History of the Jews in Manchester

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.

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.

Jews traditionally traded in slop, jewellery and calligraphy and became pawnbrokers, quack doctors, seal cutters, engravers, watchmakers and miniature painters.

[2] About fourteen Jewish families settled in Manchester in 1786; their first synagogue was a rented room at Ainsworth Court, Long Millgate.

He purchased a mansion in Kensington, Liverpool, which he called Gilead House, and an estate on Mossley Hill for a family mausoleum.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[13] Thirteen new firms were run by practising Jews who were mainly young and brought solid capital to invest in permanent ventures.

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.

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.

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.