England’s Sephardim were the first Jews legally settled in the country since the expulsion of 1290. A congregation of Portuguese merchants was worshipping in Creechurch Lane in the City of London by 1657. In 1701 it moved around the corner into the synagogue at Bevis Marks, which has been in continuous use ever since — the oldest in Britain and among the oldest anywhere in Europe.
The community was never large. It was overtaken numerically by Ashkenazim within two generations of its founding, and by the nineteenth century it was a small, wealthy and increasingly assimilated minority within Anglo-Jewry. Its records, however, were kept, and kept well.
That is why this page reads differently from the others on this site. For most Sephardi communities the problem is that almost nothing survives. For London the problem is the opposite: six printed volumes of vital records, three centuries of account books and minute books, and a congregational archive of some thousands of items. The difficulty is knowing where to look first.
Three Sephardi populations in England
They should not be confused, because their origins and their records are different.
Western Sephardim: Portuguese and Spanish families arriving from Amsterdam, Hamburg, Livorno and directly from Portugal, from the 1650s. This is the Bevis Marks community and the subject of most of this page.
Eastern Sephardim: from the Ottoman lands, chiefly Salonika, Constantinople, Aleppo and Corfu, arriving from the later nineteenth century, mostly into the Manchester textile trade and to a lesser extent London and Leeds.
Megorashim: from Morocco and Gibraltar, arriving across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some into London and some into Manchester.
The three groups overlapped, intermarried, and in London largely used the same congregation.
Where they came from
Not from Spain, and mostly not directly from Portugal.
The founding families of the Creechurch Lane congregation were merchants already living in London as nominal Catholics, trading with the Iberian peninsula and the Canaries. They declared themselves openly after Menasseh ben Israel’s petition to Cromwell in 1655 and the Council of State’s decision not to enforce the expulsion. Antonio Rodrigues Robles and Antonio Fernandes Carvajal are the names usually given.
The congregation that formed around them drew its members from Amsterdam and Hamburg, the two established Western Sephardi centres. Its rite, its constitution and its officers were copied from Amsterdam.
A second stream came direct from Portugal throughout the eighteenth century. These appear in the London records as vindos de Portugal, arrivals from Portugal, and they were often destitute: people who had left under Inquisition pressure with nothing. The congregation supported them, sometimes shipped them onward to the Caribbean, and recorded them carefully. If an ancestor appears in London as a vindo, the previous generation is in Portugal and very often in the Inquisition records.
Later arrivals came from Livorno, Gibraltar and Morocco, and from the 1880s from the Ottoman Empire.
The most useful rule for research here is that when a London line runs out, you should look to Amsterdam. The two communities were in constant contact, families moved between them in both directions, and the Amsterdam archives are both older and fuller.
How they made a living
The community was founded by merchants and its early records are commercial.
Twelve of the licensed brokerships on the Royal Exchange were reserved for Jews, the so-called Jew brokers. These were valuable, transferable, and dominated by a small number of Sephardi families. Beyond broking, the trades were the classic Western Sephardi ones: diamonds and precious stones, coral worked in Livorno and traded to India, sugar, tobacco, wine, and colonial commerce with Jamaica, Barbados and Suriname.
Below that thin commercial layer was a much larger population of the poor, which the congregational records document and the popular histories often overlook. By the later eighteenth century a majority of London Sephardim were pedlars, hawkers, old-clothes dealers, orange-sellers and street traders. Todd Endelman’s work is the standard account.
The community’s own charitable machinery — the fintas, the Sedaca, the despachos that paid for people to leave — was built around this population. It is the reason so much genealogical detail survives about people who owned nothing.
Where they went
Outward as much as inward. London was a hub rather than a terminus.
The congregation’s despacho payments sent poor members to the Caribbean and North America throughout the eighteenth century. London families are ancestral to communities in Jamaica, Barbados, Suriname, Curaçao, New York, Newport, Charleston and Georgia. Others went to Gibraltar, India and, later, South Africa and Australia.
