Even at the height of the Great Plague, Anglo-Jewry kept its synagogues open
One community leader fled but others kept Jewish life ticking over during the 1665-6 epidemic — despite losing loved ones
Ring a ring a roses A pocket full of poses Atishoo, Atishoo We all fall down
THE ORIGIN of this familiar nursery rhyme is often attributed to the Black Death of 1348 when Jews in several European countries were accused of poisoning wells in order to deliberately cause the pandemic. Jews were subsequently murdered in great numbers for their “crime”. Many, including the Church fathers, sympathised with this expunging of the “godless” from society. Jews in England escaped such scapegoating simply because they were no longer there. They had been expelled by Edward I a half a century before and dispersed.
Following their readmission in 1656, the Anglo-Jewish community of probably a couple of hundred were suddenly confronted by the Great Plague of London in 1665. This took the lives of upwards of a 100,000 people.
The Spanish and Portuguese Sephardim had come to the capital from Protestant Amsterdam due to the efforts of Menasseh ben Israel. Born Manoel Dias Soeiro in Lisbon in 1604 to outwardly Catholic parents, his father had spent four years in prison, frequently tortured on the rack, by the zealous practitioners of the Inquisition, for being a secret Jew. The first Jews of London were therefore welcomed in the name of freedom from Catholic persecution.
The newcomers were allowed to establish a synagogue during the tolerant reign of Charles II in Creechurch Lane in the City of London. In the summer of 1664, they employed a rabbi, Jacob Sasportas from Amsterdam, who brought with him his son, Samuel, as shochet (ritual slaughterer) and Solomon Lopes as gabbai (beadle).
Within a few months, the Great Plague began to spread its deadly wings. Inhibited by a severe winter, the number of deaths rose dramatically in the spring of 1665, such that King Charles decamped for Oxford
Jacob Sasportas, who ran away to Hamberg; right, top, Menasseh ben Israel; and bottom, a book about a plague that hit London in 1636
together with his queen, Catherine of Braganza, who brought her doctor, Fernando Mendes, with her. Mendes was similarly a Portuguese converso who declared his Jewishness as soon as he stepped onto English soil.
The Haham of the community, Jacob Sasportas, took the first opportunity to desert his flock and travel to
Hamburg, fleeing “from fear of the destroying hand of the Lord which was against our community in London”. The older members of the community who had been displaced by Sasportas and his family stepped back into the breach.
One was Samuel Levi, originally from Kraków who had met a non-Jewish visitor to the synagogue, John Greenhalgh, in early 1662. Greenhalgh later wrote that Levi knew Latin and a little broken English and that his mother lived in Jerusalem. Greenhalgh wrote that “when they grow old, they transport themselves thither to end their days and lay their bones there in the Holy Place as (Levi) called it”.
Two wardens also remained in office, Isaac Barzilai and Isaac Azevedo, as did the gabbai, Isaac Israel Nunes, who lost two children in the epidemic. While the well-to-do were able to escape the city, the poor Jews perished. Many were unable to work as second-hand goods traders.
The historian, Wilfred S Samuel, suggested in 1936 that there were “six identifiable plague entries in the oldest burial register at Bevis Marks syn
The gabbai lost two children in the epidemic