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The Jewish communities which developed in South
Wales in the second half of the nineteenth century based
themselves upon the growth of the coal, iron and tin-
plate industries of that region. They were as much
products of industrial South Wales as the mining and
metallurgical industries, and the difficulties which
confronted them can and ought to be seen, in part at
least, as a by-product of problems attendant upon rapid
industrialisation. The history of these communities
down to the First World War does, in fact, provide a
graphic illustration of the role which Jewish
communities traditionally play as scapegoats for economic
ills and industrial unrest.
Historically, the earliest Jewish community to
develop in South Wales after the Readmission was that of
Swansea; according to the Standard Jewish Encyclopedia,
German Jews settled in Swansea in the 1730s, though
there is evidence that they were Lithuanian Jews intending to go to America.1.
In 1740 David Michael, a founder
member of the community, built a wooden synagogue behind
his house in Wind Street, near the docks; it could hold
about 40 people. This structure served until 1789,
when a new building, also of wood, was erected on The
Strand nearby. This was replaced in 1818 by a larger
structure, with a capacity of 60-70, in Waterloo Street,
and this in turn gave way, in 1859, to the Goat Street
synagogue, the one which German bombs destroyed
in 1940.2. When the
Goat Street synagogue was opened, Swansea Jewry
could not have numbered more than about 50
souls.3.
Within the next 40 years, the size of the community
increased six-fold.4.
By far the greater part of this
increase came from immigrant Jews from eastern Europe.
And just as, in London, the immigrants shunned the cold
formalism of the cathedral-like synagogues already
established there, so in Swansea they founded their own
Beth Hamedrash, in Prince of Wales Road, in 1906.
Indeed, until the end of the Second World War, Swansea
Jewry was divided into two religious groupings, And
though, as the years wore on, the difference became more
apparent than real, in the beginning it had a definite
meaning. Goat Street was the spiritual home of the
Jewish 'establishment`; 'Prince of Wales Road was the
abode of the immigrants, Yiddish-speaking, poor (at least
to begin with), but probably more orthodox. The
established Jews, though without doubt the descendants of
peddlars, were themselves by now shopkeepers and
tradesmen; the newcomers tramped the valleys of west
Glamorgan, Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire, learning
the language of the native Welsh, doing business with
the rapidly-developing mining communities, and very
occasionally (as at Ammanford) deciding to live among
them. Often they did not establish separate synagogues,
but met for prayer in a room provided by one of their
number. The Port Talbot community was organised at the
turn of the century by Raphael Levi, a Lithuanian
immigrant, at Aberavon, but a synagogue was not erected
till after the First World
War.5. At Ammanford a
synagogue was never built. Of these very small
communities in south-central and south-west Wales, to
which Swansea ranked as a large Jewish centre, almost no
trace (except descendants) now survives.
The one exception is Llanelli. There is no
record of Jews in Llanelli prior to the 1880s. The
nucleus of the community was provided by Isaac Benjamin
Jeffreys, who arrived in 1887, and his two brothers,
Lewis and Morris: they were all glaziers. Later
arrivals were credit drapers and pawnbrokers; the first
pawnbroker's shop in Llanelli was opened by a .Jew in
1897. Religious services were held in the home of Harris
Rubinstein, for the synagogue in Queen Victoria Road was
net opened until
1909.6. By
any standards the community
was minute: 70 Jews, according to the
Jewish Year Book
of 1914, in a gentile population of over 25,000.
Jews were attracted to Swansea, Llanelli and
Ammanford because the growth of the metal and mining
industries in the second half of the nineteenth century
had created new entrepreneurial opportunities in a rapidly
expanding population. The same is true of west Monmouth
and east Glamorgan. Jewish peddlars and tradesmen were
naturally attracted to the Welsh mining centres. The
Merthyr Tydvil community was founded in 1848; the
Aberdare community dates from at least the 1860s, and
that at Pontypridd can be traced back to
18677. The
developing industrial areas situated in the Western
Valleys of Monmouthshire formed a particular area of
Jewish settlement. A synagogue was not opened at
Newport till 1869, but the community there was then
already ten years old.8. Similarly,
the synagogue at Tredegar was founded in 1870 to serve a community which
had been established several years
before.9. Russian
refugees who went to South Wales at first attached themselves to these already-established communities, but
soon spread outwards to Abertillery, Bargoed, Ebbw Vale,
Rhymney, and the surrounding localities as far north as
Brynmawr in Breconshire.
For these Jews of Monmouthshire and East Glamorgan,
Cardiff fulfilled a role similar to that of Swansea in
relation to their co-religionists in the west. Although
there are instances of Jews having lived in Cardiff in
the eighteenth century, a community was not established
there until the 1840s: the land for the Jewish cemetery
in Cardiff was presented by the Marquis of Bute in 1841.