The other departure was internal. From the 1840s the community fractured, as wealthier Sephardim moved to the West End and some joined the new Reform congregation in Burton Street, later Upper Berkeley Street. Intermarriage with Ashkenazim, and then with Christians, accelerated through the nineteenth century. A great many Sephardi lines simply cease to appear in the congregational records after about 1850, not because the families died out but because they stopped being members.
If you lose an English Sephardi family, look next at Amsterdam, Livorno, Gibraltar, Jamaica, Barbados, Suriname, Curaçao, New York and Charleston.
Communities and synagogues
London
Creechurch Lane, 1657, enlarged 1674, was the first synagogue of the resettlement, in a rented building. Wilfred Samuel reconstructed its membership from the surviving evidence, and his study remains the starting point for anyone working on the first two generations.
Bevis Marks, 1701, was built by the Quaker carpenter Joseph Avis and has been in continuous use since. Its formal name is the Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation, Sha’ar ha-Shamayim.
Bryanston Street, 1866, and Lauderdale Road, Maida Vale, 1896, were branch synagogues following the community’s westward and northward movement. Lauderdale Road became the effective centre of the congregation in the twentieth century.
Wigmore Street and Holland Park, 1928, the latter built by and for eastern Sephardim, chiefly of Ottoman origin.
The congregation today is the S&P Sephardi Community. Its membership includes Ashkenazim, Moroccans, eastern Sephardim, and families of Iraqi and Egyptian origin who arrived after 1948.
Manchester
A genuinely separate community, established in the late nineteenth century by merchants in the cotton and textile trade, and eastern Sephardi and Moroccan in origin rather than Western Sephardi.
Early members included Daniel Piccioto of Aleppo, Samuel Hadida of Gibraltar, Moses Messulam of Constantinople, Isaac Pariente of Tetuan and Abraham Btesh of Killiz in Syria. Other families were Besso and Levi from Corfu; Sharim, Sciama, Setton, Laniado and Dwek from Aleppo; Cazes, Azulay and Pariente from Morocco; and Pinto from London.
Sha’are Tephillah, Moor Lane, 1873, was the first congregation, in Cheetham Hill. The building is now the Manchester Jewish Museum.
Sha’are Rahamim, 1904, at Mauldeth Road, Withington, moved to Queens Road in 1927.
Leeds
The Leeds Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue operated at 21 Leopold Street between the 1920s and the 1940s. Its members were mostly eastern Sephardim, particularly from Salonika, but it followed the Western Sephardi rite. It is almost unknown even among Anglo-Sephardim, and we would like to hear from anyone with material on it.
Cemeteries
The London congregation has operated five burial grounds, of which two are in use.
Velho Beth Haim, 1657, the old cemetery off Mile End Road, is the oldest Jewish burial ground in England since the resettlement. It closed to burials in 1735 and is visitable by permission of the Disused Cemeteries Committee.
Novo Beth Haim, 1733, the new cemetery, also on Mile End Road. In the 1970s Queen Mary College compelled the congregation to sell most of the land; the remains were disinterred and reburied at Brentwood. What survives is enclosed by the college campus and is accessible.
Brentwood, Coxtie Green Road, Essex, holds most people buried in the Novo before 1876, in mass graves.
Hoop Lane, Golders Green, 1896, and Edgwarebury, 1972, are both in use.
In Manchester, the Urmston Jewish Cemetery opened in 1878, and there is a Jewish section in Manchester’s Southern Cemetery from 1934.
The Velho and Novo registers are published in full, which is why English Sephardi burial evidence is unusually complete by comparison with almost every other community on this site.
What are the Bevis Marks Records?
