Patrick Comerford
I recalled earlier this week (24 July 2024) how I have wondered at times whether Portugal Place in Cambridge and, by extension, Portugal Street are so named because Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula found a welcome in Cromwell’s England.
Indeed, Portugal Place is close to the Cambridge Synagogue on Thompson’s Lane, although the synagogue dates from 1937, over a century after Clement’s Lane was renamed Portugal Place.
Cambridge may have been the centre of one of the earliest provincial Jewish communities in mediaeval England. Thomas Fuller, in his History of Cambridge (1643), puts the date of the first Jewish settlement at 1073.
Last Friday (19 July 2024), in a posting on the Jewish communities in mediaeval Cambridge (HERE, I recalled a tradition that the Round Church on Bridge Street was once a synagogue, and that the parishes of All Saints’ and Saint Sepulchre were once known as ‘in the Jewry.’
But the Jews of Cambridge were victims during the revolt of the barons in 1266, and within a decade the Jews were banished from Cambridge in 1275, 15 years before King Edward I issued an edict in 1290 expelling all 5,000 Jews from England and confiscating their property.
There may have been a mediaeval synagogue in Cambridge near the prison, later the site of the Guildhall on Market Hill. The site of that Jewish house was given to the Franciscans, who had their main house in Cambridge on the site of Sidney Sussex College.
So it is interesting that Oliver Cromwell was an alumnus of Sidney College. Under his rule, Jews began returning to England in the 1650s. Jewish scholars were soon visiting Cambridge to teach Hebrew as part of the Cambridge BA, and by the early 1700s stable Jewish communities were emerging in Cambridge.
Well-known early Jewish teachers at the university include Isaac Abendana, who taught Hebrew in the 17th century but who moved to Oxford after a quarrel.
Israel Lyons the elder, a Polish Jew, had a silversmith’s shop in Cambridge from around 1730. He gave private Hebrew lessons to university students, but the Jews in Cambridge regarded him as unorthodox. When he died in 1770, he was buried according to his wishes in Great Saint Mary’s churchyard in Cambridge, where ‘his daughter Judith read some form of interment service over his grave.’
His son was the mathematician, astronomer and botanist Israel Lyons (1739-1775), one of the mathematicians who computed the navigation tables for the first Nautical Almanac (1767).
An organised Jewish community was re-established in Cambridge by 1774, although the first synagogue was not consecrated until September 1798, a quarter of a century later.
In my searches earlier this month for the early modern synagogues and Jewish congregations in Cambridge, I have found seven addresses that have been used for synagogues and minyanim from the late 18th century to the early 20th century in Jesus Lane, Hobson Street, Regent Street, Petty Cury, Saint Mary’s Passage, Park Terrace and premises behind a bicycle shop opposite the entrance to Sidney Sussex College, before the present synagogue opened on Thompson’s Lane.
‘Lyon’s Synagogue’ was on Jesus Lane and was the first synagogue established in Cambridge since the mediaeval period. Its formal name is not known, and it may have been called Lyon’s Synagogue after its founder or because it was close to Lyon’s Academy on Jesus Lane.
The Revd Solomon Lyon (1755-1820) was a teacher of Hebrew at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and published a two-part Hebrew grammar. Lyon was born in Bohemia and studied at the University of Prague. He moved to the long-established Jewish community in Portsmouth ca 1780, where he went into the jewellery trade, married and had two children.
He then moved to Cambridge, where Hebrew was an essential part of the theology degree. Lyon spent 17 years teaching Hebrew in Cambridge, where his students included the Duke of Sussex, a brother of George IV, the Duke of Wellington, Benjamin Cohen, Moses Montefiore’s brother-in-law, and Isaac Nathan, the musician.
When Lyon’s Synagogue on Jesus Lane was consecrated in 1798, a newspaper report described it as ‘neatly fitted up, and capable of holding about 100 persons.’
The Jewish congregation in Cambridge seems to have faded for some time after Lyon died in 1820, until it was re-established in 1847, when it worshipped in the University’s Union premises and then at 7 Hobson Street (1847), an address later incorprated into the developments of Sidney Sussex College.
By the 1830s and the 1840s, the anti-Jewish legislation that prevented Jews from receiving degrees was being questioned. Professor James Joseph Sylvester (1814-1897) took high honours in mathematics in 1839, but he was debarred from taking his degree by the university statutes.
