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Abstract
Early modern London’s population explosion was reliant upon the constant arrival of migrants, predominantly from the provinces but joined by a variety of those born overseas. After re-admittance during the Commonwealth in 1656, Jews made up an increasingly large proportion of immigrants. However, centuries of antisemitic distrust did not disappear, and London’s Jews faced unique obstacles to integration in the city, not least in their ability to engage in the credit market that underpinned commerce. Using surviving debt imprisonment records, this article analyses the extent to which Jews were able to overcome sustained prejudice and integrate broadly in London’s commercial environment. It suggests Jews were, by the second half of the century, just as likely to be imprisoned for debts as to imprison others, while the sums owed, the occupational structure, and residential geography of Jewish Londoners suggest that integration was frequently dependent on wealth and class.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Stanley Chapman, ‘Ethnicity and Money Making in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in Religion, Business, and Wealth in Modern Britain, ed. David J. Jeremy (London: Routledge, 1998), 156–158; David Katz, The Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 286–287; Victor Gray and Melanie Aspey, ‘Rothschild, Nathan Mayer (1777–1836)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/24162.
2 ‘List of Prisoners Handed over by the Sheriffs to their Successors on 28 Sept Annually, with Notes of Occurrences During the Subsequent Year, 1813–1815’, Wood Street Compter later Giltspur Street Compter, London Metropolitan Archives, CLA/028/01/40, 151.
3 Alexander Wakelam, Credit and Debt in Eighteenth-Century England: An Economic History of Debt Imprisonment (London: Routledge, 2020), 69–70.
4 E. A. Wrigley, ‘A Simple Model of London’s Importance in Changing English Society and Economy, 1650–1750’, Past and Present, no. 37 (1967), 46; Adam Crymble, Adam Dennett, and Tim Hitchcock, ‘Modelling Regional Imbalances in English Plebeian Migration to Late Eighteenth-Century London’, Economic History Review, 71.3 (2018), 747–771. On previous integration of foreign immigrants in London, see: Charlotte Berry, ‘Guilds, Immigration, and Immigrant Economic Organization: Alien Goldsmiths in London, 1480–1540’, Journal of British Studies, 60.3 (2021), 534–562.
5 There were, of course, some examples of Jews present in England between 1290 and 1656. See: Katz, Jews in the History of England, 15–106.
6 See: Owen Stanwood, The Global Refuge: Huguenots in the Age of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 10–39.
7 Arthur P. Arnold, ‘A List of Jews and their Households in London’, Miscellanies, 6 (1962), 73, 75–77.
8 Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656–2000 (Berkley: University of California Press, 2002), 41.
9 Endelman, Jews of Britain, 50; Israel Finestein, ‘The Jews in Hull between 1766 and 1880’, Jewish Historical Studies, 35 (1996–1998), 34; Malcolm Dick, ‘Birmingham Anglo-Jewry c.1780 to c.1880: Origins, Experiences, and Representations’, Midland History, 36.2 (2011), 195.
10 Patrick Culquhoun, A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, 4th edn (London, 1797), 159–160; Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 1714–1830: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 171–173; Peter King, ‘Immigrant Communities, the Police, and the Courts in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century London’, Crime, History, and Societies, 20.1 (2016), 53–54; Michael Hoberman, ‘Home of the Jewish Nation: London Jews in the Eighteenth-Century Anglo-American Imagination’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 50.3 (2017), 269–288.
11 Alex Kerner, ‘Shirts, Biscuits, and Underpants: Unveiling the Lower Social Strata of London’s Sephardi Congregation in the Eighteenth Century through its Inner Arbitration Court’, Jewish Historical Studies, 50.1 (2018), 45–68; Hoberman, ‘Home of the Jewish Nation’, 278–279; Endelman, Jews of Britain, 72.
12 Tijl Vanneste, ‘Unpaid Diamonds: Trust, Reputation, and the Merchants’ Style in Eighteenth-Century Europe’, Shofar, 38.3 (2020), 22; Endelman, Jews of Britain, 43.
13 Endelman, Jews of Britain, 49.
14 Adam Crymble, ‘The Decline and Fall of an Early Modern Slum: London’s St Giles “Rookery”, c.1550–1850’, Urban History, 49.2 (2022), 310–334.
15 Grace Aguilar, ‘History of the Jews in England’, Chambers’s Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts, 18.152 (1847), 32.
16 Emily Vine, ‘“The Cursed Jew Priest That Ordered the Woman and Her Child to Be Burnt”: Rumors of Jewish Infanticide in Early Modern London’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 83.2 (2020), 331–359.
