse on Back Mosley Street. The property was sold in 1810, and he left Manchester in 1811. [4]
After the Napoleonic Wars, there was rapid physical and economic expansion in Manchester. With the radical demands for political acceptance that saw the thousands on the streets at Peterloo (16 August 1819) the Jewish question was increasingly less relevant. The Jewish community supported the status quo: Jacob Nathan signed the letter pledging to support the constables in the preservation of public peace. Passionate Anglicans such as Hugh Stowell, [5] rector of St Stephen's, Salford, promoted the Anglican Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews rather than expulsion. The Manchester Guardian , founded in 1821, was firm in its support for the rights of religious minorities. [6] The fifteen most prominent Jewish families at the time were assimilated: it was a community of shop-owners with a small elite of merchants and manufacturers. In its number were fourteen clothes dealers, nine jewellers, five quill and pencil retailers, five merchants, three hawkers, two hatters, two furriers, two dentists, two silk manufacturers, two fent dealers, an optician, a pawnbroker, a furniture dealer and a rope maker. Trade was centred on the old town, but one family lived in Clarendon Street, Chorlton-on-Medlock, in the southern suburbs, and one on Salford Crescent. Abraham Franklin had a shop in St Ann's Square, Mendelson on King Street, Behrens and Gumpel lived on Mosley Street, Aaronson's surgery was in Princess Street, and Freeman, the miniaturist, had his studio in Brazenose Street, all the best addresses. [7] These families formed the oligarchy that ran the synagogue. Manchester had the fourth-largest Jewish community outside London. [8]
Abraham Franklin (born 1784) took over the leadership of the Halliwell Street Synagogue. He was the son of Benjamin Wolf Franklin, whose family had come to London via Breslau from Prague. He was adopted by his aunt, the wife of a silversmith, and started his working life as a hawker of watch glasses. He was apprenticed to a watchmaker, acquired a shop in 1807, and ascended the retail ladder. He was unwaveringly orthodox and socially and culturally English. He saw no need for religious reform and opposed the disreputable new wave of immigrant Jewish hawkers who he considered, with their broken English and lack of English commercial moral values, brought disrepute on the synagogue and settled Jewish traders. [9] He spoke out for law and order, and sent a son to Manchester Grammar School. To further the prestige and respectability of the community he sought larger accommodation, sermons in English and the formation of a choir and educational and philanthropic agencies. The 1832 cholera epidemic caused the wealthy to move from the city to outlying Broughton and Cheetham Hill, taking advantage of the new bridge over the River Irk, and along Plymouth Grove to the south. Franklin called his new home Gesunde House. [nb 1]
Alexander Jacob with Franklin's support formed the Manchester Hebrew Philanthropic Society in 1826, as the congregation accepted responsibility for the old and poor who, because of their dietary restrictions, could not use the workhouse provisions of the Poor law. Contribution was voluntary (a compulsory contribution would have had to be authorised by an Act of Parliament). Before the 1832 Reform Act Manchester had no Member of Parliament. The synagogue had to deal with the rootless poor that lived on the margins of society, un-anglicised pauper immigrants of the post-war years; [10] working as pedlars when peddling had become uneconomic. [11] The immigrants challenged the hard-won respectability that the community valued. [10] Another social change was in tailoring. Second-hand clothes were not good enough for the middle classes and bespoke tailoring was expensive. Around 1830, retail middlemen started to deal with customers and put out the work on a low-profit-margin system to outworkers in sweatshops. One of the most prominent of the retail middlemen was Benjamin Hyam, who created modern mass market tailoring, where profit came from sales volume, not high prices. He claimed to make a complete suit within six hours for a fixed price in workshops attached to his shop. He advertised suits in the Manchester Guardian with a money-back guarantee. [12] His workforce was probably over 100. Hyam was ultra-orthodox and his shop closed at sunset on Friday. His influence was great, so that by 1836 seven of the synagogue seat holders had followed his example and traded as tailors. The conditions they imposed on their workers provoked a series of unsuccessful strikes in 1833 and 1834. Ready-made clothing was the inevitable consequence of such a production system, and Hyam was advertising this in 1836. [nb 2]
1834–1836 were boom years for the cotton industry. The proprietors were driven by carriage from the suburbs, and the foremen and clerks came in by omnibuses on a half-hourly service along Upper Brook Street and Cheetham Hill. The town centre became a district of warehouses, while Newton, Ancoats and Little Ireland housed workers in slum accommodation. Franklin, Simmons, Hyam, the Jacob brothers and Simon Joseph were rich retailers. [13] The three years from 1834 saw an influx of merchants who set up agencies in Manchester. By 1837 there were 101 foreign export firms, of which 75 were German. [13] Thirteen new firms were run by practising Jews who were mainly young and brought solid capital to invest in permanent ventures. They differed from the established Jewish merchants who were throwing off their links to synagogue. Of the newcomers only one lapsed, as they saw no stigma attached to a Jewish identity. Though 1837–43 were years of recession, 28 more Jewish merchants migrated from the Netherlands and Northern Germany; and Samual Hadida from Gibraltar and Abraham Nissim Levy from Constantinople acquired a warehouse in Mosley Street. The 1841 census shows at least 76 Jews engaged in the cotton trade in Manchester. [14]
The Behrens Warehouse was built on the corner of Portland and Oxford Streets for Louis Behrens & Sons by P. Nunn c. 1860. [15] The Behrens family was prominent in the banking and social life of the city's German community. Louis Behrens was the first chairman of the Schiller Anstalt (1855–1911), which was later chaired by Friedrich Engels. Charles Hallé and Karl Marx were members. [16]
With the political events in Germany, liberals from both synagogues came together with resident gentile Germans to support the German nationalist rebels. They participated in the Liedertafel; the 1851 census suggested that there were 1,000 persons of German birth in Manchester, of whom 292 were Jewish. Demographically the leaders of the new synagogue were moving upwardly. David Hesse had acquired a factory.