England has the best-published Sephardi records of any community covered here. The core is the six-volume Bevis Marks Records.
| Volume | Contents | Years |
| Part I | History of the congregation | — |
| Part II | Abstracts of ketubot | to 1837 |
| Part III | Abstracts of ketubot and civil marriage registers | 1837–1901 |
| Part IV | Circumcision register (de Paiba) | 1679–1775 |
| Part V | Birth register | 1767–1881 |
| Part VI | Burial register, Novo cemetery | 1733–1918 |
Copies are in major reference libraries and in Jewish historical and genealogical collections. Some older copies can still be bought from the S&P Sephardi Community. There are gaps in the early period, and the volumes are abstracts rather than full transcriptions. For anything contested, go back to the manuscript.
The congregational archive
Most of the congregation’s pre-twentieth-century archive is at the London Metropolitan Archives under LMA/4521. Access requires written permission from the congregation’s archivist. Much of it has been digitised by the National Library of Israel.
The most valuable series for genealogy is the Libros de Contas, the account books. They record fintas, the membership assessments, which are effectively a graded census of the community. They also record synagogue officials, charity recipients, and payments of every kind, and they routinely state family relationships in passing. They begin in the seventeenth century and are continuous. A Nação Hebraica is a project using machine transcription to open them up.
The minute books of the Mahamad and the Elders are the other major series, recording the congregation’s governance, its disputes, its charity and its discipline. The Livro dos Pleitos, the book of disputes, is a distinct and unusually rich source, because it records ordinary members in conflict with one another and states who was related to whom.
| Record type | Years | Where | Online |
| Bevis Marks Records I–VI | 1657–1918 | Published | No |
| Congregational archive | 17th c.– | LMA/4521, permission required | Partly |
| Libros de Contas | 1660s– | LMA/4521 | Partly |
| Minute books, Mahamad and Elders | 1660s– | LMA/4521 | Partly |
| Livro dos Pleitos | 1721–1784 | LMA/4521 | No |
| Velho cemetery burials | 1657–1735 | Published / LMA | No |
| Denization and naturalisation | 1650s– | The National Archives | Partly |
| Wills | 1650s– | The National Archives | Yes |
| Old Bailey proceedings | 1674–1913 | Old Bailey Online | Yes |
| Censuses | 1841–1921 | Various | Yes |
| Civil registration | 1837– | GRO | Index |
| Alien registration; passports | 19th–20th c. | TNA, HO files and FO 611 | No |
Records elsewhere
Amsterdam City Archive, inventory 334, the Portuguese-Israelite community archive, is the first place to go when a London line disappears. The marriage banns state place of origin, and the Ouderkerk burial cards carry patronymics.
Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon, for the Portuguese Inquisition. Attempting to leave the country was itself an offence, so the trials often name relatives who escaped.
Livorno, Hamburg and Gibraltar, the other Western Sephardi centres in constant exchange with London, and Morocco and the Ottoman Empire for the later arrivals.
Jamaica, Barbados, Suriname and Curaçao, where the despachos sent people.
The fifty most common surnames
These are the fifty family names most frequently recorded in the Sephardi records of England, drawn from the congregational registers, cemetery records, censuses, account books and minute books. They are counted as the name is written in the record, which is how a researcher will meet it in an index, and listed alphabetically rather than by frequency.
Two cautions. Compound surnames fragment: a family recorded as Nunes may appear elsewhere as Martines Nunes, Cardozo Nunes or Carvalho Nunes. And frequency reflects how well a family is documented as much as how numerous it was.
Abendana · Alvares · Andrade · Baruch · Baruh · Belasco · Bensusan · Bernal · Brandon · Bravo · Cardozo · Carvalho · Castro · Cohen · Costa · Da Costa · Da Costa Gomes · De Castro · De Leon · Dias · Fernandes · Fonseca · Garcia · Genese · Gomes · Henriques · Israel · Lara · Leon · Levy · Lindo · Lopes · Martin · Martines · Martines Nunes · Mendes · Mendoza · Mocatta · Montefiore · Noah · Nunes · Pass · Paz · Pereira · Rodrigues · Silva · Soares · Torres · Valentine · Vaz
Names outside the first fifty are not rare. The English Sephardi records contain several thousand distinct family names. See our page on Sephardic surnames.
