Patrick Comerford
Charlotte and I are in Belfast this weekend, having arrived this afternoon, and we are staying here until Sunday afternoon. I have been familiar with Belfast since my school days, I did a student placement on the Shankill Road in the 1980s, and we were last in Belfast two years ago.
I may have a little time this evening or tomorrow to put together some of the missing pieces in my memories of Jewish history in Belfast. One of the most prominent leaders of the Jewish community in Belfast at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries was Sir Otto Moses Jaffe (1846-1929), twice elected Lord Mayor of Belfast.
He was a contemporary of Gustav Wilhelm Wolff (1834-1911), Conservative and Unionist MP for East Belfast and co-founder of the shipbuilding firm Harland & Wolff, who was born in Hamburg into a German Jewish family but baptised as a child.
Almost a century after his death, Otto Jaffe is still remembered and celebrated in Belfast and the Jaffe Fountain is back in place as a prominent landmark in the city centre. But it is often forgotten in Belfast that Jaffe suffered humiliating public discrimination during World War I – not because he was Jewish, but because he was German-born.
Otto Moses Jaffe was born in Hamburg on 13 August 1846 to the Jaffe family, a leading rabbinic dynastic family that was descended from the 12th century scholar Samuel ben Elhanan, who claimed descent from the biblical commentator, Rashi, who, in turn, claimed descent from King David through the Kalonymos or Kalonymus family, a prominent Jewish family with a Greek name in Italy, mostly in Lucca and in Rome.
Otto Jaffe was one of the nine children of Daniel Joseph (1809-1874), a prosperous merchant. One of Daniel Jaffe’s brothers, Edgar Jaffe, was an economics professor in Heidelberg, and married Else von Richthofen, sister of DH Lawrence’s wife, Frieda. He was an associate of the sociologist Max Weber and was the Socialist Finance Minister of Bavaria in the 1920s.
Daniel Jaffe moved with his family to Belfast in 1852, where he and his older sons, Martin, John and Alfred, set up a linen-exporting business. Otto went to school in Holywood, Co Down, and then in Hamburg and Switzerland.
Otto lived and worked in New York for 10 years, from 1867 to 1877. While he was away, his father established the Victoria Street synagogue in Belfast on 7 July 1871. When Daniel Jaffe died in Nice on 21 January 1874, his family brought him back to Belfast where he was buried in what became the Jewish Cemetery.
When Otto Jaffe’s brothers retired in 1877, he returned to Belfast to head the family business. He married Paula Hertz from Braunschweig in 1879, and they were the parents of two sons, Arthur Daniel Jaffe and William Edward Berthold Jaffe.
Through Otto Jaffe’s business acumen, the family business became the largest linen exporter in Ireland, and he became a naturalised citizen in 1888. He was prominent in public life and charitable work in Belfast as a Justice of the Peace, a member of the Harbour Commission, a governor of the Royal Hospital, a member of the Technical Education Board and a member of the Senate of Queen’s College, later Queen’s University of Belfast.
Otto Jaffe was active too in the life of the Jewish community of Belfast, and was the life-president of the Belfast Hebrew Congregation. The Great Victoria Street synagogue, which his father founded, grew in numbers from 55 in 1871 to over 1,000 in 1903. A year later, he paid for building a new synagogue in Annesley Street and opened it in 1904, wearing his mayoral regalia.
His wife Paula set up a school on the Cliftonville Road in 1907, and for two years Maxim Litvinov, a future Soviet foreign minister, taught languages there.
In politics, Jaffe was a Unionist, and he was first elected to Belfast Corporation in 1894. He was elected Lord Mayor of Belfast twice, in 1899 and 1904, and was High Sheriff in 1901. When he was Lord Mayor, he was knighted in Dublin Castle in 1900.
The Jaffe Spinning Mill or Strand Spinning on the Newtownards Road was employing 650 people when World War I broke out in 1914. The factory turned to making arms during the war, and Jaffe’s son and nephew joined the army.
However, the outbreak of war brought a rise in anti-German sentiment throughout Ireland and Britain. This reached a breaking point when the Lusitania was torpedoed by a German submarine off the coast of Cork on 7 May 1915 and 1,000 people died.
Jaffe was accused of being a German spy and people involved in charities in Belfast withdrew their support to demand Sir Otto and Lady Jaffe resigned from the boards. Jaffe said he ‘overwhelmed with pain and sorrow’. After 25 years in public life, he resigned as an alderman in June 1916. He was almost 70 and moved to London, where he died on 29 April 1929. Lady Jaffe was too ill to attend his funeral, and she died a few months later, in August 1929.
Otto Jaffe erected the Jaffe Memorial Fountain in Victoria Square, Belfast, in memory of his father. It was moved to the Botanic Gardens in 1933, but it was restored in 2008 and returned close to its original site in Victoria Square opposite the Old Town Hall. The Ulster History Circle has unveiled a blue plaque on the side of the Ten Square Hotel on Linenhall Street to mark the location of his former office.
While Sir Otto Jaffe was to the forefront in public life in Belfast, my great-uncle James Comerford, my grandfather’s eldest brother, was living at No 82 Lower Clanbrassil Street, Dublin, in 1911, when he shared the family space above Rubinstein’s shop with Isaac Joffe or Jaffe, a Jewish refugee from Lithuania.
