History of the Jews in England

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1290, King Edward I of England issued the Edict of Expulsion, ordering every Jew to leave his kingdom. It was a decree that erased an entire community in one stroke. Yet the history of the Jews in England did not end there. Today the United Kingdom is home to around 275,000 Jews. That is the second largest Jewish population in Europe, behind France, and the fifth largest Jewish community in the world. How did a people banned by royal order become so firmly part of British life? Why did English kings protect Jews for generations before turning on them? And who were the Jews who quietly lived in England while the ban was still on the books?

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• 2. The King's Property

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  In Caerleon, a major Roman legionary base in Wales, tradition remembers two Christian martyrs named Julius and Aaron. The name Aaron suggests a Jewish origin, and that is nearly all the evidence there is for Jews in Roman Britain. Soldiers, slaves, silversmiths and traders are all plausible. Any Jews who arrived around 70 CE were probably wiped out after the Romans left in 410 CE, as the Anglo-Saxons gradually took power from the Romano-Celts.

  Reliable history begins after the Norman Conquest of 1066, which tied England back into the European system and made it known to Jewish communities on the Continent. William of Malmesbury states that William the Conqueror brought Jews over from Rouen. The motive can be inferred. William wanted feudal dues paid to the royal treasury in coin rather than in kind, and that required men scattered across the country who could supply coin.

  A charter granted under Henry I to Rabbi Joseph, chief rabbi of London, and his followers spelled out the bargain. Jews could travel without paying tolls, buy and sell freely, and sell their pledges after holding them for a year and a day. They were tried by their peers and swore oaths on the Torah. A Jew's oath was valid against the oaths of twelve Christians.

  The sixth clause of the charter mattered most. It let Jews move wherever they wished, as if they were the king's own property, in the Latin phrase sicut res propriæ nostræ. That wording cut both ways. As royal property, Jews could be mortgaged whenever the monarch needed money, and they could be taxed without the consent of Parliament. In time they became the main taxpaying population.

  The Constable of the Tower of London was responsible for the Jews of the capital. When mobs threatened, they could shelter inside the Tower, sometimes in large numbers and for months at a time. In 1267, during the Second Barons' War, records show a body of Jewish men-at-arms forming part of the Tower garrison.

  The arrangement made Jews what the sources call "royal serfs". They enjoyed the freedom of the king's highways, exemption from tolls, the right to hold land directly from the king, and shelter in the castles built to assert Norman authority. Dependence also brought marks of difference. After the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, Christian authority, acting through the king, required Jews to wear a badge symbolising the two Tablets of Stone.

  Aaron of Lincoln is believed to have been the wealthiest man in 12th century Britain. His fortune may have exceeded the king's. When Aaron died in 1186, Henry II claimed the estate, because property gained by usury, whether by Jew or Christian, passed to the crown at the lender's death. It included £15,000 worth of debts owed to Aaron. Much of the fortune was lost on the journey to the royal coffers in Normandy, and a special branch of the treasury, known as Aaron's Exchequer, was created to handle the account.

  That windfall probably shaped what followed. In 1188, when Henry asked the country for a tithe to fund the Crusade against Saladin, he demanded a quarter of all Jewish chattels. The tithe was reckoned at £70,000 and the Jewish quarter at £60,000, which implies Jews held about a quarter of the nation's personal property. Arrears were still being chased from reluctant payers for many years. Twenty years earlier, in 1168, Henry had seized the chief representatives of the Jews and sent them to Normandy. He had also imposed a tallage of 5,000 marks on the rest.

  Still, Henry II's reign was something of a golden age. An economic boom and a hunger for credit made major Jewish fortunes in London, Oxford, Lincoln, Bristol and Norwich. Within five years of his accession, Jews were living in towns such as Cambridge, Thetford, Bungay, Canterbury, Winchester, Stafford, Windsor and Reading. Their spread let the king draw on their resources wherever he needed them. He repaid them with demand notes on the sheriffs, which were recorded in the pipe rolls. Burial was still restricted to London until 1177.

  The loans reached far beyond England. A Jew of Gloucester named Josce helped finance Strongbow's conquest of Ireland in 1170, and the king fined Josce five pounds for lending to men who had earned his displeasure. Strongbow also borrowed from Aaron of Lincoln. Visitors such as Abraham ibn Ezra in 1158 and Isaac of Chernigov in 1181 showed how attractive England had become. In 1182 it also received Jews exiled from the king's properties in France by Philip Augustus.