A permanent synagogue was soon established in a room in
Trinity Street, near the market; then it moved to larger
premises in Bute Street. In 1858 a synagogue was opened
in East Terrace to serve a community then numbering
perhaps 150 persons. At the same time the community
acquired its first Minister - Nathan Jacobs.
The Cardiff Jewish community, as it developed
during the Victorian period, was a business one par
excellence: watchmakers, jewellers, 'slop'-sellers, tailors,
pawnbrokers and general dealers.10. It
was prosperous.
tightly-knit and exclusive. Discipline of members, as
revealed in the Congregation Minute Books, was rigorous.
In August 1880 it was decided that a policeman should be
present at East Terrace during the forthcoming high-holydays 'to prevent non-subscribers entering the
Synagogue.11. Discontent
with the high-handed, over-bearing attitude of the anglicised communal leaders
eventually led to open revolt. One source of trouble was
arrears of payments of subscriptions and seat-rentals;
another was criticism of the spiritual leadership. In
1878 the Minister, the Rev. I. Lewis, had been given six
months' notice to quit 'unless he conducts the service
with more devotion'; in 1885 Mr. M. Lewis was appointed
shochet and mohel at £70 per annum, and two years later
the Rev. J.H. Landau was appointed Minister and teacher
at £100
per annum.12. These
appointments did not, however, meet with universal approval. A group of 'seceders'
had established their own chevra in Edward Place some
time between 1889 and 1890, and had enticed to their
side a shochet, the Rev. J.B. Rittenberg. The delegate
Chief Rabbi, Hermann Adler, was prevailed upon to withdraw his endorsement of Rittenberg's
shechita and to tell
the seceders that animals slaughtered by him were trefa.
But reinforced by the adherence of recently-arrived
immigrants, the seceders were not to be put off so
lightly. In March 1889 they made a formal approach to
Adler to appoint for them a chazan and shochet. He
interviewed representatives from both sides, but was
unwilling to press the seceders to withdraw. 'Your
decision', Mr. I. Samuel, of East Terrace, wrote to
him, 'can have but this effect, that instead of Cardiff
having as now one good Congregation with an English
minister and teacher, a school open and free to all poor
children, it must revert to its former state of affairs,
when a foreign Shochet will be the Jewish representative
and the rising generation will be deprived of Jewish
education.13. But
Adler would not apply further
pressure. The Edward Place synagogue came into being,
and in 1897 acquired its own marriage
secretary.14.
Although the breach between the two Cardiff
communities was now complete, the East Terrace synagogue
remained the more prestigious of the two: it was the
synagogue of Cardiff's Jewish establishment. When
Colonel A.E.W. Goldsmid came to Cardiff in 1894 as
Colonel-in-Command, 41st. Regimental District, he
naturally joined East Terrace, and was the prime mover
in the project to build the new synagogue in Cathedral
Road, opened by F.D. Mocatta and consecrated by Chief
Rabbi Adler on 11 May
1897.15. Goldsmid's
presence in
the Welsh capital gave Cardiff Jewry some national
prominence. The founder of the Jewish Lads' Brigade,
he had become a devoted Zionist, was founder of the British Zionist
Federation, and took part in the El Arish Expedition of 1903. When Herzl
visited Cardiff, it was primarily to interview Colonel Goldsmid. He died, like Herzl,
in 1904.16.
By the turn of the century, Cardiff was the undisputed capital of South
Wales Jewry. It had a Jewish population of about 1,500, two synagogues (and
for a time between 1901 and 1904, an immigrant-inspired Beth Hamedresh as
well), a Board of Shechita and, in 1905, a Jewish Naturalisation and
Political Association. It also boasted a Board of Gaurdians, founded in
1900, which in that year alone relieved 230 cases, one-third of whom were
alleged to be 'professional beggars'. The board soon ran into financial
difficulties and by 1904 had been
wound up.17. At
the other end of the
social scale, well to-do Cardiff Jews were making the familiar moves west
and east to newer residential areas, to Grangetown, Riverside, City Road and
Newport Road. Louis Samuel, who died in 1906, provided the city with its
first Jewish J.P., and Lionel Fine, born in Rhymney in 1865, was appointed a
J.P. in 1904. The community, at least as far as its leadership was
concerned, appears to have been as integrated as any section of Anglo-Jewry
at that time.
