From time immemorial Jews have buried their dead. The institution of a cemetery as a common burial ground, however, is probably post-biblical. In Talmudic times the cemetery was usually located far from a town, and needed a watchman to guard against grave robbers or animals. Grave monuments in ancient times appear to have become very elaborate as the Talmud records 'Jewish tombstones are fairer than royal palaces' (Sanh. 96b).

Some Jewish cemeteries are very famous. The ancient Jewish burial ground in Jerusalem, the Mount of Olives, with its second-century monuments known as Absalom's Tomb, the Tomb of the Hezir family and Zechariah's Tomb; and the Prague Jewish cemetery opened in 1254 and closed in 1787, spring to mind. The Jewish cemeteries of medieval England have long since vanished, for the most part one can only guess where they were originally situated.

The first Jewish cemetery in post-Expulsion England was opened in London by the Sephardim at Mile End in 1657. This was followed by Ashkenasi burial grounds in Alderney Road in 1696, and at Hoxton and Hackney in the eighteenth century. In the second half of the eighteenth century Provincial Jewish congregations began to establish their own cemeteries. By 1800 there were some twenty Jewish cemeteries outside London, a number which had doubled by 1840.⁽¹⁾

There is no strict definition of what is meant by the West of England but for the purposes of this article we shall look at Jewish cemeteries in the counties of Cornwall, Devon, Avon and Gloucester.

The furthest point west in England is Land's End. Some medieval Jewish scholars referred to England as Ketzei HaAretz, although the more usual term was Iyyei HaYam.⁽²⁾ Perhaps the Jews' first contact with England was at Land's End, and they afterwards used the name to designate England as a whole. Travelling west from Land's End towards London we come to Penzance. The Jewish cemetery here is in Leskinnick Terrace. When the Penzance Hebrew Congregation built its first synagogue in 1807⁽³⁾ it already had a cemetery. There are a number of beautifully incised slate gravestones, the oldest dated 1791, and wonderfully preserved, as they were almost entirely protected by the houses which had been built all round the cemetery and close to it. In 1965 I found 48 stones and made a transcript of the 45 which were then legible.

Still travelling west we come to Falmouth. The Jewish cemetery is on the Penryn road. It was said that the ground was presented to the congregation by Lord de Dunstanville in the 1790s.⁽⁴⁾ In 1913 Mr A. A. de Pass, a Jew then living in the area, learned that the land had not, in fact, been donated but was subject to a lease which had expired. He duly bought the land, and the cemetery is now cared for by the Board of Deputies.⁽⁵⁾ B.L. Joseph had made a transcript of the tombstone inscriptions and this was in the possession of Samuel Jacob in 1910. Seven inscriptions which Joseph had read were indecipherable by me, and I found a further eight which he had not transcribed. The earliest stones appear to be dated 1791.⁽⁶⁾ In all there is a record of 43 inscriptions.

Leaving Cornwall we cross the Tamar Bridge into Devon and stop at Plymouth. Here there are two Jewish cemeteries. The older is on Plymouth Hoe, just below the Citadel in New Street. When I first visited it in 1961 only the tops of a half dozen tombstones were visible, the rest were drowned in a sea of weeds, brambles and rubbish. This cemetery started in a garden owned by Mrs Sarah Sherrenbeck in the 1740s. Contiguous additional land was bought in 1758, 1811 and in 1815.⁽⁷⁾ In one section there are more tombstones than there is space for graves. This might well indicate that a layer of earth was added and the same ground was then re-used. An 1825 minute records, "... agreed to cover in the old cemetery some graves which will be chosen according to the letter which came from the Rav, the Gaon of the holy community of London."⁽⁸⁾ In all, I was able to decipher 146 inscriptions, though there were another dozen or so which might have been read if one had two or three hours to spend on each stone. Around 1900 the Revd Dr M. Berlin made a transcript of the vital information from 95 tombstones, but 50 of these had totally disappeared by the time I transcribed those still extant in the 1960s. Continued expansion of the Plymouth Hebrew Congregation necessitated a further purchase in 1868 of land in Gifford Place adjoining the Old Plymouth Cemetery near Central Park.⁽⁹⁾ In 1978 Dr H. Greenburgh made a computerized alphabetic list containing 506 English names and the date of death of all the persons buried in this cemetery.⁽¹⁰⁾

