Sephardic Jews in Ireland: Dublin, Cork and the Portuguese Century

Ireland had a Sephardi presence for about a century, and then it stopped.

Portuguese families were in Dublin by the 1660s, leased a cemetery in 1718, numbered perhaps forty families in the 1740s, and by the end of the eighteenth century had gone — to London, to the Caribbean, or out of the community altogether.

The Jewish community that exists in Ireland today is Ashkenazi, descended from Lithuanian immigration after 1880, and has no connection to the Portuguese one beyond a shared burial ground.

This page is short because the evidence is thin. There is no congregational archive, no register of births or marriages, no minute book. What survives is a cemetery, a handful of leases and petitions, some names in London records, and the observations of people passing through. It is not nothing, and much of it has never been collected in one place.

Everyone described here is Western Sephardi: Portuguese and Spanish families who reached Ireland from London or Amsterdam, not directly from Iberia. There was no Eastern Sephardi presence in Ireland.

A warning about the literature. Almost everything written about Jews in Ireland is about the Ashkenazi community — Dublin’s Little Jerusalem, the Limerick boycott of 1904, Robert Briscoe, the Belfast congregation. All of that is a different community, two centuries later. If you are researching a Portuguese family, the standard histories will give you very little.

Where did Ireland’s Sephardim come from?

From London, mostly, and from Amsterdam behind it.

Jews were readmitted to England under Cromwell in 1656, and Ireland was under English rule. The Portuguese merchants who came to Dublin were part of the same commercial network as the Creechurch Lane congregation — the same families, the same trades, the same correspondents. Some came from the Netherlands directly, which is what the accounts of the Fairview settlement suggest.

The recorded arrivals are commercial, not refugee. A merchant went where the business was, and for a period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Dublin and Cork were worth going to.

How did they make a living?

Trade, and specifically Atlantic trade.

Cork’s position made it valuable. It was the last provisioning port for ships leaving Britain and Ireland for the Americas, taking on salt beef, butter and water, and it drew merchants for that reason alone. Dublin was the administrative and commercial capital.

One episode explains a good deal. It is reported that London diamond merchants moved to Ireland in the middle of the eighteenth century because war disrupted the East India trade — plausibly the War of the Austrian Succession of 1740 to 1748 — and that shipping through Irish ports was less exposed to French attack than shipping through English ones.

We record this as a reported explanation rather than an established one. If it is right, it accounts for the population peak of the 1740s and for the disappearance that followed, because a wartime diversion of trade ends when the war does.

Not everyone prospered. In 1749 the London congregation paid for a destitute Mendoza family to return from Ireland — the household of the grandmother of Daniel Mendoza, the boxer. This is the despacho system working exactly as it did everywhere else: London shipped its poor onward, and sometimes shipped them home.

Where did they go?

Away, and early.

The Sephardi presence in Ireland appears to have ended in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Marlborough Street synagogue is reported to have closed around 1790, and no Portuguese congregation succeeded it. When Jewish life revived in Dublin in the nineteenth century it was Ashkenazi and unrelated.

Where the families went is largely unrecorded, and this is the central unanswered question about Irish Sephardim. London is the obvious destination and the London records are the obvious place to look, but no one has systematically searched them for Irish connections. The Caribbean is the other possibility, given the trade routes.

If you lose an Irish Sephardi family, look next at London, then Amsterdam, then Jamaica and Barbados.

Where were the communities?

Dublin

Crane Lane, off Dame Street, from the late 1650s. A Portuguese synagogue here is reported for the late 1650s and early 1660s, which would make it the earliest in Ireland and roughly contemporary with Creechurch Lane in London. The evidence is not strong and the building has not been identified.

Around 1662 the brothers Manuel and Gaspar Pereira were living in Dublin. These are, as far as we know, the first Sephardic Jews in Ireland identifiable by name.

In 1672 Bishop John Brennan reported to Rome that a few Jews were present in Ireland.

Around 1718 the community moved to the Annadale area off what was then Ellis Avenue and is now Philipsburg Avenue, in Fairview. Some of these families are said to have come from the Netherlands.

Marlborough Street, reported as opening in 1746 or 1762 and closing around 1790 or 1791. Whether this congregation was Sephardi is not clear, and the date discrepancy suggests the sources have not been reconciled.

John D’Alton, in The History of the County of Dublin, reports about forty Jewish families in Dublin in 1745, comprising some two hundred people. That is the high-water mark and it is a single-source figure.

Cork

Sephardi merchants settled in Cork, drawn by the port. The evidence is scattered rather than communal — there is no record of a congregation in this period — but individuals appear in commercial and legal records.

Two documents in our database name Cork. In 1776 Aaron Jewell, a dealer and chapman, appears in the London court records with addresses at “Corke, Ireland” and Gravel Lane, Houndsditch, imprisoned for debt in the Poultry Compter. And the minute book of the London congregation for 15 Kislev 5542 — 11 November 1781 — records a matrimonial dispute between Sarah Benhakuk and Mukluf Belilo which began aboard ship at Cork, on a voyage from Gibraltar, and continued to a hearing in London.

Both show the same thing: Cork as a stop on a route rather than a place people stayed.

Youghal — the earliest of all

The earliest identifiable Sephardim in Ireland are not in Dublin at all.