17 Frank Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Endelman, Jews of Britain, 74–76; Avinoam Yuval-Naeh, ‘The 1753 Jewish Naturalization Bill and the Polemic over Credit’, Journal of British Studies, 57.3 (2008), 468–469.
18 See: Endelman, Jews of Britain, 41–77; Kerner, ‘Shirts, Biscuits, and Underpants’, 45–68; Sue Silberberg, ‘Middle-Class Mobility: Jewish Convicts in Australia’, History Australia, 15.2 (2018), 294–295.
19 Yuval-Naeh, ‘1753 Jewish Naturalization Bill’, 468–469; Karen A. MacFarlane, ‘“Does He Know the Danger of an Oath?” Oaths, Religion, Ethnicity and the Advent of the Adversarial Criminal Trial in the Eighteenth Century’, Immigrants and Minorities, 31.3 (2013), 317–345; David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 210–211. See: Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, 25; Charlie Taverner, ‘Feeding the Community: London’s Immigrants and Their Food, 1650–1800’, Journal of Social History, 56.2 (2022), 335–336; Endelman, Jews of Georgian England, 212; and Benjamin Braude, ‘The Myth of the Sephardi Economic Superman’, in Trading Cultures: The Worlds of Western Merchants, ed. Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), 165–194.
20 Craig Muldrew, ‘Hard Food for Midas: Cash and its Social Value in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, no. 170 (2001), 78–120; Margot Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 5; Jon Stobart and Lucy Bailey, ‘Retail Revolution and the Village Shop, c.1660–1860’, Economic History Review, 71.2 (2018), 415.
21 Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman in Familiar Letters (London, 1726), 408–423; Julian Hoppit, ‘Attitudes to Credit in Britain, 1680–1790’, Historical Journal, 33.2 (1990), 312–313; Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 95; Craig Muldrew, ‘From Credit to Savings? An Examination of Debt and Credit in Relation to Increasing Consumption in England (c.1650 to 1770)’, Quaderni Storci, 46.137 (August 2011), 402–407.
22 Daniel Defoe, Some Objections Humbly offered to the Consideration of the Hon House of Commons, Relating to the present intended Relief of Prisoners (London, 1729), 14–15.
23 Muldrew, Economy of Obligation; K. Tawny Paul, ‘Credit, Reputation, and Masculinity in British Urban Commerce: Edinburgh, c.1710–70’, Economic History Review, 66.1 (2013), 226–248.
24 Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 277–302; Tawny Paul, The Poverty of Disaster: Debt and Insecurity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 137–187; Finn, Character of Credit, 320.
25 W. M. Jacob, ‘“This Congregation Here Present”: Seating in Parish Churches during the Long Eighteenth Century’, Studies in Church History, 42 (2006), 294–304; Judith Spicksley, ‘A Dynamic Model of Social Relations: Celibacy, Credit, and the Identity of the “Spinster” in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Identity and Agency in England, 1500–1800, ed. Jonathan Barry and Henry French (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 116–117.
26 Emily Vine, ‘“Those Enemies of Christ, if They are Suffered to Live Among us”: Locating Religious Minority Homes and Private Space in Early Modern London’, The London Journal, 43.3 (2018), 197–214; Jacob Selwood, Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 153.
27 Carys Brown, ‘Catholic Politics and Creating Trust in Eighteenth-Century England’, British Catholic History, 33.4 (2017), 622–644.
28 See: Julie L. Mell, The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender, Volume 1 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 31–64; Daniel Carpi, ‘The Account Book of a Jewish Moneylender in Montepulciano (1409–1410)’, Journal of European Economic History, 14.3 (1985), 513; Amos Morris-Reich, ‘The Beautiful Jew is a Moneylender: Money and Individuality in Simmel’s Rehabilitation of the “Jew”’, Theory, Culture and Society, 20.4 (2003), 127–142; and Yuval-Naeh, ‘Jewish Naturalization Bill’, 468.
29 Hoppit, ‘Attitudes to Credit’, 313–314; Katz, Jews in the History of England, 316–320; Endelman, Jews of Britain, 44–46, 70–71.
30 For previous identification of the figure as Jewish, see: Endelman, Jews of Georgian England, plates. On Rowlandson’s depiction of Jews, see: Alfred Rubens, ‘Portrait of Anglo-Jewry, 1656–1836’, Transactions, 19 (1955–1959), 18, 25.
31 Jeanne-Marie de Beaumont, The New Clarissa, Volume II (London, 1768), 263.
32 An Historical Treatise Concerning Jews and Judaism in England (London, 1753), 27–28; Endelman, Jews of Georgian England, 204.
