Historians commonly date Jewish emancipation to either 1829 or 1858, while Benjamin Disraeli, born a Sephardi Jew but converted to Anglicanism, had been elected twice as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1868 and in 1874.

[2][failed verification] By the outbreak of World War II, about half a million European Jews fled to England to escape the Nazis, but only about 70,000 (including almost 10,000 children) were granted entry.

[19] As the king's property, English Jews could be mortgaged whenever the monarch needed to raise revenue and could be taxed without the permission of Parliament, eventually becoming the main taxpaying population.

[23] English Jews experienced a "golden age" of sorts under Henry II in the late 12th century due to huge economic expansion and increased demand for credit.

Though rulers of both church and state exploited and monopolized on the advancements in commerce and industry of English Jews, popular anti-Jewish sentiments grew as a result of their prosperity and relationship with the king and the courts.

[26] External pressures such as the circulating myth of the blood libel, the religious tensions in light of the Crusades, and the interference of Pope Innocent III in the late 12th century created an increasingly violent environment for English Jews.

[26] The incompetence of King John in the early 13th century depleted even the wealthiest Jews, and though they had more than a decade to recover, Henry III's equally mismanaged finances pressed roughly 70,000 pounds out of a population of only 5,000.

[19] In 1168, when concluding an alliance with Frederick Barbarossa, Henry II seized the chief representatives of the Jews and sent them to Normandy, and imposed a tallage on the rest of the community of 5,000 marks.

All property obtained by usury, whether by Jew or by Christian, fell into the king's hands on the death of the usurer; Aaron of Lincoln's estate included £15,000 worth of debts owed to him.

Henry III's official attitudes moved from protection to hostility when he became the first monarch to lend credence to a blood libel, when he ordered investigations and arrests of Jews concerning the death of a child, Hugh, in Lincoln.

Overtaxation inevitably led to overdue debts being foreclosed, meaning that the lands of middling Knights and gentry being bought up by the biggest landowners, notoriously including Queen Eleanor and other members of the court.

During the Second Barons' War in the 1260s, de Montfort's forces led a series of pogroms in many English cities where Jewish communities were attacked, and debt records captured and destroyed.

In 1542 many were arrested on the suspicion of being Jews, and throughout the sixteenth century a number of persons named Lopez, possibly all of the same family, took refuge in England, the best known of them being Rodrigo López, physician to Queen Elizabeth I, and who is said by some commentators to have been the inspiration for Shylock.

Jewish visitors included Joachim Gaunse, who introduced new methods of mining into England and there are records of visits from Jews named Alonzo de Herrera and Simon Palache in 1614.

This translation of the Bible, for the first time, began to "dehellenize" biblical names For example, Elias, as he had been called previously, became Elijah to sound more like the Hebrew pronunciation.

The Puritan William Prynne was vehemently opposed to permitting Jews to return, the Quaker Margaret Fell no less passionately in favour, like John Wemyss, a minister of the Church of Scotland.

[62][63][64] With Catholic Emancipation in 1829, the hopes of the Jews rose high; and the first step toward a similar alleviation in their case was taken in 1830 when William Huskisson presented a petition signed by 2,000 merchants and others of Liverpool.

In 1837, Queen Victoria knighted Moses Haim Montefiore; four years later, Isaac Lyon Goldsmid was made a baronet, the first Jew to receive a hereditary title.

(Though born a Jew, Disraeli's baptism as a child qualified him as eligible for political aspirations, presenting no restrictions regarding a mandated Christian oath of office.)

He adds, "Before the 1990s...few biographers of Disraeli or historians of Victorian politics acknowledged the prominence of the antisemitism that accompanied his climb up the greasy pole or its role in shaping his own singular sense of Jewishness.

The Jewish communities of the Northern ports were swelled both by transient and temporary migrants, bound for New York, Buenos Aires, the Cape, as well as London and other British cities.

Until the late 20th century, East London was the main centre of Jewish life in England, with settlement heavily focused on an area in and around Whitechapel, extending from Bishopsgate to Cable Street.

The Marconi scandal brought issues of antisemitism into the political arena, on the basis that senior ministers in the Liberal government had secretly profited from advanced knowledge of deals regarding wireless telegraphy.

"[77][79] About 50,000 Jews served in the British Armed Forces during World War I, and around 10,000 died on the battlefield, while Britain's first all-Jewish regiment, the Jewish Legion fought in Palestine.

Jews were heavily involved in boxing as professional and amateur fighters, managers, promoters, coaches and spectators—as well as gamblers and a certain criminal element that tried to fix fights.

[83] The Jewish establishment worked hard to promote boxing among the youth, as a deliberate "Anglicisation" campaign designed to speed their adoption of British character traits and cultural values.

[84] The most celebrated of the Jewish athletes in Britain was Harold Abrahams (1899–1978)-– the man made famous by the film Chariots of Fire for winning the gold medal in the 100 metre sprint in the 1924 Paris Olympics.

During the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands three Jews from Guernsey—Marianne Grunfeld, Therese Steiner, and Auguste Spitz—were deported to Saint-Malo, Nazi-occupied France, and eventually killed at Auschwitz concentration camp.

During the War, Zionists organised an illegal immigration effort, conducted by "Hamossad Le'aliyah Bet" (the precursor of the Mossad) that rescued tens of thousands of European Jews from the Nazis by shipping them to Palestine in rickety boats.

The efforts began in 1939, and the last immigrant boat to try to enter Palestine before the end of the war was MV Struma, torpedoed in the Black Sea by a Soviet Navy submarine in February 1942.