Patrick Comerford
Mediaeval Bedford once had an important Jewish community, and later there was a small community of Jews in Bedford from the 1780s to the 1880s. In recent weeks, without success, I have search for the locations of its synagogues on Silver Street and Offa Street.
The life stories of Nathan Joseph and his brother-in-law Morris Lissack tell contrasting stories of Jewish life in Bedford, involving proselytism, evangelical missions and conversions on the one hand, and, on the other struggles against discrimination, for children’s rights and human rights and to keep alive a small synagogue and a small Jewish community in a growing provincial town in Victorian England.
The story of Nathan Joseph (1801-1864), also known as the Revd Henry Samuel Joseph, was first brough to the attention of a wider public in 1986 by Patricia Bell, the county archivist at the Bedfordshire Record Office, in her well-researched paper ‘Nathan Joseph and the Evangelicals’.
Nathan Joseph was a converted Jew from Bedford, who worked for many years in Liverpool as a missionary with the London Jews Society (LJS), known today as the Church’s Ministry among Jewish People (CMJ). His conversion to Christianity and his subsequent ordination in the Church of England caused great grief for his aged father, Michael Joseph, who had lived in Liverpool before moving to Bedford.
The London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews (known colloquially as the London Jews Society or LJS), and known today as the Church’s Ministry among Jewish People (CMJ), was formed in 1809. The LJS initially used an old Huguenot chapel in Brick Lane, Spitalfields, as the venue for debates and worship.
A Bedfordshire vicar, the Revd Legh Richmond (1772-1827), Vicar of Turvey, 11 km west of Bedford, was an early active supporter of LJS, and by 1811 he was an active fundraiser and preacher for the LJS in the Bedford Auxiliary, which included 10 other Anglican clergy in the area.
Nathan Joseph was born in Liverpool in 1801, a son of Michael (Meyer) Josephs or Konigsberger (1760-1830). Michael Josephs moved to Bedford, where he was one of the founders of the small synagogue. His son, Nathan Joseph, worked as a watchmaker in Bedford and became the reader and acting rabbi serving the small Jewish community.
While he was the acting rabbi in Bedford, Nathan Joseph met the Revd Samuel Hillyard (1790-1839), the Independent or Congregational minister at the Bunyan Meeting in Mill Street, a joint Baptist-Congregational chapel that was associated with the Puritan John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Hillyard befriended Joseph and tried to convince him that Christ was the Messiah.
When the Chief Rabbi, Dr Solomon Hirschell (1762-1842), heard reports that Joseph was considering conversion to Christianity, he suspended him as an acting rabbi, resulting in the temporary closure of the synagogue in Bedford.
A neighbouring Anglican vicar, the Revd Thomas Shuttleworth Grimshawe (1778-1850), who was the Vicar of Biddenham, 3 km west of Bedford, was also a prominent local figure in the LJS and its efforts to convert Jews to Christianity. Grimshawe wrote to the Jewish Expositor, the LJS journal, in 1827, claiming to report the news of ‘the conversion and baptism of the Jewish Rabbi in Bedford’.
But Joseph had not yet been baptised, and this exaggeration and fiction had been provided by the editor the Jewish Expositor. According to some accounts, Joseph’s planned ‘conversion’ may have been prompted less by his conversations with Hillyard, Richmond and Grimshawe than by a desire to marry a young Christian woman.
Nathan Joseph moved to Norwich, where he changed his name to Henry Samuel Joseph and was baptised by the Revd Samuel Titlow in March 1829. The Northampton Mercury reported that ‘a converted Jew named Josephs [sic] preached in a chapel belonging to the Baptists … it was crowded to excess … he spoke about the contempt he had received from his Jewish brethren’.
Joseph taught Hebrew in Norwich and published Reasons for Renouncing Judaism and Embracing Christianity in 1830. He then worked for the LJS in Liverpool as an evangelist among the Jewish community of about 3,000 people.
He studied theology and was ordained in December 1836 in Saint Simon’s Church, Liverpool, by the Bishop of Chester. The Revd Aaron Bernstein (1841-1921) notes that on the day Nathan was ordained on Liverpool, six Jews were baptised by the Revd H Stewart – Theodor Bernstein, and Joshua George Lazarus with his wife and three children – and 12 more Jews were baptised in Liverpool later that year.
Joseph was attached to Saint Simon’s, a district church in Saint Peter and Saint Nicholas parish, and there he established a Hebrew service for a time. He joined the LJS in 1837, and received a grant to open a home for enquirers. Later he became traveling secretary of the LSJ. He was also the chaplain to Chester Castle in 1847-1856, when he published Memoirs of Convicted Prisoners (Chester, 1853).
The converted Jews baptised by Joseph included Isaac Hellmuth (1820-1901), baptised in 1841 and later President of Huron College and Archdeacon of Huron in Canada, Dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, Huron, and then Bishop of Huron (1871-1883); the Revd Dr Moses Margoliouth (1820-1881), who then studied at Trinity College Dublin and became Vicar of Glasnevin in 1844 and then Vicar of Little Linford, Buckinghamshire; and the Revd Dr Alfred Moritz Myers.
At the end of his life, however, it seems that Joseph had doubts about his decision to renounce his Jewish faith and to convert to Christianity. In 1863, he met Professor David Woolf Marks (1811-1901), the first religious leader of the West London Synagogue and Professor of Hebrew at University College London.