I have tried to trace Isaac Jaffe and his family in recent years, but with few results. He is probably the Isaac Jaffe of 32 Lower Clanbrassil Street who died six years later on 9 July 1917 after two strokes at the age of 66. Undoubtedly he was related to another Isaac Jaffe – perhaps a first cousin – living in the same area at that time. Isaac Bernard Jaffe (1863-1937) was born in Kovno or Kaunas in Lithuania and moved with his family in the 1890s first to Glasgow and then to Dublin. He lived for much his life at 30 Emorville Avenue, Dublin, and another Jaffe family lived at 22 Emorville Avenue and at 22 St Kevin’s Parade at the same time.
Isaac Bernard Jaffe officiated in 1929 at the wedding of his daughter Sarah and Jacob (Jack) Brazil (1893-1972) in the Greenville Hall or Dolphin’s Barn Synagogue in Dublin. As the Revd B Yaffey, he was the reader of the congregation in the Jewish Year Book until he died at Emorville Avenue on 29 January 1937 at 75. The witness at the registration of his death was Harry Aitkins (? spelling) of 87 Lower Clanbrassil Street.
There were other Jaffe, Joffe and Yaffey families in Ireland at this time, including families living in Kenilworth Park, Dublin, and in Limerick, Waterford and Belfast, and they all seem to have been closely inter-related.
The Jaffe family in Limerick were also part of the Lithuanian branch of the family. Fleeing the Russian Empire at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, they bought tickets for New York City, but were cheated and instead were dropped off at Cork.
Dr Henry Norman Jaffé (1898-1969), who left Limerick in 1904 at the height of what is often called the ‘Limerick Pogrom,’ was the grandfather of the popular historian Simon Sebag Montefiore and his brother, the writer and historian Hugh Sebag Montefiore. But their great-great-grandparents, Benjamin and Rachel Jaffe, remained in Limerick and were living in Catherine Street in 1911, along with their great-grandparents, Marcus and Leah Jaffe, who also lived on Catherine Street. A Jaffe family continued to run a business in Cecil Street, Limerick, for some decades.
Dr Henry Jaffe was a GP in Nottingham. A son, Dr Gabriel Jaffe (1923-2016), was a GP and was also the first Jewish Mayor of Bournemouth (1977-1978. A daughter, the actress and novelist Phyllis April Jaffé (1927-2019), married the psychotherapist Dr Stephen Eric Sebag-Montefiore (1926-2014), a great-grandson of the banker Sir Joseph Sebag-Montefiore (1822-1903), nephew and heir of the wealthy philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore.
The Jewish Encyclopaedia describes the Jaffe or Joffe family as a family of rabbis, scholars and communal workers. Family members include famous rabbis, ‘court Jews,’ Talmudic scholars, scientists, business figures, academics and politicians. Family members are found in Germany, Bohemia, Austria, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Ireland, Britain, Italy, Canada, Israel and the US.
According to legend, the family was descended from the 12th century scholar Samuel ben Elhanan, who claimed descent from the biblical commentator, Rashi, who claimed to be a 33rd-generation descendant of Johanan HaSandlar ,who in turn claimed descent from King David through the Kalonymos or Kalonymus family, a prominent Jewish family with a Greek name in Italy, mostly in Lucca and in Rome. The name Kalonymos (Kαλώνυμος) means ‘good name,’ perhaps a translation of the Hebrew ‘Shem-Tov.’ Traces of the family in Italy are said to be found as early as the second half of the eighth century.
The main branch of the family claims descent from the 12th century Tosafist, Elhanan Jaffe of Dampierre (died 1184), and through him from Moses Jaffe of Bologna, who died in 1480. He was a Polish rabbi who was forced to live in Italy. His son Abraham settled in Bohemia and died in 1535. A descendant of this Abraham was the celebrated Rabbi Mordechai Jaffe, author of Lebushim, an important code of rabbinical law.
The descendants of Mordecai Jaffe of Prague in western Europe include prominent business leaders, politicians, scientists, academics, journalists and jurists. Along with Sir Otto Jaffe, they include the Israeli general and politician Avraham Yoffe, Joel Joffe, Baron Joffe, and Josef Joffe, publisher and editor of Die Zeit. In eastern Europe, his descendants include Mordechai Jaffe (1742-1810), who founded the Lechovitch Hasidic dynasty, Mordecai-Gimpel Jaffe (1820-1891) and Dov Yaffe (1928-2017).
A member of the Jaffe family who cut an admirable and heroic figure in recent years was the Labour life peer, Joel Goodman Joffe, Baron Joffe (1932-2017), a South African-born lawyer whose father was born in Lithuania. He worked as a human rights lawyer, and was the defence attorney of the leadership of the ANC at the Rivonia Trial in 1963-1964, representing Nelson Mandela and his co-defendants.
After the Rivonia trial, he was refused entry to Australia as ‘undesirable’ and he moved to Britain in 1965. In Britain, he set up Hambro Life Assurance with Sir Mark Weinberg and chaired Oxfam in 1982-2001. He was made a life peer in 2000 with the title Baron Joffe of Liddington. Lord Joffe appeared along with the surviving defendants and defence team at the Rivonia Trial in a documentary film, Life is Wonderful in 2017. He died later that year on 18 June 2017.
Rubinstein’s shop and 82 Clanbrassil Street, Dublin, have long been demolished. But it would be interesting to find out, in time, how these Jaffe, Joffe and Yaffe families are related to Sir Otto Jaffe, one of the most the celebrated Jewish figures in the history of Belfast, and to Isaac and Hannah Joffe, refugees from Lithuania, who shared living space above Rubinstein’s shop with my Great-Uncle James Comerford and his family.
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
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