  Richard I tried to organise all this lending in 1194 through the Ordinance of the Jewry. Royal officials had to keep records of every Jewish transaction, and each debt was written on a chirography so the king could see Jewish property at once. A special exchequer collected unpaid debts after a Jewish creditor died. Through the Exchequer of the Jews, every transaction became taxable, with the king also taking 10 percent of sums recovered through English courts. The records were kept in chests called archae, guarded by panels of local Christian and Jewish key holders.

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• 3. Blood Libel and Expulsion

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  In 1144, the case of William of Norwich produced the first report in history of a blood libel against Jews. The historian Anthony Julius argues, in his 2010 book, that England became the "principal promoter, and indeed in some sense the inventor of literary anti-Semitism." He sees the blood libel as the key, because it bundles the claims that Jews are malevolent, powerful, merciless and always conspiring against Christians. Variations followed, about poisoning wells, twisting minds, and buying and selling Christian souls and bodies.

  King Stephen had already shown how fragile Jewish safety was. He burned down the house of a Jew in Oxford, and some accounts say the Jew was inside, because the man refused to contribute to the king's expenses. Yet Jewish chroniclers credit Stephen with preventing outbursts in England while Crusaders were killing Jews in Germany.

  Under Henry II, Jews at first lived on good terms with their neighbours, including the clergy. They entered churches freely and took refuge in abbeys in times of commotion. Some lived in opulent houses and helped to build many of the country's abbeys and monasteries. By the end of Henry's reign they had earned the ill will of the upper classes, and anti-Jewish feeling stirred up by the Crusades was reaching official policy.

  In 1189 and 1190, during the crusading years, massacres were recorded in London, Northampton and York. Whole Jewries were murdered in York, and mobs also struck in Norwich and Lynn. William of Newburgh wrote that the York killers acted less from religion than from greed. Church policy hardened after 1215, demanding the separation of Jews from Christians to stop the spread of heresy and sexual relations across faiths. A Jewish hat, an identifying mark, is depicted in the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre in Winchester Cathedral.

  King John and Henry III both overtaxed the Jews as an easy source of income. Henry III pressed roughly 70,000 pounds out of a population of only 5,000. To pay, Jews had to call in overdue debts, and since debts were usually secured against land, middling gentry lost the land that gave them feudal status. Jews could not legally keep land, so the crown's allies bought it cheaply. Queen Eleanor was among the notorious beneficiaries.

  In the 1260s, during the Second Barons' War, the forces of Simon de Montfort led pogroms in many English cities. They attacked Jewish communities and captured and destroyed debt records. Henry III himself had become the first monarch to lend credence to a blood libel, when he ordered investigations and arrests of Jews over the death of a child named Hugh in Lincoln. Hugh was venerated locally, and his story spread widely in prose and folk songs. In 1269 Henry made blasphemy by Jews a hanging offence.

  By the 1270s only about 2,000 to 3,000 Jews remained in England. Edward I passed the Statute of the Jewry in 1275 and forbade them from taking any more property into bond, the way they had earned a living. To finance his war against Wales in 1276, he taxed Jewish moneylenders. When they could no longer pay, he accused them of disloyalty, restricted their movements and made them wear a yellow patch.

  On the 17th of November 1278, the heads of Jewish households, believed to number around 600, were arrested on suspicion of coin clipping and counterfeiting. Coin clipping was common among Jews and Christians alike, and it had been made a capital offence in 1275. Homes were searched, and the Bury Chronicle describes Jews of every condition, age and sex being seized and sent to castles around England. About 600 were held in the Tower of London. More than 300 are known to have been executed in 1279, including 298 in London. A few who could afford to buy a pardon and had a patron at court escaped.

  Pettiness followed cruelty. In 1280 Edward granted a toll on a bridge at Brentford. It charged a penny for each Jew or Jewess on horseback and a halfpenny on foot, while other travellers paid nothing. The source of this hostility has been debated. One view holds that antisemitism passed from the crown's opponents to something "deliberately deployed and developed in the interests of the English state", and that financial motives mingled with Edward's "sincere religious bigotry".