Solomon Marcus Schiller-Szinessy was elected minister of the United Congregation at Manchester. This was before the secession which led to the establishment of a Reform congregation in that city. Chiefly owing to Tobias Theodores (professor of Hebrew at Owens College), Schiller-Szinessy was offered and he accepted the office of minister to the newly formed congregation. The Manchester Reform Synagogue was founded in 1857 [17] under the name "Manchester Congregation of British Jews" by a group consisting mainly of German-Jewish immigrants. [18] It suffered wartime bomb damage in 1941, and was replaced by a new building in 1952.
The Aleppo Sephardic Jewish community of Manchester had contacted Rabbi Yeshaya Attia to come to be their Rabbi to be their leader but he disappeared. Years later a record was found that showed that, while he was a passenger on a sailing ship from Alexandria, Egypt to Liverpool, England, he was apparently lost in a storm in the Bay of Biscay on the night of 25-27 June 1859. [19]
The earliest recorded evidence of the Oldham Jewish Community is the birth of Philip Cohen in 1872 [20] . Since then there have been community members moving back and forth from the two communities and while the complete history of the Oldham community remains more elusive the two communities share a common history.
The Manchester Jewish Museum is a Jewish history museum, located on 190 Cheetham Hill Road in Manchester, England, in the United Kingdom. The museum occupies the site of a former Orthodox Jewish synagogue, the place of worship for the Congregation of Spanish & Portuguese Jews, called the Spanish & Portuguese Synagogue, also the Sha'are Tephillah Synagogue. The congregation worships in the Sephardic rite from premises located at 18 Moor Lane, Kersal, Salford.
Louis Jacobs was a leading writer, Jewish theologian, and rabbi of the New London Synagogue in the United Kingdom. He was also the focus in the early 1960s of what became known as the "Jacobs Affair" in the British Jewish community.
Neologs are one of the two large communal organizations among Hungarian Jewry. Socially, the liberal and modernist Neologs had been more inclined toward integration into Hungarian society since the Era of Emancipation in the 19th century. This was their main feature, and they were largely the representative body of urban, assimilated middle- and upper-class Jews. Religiously, the Neolog rabbinate was influenced primarily by Zecharias Frankel's Positive-Historical School, from which Conservative Judaism evolved as well, although the formal rabbinical leadership had little sway over the largely assimilationist communal establishment and congregants. Their rift with the traditionalist and conservative Orthodox Jews was institutionalized following the 1868–1869 Hungarian Jewish Congress, and they became a de facto separate denomination. The Neologs remained organizationally independent in those territories ceded under the terms of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, and are still the largest group among Hungary's Jews.
Jews in Philadelphia can trace their history back to Colonial America. Jews have lived in Philadelphia since the arrival of William Penn in 1682.
The history of Jews in Charleston, South Carolina, was related to the 1669 charter of the Carolina Colony, drawn up by the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury and his secretary John Locke, which granted liberty of conscience to all settlers, and expressly noted "Jews, heathens, and dissenters". Sephardi Jews from London were among the early settlers in the city and colony, and comprised most of its Jewish community into the early 1800s.
