The Jews of Wales

Cai Parry-Jones

Description

This study considers Welsh Jewry as a geographical whole and is the first to draw extensively on oral history sources, giving a voice back to the history of Welsh Jewry, which has long been a formal history of synagogue functionaries and institutions. The author considers the impact of the Second World War on Wales’s Jewish population, as well as the importance of the Welsh context in shaping the Welsh-Jewish experience. The study offers a detailed examination of the numerical decline of Wales’s Jewish communities throughout the twentieth century, and is also the first to consider the situation of Wales’s Jewish communities in the early twenty-first, arguing that these communities may be significantly fewer in number and smaller than in the past but they are ever evolving.

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Map of Jewish communities established in Wales between 1768 and 1996
Introduction
1. Migration and Settlement
2. Religious and Communal Life
3. Evacuation, Refuge and the Second World War
4. Jewish and Non-Jewish Relations in Wales
5. Jewishness and Welshness
6. Decline and Endurance
Conclusion
Appendix: The Population of Wales’s Jewish Communities
Glossary
Notes
Select Bibliography

Sujets

• Religion
• Judaïsme
• Wales
• History
• Jews
• Histoire
• Jewish

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786830869
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE JEWS OF WALES
THE JEWS OF WALES
A History
CAI PARRY-JONES
© Cai Parry-Jones, 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library CIP Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-78683-084-5
eISBN: 978-1-78683-086-9
The right of Cai Parry-Jones to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published with the financial assistance of the Marc Fitch Fund
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Cover image: The Wartski Family of Bangor and Llandudno 1893-4, by kind permission of STORIEL.
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Map of Jewish communities established in Wales between 1768 and 1996
Introduction
1. Migration and Settlement
2. Religious and Communal Life
3. Evacuation, Refuge and the Second World War
4. Jewish and Non-Jewish Relations in Wales
5. Jewishness and Welshness
6. Decline and Endurance
Conclusion
Appendix: The Population of Wales’s Jewish Communities
Glossary
Notes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
My research on the history of Welsh Jewry has occupied me for more than half a decade. The project began as a PhD thesis titled ‘The History of the Jewish Diaspora in Wales’ that was successfully defended at Bangor University in March 2014. I wish to acknowledge the important contributions made by my former PhD supervisor, Professor Nathan Abrams, as it was he who introduced me to this field of research. I would also like to thank Professor Andrew Edwards, who offered continual encouragement, guidance and support throughout my time at Bangor.
Many individuals have shared their expertise, insights and materials with me and have offered encouragement. I especially wish to thank Meic Birtwistle, Grahame Davies, Jasmine Donahaye, Colin Heyman, Glen Jordan, David Morris, Paul O’Leary, Huw Pryce, Esther Roberts, Einion Thomas, Diana Soffa and Stanley Soffa, as well as the assistance of archival and library staff in both the United Kingdom and the United States.
Various bodies have provided financial support for both my research and this publication. Major funding for my doctoral research came from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, while both the Royal Historical Society in London and the College of Arts and Humanities at Bangor University generously awarded me travel grants to attend archives and conferences in both the United Kingdom and the United States. I also wish to acknowledge the substantial financial support I have received from the Marc Fitch Fund towards the cost of publishing this work. I am grateful to all bodies for their vision and generosity in funding academic research.
I thank also my immediate family – Dad, Beca and Catrin – for the interest they have shown in my work and, more importantly, for always telling me that I could do it. Finally, I thank all the people at the University of Wales Press who have been involved in preparing this book for publication, particularly Dr Llion Wigley. It has been a pleasure to work with them.
I dedicate this book to the Jews of Wales, both past and present, and also to the memory of two special people who are no longer with us – my Nain, Elizabeth Alice Jones (1930–2017), who was extremely excited to see my doctoral work being published, and my mam, Meryl Elizabeth Parry-Jones (1953–96), who I know would have been behind me all the way.
List of Abbreviations
AAC
Academic Assistance Council
BMA
British Medical Association
BUF
British Union of Fascists
CAJEX
Magazine of the Cardiff Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women
CNS
Cardiff New Synagogue
CRO
Caernarfon Record Office
CUS
Cardiff United Synagogue
GA
Glamorgan Archives
HLUS
Hartley Library, University of Southampton
IWM
Imperial War Museum
JC
Jewish Chronicle
JYB
Jewish Year Book
LMA
London Metropolitan Archives
NWC
North Wales Chronicle
NLW
