History of the Jews in Scotland
In 2013 the Edinburgh Jewish Studies Network curated an online exhibition based on archival holdings and maps in the National Library of Scotland exploring the influence of the community on the city.
[6] The late-18th-century author Henry Mackenzie speculated that the high incidence of biblical place names around the village of Morningside near Edinburgh might indicate that Jews had settled in the area during the Middle Ages.
[8] Most Jewish immigration appears to have occurred post-industrialisation, and post-1707, by which time Jews in Scotland were subject to various anti-Jewish laws that applied to Britain as a whole.
Joseph Hart Myers, born in New York, was the first Jewish student to study medicine in Scotland; he graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1779.
The presence of the plot on Calton Hill is no longer obvious today, but it is marked on the Ordnance Survey map of 1852 as "Jew's Burial vault".
The story of his own family's experience was immortalised in Jack Ronder's book and TV series called The Lost Tribe, starring Miriam Margolyes and Bill Paterson.
In 1878, Jewish Hannah de Rothschild (1851–1890), the richest woman in Britain at the time, married Scottish aristocrat Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, despite strong antisemitic sentiments in court and the aristocracy.
[16] Russian Jews tended to come from the lands in the west of the empire known as the Pale of Settlement, in particular Lithuania and Poland, many using Scotland as a stopping post en route to North America.
This second influx of Jews was notably larger than the first, and came from Eastern Europe as opposed to Western European countries like Germany and the Netherlands.
This led to the informal distinction between the Westjuden, who tended to be middle-class and assimilated into Scottish society, and the much bigger Ostjuden community, consisting of poor Yiddish-speakers who fled pogroms in Eastern Europe.
Jewish life in the Gorbals in Glasgow initially mirrored that of traditional shtetl life; however, concerns around this being a contributing factor to a rise in anti-semitism led to the established Jewish community establishing various philanthropic and welfare organisations with the goals of offering assistance to the refugees, including support in assimilating into Scottish society.
The passing of the Aliens Act 1905 and the onset of World War I led to a substantial decrease in the number of Jewish refugees arriving in Scotland.
Scottish Jews have also emigrated in large numbers to England, the United States, Israel, Canada, Australia and New Zealand for economic reasons, as other Scots have done.
[4][29] 41% (2,399) of Scottish Jews live in the local authority area of East Renfrewshire, Greater Glasgow, making up 2.65% of the population there.
Blackshirt meetings were physically attacked in Edinburgh by communists and "Protestant Action", which believed the group to be an Italian (i.e. Roman Catholic) intrusion.
[34] In fact, William Kenefick of Dundee University has claimed that bigotry was diverted away from Jews by anti-Catholicism, particularly in Glasgow where the main ethnic chauvinist agitation was against Irish Catholics.
[40] During the Operation Protective Edge, in August 2014, the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities reported a sharp increase in antisemitic incidents.
[41] A few months later, an irritating chemical was thrown on a member of staff selling Kedem (Israeli cosmetics) products in Glasgow's St Enoch Centre.
[48] Daiches explores the social stratification of Edinburgh's Jewish society in the interwar period, noting what is effectively a class divide between two parts of the community, on the one hand a highly educated and well-integrated group who sought a synthesis of Orthodox Rabbinical and modern secular thinking, on the other a Yiddish-speaking group most comfortable maintaining the lifestyle of the Eastern European ghetto.
[citation needed] Daiches describes how this language was spoken by the band of itinerant salesmen known as "trebblers" who travelled by train to the coastal towns of Fife peddling their wares from battered suitcases.
[51] In 2020 the poet David Bleiman[52] won the first prize and Hugh MacDiarmaid Tassie in the Scots Language Association Sangschaw competition for his poem "The Trebbler's Tale" written in "macaronic" Scots-Yiddish.
