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Wales and the Jewish people. Now there’s an association that seldom springs to mind.

This is scarcely surprising, as the stereotypical notions of Wales (a quaint, homogeneous rural land reeling from the ravages of industrial fallout) and the Jewish people (a dispersed people fighting against persecution the world over) have scant similarities on the surface.

These stereotypes and notions, however, belie the reality: the deep similarities between the Jewish and Welsh people and the long, illustrious history of Wales’ Jewish people and community, a historical chapter that manages to pull off the arduous task of being at once both quintessentially Welsh and quintessentially Jewish.

Although the development of Wales’ Jewish community was built around the industrialisation and mass immigration of the 19th century, Jews have been in Wales since the Middle Ages. This presence, however, was essentially just a miniscule trickle of Anglo-Jews after 1066. Indeed, although we know of Jewish individuals like merchant patriarch Josce of Caerleon, it seems no tangible Jewish community actually developed in medieval Wales.

Edward I, blood libel and the Edict of Expulsion

Most ‘evidence’ for medieval Welsh Jews is in fact conjectural, such as Cecil Roth’s notion of Jews in north Wales due to their funding of Edward I’s ‘iron ring,’ or Welsh merchants in Ireland with common Jewish names.

Despite the miniscule Jewish presence, persecution still existed as an extension of English policy (such as exclusion from boroughs) and anti-Semitism was present, in canards like the blood libel and derogatory poems. Blood libel cited Jews sacrificed Christian children as a part of religious rituals (its origins lie with the murder of a boy in Norwich), and the poems, for example, used the Welsh word for Jew (Iddew) in a derogatory fashion.

The few Welsh Jews were officially expelled alongside their English counterparts as a part of Edward I’s Edict of Expulsion in 1290, in which the King expelled Jews from England and crown lands, including Wales.

Although there are scant examples of Jewish activity after 1290 (an unnamed Jew at a Welsh court nearly a century after the Edict of Expulsion) all official activity ceased until 1656 with the readmission of the Jews under Oliver Cromwell after the English Civil War (although the Edict of Expulsion was not officially repealed as a part of this resettlement).

The 18th century and the first Welsh-Jewish communities

In the mid-18th century, the first tangible Welsh-Jewish community developed around the copper industry in Swansea, largely due to the efforts of German-Jewish immigrant David Michael. By 1768 there was a Jewish cemetery and the Swansea Hebrew Congregation built two purpose-built synagogues in the early-mid 19 century, both accommodating over 100 worshippers.

The Jewish communities of Cardiff, Newport, Neath, Tredegar, Pontypridd, and Merthyr Tydfil all followed a roughly similar process of development in the 19th century with the rise of Welsh industry. The Merthyr Synagogue in particular is unique among all synagogues for having its cable adorned with a dragon, Y Ddraig Goch .

By 1881 there were seven Jewish congregations concentrated around the industrial settlements of the south and the community numbered in the hundreds - this was just the beginning, as the mass immigration of eastern Jews would demographically revolutionise Wales’ Jewish community.

Mass immigration and persecution in the Russian Empire

The mass immigration of eastern European Jews (fleeing the persecution and injustices of the Russian Empire) dwarfed all prior and future Jewish immigration into Britain and caused the demographic explosion of British Jews; Wales was no exception, with the Jewish community numbering over 5,000 with 19 congregations by 1918. Once again new congregations were built around industry (such as shipbuilding in Bangor) and Jewish people in Wales prospered culturally, with dozens of various Jewish literary societies, charity organisations, Hebrew classes, and social centres springing up in both the north and south of Wales.

The Jewish immigrants, though largely maintaining Jewish identity, integrated well during this period, active in both Welsh social and political life. Indeed, the relations between Welsh-Jews (old and new) and the indigenous Welsh were largely positive; the Welsh provided their Jewish countrymen tremendous support as the pogroms (anti-Semitic riots and massacres) were being carried out in the Russian Empire, such as the aid organised in Swansea to aid the families affected by the Odessa pogrom of 1905. This is quite a testament to Wales (and the wider British society) considering this was a time when continental Jews experienced horrific forms of persecution, from the pogroms to the ghettos to the deprivation of the most basic rights.

