he history of Jews in England dates back to 1070 when William the Conqueror invited Jewish traders from Rouen to England, probably to help the Crown in financial matters. It was not until the end of the eleventh century that Sephardic Jews began to immigrate in larger groups, initially only in London. During Henry I’s reign, the royal decree provided Jews with the right to buy and sell goods and property, to maintain their own courts, to take the oath to the Torah instead of the Christian Bible, and to travel around the country without paying tolls. In 1290, King Edward issued an edict expelling all Jews from England accusing them of usury practices. It is believed that from 4,000 to 16,000 Jews then had to leave the country. Despite the ban, the Jews began returning to England in small groups almost immediately after their expulsion, but for a long time they were denied the right of becoming British citizens. The edict prohibiting Jews from settling in England was abolished in 1656, when Oliver Cromwell allowed Jews who originally came from Spain and Portugal to practise the their religion.
In both pre-Christian times and afterwards, Jews settled as far East as China and India famously often working as traders in partnership with Christians and Muslims. In the Middle Ages, the Jewish diaspora in Europe divided into two groups, Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews. Sephardic Jews (also called Spaniols), who had lived in the Iberian Peninsula, spoke the Ladino language, a Romance language derived from Old Spanish. In 1492 Spain expelled its Jewish inhabitants who refused to convert to Christianity and stole their property; in 1497 Portugal did the same. Sephardic Jews settled mainly in Italy, northwest Africa, and the Middle East. Unlike the Sephardim, the Ashkenazi Jews whose ancestors had settled in Central and Eastern Europe spoke Yiddish, a Germanic language dating from the ninth century that added vocabulary from countries where they lived as well as Aramaic and Hebrew. The customs of each group, including clothing, cuisine, and experience of other religions, differed. The Jews who first settled in England were Sephardic and never numbered more than 2,000. The Ashkenazi Jews who immigrated to Britain in the nineteenth century arrived looking for homes safe from the murder and rape of Eastern European progroms more than for economic opportunity, as had the Sephardim. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries comparatively large numbers of Ashkenazi Jews began to arrive in England from from Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Russia. Many of the Ashkenazi who clustered in London’s East End and similar neighborhoods in other British cities came from Eastern European peasant communities and shared these communities’s poverty and lack of education. Disraeli, who emphasized his Sephardic ancestry, understandably wished to differentiate himself from poorer, less cultured Jews. English Sephardic Jews looked at the newcomers from Central and Eastern Europe, whom they called Tudescos, with a clear sense of cultural and material superiority. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Ashkenazi with their Yiddish culture far outnumbered the long-established Sephardimm who had names such as Disraeli, Montefiore, Mocatta, Lindo and Da Costa, who they remained the most influential section of British Jews. In the 1850s, the total Jewish population of England numbered around 35,000, over half of whom lived in London (Lewenthal and Goldstein, 43).
Jews born in England had the status of subjects of the Crown and enjoyed greater rights than their peers in many other European countries. However, because they did not belong to the Church of England, unlike Dissenters and Roman Catholics, could neither participate in parliamentary elections or apply for municipal offices. In 1753, Parliament passed the Jewish Naturalisation Act, but it was repealed the following year as a result of public demonstrations and protests. The status of English Jews did not change until the middle of the next century. Since its foundation in 1826, Jewish students could graduate from University College London, which accepted students from all faiths. By the end of the Victorian era, all restrictions for every position in Britain, except that of monarch, were removed to British Jews.
Related material
- Judaism in Nineteenth-Century England: A Chronology
- British Liberal Judaism: Montefiore, Montagu, and Reforming Reform
- The Protestant Fight for Jewish Civil Liberties in Victorian England
- Thomas Arnold against the “Jew Bill” that would give Jews the civil rights of other citizens
- Is Judaism a Race or a Religion?
Bibliography
Arendt Hannah, 'Antisemitism': Part One of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York and London 1979.
Borgstede, Simone Beate. 'All is Race': Benjamin Disraeli on Race, Nation and Empire. Lit Verlag, Wien, Berlin 2011.
Endelman, Todd M. ‘Benjamin Disraeli and the Myth of Sephardi Superiority', in Jewish History. 10.2 (1996): 21-35.
Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, Vol. XCV. London 1848.
Lewenthal Michael, Richard Goldstein, Jews in Britain. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013.
Last modified 21 May 2020