  When the expulsion came, most Jews could take only what they could carry. A small number favoured by the king were allowed to sell their properties first, but most of the money and property of the dispossessed was confiscated. A monk named Gregory of Huntingdon bought every Jewish text he could find so that he could begin translating them. Because of him, at least some of what the exiles had written and created survived.

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• 4. Hidden Jews and Returnees

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  The Domus Conversorum, a house for Jewish converts, kept records of Jews up to 1551 and even later. Outside it, no official record of Jews in England exists until 1655, with a few exceptions such as Jacob Barnet, who was arrested and exiled. An attempt to revoke the edict of expulsion failed as early as 1310. Even so, four complaints were made to the king in 1376 that some of those trading as Lombards were actually Jews. In 1410, an eminent physician from Bologna named Elias Sabot was given a permit to visit and attend Henry IV.

  The expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497 finally sent a considerable number of Sephardic Jews to England. In 1542, many people were arrested on suspicion of being Jews. Throughout the sixteenth century, a number of people named Lopez, possibly all of one family, took refuge in the country. Henry VIII took a curious interest in Judaism. His representatives consulted notable Italian Jews during his attempt to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, and he cited Old Testament laws. Hebrew was first printed in England in 1524, and in 1549 its use in private worship was allowed.

  From the early 16th century, in the wake of the Spanish Inquisition, Jews returned in growing numbers. They had to hide their religion, but only loosely, and many became known as Jews despite their efforts. Hector Nunes, a Marrano from Spain, passed intelligence from Spain to Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth's spymaster, aboard his merchant vessels. That information helped England defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588.

  Joachim Gaunse of Bohemia came as a metallurgist and metal engineer and introduced new methods of mining. Sir Walter Raleigh invited him on an expedition to North America, where he became the first Jew to set foot on North American soil. Francis Drake's quartermaster on his voyage around the globe was named as "Moses the Jew", and there is evidence of Jews living in Plymouth in the 17th century.

  Another Marrano drew attention for darker reasons. Roderigo Lopez became personal physician to Elizabeth I. He was allegedly bribed by the Spanish crown to poison the queen, and he was executed. A wave of anti-Jewish feeling followed, unlike anything seen since the expulsion. In its wake came William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, both of which portray Jews in negative, stereotyped ways. Some commentators say Lopez inspired Shylock.

  Toward the middle of the 17th century, a considerable number of Marrano merchants settled in London and formed a secret congregation. Antonio Fernandez Carvajal and Samuel Maylott, a French merchant, stood at its head. Their business ran to the Levant, the East and West Indies, the Canary Islands and Brazil, and above all to the Netherlands and Spain.

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• 5. Cromwell's Quiet Decision

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  In 1607, Cambridge University received its first rabbi, hired to teach Hebrew to students. Many of those students went on to translate the King James Bible, which for the first time "dehellenized" biblical names. Elias, as the prophet had been called, became Elijah, closer to the Hebrew sound. Puritans loved the Old Testament names and gave their children the new spellings. They also adopted Jewish practices such as strict observation of the Sabbath.

  The English Reformation had made it more appealing for Anglicans to link their traditions to Jewish ones rather than Catholic ones. The theologian Richard Hooker was cunning enough to tie Anglican practices to Jewish ones, to silence Puritan attacks that called them too Catholic. Around the turn of the 17th century, Englishmen such as Edwin Sandys and Laurence Aldersey visited Jewish ghettos and synagogues on the Sabbath. They compared Jewish and Anglican practices in popular writings when they returned.

  Oliver Cromwell believed the English to be one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and therefore entitled to the blessings promised in the Old Testament. In the 1650s, Menasseh Ben Israel, a rabbi and leader of the Dutch Jewish community, approached Cromwell with a proposal that Jews finally be readmitted. Cromwell agreed. He could not force a council called for the purpose in December 1655 to consent formally, but he made clear that the ban would no longer be enforced.

  The argument raged for 1655 and 1656 as a pamphlet war. It divided religious radicals from more conservative voices. The Puritan William Prynne fiercely opposed the return. The Quaker Margaret Fell was just as passionately in favour, as was John Wemyss, a minister of the Church of Scotland. A small colony of Sephardic Jews in London was identified in 1656 and allowed to remain, and by 1690 about 400 Jews had settled in England. The sign of progress came in 1700, when William III knighted Solomon de Medina, the first Jew to be so honoured.