Magdalene College admitted Arthur Cohen to read Mathematics in 1849, and he became President of the Cambridge Union Society. As a Jew, Cohen could not take his degree until the Cambridge Reform Act was passed in 1856, abolishing the obligatory Christian oath that was part of graduation. In 1858, Cohen became the first professing Jew to take his at Cambridge.
A distinguished Jewish academic in Victorian Cambridge was Dr Solomon Marcus Schiller-Szinessy (1820-1890), sometimes known as Solomon Mayer Schiller-Szinessy, a Hungarian rabbi and academic who was born in Budapest. He taught at the University of Jena and was an assistant professor at the Lutheran College in Eperies, Hungary, before he became the first Jewish Reader in Talmudic and Rabbinic Literature at the University of Cambridge.
He was jailed for his part in a revolution in Hungary against Austrian rule in 1848 and sentenced to death. He escaped on the night before his planned execution. He fled to Trieste, and from there made his way to Ireland. He landed at Cork, and from there he moved to Dublin, where he was invited by the congregation to preach.
He later held appointments in London and Manchester, where he became the minister of a newly-formed Reform congregation. He resigned in Manchester in 1863 and moved to Cambridge, where in 1866 he was appointed teacher of Talmud and rabbinical literature, and then reader in rabbinics. He was the first Jew in either Oxford or Cambridge to be placed on the Electoral Roll.
After Solomon Marcus Schiller-Szinessy died in 1890, the Romanian-born Rabbi Solomon Schechter (1847-1915) was appointed to the faculty at Cambridge University in 1890, serving as a lecturer in Talmudics and reader in Rabbinics.
Solomon Schechter, whose work has become internationally known, was born in Romania into an orthodox Jewish family. It is said that he learned to read Hebrew by the time he was three and by five had mastered the Chumash. He studied at yeshiva and then at the rabbinical college in Vienna. He was invited to England as a tutor of rabbinics under Claude Montefiore in London, and was appointed to the Hebrew faculty in Cambridge in 1890.
Schechter’s great academic achievement is his discovery in 1896 of the papers of the Cairo Geniza, a collection of over 100,000 pages of rare Hebrew religious manuscripts and mediaeval Jewish texts that were preserved in an Egyptian synagogue. His find revolutionised understandings of mediaeval Judaism. The story is told in Janet Soskice’s book Sisters of Sinai (London: Vintage, 2010).
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Meanwhile, by 1873, Cambridge Hebrew Congregation was meeting in Regent Street.
There was a brief move ca 1888 to Petty Cury, a narrow street that links Sidney Street and Saint Andrew’s Street to the east, Market Hill and Guildhall Street to the west, and Hobson Street on the corner of Christ’s College.
Professor Alfred Philipp Bender (1863-1937), who was born in Dublin and educated at Saint John’s College, Cambridge, was instrumental in refounding the Cambridge Hebrew Congregation and conducted its services for many years. His father, the Revd Philipp Bender (1831-1901), was the minister of Mary’s Abbey Synagogue in Dublin from 1863 to 1891.
The university students took over from the Jewish residents of Cambridge in responsibility for running the synagogue in 1899. A year later (1900), residents and students were managing a minyan in a room over Barrett’s china shop in Saint Mary’s Passage, on the south-west corner of Market Place.
The congregation then moved to a studio in a garden in Camden Terrace (Park Terrace).
By late 1912, the Jewish community in Cambridge had moved into premises behind a bicycle shop opposite the entrance to Sidney Sussex College, possibly in premises on the site that is now part of Sainsbury’s.
A purpose-built synagogue in Ellis Court (as it was called then) in Thomson’s Lane, off Bridge Street and parallel to Portugal Place, was consecrated on 21 October 1937 by the Chief Rabbi, Dr Joseph Herman Hertz. There were some 50 active Jewish students at the time.
Today, there are now two active Jewish congregations in Cambridge: the Beth Shalom congregation, founded in 1981, developed from the Cambridge Reform Jewish Community which was established in October 1976; the Cambridge Traditional Jewish Congregation on Thompson’s Lane, dates from 1937, but is a continuity of the earlier ‘Lyon’s Synagogue’.
In addition, Professor Nicholas Lange is chaplain to a Progressive Jewish Community in Cambridge and there is a Chabad House at 37a Castle Street, Cambridge.
But the stories of these four congregations in Cambridge may be for telling on another Friday evening.
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
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