Some 40 miles east of Plymouth is Exeter. The Jewish cemetery is in Magdalen Street. The story of its purchase is clearly recorded. On the 28 March 1757 the Exeter City Council "agreed with Abraham Ezekiel for a term of 99 years determinable on three lives in late Tanner's plot in the parish of Holy Trinity at the yearly rent of 10s 6d for a burial place for the Jews and the Town Clerk is directed to make the lease accordingly".⁽¹¹⁾ The lives were Abraham Ezekiel himself, then aged 31, his daughter Rose aged two, and Israel Henry the son of Israel Henry, also aged two. This lease was renewed on 7 January 1803 by Moses Mordecai on three lives, viz. Solomon Ezekiel, aged 17, Simon Levy and Jonas Jonas, both aged 12, for a consideration of five shillings and a yearly rent of one guinea. Four years later on 23 June 1807 the lease was further renewed together with an additional plot of land, the consideration being the surrender of the previous lease, payment of five shillings, and again a yearly rent of one guinea. In the 1920s and 1930s Sir Thomas Colyer-Ferguson, the great gentile genealogist of Anglo-Jewry, made a note of English inscriptions of families which particularly interested him, notably the Ancona, Ezekiel and Gompertz families. The Revd Michael Adler DSO made a transcript of the English inscriptions which were extant in 1940. I added names and information recorded in Hebrew in the 1960s. Down to 1958 there were 110 readable inscriptions.

From Exeter we make our way north-eastwards on the M5 motorway. We pass through Honiton where in 1270 "Jacob of Norwich, Jew, is resident without the King's licence". We pass through Glastonbury where legend has it that Joseph of Arimathaea, a wealthy Essene Jew, planted his staff as he stopped to rest, and arrive at Bristol in the county of Avon. Here there are two Jewish cemeteries, a twentieth century one in Oakdene Avenue, off Fishponds Road, and a nineteenth century cemetery in Barton Road which was in use from 1840 for about 60 years. The Barton Road cemetery also contains the remains of Jews, and some of their tombstones, who were buried in the first Jewish cemetery in Rose Street, a site which now forms part of Temple Mead Station.⁽¹²⁾ Mrs Judith Samuels deciphered some 116 English inscriptions. On 92 of these stones, together with my son Jacob, I was able to decipher the Hebrew inscriptions giving corresponding Hebrew names and /or dates of death, and the Hebrew inscriptions on a further 15 stones which had no English at all.

After visiting Bristol we can go west on the A4 which takes us to Bath. The Jewish cemetery here is situated in Bradford Road, Coombe Hill, and is administered by the Board of British Deputies (which also looks after the Jewish cemeteries in Falmouth and Penzance). This cemetery was acquired and the first burial took place in 1836. It was surveyed in 1983 by A. Reese and helpers, and at that time there were some 50 stones standing with legible inscriptions, although Dr N. de Lange's list contains only 35 inscriptions.⁽¹³⁾

Travelling north from Bath on the A46 we enter the county of Gloucester, and make our way through Stroud, whose synagogue ceased to function in 1908,⁽¹⁴⁾ and on to the city of Gloucester. According to Brian Torode, the eighteenth century Jewish cemetery was in Organ's Passage, off Barton Street, on land bought in 1780 from the then rector of St Michael's Parish and measured about 12x9 yards. The first burial was in 1794, according to Torode, but a translation of some of the inscriptions was published in Gloucester Notes & Queries, 1890, and one of them indicated that Uri known as Feiss the son of Jacob HaLevi died in October 1784 and was one of the first to be buried in the Gloucester cemetery. The last dated inscription, of the 35 then extant, was dated 1886. That cemetery was closed in 1938, and the bodies re-interred and the tombstones re-erected at Coney Hill cemetery.⁽¹⁵⁾ Dr N. de Lange reports that there are now only 17 legible inscriptions dated between 1807 and 1887.

Some 60 miles from Gloucester travelling eastward on the A40 we come to the genteel town of Cheltenham. Once again we rely on Mr Torode who tells us that the Cheltenham Jewish cemetery was purchased in Worcester Row on 30 November 1824. In 1835, 1839, 1845, 1860, and possibly 1892, further land was bought adjoining the original burial ground. The earliest legible gravestone dates from 1833,⁽¹⁶⁾ though a Hebrew wall plaque commemorates a four-month-old child who died in May 1822,⁽¹⁷⁾ i.e. 30 months before the cemetery was purchased. Up to 1872 Jewish burials from Stroud, Ross, Hereford and Gloucester were interred at Gloucester, but in July 1872 the Trustee of the Gloucester Burial Ground wrote to the Warden of the Cheltenham Synagogue confirming that the Gloucester Ground was henceforth annexed to the Cheltenham Congregation.⁽¹⁸⁾ The ground is still in use and is a walled plot on the corner of Elm Street and Malvern Street, Cheltenham. There are some 79 legible inscriptions of the nineteenth century.