Sephardic World lectures on England
- The Sephardic Poor of Amsterdam and London — Ton Tielen
- Vindos de Portugal — Carla Vieira
- Trade and Persecution: three merchants between Lisbon and London — Carla Vieira
- Jews in Georgian Society: the Laras of London — Pearl Foster
- Sir Moses Montefiore — Abigail Green
- Opening the Archives with Technology: Bevis Marks, a case study — David Silvera
- The Bevis Marks Synagogue Story — Marilyn Scott with Rabbi Shalom Morris
- London’s 18th Century Secular Records — David Mendoza
- Daniel Mendoza, Regency Boxer and Improbable Jewish Hero — David Mendoza
- Everyday Justice in London’s Sephardic Jewish Community — Wendy Filer
- Keeping the Faithful: poverty and welfare in Georgian London — Ali Erginsoy
- Sephardic Jews of Manchester
- Leeds Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue
What has and hasn’t been researched
England is the best-served community on this site, and the gaps are correspondingly specific.
The published record is excellent for vital events and poor for everything else. The six Bevis Marks volumes cover births, marriages, circumcisions and burials. What they do not cover is the working life of the congregation — its finances, its charity, its governance, its arguments — and that is precisely where the account books and minute books are, largely untranscribed and largely unread. The account books alone would transform what is known about the eighteenth-century Sephardi poor.
The Ashkenazi majority has drawn most of the scholarly attention. The standard social history of the period, Endelman’s Jews of Georgian England, treats Sephardim as one part of a larger Anglo-Jewish story rather than as a subject in itself.
Manchester and Leeds are barely worked at all. Lydia Collins and M. L. Bierbrier’s Sephardim of Manchester is the exception, and there is nothing comparable for Leeds.
Further reading
Bevis Marks Records, Parts I–VI (Jewish Historical Society of England and the Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation).
Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Georgian England, 1714–1830 (Philadelphia, 1979).
Wilfred S. Samuel, The First London Synagogue of the Resettlement.
Lucien Wolf, Menasseh ben Israel’s Mission to Oliver Cromwell.
H. S. Q. Henriques, The Return of the Jews to England (London, 1905).
Moses Gaster, History of the Ancient Synagogue of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews in Bevis Marks (London, 1901).
Albert M. Hyamson, A History of the Jews in England (London, 1908).
Lydia Collins and M. L. Bierbrier, The Sephardim of Manchester: Pedigrees and Pioneers.
Joseph Pereira-Mendoza, Historical Record of the Withington Congregation of Spanish and Portuguese Jews 1904–1929.
Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, in more than forty volumes.
Organisations and repositories
S&P Sephardi Community, the congregation; the archivist’s permission is required for LMA/4521.
London Archives – until recently called the London Metropolitan Archives – for LMA/4521 and LMA/3541.
The National Archives, Kew, for wills, denization and naturalisation, alien registration and FO 611.
Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain, which holds Europe’s largest Jewish genealogy library and has a Dutch and Sephardi Special Interest Group.
Jewish Historical Society of England.
Manchester Jewish Museum, in the former Moor Lane synagogue.
University of Southampton Special Collections, holding the papers of the Manchester Congregation.
Guildhall Library; the British Library; London Lives; Old Bailey Online; The London Gazette; and the General Register Office.
Sephardic Genealogical Society.
Help us find records
We are looking for:
- Material on the Leeds Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue at 21 Leopold Street
- Records of the Manchester congregations beyond the Southampton papers
- Photographs or transcriptions of the Velho Beth Haim stones
- Anything documenting the Novo disinterments of the 1970s and the reburials at Brentwood
- Family papers, correspondence or photographs from any English Sephardi family
If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected].
Research services
English Sephardi research is unusually well provided with published sources and unusually demanding beyond them: a congregational archive that requires written permission, account books in Portuguese, ketubot in Hebrew, and families that move between London, Amsterdam, Livorno and the Caribbean within a single generation. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.
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