History of Merseyside Jewry Introduction

Liverpool's Jewish community has played a major part in the modern history of Anglo-Jewry. It was founded by a handful of immigrant pedlars in the mid-l8th century, it was almost certainly the first Jewish community in the north of England. For over a century it was also the largest Jewish settlement in the English provinces, and the most influential. Beginning with the foundation of the Liverpool Hebrew Philanthropic Society in 1811, it provided pioneering models for the evolution of Jewish charitable and educational institutions elsewhere in the provinces. Its middle class of merchants, bankers and shopkeepers also achieved a very early and remarkably complete integration into the upper echelons of Liverpool society, developing a mutuality of respect emulated by other provincial communities during the Anglo-Jewish struggle for recognition and emancipation. A continual nurturing of these links rendered Liverpool relatively free of anti-alien and anti-semitic sentiment.

Lying, as it did, on the main route of migration by rail and sea from Eastern Europe to Canada and the United States, Liverpool served in the later 19th century as a major staging post for Jewish refugees from poverty and persecution in Russia, Austria and Rumania. The vast majority were eased across the Atlantic, but at least 5,000 remained in Liverpool, where they created in Brownlow Hill and Islington a miniature version of London's East End. The wide intellectual and political horizons of Liverpool's Jewish leaders led to the foundation there in 1867 of the first English branch of the Alliance Israelite Universelle and in later years made Liverpool into what Dr. Issac Lipkin described in 1961 as 'the most Zionist community in the country'.

Although massively overtaken in size by Manchester from the 1850s and Leeds from the early 1880s, the coherence of Liverpool's Jewish community and the vision of its leaders have enabled it to develop a sophisticated and comprehensive network of synagogues and societies and to exercise an influence on national and international Jewish affairs out of all proportion to its size.