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Much may be learned from tombstone inscriptions. West country Jewish cemeteries clearly demonstrate the process of acculturation. At first only Hebrew was used on the stones. From about 1825 English began to appear on the reverse side of stones in Plymouth, "In memory of Lyon Joseph Esq. (merchant of Falmouth, Cornwall), who died at Bath June, AM 5585/VE1825",⁽¹⁹⁾ and on the same side as the Hebrew in the Plymouth cemetery from about 1840: "Our lives are in thy hands O God/ And the length of our days/ Are as nought before thee./Here lies David the son of Abraham /For 50 years a member of the Congregation of this town.../"⁽²⁰⁾ In Cheltenham the earliest English inscription is dated 1833.⁽²¹⁾ In the South West, after 1840 the Jewish name is retained in Hebrew but the secular name as well as the Jewish date appear in English. There were isolated uses of the common era year in the first six decades of the nineteenth century but after 1870 it invariably appears. Surnames themselves may be an indication of the assimilatory process - Kennard, Palmer, Harding and Walter in the South-West; Shane in Cheltenham and Gloucester; Brooks in Bath; Campbell, Churchill, Jackson, Morse and Rousseau in Bristol. Hebrew names ending in the son/daughter of our father Abraham indicate a convert to Judaism. Perhaps the ultimate stage in the process occurs in the Torquay Jewish cemetery in Paignton which dates from 1962 and which is a railed off part of the municipal cemetery. There is a stone there which when approached from the Jewish section displays on its front a magen david but when looked at from the municipal part had on its rear a cross!

Until the third quarter of the nineteenth century religious sentiments are to be found. On the tombstone of Mary Nathan (died 1858) is inscribed: Miriam ... wife of Aaron Nathan. May her pains and poverty which she bore in her lifetime atone for her sins... Her poverty was no exaggeration. In 1827 her husband had written to the "Plymouth Congeratation ... I am Drove to the last Extramity, without a farthin in the world having disposed of Everything I could make money of - so as my wife and sevon children should not starve ...."⁽²²⁾ Shortly after this he became a constable, rising to Superintendent of Police in 1851.

Real belief in the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead is evidenced by inscriptions such as: His body lies in the ground, but his soul is in Gan Eden [=the Garden of Eden] on the stone of Woolf Emden (died 1867);⁽²³⁾ and on the stone of Reichla, widow of Naphtali Benjamin, who died in 1817: ...A woman who fears the Lord she shall be praised. She went to her everlasting world 17 years after her husband, and there they shall delight in honour with all the righteous men and righteous women in Gan Eden, and stand at their portion [i.e. will receive their reward] at the end of days.⁽²⁴⁾

Pride in being native-born, whether of the city in which the cemetery was situated or elsewhere in Britain, is often evident. On the Penzance tombstone of James Jacob Hart, for example, is inscribed: "...late her Majesty's consul for the kingdom of Saxony. A native of Penzance. Died London 19 February 1846."⁽²⁵⁾ The stone of Abraham Emden, a Town Councillor of Plymouth who died in 1872, proclaims: ...and was gathered to the place of his fathers.⁽²⁶⁾ The stone of Andrew George Jacob who died in 1900 reads: "... born at Falmouth, Cornwall. Died at Exeter".⁽²⁷⁾

A former place of residence in Britain is often given. Thus Miriam Jacobs (died 1850), born in Devon in 1771, is described in Hebrew and English as " ... wife of Nathan Jacobs, formerly of Dartmouth".⁽²⁸⁾ David Moses (died 1812) was from Norwich.⁽²⁹⁾ He was born in Saarbruck in 1737, landed in Harwich in 1759, went straight to Norwich where he stayed until 1793, and then moved to Plymouth where he spent the last 19 years of his life. Similarly, her tombstone in the Exeter cemetery tells us that Rachel (died 1826), wife of Gershon Levy, was "of Guernsey".⁽³⁰⁾ The tombstone of Moses Solomon (died 1838) tells us that he was from the city of London which was the city of his birth and formerly of Scotland;⁽³¹⁾ in the Cheltenham cemetery Selena Myers, Solomon Lazarus, Abraham Myer and Sidney Myer came from Hereford, Lipman Goldsmith was from Ross and formerly Southampton, Fanny Sington, the daughter of a physician from Lissa, came from Manchester, Moses Moses was late of the City of Gloucester, Helen Amelia Joel came from Portsea and Southsea, Joseph Hart formerly resided at Exeter, and Miriam Samuel came from Cardiff.⁽³²⁾