Around Cardiff, meanwhile, to the north and west, a dozen or more Jewish
communities had established themselves. Foremost among these were Merthyr,
with a literary & Social Society, a Naturalisation Society, and a branch of
the Chovovei Zion and Newport, which had its own Board of
Guardians.18.. At
the turn of the century the Rev. Michaelson, Minister at Newport, was paying
weekly visits to Tredegar and
Brynmawr.19. But
each of these latter
communities had its own shochet who presumably officiated at services in the
synagogues which each
possessed.20. Other
Jewish centers in East Glamorgan
and West Monmouth did not (with the exception of Abadare) possess an
excluive shochet, but all had synagogues (usually converted houses or rooms)
with a cheder attached. Fed by periodic influxes of Russian refugees, South
Wales Jewry spread itself into every major town and many minor villages and
hamlets. Yomim Noraim services were held at Barry Dock for the
first time in 1904.21. The
synagogue at Ebbw Vale was
not formally opened till 1911, when its congregation
numbered about 80 persons.
In numerical terms all these communities were
minute. In 1914 the 135 Jews of Brynmawr represented
2.6 per cent of the town's population. Tredegar Jewry,
160-strong, amounted to approximately three-quarters of
one per cent of Tredegar's inhabitants; in Abertillery
there were 100 Jews, less than half of one per cent of
the population, with Merthyr's 300 Jews representing
roughly the same proportions while at Newport there
were 250 Jews, just over a third of one per cent of the
inhabitants. Swansea's 1,000 Jews amounted to just
over one per cent of Swansea's population. Even the
largest number of Jews in South Wales, the 2,000-strong
Cardiff community, comprised only slightly more than one
per cent of Cardiff's total population. The Jewish
populations of the newer areas of settlement in
Glamorgan and Monmouth were too small even for the Jewish Year Book to bother to mention separately. It
is very doubtful whether, on the eve of the First World
War, South Wales Jewry amounted to 5,000 souls: the
total may well have been nearer 4,500.
That such small, well-ordered communities could
have become the objects of antisemitic outbursts which,
if they were not as long-lasting as those suffered by
London Jewry at the time, were certainly more violent,
seems at first glance difficult to believe. Yet between
the 'Jew Bill' riots of 1753 and the fascist-inspired
outbreaks of the 1930s, the attacks upon South Wales
Jewry in 1911 stand out as the only example of
organised mass antisemitic violence in Great Britain.
I have examined in detail elsewhere these anti-Jewish
riots, which took place in August 1911 in the Western
Valleys of Monmouth.22. Here,
at the risk of repeating
some of my findings, I wish to place these riots in a
somewhat broader context.
Victorian Jewry in South Wales was a mercantile
community which established itself and grew as a result
of the expansion of trade and industry there. But
this industrial revolution, which seemed to offer so
many opportunities for Jewish trading talents, contained
within itself the seeds of subsequent misfortune. The
explosive growth of the coalfields in industrial South
Wales in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries had attracted to Glamorgan and Monmouthshire
thousands of migrants, at first from neighbouring
welsh counties. but later from south-west England and
from even further afield.23. Of
the total population
enumerated in Glamorgan and Monmouthshire in the census
of 1911, 35 per cent and 37 per cent respectively were
returned as having been born outside the county in which
they resided; over 20 per cent in both counties had
been born outside Wales. At first the native Welsh
were able to absorb the newcomers. But the process
of assimilation was unable to keep pace with the
continuing influx of migrants.24. There
was a 'head-on
collision' between different cultural
identities.25.
When this confrontation was reinforced by strong ethnic and/or religious
differences, open conflict was difficult to avoid. To the native Welsh the
Jews, however few in number, however well established, however worthy,
however fluent in the Welsh language (as many of them were), remained
foreigners and interlopers, 'a small and separate class, convenient for
attack'.26. The
Jews in South Wales, unlike the Irish,
did not work longer hours, take lower wages, or accept
inferior living standards, to the detriment of Welsh
miners and factory workers. Indeed, though it is
impossible to say for certain that (prior to 1914)
no
Jew in South Wales was a coal-miner, or a blast-furnaceman, or a tinplate-worker, it is equally impossible
to deny that very few Jews living there in the late
Victorian and Edwardian period belonged to the classic
Marxist proletariat.27. They
were poor, often very
poor, but poverty alone was not sufficient to bind
them to the working-class populations in whose midst
they lived. And when, in the summer of 1911, the
eleven-month-old Cambrian Combine strike collapsed,
to be followed by the first-ever national railway
strike, with its own consequent effect upon the
collieries and blast furnaces, the mining communities
of the Western Valleys erupted into an orgy of violence
in which the Jews were the prime, and generally the sole targets.
Accusations that the Jews were taking advantage of the industrial unrest to
raise rents and food prices were, on investigation, found to be false in almost
every case. Nor were the rioters 'hooligans' and 'roughs'; they were miners and
their wives, members of the 'respectable' working classes. Nor were the riots
spontaneous; at Tredegar, where they began, 'open threats' had been made against
the Jews for some time, a fact to which the Rev. Jerevitch, at Cardiff, bore
witness.28.