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• 6. The Long Road to Equality

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  On the 7th of July 1753, George II gave royal assent to the Jewish Naturalisation Act, which was repealed in 1754 after widespread opposition. The bill had grown out of the Jacobite rising of 1745, when Jews showed particular loyalty to the government. Their chief financier, Samson Gideon, steadied the stock market, and several younger members volunteered in a corps raised to defend London. Henry Pelham's Jew Bill allowed naturalisation by application to Parliament. It passed the Lords with little fuss. In the Commons, the Tories protested loudly against this "abandonment of Christianity", but the Whigs persisted.

  In 1798, Nathan Mayer von Rothschild set up a business in Manchester, sent to the UK by his father, Mayer Amschel Rothschild. He later founded the N M Rothschild & Sons bank in London. The bank funded Wellington in the Napoleonic Wars, financed the 1875 British purchase of Egypt's interest in the Suez Canal, and funded Cecil Rhodes in the British South Africa Company. Meanwhile, ports such as Hull had started receiving immigrants and trading "port Jews" around 1750, and in the 1780s and 1790s Daniel Mendoza, of Sephardic descent, was an active prizefighter.

  Catholic Emancipation in 1829 raised Jewish hopes. In 1830, William Huskisson presented a petition signed by 2,000 merchants and others of Liverpool. It was followed on the 15th of April that year by a bill from Robert Grant, which would occupy Parliament in one form or another for thirty years. In 1846, at the insistence of the Irish leader Daniel O'Connell, the British law "De Judaismo", which prescribed a special dress for Jews, was repealed.

  The honours arrived one by one. Queen Victoria knighted Moses Haim Montefiore in 1837, and four years later Isaac Lyon Goldsmid became a baronet, the first Jew to receive a hereditary title. Sir David Salomons was elected the first Jewish Lord Mayor of London in 1855. On the 26th of July 1858, Lionel de Rothschild finally took his seat in the House of Commons, after the law restricting the oath of office to Christians was changed. Since 1858, Parliament has never been without practising Jewish members.

  Benjamin Disraeli was already an MP by then. Born a Jew but baptised as a child, he faced no Christian-oath barrier. He served as Chancellor of the Exchequer and became prime minister in 1868 and again in 1874. As a leader of the Conservative Party, with its ties to the landed aristocracy, he used his Jewish ancestry to claim an aristocratic heritage. He was proud of it and wrote novels celebrating it. In 1884, Nathan Mayer Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild, became the first Jewish member of the House of Lords.

  Chief Rabbi Nathan Adler worked to unify diverse congregations under institutional authority, and the United Synagogue was founded in 1870. Sunday schools, benevolent societies and burial clubs reflected the community's adaptation to Victorian social norms. The very rich Rothschild, Montefiore and Mocatta families supported hospitals, schools and civic institutions. Novelists such as Grace Aguilar and the poet Amy Levy wrote about faith, gender and national belonging. Reform Judaism emerged alongside the much larger Orthodox practice, and congregations built grand synagogues such as Singers Hill Synagogue in Birmingham.

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• 7. The East End Arrives

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  From the 1880s, massive pogroms and the May Laws in Russia drove many Jews out of the Pale of Settlement. Of the East European Jewish emigrants, 1.9 million, about 80 percent, went to the United States, and 140,000, about 7 percent, to Britain. Chain migration did the work. The first successful members of a family sent information, money and sometimes tickets to later arrivals. Railways funnelled them to North Sea and Baltic ports, and they entered England through London, Hull, Grimsby and Newcastle. Others stopped only briefly, bound for New York, Buenos Aires or the Cape.

  The Jewish population grew from 46,000 in 1880 to about 250,000 in 1919. Until the late 20th century, East London was the centre of Jewish life, especially around Whitechapel, from Bishopsgate to Cable Street. Cheap rents and independent trades such as weaving and textiles, known as "the rag trade", drew people there. Spitalfields earned the nickname Little Jerusalem. In Manchester and Salford, Jews settled in Strangeways, Cheetham and Broughton. They started Yiddish and Hebrew newspapers and youth movements such as the Jewish Lads' Brigade.