National Library of Wales
RCM
Refugee Children’s Movement
SFNHM
St Fagans National History Museum
SWMF
South Wales Miners’ Federation
TNA
The National Archives, Kew
WGA
West Glamorgan Archives
WL
Wiener Library
YMCA
Young Men’s Christian Association
Map of Jewish communities established in Wales between 1768 and 1996
Introduction
A LTHOUGH Jewish communities have been present in Wales since 1768, we have waited more than 250 years for the first nationwide historical study of the Jews in Wales to be written. This is largely because Welsh historians have traditionally associated religious belief and practice in Wales with Nonconformity (and Anglicanism to a lesser extent) and have thus tended to ignore the historical experiences of other religious minority groups such as the Jews. 1 This neglect should surprise no one, as for most of its history Wales has not been known as a nation of diverse faiths, however multi-denominational its Christianity. The religious census of 1851, for instance, revealed that 78 per cent of Welsh worshippers attended a Nonconformist chapel, and the predominance of Nonconformity up until the mid-twentieth century has led several scholars to brand Wales as a ‘Nonconformist nation’ or the Welsh as a ‘Nonconformist people.’ 2 As Paul Chambers and Andrew Thompson have pointed out, the story of Welsh religious history is ‘not merely about Christian institutions.’ 3 , but nevertheless the historical presence of Jews and other religious minorities in Wales has been overlooked until relatively recently. 4 Their small numbers make it difficult to fit them into conventional narratives and analysis frameworks, and they have therefore been placed outside the dominant ways of thinking about the Welsh religious landscape.
If most Welsh historians have viewed the Jewish experience in Wales as peripheral or irrelevant to major trends in their field, the same is even more true in regard to historians of British Jewry, who have shown little, if any, desire to pay attention to the histories of Jews in British nations other than England. As the discipline’s name, ‘Anglo-Jewish’ historiography, suggests, historians of British Jewry have focused primarily on Jewish experiences in England, with the terms ‘Britain’ and ‘England’ often used synonymously, as in Sidney Salamon’s work, The Jews of Britain , which offers an account of the Jews in England only. 5 This is hardly surprising given that Britain’s more populous Jewish communities are to be found in English cities such as Leeds, London and Manchester. As Britain’s largest Jewish centre, London has received the lion’s share of attention, but studies of Jewish communities in the ‘English provinces’ have also been produced and are growing. 6 By contrast, the number of studies that focus on Jewish life in other parts of the United Kingdom remains small. 7 Undoubtedly this will continue to be the case until more works such as this are written, when ‘British Jewish’ rather than ‘Anglo Jewish’ should become the preferred term used by historians. 8 To help make this a reality, this book does not use the terms ‘British Jewish’ and ‘Welsh Jewish’ synonymously. Rather, it sees Welsh Jewry as a distinctive section of British Jewry, the other sections being Scottish, Anglo, Irish (to 1922) and Northern Irish (from 1922) Jewry. 9
Regrettably, some historians are reluctant to change the terminology. Todd Endelman, for instance, is unwilling to discard the term ‘Anglo Jewish’ because:
it is conventional to use the term ‘Anglo-Jewish’ to refer to Jews in Britain as a whole, including Jews in Scotland and Wales, even though they were not, in a strict sense, ‘English’ Jews. This usage is too well established to be dropped. Moreover, since the number of Jews who lived in Wales and Scotland was never large, folding them into ‘Anglo Jewry’ does not distort the overall picture. 10
However, while the overall picture may not be distorted by folding Scottish and Welsh Jewry into Anglo Jewry, the process certainly distorts the picture of Scottish Jewry and Welsh Jewry. As Endelman clearly points out, Scottish and Welsh Jews are not ‘English’ and the particularities of their experiences would be lost if scholars took Endelman’s advice. William D. Rubinstein uses the term ‘Anglo’ to describe British Jewry, but as Nathan Abrams reminds us, Rubinstein uses it in a linguistic sense, as the title of his work demonstrates: A History of the Jews in the English-Speaking World: Great Britain . The term is acceptable in this instance, for it is mostly accurate, (there are examples of Welsh-speaking Jews), but is an approach not widely shared by historians. 11
More recently, some British-Jewish historians have been influenced by the school of ‘New British History’, offering a balanced account of Jewish history from all nations of the United Kingdom. 12 Although a section on Ireland (to 1922) and Northern Ireland (from 1922) is missing, the coverage of English-Jewish, Scottish-Jewish and Welsh-Jewish histories in John Campbell’s ‘The Jewish Community in Britain’, for instance, demonstrates an attempt to move away from the Anglocentricity of British-Jewish historiography. 13 Indeed, other historians, such as Geoffrey Alderman and Raphael Langham, have published under the ‘British-Jewish