Immigrants often had their former or native town or country recorded. Thus we are told that the Revd Moses Horwitz Levy (died 1834) who ministered to the Exeter Hebrew Congregation for 42 years was from Danzig.⁽³³⁾ In the Plymouth Hoe cemetery David Jacob Coppel (died 1805) was from Bialin in Polin;⁽³⁴⁾ in 1832 a Ze'ev ben Judah from Shatwinitz in the country of Polin died of the plague;⁽³⁵⁾ Jacob Phillip Cohen (died 1832) was from Lontschotz;⁽³⁶⁾ Esther, wife of Lazarus Solomon, who died in 1831, was from the holy congregation of Lublin in the state of Polin.⁽³⁷) In Bristol, Adam Louis Sametband (died 1883) was from Warsaw;⁽³⁸⁾ whilst in Bath Henrietta Leon, who died there aged 71, was born in Hildersheim on 26 July 1823.⁽³⁹⁾ In the Cheltenham cemetery, Samuel Gurnier (died 29 December 1863) was born in Bojanowo, Prussia, in 1825; Solomon (died 30 May 1861) and Sarah (died 31 December 1870) Mendes da Silva were born in 1781 and 1783 respectively, in Jamaica, as was Moses Quixano Henriques (died 2 July 1866), who was born 9 July 1800.⁽⁴⁰⁾

It is, perhaps, noteworthy that foreign provenance is always recorded in the Hebrew part of the inscription, whereas British former residence or place of nativity generally appears in the English part.

The stones which record an east European origin are of interest insofar as they indicate an immigration from eastern Europe much earlier in the nineteenth century than has been generally recognized. The trend is corroborated by an examination of the Decennial Census returns for Devon and Cornwall from 1851 onwards.

There are snippets of information to be gleaned regarding the character and activities of some individuals. Thus, we are told that "Samuel Cohen (died 1860) was of the stock of martyrs ... hastening to his prayers evening, morning and noon".⁽⁴¹⁾ From the chronogram And you shall circumcise the foreskin of your hearts, Moses ben Isaac (died 1780) must have been a mohel.⁽⁴²⁾ The descriptions of men variously as ha-rabbani hamuflag, parnas u-manhig, ha-nadiv indicate that they were an outstanding scholar, a president of the congregation, and a philanthropist respectively. Yashish is used to describe both bachelors and married men,⁽⁴³⁾ though in the Sephardi tradition the term is reserved for elderly bachelors of high repute. Zaken, an old man was used mainly of octogenarians,⁽⁴⁴⁾ though once a 64 year-old is also so described.⁽⁴⁵⁾ Abraham Alexander (died Clifton, 22 July 1870) 'represented Russia as Consul in the City of Bristol for forty-two years'.⁽⁴⁶⁾

In the early 19th century the balmy South Devon air attracted a number of anglicized, wealthy Jews from London. One of these, Barent Gompertz (died 1824), a member of a well-known Anglo-Jewish family, lies in an altar tomb which was inscribed with no less than twelve lines of a poem written by his brother Isaac.⁽⁴⁷⁾ The inscription is now illegible but fortunately it was copied by Sir Thomas Colyer-Ferguson.

Relics of a small but elite Sephardi settlement in Devon is evidenced by the tomb of Hannah, relict of Moses Ancona and daughter of Moses Vita Montefiore, who died in 1839.⁽⁴⁸⁾ Cheltenham also had a small coterie of Sephardim in the late nineteenth century. Inscriptions record the deaths of Solomon Mendes da Silva, his widow Sarah, and Moses Quixano Henriques, who were all born in Jamaica.⁽⁴⁹⁾

The hardships of foreign travel, even post mortem, are brought to light, as the following inscription (in translation) indicates: "The bachelor Issacher Behrman the son of the President Joshua Levy the righteous Priest from the holy congregation of London, died Yom Kippur 5565 [= October 1804] in the Island of Madeira and was buried here in Plymouth on Friday, the eve of Sabbath, 6 Iyyar 5565 [= May 1805]".⁽⁵⁰⁾ The dead man was the son of Levy Barent Cohen, the progenitor of the distinguished Cohen family of nineteenth-century London. One of Issacher's sisters, Hannah, married Nathan Mayer Rothschild, whilst another, Judith, married Sir Moses Montefiore. The Plymouth Hebrew Congregation still owns a magnificent silver ewer and bowl for the use of the kohanim [= priests] presented by his brothers and his widowed mother in 1807 for the loving kindness bestowed on the bones of her son. The Plymouth Congregation likewise made itself responsible for the mortal remains of another traveller, Rodolfo A. Correa, whose stone records that he 'died on board the Royal Mail Steamer Nile, 26 April 1875, on the passage from Savanilla to this port, Lat. 49 o 0' N Long. 18 o 31' aged 35 years and 20 days ...'⁽⁵¹⁾