  The newcomers split the community. Older, Anglicised, middle-class Jews and the poorer, Yiddish-speaking immigrants often had little in common. Many of the immigrants became entrepreneurs, especially in the garment trade, retailing, entertainment and real estate. Pressure from groups such as the British Brothers' League led to the Aliens Act 1905, followed by the Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act 1919.

  From the 1890s to the 1950s, British boxing was dominated by Jews whose families came from Russia or the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They were fighters, managers, promoters, coaches and spectators. The Zionist critic Max Nordau promoted the term "muscle Jew" to answer the stereotype that Jews were weak and cowardly. Harold Abrahams won the 100 metre gold medal at the 1924 Paris Olympics, a feat later made famous by the film Chariots of Fire. He became a hero to the Jewish community, although his quest to enter upper-class society left his Jewishness meaning less and less to him.

  The Marconi scandal of 1912-1913 brought antisemitism into politics. Senior ministers in the Liberal government were accused of secretly profiting from advance knowledge of deals about wireless telegraphy, and some key players were Jewish. The historian Todd Endelman names Hilaire Belloc and the brothers Cecil and G. K. Chesterton among the most virulent attackers. Frances Donaldson says Chesterton's feeling against Jews was "open and vicious".

  About 50,000 Jews served in the British Armed Forces in World War I, and around 10,000 died on the battlefield. The Jewish Legion, Britain's first all-Jewish regiment, fought in Palestine. In 1917, Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild, helped set the conditions for the Balfour Declaration. At home, antisemitism went "in most cases" along with Germanophobia, and Jews were equated with Germans. Many Ashkenazi families responded by Anglicising their German-sounding names.

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• 8. Refuge, War and Today

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  In the 1930s, the Battle of Cable Street showed the strength of local solidarity. Socialists, trade unionists, Jews and their neighbours stopped a British Union of Fascists rally from marching through a heavily Jewish area, despite police efforts to clear a path.

  Britain's welcome to refugees was far more guarded. At the 1938 Evian Conference, it refused to admit further Jewish refugees. By 1939, about half a million European Jews had fled toward England, but only about 70,000 were granted entry. The notable exception was the Kindertransport, which brought Jewish children from Germany without their parents, who were not given visas. Around 10,000 children were saved, out of a plan to rescue five times that number.

  When war was declared, 74,000 German, Austrian and Italian citizens in the UK were interned as enemy aliens. After tribunals, most of them, largely Jewish and other refugees, were released within six months. During the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands, three Jews from Guernsey, Marianne Grunfeld, Therese Steiner and Auguste Spitz, were deported to Saint-Malo in France and eventually killed at Auschwitz. They were the only Jews deported from British soil and killed in the Holocaust.

  Britain also strictly limited immigration to Mandatory Palestine, and the White Paper of 1939 all but stopped legal arrivals. Zionists organised an illegal effort called Hamossad Le'aliyah Bet, a precursor of the Mossad, which shipped tens of thousands of Jews in rickety boats. The last immigrant boat to attempt the crossing before the war's end was the MV Struma. A Soviet Navy submarine torpedoed it in the Black Sea in February 1942, and nearly 800 people died. Some 30,000 Jewish volunteers from Palestine joined the British Armed Forces, and some fought in the Jewish Brigade.

  By July 1945, 228,000 troops of the Polish Armed Forces in the West served under the British Army's high command. Many had been deported to Siberia by Stalin from 1939 to 1941, then released to form the Anders Army. Some Polish Jews, including Menachem Begin, deserted in Palestine to work toward a state of Israel. About 10,000 Polish Jews fought at the Battle of Monte Cassino. All were eligible to settle in the UK under the Polish Resettlement Act 1947, Britain's first mass immigration law.

  Of the Jews now in the UK, more than 260,000 live in England, mostly in and around London. Almost 160,000 live in London itself, with 20,800 in Hertfordshire, mainly in Bushey, Borehamwood and Radlett. Greater Manchester has slightly more than 25,000, led by Bury with 10,360 and Salford with 7,920. Other communities include Leeds with 6,760 and Gateshead with 3,000.

  In May 2026, the Board of Deputies of British Jews launched the country's first nationwide Jewish Culture Month. It offered more than 150 events on food, music, literature, comedy and heritage. Participants included the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Library, the National Portrait Gallery and JW3. Organisers said they wanted to show Jewish life beyond stories centred on antisemitism and security, after the 7th of October attacks and the rise in antisemitic incidents that followed.

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