Following the expulsion from Portugal in 1497 some Portuguese families settled on the south coast, and one of them produced two mayors of Youghal in County Cork: William Annyas, elected in 1555, and Francis Annyas — the name also appears as Ãnes, and behind it stands the Portuguese Anes or Annes — who held the office three times, in 1569, 1576 and 1581.

This is a full century before Crane Lane, and it belongs to a different phenomenon: New Christian merchant families living outwardly as Catholics, in a period when open Jewish practice was impossible anywhere in the British Isles. Whether the Annyas family maintained any Jewish observance is unknown and probably unknowable.

They are worth recording because they are the first, and because nobody has traced them.

The cemetery at Ballybough

Ballybough, Fairview Strand, Dublin. In 1718 Alexander Felix — also recorded as David Penso — together with Jacob do Porto and David Machado do Sequeira leased a plot of land for a cemetery. This is Ireland’s first Jewish burial ground, and it is Sephardi in origin.

The ground later passed into use by the Ashkenazi community, which is why it is usually described in the literature as simply the old Dublin Jewish cemetery. A gate lodge survives, with an inscription over the gate. Diarmuid Hiney’s survey, cited below, is the essential source.

A note on Dolphin’s Barn. This cemetery is often mentioned alongside Ballybough, and the two are sometimes conflated. They should not be. Dolphin’s Barn is on the other side of the city and belongs to the nineteenth-century Ashkenazi community. If you find a claim that a cemetery was consecrated at Dolphin’s Barn in 1748, treat it with caution — we have not been able to substantiate it, and the 1718 Fairview lease is the documented Sephardi ground.

Cork has two Jewish burial sites and Limerick one, all recorded in JewishGen’s burial registry, but these are Ashkenazi and later.

What records survive?

There is no Irish Sephardi congregational archive. That is the fundamental problem, and it means the records are all somewhere else.

Bevis Marks archives, held at the London Archives. This is the single most important body of material for Irish Sephardim, because the Dublin and Cork families were part of the London community’s world — supported by it, disciplined by it, and in at least one case shipped home by it. The despacho accounts, the Mahamad minutes and the Livro dos Pleitos all record people moving between London and Ireland. None of it has been indexed for Irish content.

Registry of Deeds, Dublin, from 1708. The 1718 cemetery lease is the kind of document this series holds, and it is the obvious place to look for property transactions by Portuguese merchants.

Contemporary newspapers, both Irish and London. For a merchant population with no synagogue registers, commercial notices, shipping intelligence and bankruptcy announcements are often the only surviving trace.

Youghal and Cork municipal records, for the Annyas mayoralties and any related family material.

Where else should you look?

The London Archives, for the Bevis Marks material described above.

Amsterdam City Archive, inventory 334 — the Portuguese-Israelite community archive. If Fairview families came from the Netherlands, as reported, the Amsterdam marriage banns record place of origin and are the way to test it.

The National Archives, Kew, for naturalisation, denization and colonial trade papers.

What has and hasn’t been researched

Very little, and the standard work is over half a century old.

Louis Hyman’s The Jews of Ireland: From Earliest Times to the Year 1910 remains the foundation and has not been superseded for the early period. Dermot Keogh’s Jews in Twentieth-Century Ireland is excellent and concerns a different community entirely.

Diarmuid Hiney’s study of the Fairview Strand cemetery is the only piece of genuinely genealogical work on the Sephardi period that we are aware of.

Nobody appears to have searched the London congregational records for Irish references, traced where the Dublin families went after 1790, worked the Registry of Deeds for Portuguese merchants, or looked at the Annyas family of Youghal at all. Each of these is a defined and finite task, and any one of them would materially advance the subject.

We should also say plainly that the basic outline above rests on a small number of sources repeating one another. The population figure for 1745, the Crane Lane synagogue, the diamond merchants’ migration and the Marlborough Street dates are each essentially single-source claims. They may all be correct. They have not been independently verified.

Organisations and repositories

Irish Jewish Museum, 3 Walworth Road, Portobello, Dublin 8 — jewishmuseum.ie

The London Archives (formerly London Metropolitan Archives), 40 Northampton Road, London EC1R 0HB — for the Bevis Marks congregational archive

Registry of Deeds, Henrietta Street, Dublin 1

National Archives of Ireland, Bishop Street, Dublin 8 — nationalarchives.ie

National Library of Ireland, Kildare Street, Dublin 2 — nli.ie

Jewish Representative Council of Ireland

Help us find records

We are looking for:

Any transcription or photograph of the 1718 cemetery lease, and any later Ballybough deeds
Burial records or inscriptions from Ballybough for the Sephardi period, before the ground passed to the Ashkenazi community
The source behind John D’Alton’s count of forty families in 1745
Any documentary evidence for the Crane Lane synagogue of the 1650s and 1660s
Any evidence identifying the Marlborough Street congregation as Sephardi or Ashkenazi, and settling its opening date
Anything on Manuel and Gaspar Pereira in Dublin around 1662
Anything on the Annyas or Ãnes family of Youghal
Evidence for the reported migration of London diamond merchants to Ireland in the 1740s
Any Irish reference in the Bevis Marks despachos, Mahamad minutes or Livro dos Pleitos
Family papers from any Portuguese family settled in Ireland

If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected]. Material contributed is credited, and we are happy to work under any conditions you set.

Research services

Irish Sephardi research means a small number of families, no congregational registers, and records dispersed across Dublin, London and Amsterdam in English, Portuguese and Hebrew. It is difficult work with a low success rate, and we would rather say so. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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