SKETCHES

OF

ANGLO-JEWISH HISTORY.

BY

JAMES PICCIOTTO., /830-1897,

LONDON:

TRÜBNER & CO., LUDGATE HILL.

1875.

[All rights reserved.]

ΤΟ

SIR MOSES MONTEFIORE, BART., F.R.S.

&c. &c. &c.

THIS BOOK IS RESPECTFULLY

Medicated

AS A HUMBLE TRIBUTE OF ADMIRATION AND VENERATION

FOR HIS UNIVERSAL AND HEROIC CHAMPIONSHIP

OF THE JEWISH CAUSE,

FOR HIS PURE AND LOFTY PHILANTHROPY, AND

FOR HIS UNIVERSAL BENEVOLENCE,

BY THE AUTHOR.

PREFACE.

It is singular that few enlightened and wealthy communities know so little of their own early history, as the Jews of Great Britain. Yet few races indeed present more vicissitudes for description, or possess records offering a more interesting and extended field for investigation. Perhaps the mart, the exchange, the counting-house, may have absorbed, in former times, and under especial circumstances, energies which, if directed to literary pursuits, would have deserved and commanded success. Certain it is that no chronicler has narrated the earlier struggles of the Jews when they returned to these isles after centuries of banishment, and no writer has attempted to depict the gradual rise and progress of the Jewish community in London. Nay, the archives of the older Synagogues, which are treasures of curious information, remained until the present time buried in obscurity, their very existence being scarcely known. Some few of the elder officials had a glimmering of their contents, but to the vast majority of even the Jews themselves these books were as hidden and impenetrable as the Vedas or the Zend Avesta. In addition to being jealously guarded, they were written in the Spanish and Portuguese languages, or in the Jewish-German dialect, which rendered them thus necessarily understood but by few. The author has had the privilege of being permitted not only to