Anti-Jewish riots in Tredegar

However, this is not to say anti-Semitism was absent. Indeed, the most well-known aspect of Welsh-Jewish history concerns the events that transpired in and around Tredegar in 1911. Tredegar, once a flourishing ironworks town, was suffocating under economic depression. The Jewish residents, however, mostly ran shops and other businesses and were thus relatively unaffected by the depression. With attitudes towards minorities often souring in times of hardship (anti-Irish riots took place in 1880s Tredegar) and provided with a useful scapegoat, anti-Jewish riots erupted on August 19, with over twenty Jewish businesses sacked by the time the police arrived. Spreading to the likes of Caerphilly and Ebbw Vale, Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, dispatched the army to quell the rioting, although it had already fizzled out, a week after it had begun, by the time soldiers arrived. No Jews were killed during the unrest.

Although tame relative to some of the Russian massacres, Churchill classified these events as a pogrom. Most Jews did return to the "pogrom districts" in due course, but they did not forget; most permanently moved to the likes of Cardiff after the First World War. Although persecution is not a core aspect of Welsh-Jewish history and the anti-Semitic nature of what happened in Tredegar has been debated, the riots did expose the base elements of human nature; how quickly people "respectful by all appearances" descend into barbarism when embittered by hardships.

The Second World War and Kindertransport

The 1920s and 30s saw a decline in Welsh Jews marked by the decay of the once flourishing Welsh industry; Jews were a noticeable portion of the 500,000 people to have emigrated during these decades. Welsh Jews did, however, experience a boom from the 1933 rise of Nazi Germany to the 1945 end of the Second World War. This was largely due to the substantial number of Jewish refugees and evacuees flooding into Wales (a designated safe zone). Various new wartime congregations were formed at the likes of Aberystwyth and waning ones like Rhyl were revived by the new arrivals.

(Image: Fred Morley/Getty Images)

Welsh Jews (and Christian) cared for the refugees and evacuees (particularly fostering children as Wales was heavily involved in the Kindertransport effort), supported the war effort on an industrial scale via the Treforest Industrial Estate, and enlisted in the armed services in droves, being dispatched from the Royal Air Force to providing religious services for front line troops. Glynneath's Rev Leslie Hardman was one of the first to enter a liberated Bergen-Belsen in 1945. He read service at the mass burials of thousand of Holocaust victims alongside Irish priest Michael Morrison. Welsh Jews were among the two thousand British-Jewish servicemen and women killed between 1939 and 1945.

The decline of Jewish life in Wales

The wartime resurgence was, however, temporary, with Welsh-Jewish history mostly being one of poignant decline after 1945 (highlighting the odd situation in which Welsh Jews flourished during war but waned during times of peace and tolerance). Though Cardiff experienced a small period of prosperity (symbolised chiefly by the opening and consecration of a new Penylan synagogue in 1955), all of Jewish life in Wales decayed, with even some of the original seven congregations (Neath and Merthyr Tydfil) being dissolved and its synagogues either left derelict or sold off.

By the 1950s there were just eleven congregations and over 4,000 Welsh Jews, then just five congregations and a little over 2,500 by the 1990s. In many areas only the decaying Jewish cemeteries act as a reminder of the Welsh Jews that once existed and flourished. Just as Cardiff, Swansea, and Newport once mirrored each other in how they rose and prospered they now mirror each other in how they decline. The poignant decline (brought about by the emigration refugees and evacuees due to the war's end and other Welsh Jews due to complex socio-economic factors) has, however, been tempered by the steadfast endurance of the Welsh Jews, with the oldest congregations in Cardiff and Swansea still clinging on and projects undertaken in north Wales to revive Jewish life.

Though the likes of Tredegar and the modern decline are tragic, Welsh-Jewish history is not one to be defined by pain and decay, but, rather, success, community, strength, and inspiration; Welsh Jews have, despite being just 0.2% of Wales at their 1918 height, contributed tremendously to Welsh literature, art, political life, society, and culture. From the Middle Ages through to industrialisation and war and into the present day, Welsh-Jewish history is a long and illustrious one defined by success, inspiration, and poignancy, and may their tale continue for the foreseeable future.

Matthew Williams was born and raised in Oxfordshire of Welsh and Jewish descent. He has created the Welsh-Jewish History project, dedicated to promoting and exploring the history of the Welsh-Jewish people and community. You can visit the project here .

The author gratefully acknowledges use of information and statistics from Dr. Cai Parry-Jones' doctoral thesis, 'The History of the Jewish Diaspora in Wales' (Bangor University, 2014).