Yet if it was the misfortune of the Jews to have
come into South Wales at a time of social upheaval, and
to have received its backlash, they were still more
unfortunate to have entered a land seething with
religious bigotry. Here the Welsh Baptists were well
to the fore. The abduction and conversion of Esther
Lyons, in 1868, which created such a storm of indignation in Jewish circles, and which was compared with the
Mortara case, was carried out by a Cardiff Baptist
Minister, Nathaniel Thomas, and his wife; the
subsequent legal proceedings revealed that Esther Lyons
had not been their first Jewish
victim.29. There is no
evidence to suggest that the Welsh Revival of 1904 was
itself philo- or antisemitic; but it is known that some
converted Jews were brought to Llanelli to preach as part
of the revivalist effort
there,30. and it may not be pure
coincidence that attempts were being made at Llanelli at
about the same time to ban shechita without prior
stunning.31. At
Pontypridd there was an 'incident'
involving Jewish voters, and the Cardiff community took
the precaution of forming a Jewish Vigilance
Society.32.
When the riots of 1911 broke out at Tredegar, they began
with a mob of 200 attacking Jewish shops and singing
several favourite Welsh hymn
tunes.33. And when the
Monmouthshire Welsh Baptist Association, meeting at
Blackwood, near Bargoed, on 6 September 1911, was asked
to pass a resolution expressing sympathy with the Jews,
several ministers and others took exception to the
motion; one delegate argued that 'Resolutions did more
harm than good, and they encouraged the Jews. There
were about 100 Jews at Tredegar now, and if they had
many more resolutions they would have 500
there'.34.
The resolution was not passed.
It would be interesting to know what picture of
the Jews was being painted by Baptist ministers in South
Wales in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries; at all events, it cannot have been a very
favourable one. The Revival, certainly. turned many
Welshmen's minds towards social problems. In this
respect it had a long term effect which can be seen at
work during the Cambrian stoppage of 1910-11 and which
may well have contributed towards the concern with bad
housing which was a marked feature of the 1911 riots.
When those riots began, Jews fled from the Western
Valleys in large numbers to Aberdare, Merthyr, Newport
and Cardiff.35. They
had been the victims of organised
attacks by economically-motivated and religiously-inspired mobs; Welsh as well as English newspapers had
no hesitation in calling their experience a
'pogrom'.36.
They returned to the Valleys in due course, but the
memories of 1911 sank deep, and at the end of the Great
War many of them moved permanently to Cardiff where,
incidentally, they appear to have had a noteworthy
revivifying effect upon orthodox religious observance
there.37.
I am painfully aware that the picture I have
painted of South Wales Jewry in the Victorian and
Edwardian periods is a sombre one. It is in the nature
of Jewish history that its darker periods are more
faithfully and more fully recorded than its happier
moments. In the context of Anglo-Jewry as a whole,
the Jews of South Wales were too small at that time to
make a marked impact or create a decisive image. In
the context of South Wales the newspapers of the
period mentioned them only when their sufferings
merited column-space; Tredegar was more newsworthy
than Kishinev. Were it not for the events of 1911,
the history of the Jews in South Wales before 1914 would
be dominated by Cardiff, as that of Anglo-Jewry as a
whole is dominated by London. As it is, the records
tell us precious little about the daily lives of these
Jewish people, their hopes and fears, their family
circumstances, their economic and social status. It is
easier to ask these questions than to answer them. Why,
for instance, were the western communities - in Llanelli,
Swansea and its environs - apparently unaffected in 1911?
Why were Cardiff and Newport untouched? Had relations
with the gentile communities in these areas been of a
different, more amicable order, or did antisemitic
rabble-rousers find it easier to do their work in small,
isolated towns and villages than in the larger urban
centres? And what was it about life in South Wales which
managed to sustain communities which must have been among
the most orthodox of the Victorian era, and which have
produced a half-dozen or more rabbis and ministers of
religion? Was it simply that the Jews who settled in
South Wales were staunchly orthodox anyway? Or was it
also, as I suspect, that the normal pressures of social
and religious conformity in a small community were, in
this case, reinforced by unspoken fears? Although
Swansea, Cardiff and Newport Jewry were well established
before the 1880s, the Jewish communities of South Wales
owed their growth and development largely to immigrants
arriving in the last two decades of Victoria's reign. It
seems likely that these people saw in the religious
fanaticism of Welsh nonconformity echoes of Russian
Christianity at its worst.
(I should like to express my appreciation of the
advice given to me by Dr. Kenneth Morgan, Fellow
of The Queen's College, Oxford, in the preparation
of this paper, for the contents of which I alone
am responsible.)