Communities settled in ports or by rivers are bound to have more than their share of deaths by drowning. Pathetic inscriptions in the Cheltenham and Plymouth cemeteries recall Walter Emanuel Levason, aged nine, of Hereford "accidentally drowned in the River Wye",⁽⁵²⁾ and Nathan Fredman, aged 25, who died on 8 June and was buried on 29 June 1884, 'It should not happen to you who travel on the way/ Look and see my pain, for taken/ From me was my son, my only one, who drowned in the sea.⁽⁵³⁾

The danger of travelling the countryside is illustrated by another inscription (in translation): "Joshua Falk the son of Isaac from Breslau. He was slain in the place of Fowey by the wicked man Wyatt and drowned in the waters 14th Kislev 5572 and buried on the 17th thereof [= 30 November 1811]".⁽⁵⁴⁾ Isaac Valentine, as he was called, became the shochet of the Plymouth congregation in 1811 when he was paid £25 per annum. He augmented his wages by acting as an agent of the Joseph family of Plymouth who, in turn, were agents of the London brokers Goldsmid, buying up for the Government golden guineas for paper money during the Napoleonic Wars. Valentine was enticed to bring £260 to Fowey by an innkeeper called Wyatt who murdered him and dropped his body into the dock. Wyatt was hanged at Bodmin in the presence of a large crowd which flocked in from the surrounding countryside.

Tragedies of a different nature are recorded on war graves. In the Plymouth Hebrew Congregation's Gifford Place cemetery there is a tombstone erected to "John Lithman, late of the Judeans 38/40 Royal Fusiliers, died 8th January 1919/5679 aged 16 years and 9 months" and in the Hebrew inscription mi-tzeva ha-yehudit (= from the Jewish Army).⁽⁵⁵⁾ I wondered how a lad who was sixteen and a half years old when the First World War ended in November 1918 came to be in the army at all, and whether perhaps he died in the post-war flu epidemic. I made enquiries at the War Office but they had no information other than his army number and that the War Graves Commission knew of the location of his grave. Enquiries at Bet HaGedudim, the Museum near Netanya, Israel, devoted to the history of the Jewish Brigades in the British Army in the First and Second World Wars, were similarly fruitless. But a speculative telephone call in London to a person bearing the same surname elicited the unexpected response, "I was his brother, and remember that as a young boy I attended his funeral". Later, he told me that his brother had falsified his age to get into the army and had died in some kind of accident. Another Judean who was laid to rest in this cemetery was Myer Nyman of Swansea who served under the name Pte Michael Burns. He died 2 February 1919 aged 18 years and 4 months.⁽⁵⁶⁾ The third war grave in this cemetery is that of Stoker Harry Phillips of HMS Vivid. He died 2 April 1918 aged 29.⁽⁵⁷⁾ Graves from the Second World War in this cemetery are those of Sgt Ralph Emdon of the Queen's Royal Regiment who died 1944 of wounds received at Dunkirk,⁽⁵⁸⁾ and Sgt Morris Solomon of the Royal Australian Air Force who died on 21 July 1942 aged 23.⁽⁵⁹⁾ We are reminded of those dark days when we contemplate the double stone marking the deaths of a mother and her daughter, Mary and Esther Smith, who were Plymouth's first civilian deaths from Nazi bombing on 10 July 1940.⁽⁶⁰⁾

Why should we take an interest in our past? Well, perhaps a lesson I learned from the late Rabbi Dr Louis Rabbinowitz will answer this question. He told me that once he had conducted a funeral and before leaving the cemetery, he visited the grave of a rabbi who had died a long time before and who had left no family. There he recited a psalm. As he made his way back to his car, he recalled, he happened to look back. He saw a cemetery groundsman go over to the rabbi's grave, clear away some grass and weeds which had overgrown the tombstone and wash it down. "Because I had taken notice of that grave the groundsman realized that it was of some special significance, and therefore took an interest in it." If we do not want others to vandalize and rubbish our sacred places, perhaps we should show the way and demonstrate our own respect for them.