33 Muldrew, Obligation, 96, 105–106.
34 Paul, Poverty, 67–94.
35 Report for the Committee Appointed to Enquire into the Practice and Effects of Imprisonment for Debt (London, 1792), 19, 82–83.
36 Paul, Poverty; Wakelam, Credit and Debt, 37–38, 69–70, 73, 85–114, 118–119.
37 ‘List of Prisoners Handed over by the Sheriffs to their Successors on 28 Sept Annually, with Notes of Occurrences During the Subsequent Year’, 1741–1815, Wood Street Compter later Giltspur Street Compter, LMA, CLA/028/01/01-40.
38 P. J. Lineham, ‘The Campaign to Abolish Imprisonment for Debt in England, 1750–1840’ (MA thesis, University of Canterbury, 1974), 25–31; Paul Hess Haagen, ‘Imprisonment for Debt in England and Wales’ (PhD thesis, University of Princeton, 1986), 10–11; Wakelam, Credit, 139–155.
39 Jonathan McGovern, ‘The Compters at Poultry and Wood Street in Early Modern London’, The London Journal, 46.3 (2021), 249–267; John Entick, A New and Accurate History of London, Westminster, Southwark, and Places Adjacent (London, 1766), 46–48, 125; Edward Wood, A Complete Body of Conveyancing, in Theory and Practice, Volume 3 (Dublin, 1792), 231–235; Wakelam, Credit, 35–37, 54–62.
40 London Gazette, 19–23 July 1720, no. 5870–London Gazette, 5–9 November 1811, no. 16538.
41 John Howard, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, with Preliminary Observations, And an Account of some Foreign Prisons (London, 1777), 171. I am grateful to John Levin for bringing this passage to my attention.
42 House of Commons, Report from the Committee on the State of the Gaols of the City of London &c (London, 1814).
43 ‘Trial of Benjamin Fonseca’, 19 July 1786, Old Bailey Proceedings Online, t17860719-97.
44 ‘Edward Smith’, Debtors Schedules: Wood Street Compter and Borough Compter, 1761, LMA, CLA/047/LJ/17/045.
45 Ann M. Carlos, Karen Maguire, and Larry Neale, ‘A Knavish People: London Jewry and the Stock Market During the South Sea Bubble’, Business History, 50.6 (2008), 728–748; Arnold, ‘List of Jews’, 73–141; Adam Crymble, ‘A Comparative Approach to Identifying the Irish in Long Eighteenth-Century London’, Historical Methods, 48.3 (2015), 141–152. For a less positive view of this methodology, see: Karen A. Macfarlane, ‘The Jewish Policemen of Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 10.2 (2011), 225–226.
46 Endelman, Jews of Georgian England, 171–173.
47 Paul, Poverty, 50–52.
48 Amy Louise Erickson, ‘Coverture and Capitalism’, History Workshop Journal, no. 59 (Spring 2005), 1–16.
49 Esther Sahle, ‘Quakers, Coercion, and Pre-Modern Growth: Why Friends’ Formal Institutions for Contract Enforcement did not matter for Early Modern Trade Expansion’, Economic History Review, 71.2 (2018), 418.
50 Katz, Jews in the History of England, 303–311; Walter Thornbury, Old and New London: A Narrative of its History, its People, and its Places, Volume 1 (London, 1873), 416–424; Wakelam, Credit, 107–108.
51 Wakelam, Credit, 188–197.
52 Kerner, ‘Shirts’, 60.
53 Wakelam, Credit, 197–200.
54 Kerner, ‘Shirts’, 60; Katz, Jews in the History of England, 289–292; Endelman, Jews of Britain, 54–56.
55 Alex Kerner, ‘Arbitration and Conflict Resolution in the Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation in London in the Eighteenth Century’, Jewish Historical Studies, 49.1 (2017), 72–105.
56 Endelman, Jews of Georgian England, 101–105; Katz, Jews in the History of England, 284–323; Sorkin, Emancipation, 91–127.
57 Endelman, Jews of Georgian England, 166–191. On Sephardic poverty, see: Kerner, ‘Shirts’.
58 Vanneste, ‘Unpaid Diamonds’, 22.
59 Two debtors owing larger debts initially deemed possibly Jewish by name-determination were discounted (including the Protestant Rothschild rival Simon Moritz Bethmann’s £8,500 in 1799) though John Joseph Bauer (owing £19,400 in 1797) of Ostend could conceivably have been Jewish as well as Dutch.
60 Muldrew, ‘Credit to Savings’, 401–409; Paul, Poverty.
61 Betty Naggar, ‘Old-Clothes Men: 18th and 19th Centuries’, Jewish Historical Studies, 31 (1988), 171–190; Endelman, Jews of Georgian England, 105–107; Endelman, Jews of Britain, 43–51; Culquhoun, Police, 49.