The history of the Jews in the Netherlands largely dates to the late 16th century and 17th century, when Sephardic Jews from Portugal and Spain began to settle in Amsterdam and a few other Dutch cities, because the Netherlands was an unusual center of religious tolerance. Since Portuguese Jews had not lived under rabbinic authority for decades, the first generation of those embracing their ancestral religion had to be formally instructed in Jewish belief and practice. This contrasts with Ashkenazi Jews from central Europe, who, although persecuted, lived in organized communities. Seventeenth-century Amsterdam was referred to as the "Dutch Jerusalem" for its importance as a center of Jewish life. In the mid 17th century, Ashkenazi Jews from central and eastern Europe migrated. Both groups migrated for reasons of religious liberty, to escape persecution, now able to live openly as Jews in separate organized, autonomous Jewish communities under rabbinic authority. They were also drawn by the economic opportunities in the Netherlands, a major hub in world trade.
The history of Jews in Australia traces the history of Australian Jews from the British settlement of Australia commencing in 1788. Though Europeans had visited Australia before 1788, there is no evidence of any Jewish sailors among the crew. The first Jews known to have come to Australia came as convicts transported to Botany Bay in 1788 aboard the First Fleet that established the first European settlement on the continent, on the site of present-day Sydney.
The history of the Jews in Cincinnati occupies a prominent place in the development of Jewish secular and religious life in the United States. Cincinnati is not only the oldest Jewish community west of the Allegheny Mountains but has also been an institutional center of American Reform Judaism for more than a century. The Israelite, the oldest American Jewish newspaper still (2019) being published, began publication in Cincinnati in 1854.
The Belfast Jewish Community is the Jewish community in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Its Rabbi is the Rev David Kale. The community follows the Ashkenazi Orthodox ritual. Membership has fluctuated from 78 in 1900, approximately 1500 during World War II, about 375 after World War II, to 350 in 1945, 380 in 1949 and 200 in 1999. The congregation was fewer than 80 people as of January 2015.
Shangarai Chasset, also called Shaarei Chesed, was an Orthodox and later, Reform, Jewish congregation and synagogue, located in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the United States. The congregation worshipped in the Sefardi rite.
The history of the Jews in Omaha, Nebraska, goes back to the mid-1850s.
Congregation Beth Israel was a Reform Jewish congregation and synagogue, located for most of its history at 761 Chestnut Street in Gadsden, Alabama, in the United States. An outgrowth of Gadsden's Jewish religious school, it was founded in 1908 and incorporated in 1910. It moved into its Chestnut Street building in 1922, and joined the Union of American Hebrew Congregations in 1924.
From about 1590 on, there had been a Portuguese Jewish community in Hamburg, whose qehilla existed until its compulsory merger with the Ashkenazi congregation in July 1939. The first Sephardic settlers were Portuguese Marranos, who had fled their country under Philip II and Philip III, at first concealing their religion in their new place of residence. Many of them had emigrated from Spain in the belief that they had found refuge in Portugal.
The Exeter Synagogue is a Jewish synagogue, located in Synagogue Place, Mary Arches Street, in the old city of Exeter, Devon, England, in the United Kingdom. Established in the 1720s as the Exeter Hebrew Congregation, an Orthodox congregation that worshiped in the Ashkenazi rite, the congregation has been led by laity since c. 1990s, and caters to all shades of Judaism including Reform, Liberal, Masorti and other Jewish denominations.
Jews have been living in Maine, a state in the northeastern United States, for 200 years, with significant Jewish communities in Bangor as early as the 1840s and in Portland since the 1880s. The arrival of Susman Abrams in 1785 was followed by a history of immigration and settlement that parallels the history of Jewish immigration to the United States.
Cheetham Hill Road is a road in north Manchester, England, running from Corporation Street in Manchester city centre, through Cheetham to Prestwich. In Crumpsall, its name changes to Bury Old Road.
The Manchester Reform Synagogue is a Reform Jewish congregation based in Central Manchester, England, in the United Kingdom. The congregation, founded in 1857 as the Manchester Congregation of British Jews, is one of the oldest Reform communities in the United Kingdom, and is a member of the Movement for Reform Judaism.
Few Jews arrived in Baltimore, Maryland, in its early years. As an immigrant port of entry and border town between North and South and as a manufacturing center in its own right, Baltimore has been well-positioned to reflect developments in American Jewish life. Yet, the Jewish community of Baltimore has maintained its own distinctive character as well.
The history of the Jews in San Francisco began with the California Gold Rush in the second half of the 19th-century.
Kingston upon Hull, on England's East Coast was, by 1750, a major point of entry into Britain for traders and migrants, second only to London for links to the continent. Around then, a few Jews from German and Dutch cities lodged and settled in Hull. Selling jewelry and dealing goods in the thriving port and market town, they maintained contacts with Europe, London, and many other – particularly Northern – towns. The small community produced its own institutions and leaders, which were tested by anti-Jewish sentiment, and later by an influx of East-European refugees.
Notes
Footnotes
Bibliography