Marks was on holiday in Switzerland when he met Joseph and subsequently wrote in the Bedfordshire Times about their meeting. Marks was shocked to discover that Joseph wanted a Jewish burial. Marks claimed the life and confession of Joseph were not consistent with those of a Christian minister, and suggested they were a deceptive means for Joseph to earn a living.
Patricia Bell records that Joseph died in Strasbourg on 28 January 1864. His death recorded by Jewish people, but there is no record of a Jewish burial for him – leaving us to wonder whether he had a Jewish or a Christian burial. Two years later, Saint Simon’s Church where he had worked in Liverpool was demolished in 1866.
The shame surrounding Nathan Joseph was real and painful for the Jewish community in Bedford. His brother-in-law Morris Lissack had become the leader of the Bedford Jewish community, and lived in Mill Street near the Bunyan Meeting Church. He wrote to the Bedfordshire Times soon after, acknowledging the fraud that Joseph had been to the Christian faith.
Morris (Moshe) Lissack (1814-1895) was born in Schwerin in Germany in 1814 into a relatively prosperous family. His father was a corn merchant and he received a traditional Talmudic education. After his father’s death, he emigrated to England in 1835 and travelled the country as an itinerant hawker. He settled in Bedford in 1829, where he married a Nathan Joseph’s sister, Hannah Joseph, who was born in Bedford in 1814. Morris Lissack taught German, then traded in jewellery and finally became a wine and spirits merchant.
A second modern Jewish congregation was formed in 1837, although the congregation met only on the solemn festivals, and a private room in Offa Street, Bedford, initially served as the place of worship.
Lissack published his autobiography, Jewish Perseverance, or The Jew at Home and Abroad, in Bedford in 1851. The subscription list at the beginning of the book starts with the Chief Rabbi, Dr Nathan Adler and including non-Jewish notables, including the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, and many local Anglican clergy, including Grimshawe. The book includes a strong attack on the integrity of Jewish missionaries and of their converts and argues that once a Jew, a Jew should always remain a Jew.
In his autobiography, Morris Lissack reflected on an important legal battle waged by the Jewish community in Bedford. The children of Bedford received a free education through grants from a long-established local charity, the Harpur Trust. However, the Harpur Trust refused to allow Jewish children to benefit.
The Bedford Charity or the Harpur Trust began in the 16th century, when Sir William Harpur re-founded the Bedford Grammar School and endowed it with 14 acres in central London. By the end of the 18th century, the Harpur Trust supported the grammar school and a new lower or English school. In time, it also supported elementary schools, marriage portions for young girls, apprenticeships, grants to young people in their first jobs, and almshouses and pensions for the elderly, with annual hand-outs to the poor.
Morris Lissack believed that England was a country of liberty and opportunity and that Jewish citizens should have equal rights. One of his early, significant successes was in securing religious equality for Jewish children in the Harpur Trust in 1847.
The synagogue was located on High Street in Bedford by the 1850s. However, it had only five known members, including Godfrey Levy, who presided over the congregation in 1853.
Lissack had found a warm welcome in Bedford and, in time, he became a leading member of the Liberals in the town. Despite being a prominent Jew, he was nominated in 1855 as churchwarden for Saint Paul’s Church in the town centre.
At that time, a churchwarden had civil as well as religious roles, and all ratepayers, whether members of the Church of England or not, could vote at the election in their parish. Lissack accepted the nomination, saying, ‘So long as a parishioner was called upon to pay towards the maintenance of the [parish] church irrespective of his religion, no man had a right to question his religious principles.’
Lissack and the Church of England candidate tied in the vote, and Lissack’s opponent was elected on the chairman’s casting vote.
Lissack remained popular in Bradford, and he was elected a trustee of the Harpur Trust in 1870. He continued to ensure that Jewish children in the town properly catered for in the schools supported by the trust.
Meanwhile, the synagogue on Bedford’s High Street had only three seat-holders by 1874. It became defunct and it was dissolved some time in the 1870s. By 1879, Morris Lissack was the only Jew in Bedford. He retired to London in the 1880s, and died there on 13 January 1895.
As for the LSJ, in response to changing attitudes towards proselytising work by Christians among the Jewish people, it changed its name several times over the years, first to the Church Missions to Jews, then the Church’s Mission to the Jews, followed by the Church’s Ministry Among the Jews, and finally to the current name, thee Church’s Ministry Among Jewish People, adopted in 1995.
The missionary focus of CMJ attracts criticism from the Jewish communities everywhere which see its activities as highly detrimental to Jewish-Christian relations, and many rabbis and Jewish organisations have called for CMJ to be disbanded.
Archbishop George Carey became the first Archbishop of Canterbury in 150 years to decline to be the Patron of CMJ. His decision in 1992 was praised by Jewish leaders and reported as front-page news in the Jewish Chronicle.
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
Further reading:
Patricia Bell, Belief in Bedfordshire (Bedford: Belfry Press, 1986).
Patricia L Bell, ‘Bedford’s Second Jewish Community 1787-1883’ (Bedford: Patricia Bell, 1994), pp 14-26.
Patricia Bell, ‘Bedford’s Jews in 1800s’, Shemot (London: The Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain) vol 12, no 4 (December 2004), pp 6-7.
Rodney M Curtis, ‘Baptists and Jews in England 1720-1920: An Outline Survey’ pp 99-139 in The Peoples of God: Baptists and Jews over Four Centuries (Oxford: Regent’s Park College, 2019).
WD Rubinstein, Michael Jolles, Hilary L Rubinstein (eds), The Palgrave dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