62 See: Sorkin, Emancipation, 211; Kenneth Collins, ‘Philip de la Cour (1710–1785), a Jewish Physician in Eighteenth-Century London and Bath’, Journal of Medical Biography, 29.4 (2021), 196–198.
63 London Gazette, 8–11 August 1761, no. 10129, 3; London Gazette, 25–28 June 1774, no. 11469, 11; London Gazette, 16–20 July 1811, no. 16505, 22; London Gazette, 22–26 September 1761, no. 10142, 33.
64 Vanneste, ‘Unpaid Diamonds’, 15–16, 30; Endelman, Jews of Britain, 66, 69–73.
65 London Gazette, 28–31 May 1748, no. 8749, 7; London Gazette, 23–26 July 1748, no. 8765, 6.
66 London Gazette, 18–22 August 1761, no. 10132, 19.
67 Locating London’s Past (2011), https://www.locatinglondon.org/.
68 Edward Jamilly, ‘Patrons, Clients, Designers and Developers: The Jewish Contribution to Secular Building in England’, Jewish Historical Studies, 38 (2002), 75–76; Vine, ‘Enemies’, 208.
69 London Gazette, 30 July–2 August 1748, no. 8767, 3.
70 Judith Spicksley, ‘“Fly with a Duck in thy Mouth”: Single Women as Sources of Credit in Seventeenth-Century England’, Social History, 32.2 (2007), 187–207.
71 Carlos, Maguire, and Neale, ‘A Knavish People’; Amy Froide, Silent Partners: Women as Public Investors During Britain’s Financial Revolution, 1690–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
72 See the 5 surviving schedules of 28 applicants in 1748: ‘Debtors Schedule: Fleet Prison, Ludgate Prison, Poultry Compter, Wood-Street Compter’, 1748, LMA, CLA/047/LJ/17/027/72-77.
73 ‘Debtors Schedules: Wood-Street Compter A-N’, 1761, LMA, CLA/047/LJ/17/044; ‘Debtors Schedules: Wood-Street Compter P-Y’, 1761, LMA, CLA/047/LJ/17/045.
74 ‘Francis Brittain’, CLA/047/LJ/17/044/026.
75 Endelman, Jews of Georgian England, 213; Yuval-Naeh, ‘Naturalization’, 473–474.
76 ‘Samuel Levy’, CLA/047/LJ/17/044/135-6; ‘Abraham Malcah’, CLA/047/LJ/17/044/148; ‘Moses Benjamin’, CLA/047/LJ/17/044/018.
77 ‘Myer Abrahams’, CLA/047/LJ/17/044/002; ‘Job Lilly’, CLA/047/LJ/17/044/137.
78 David Brown, ‘“Persons of Infamous Character” or “an Honest, Industrious and Useful Description of People”? The Textile Pedlars of Alstonfield and the Role of Peddling in Industrialization’, Textile History, 31.1 (2000), 9–12.
79 ‘Henry Jacob’, CLA/047/LJ/17/044/116.
80 ‘Thomas Denton’, CLA/047/LJ/17/044/058; ‘Matthew Matthews’, CLA/047/LJ/17/044/157; ‘William Tasker’, CLA/047/LJ/17/045/151.
81 ‘Richard Hoar’, CLA/047/LJ/17/044/100; ‘Thomas Silk’, CLA/047/LJ/17/045/127.
82 ‘Henry Markes’, CLA/047/LJ/17/044/151.
83 ‘Spectacle maker’ Joseph Abrahams’ ten debts of between 5s and £7 9s 6d were, for example, probably for goods, though he failed to state how any arose. ‘Joseph Abrahams’, CLA/047/LJ/17/044/001. Markes is similarly excluded as he did not differentiate between goods sold and work done.
84 ‘Myer Abrahams’, CLA/047/LJ/17/044/002; ‘Uziel Burrouch’, CLA/047/LJ/17/044/031.
85 ‘Phineas deFonseca’, CLA/047/LJ/17/044/059.
86 Taverner, ‘Feeding the Community’, 10.
87 ‘Robert Rimmer’, CLA/047/LJ/17/045/109.
88 Susannah Gunning, Fashionable Involvements, Volume 1 (London, 1800), 201, 217.
89 Vine, ‘Enemies of Christ’, 211.
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Notes on contributors
Alexander Wakelam
Alexander Wakelam is an economic historian of Britain after 1660 and a postdoctoral research associate with the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure working on the I-CeM 1921 project. His research explores occupational identity and commercial society in modern Britain primarily through experiences of credit and debt.