The United Synagogue

Stories need beginnings, and it has been customary to begin the story of the United Synagogue in the sukkah of Chief Rabbi Nathan Marcus Adler on 24 September 1866. It was there, over breakfast with the wardens of the Great Synagogue, that Dr. Adler urged an alliance of the leading Ashkenazi synagogues of London. Less than four years later, on 14 July 1870, the Jewish United Synagogues Bill received royal assent and the United Synagogue was born.

Like most beginnings, this account simplifies a longer and more prosaic chain of events. Jews, having been expelled from England in 1290, had been readmitted by Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s. There had been Jews in England for some decades prior to this, but they had been marranos, refugees from the Spanish expulsion in 1492, who had made their way to England via such exotic way stations as the Canaries, Amsterdam, Brazil and the West Indies. Like many of their contemporaries they were Jews in secret, outwardly professing Christianity. Cromwell’s latitudinarianism allowed them for the first time to meet and worship privately as Jews. So began modern Anglo-Jewry.

The first Jews to resettle were Sephardim. But they were soon joined and outnumbered by Ashkenazim from Holland, Germany and Central Europe who saw in England a relatively benign and tolerant prospective home. London was a thriving commercial centre. More importantly, Jews were not singled out for persecution. Cromwell’s decision to re-admit Jews had called for no specific legislation. Jews were not recognised as a special case in English law. The disabilities they suffered they shared with others who were not members of the Established Church: with Catholics, members of the Free Churches, and other dissenting minorities. During the course of the nineteenth century, these disabilities were slowly removed, often to the accompaniment of heated debate but without the organised and politically potent antisemitism that marked much of the rest of Europe. By the 1850s there were some thirty thousand Jews in England. Of these, the vast majority were to be found in London.

From quite early on in its history, Anglo-Jewry demonstrated a capacity for communal organisation. In the early eighteenth century the Spanish and Portuguese congregation had formed a committee of deputados to deal with political matters affecting the community. In 1760 it delivered a “loyal address” to the new King George III, and was taken to task by the Ashkenazim for not first conferring with them so that a single tribute could be delivered on behalf of all of England’s Jews. Thereafter it was agreed that the two communities (described at the time as “the Two Nations”) would meet and deliberate together. Thus was born the London Committee (subsequently the Board) of Deputies of British Jews. It met intermittently until 1835, when the need for a more formal structure was recognised. A resolution passed on 11 May 1835 expressed the general sentiment that

it would be of essential advantage to the Interests of the Jews of Britain, that in all matters touching their political welfare they should be represented by one Body, & inasmuch as the general Body of Deputies have long been recognised as their representatives, it is highly desirable for the general good that all British Jews should so acknowledge them, having a sufficient number of Members from each Congregation to ensure the accordance of their proceedings with the general wishes of the Jews.

With government recognition, and under the long Presidency of Sir Moses Montefiore, the Board achieved significant prominence as the representative body of Anglo-Jewry.

No less important was the development of another institution, the Chief Rabbinate. During the first half of the eighteenth century Jewish communities throughout the provinces had turned for guidance to the rabbi of the leading Ashkenazi synagogue of the day, London’s Great Synagogue. The long incumbency (c. 1704–56) of Rabbi Aaron Hart consolidated this influence, which was briefly though unsuccessfully challenged during the office of Rabbi David Tevele Schiff (1765–92). By the 1840s the broad base of the Chief Rabbinate was recognised in the form of an electoral process involving representatives of congregations throughout the country. The man chosen, Dr. Nathan Marcus Adler, rapidly set about reorganising the religious life of Jewry throughout Britain, imperiously but effectively, and along with Sir Moses Montefiore did much to give Victorian Jewry its character and coherence.

There remained, though, the fact that individual synagogues were just that: local congregations with highly localised concerns. This gave rise, not infrequently, to the question of who was responsible for matters which cut across congregational loyalties. There was the issue of welfare and the needs of the poor. Synagogues accepted the fact that they were responsible for the charitable needs of their own members. But what of the poor who were not members of any synagogue? Incidents occurred in the 1790s in which Jewish paupers were left unburied for several days while synagogues argued amongst themselves as to which should bear the costs of the funeral.

Then there was the question of the movement of Jews away from their area of first settlement, the City and London’s East End. As the established Jews of London reached a degree of affluence and social integration they moved westward to Marylebone, Bayswater and Westminster and sought to establish congregations there. This was resisted by the older synagogues, who saw in this development a loss of membership, revenue and prestige for themselves. But resistance carried a price. It had been just such a refusal, on the part of the Spanish and Portuguese congregation, to establish a West End branch which had led to the creation of the first Reform synagogue in Britain, the West London Synagogue, in 1840.

There were also border disputes between the various synagogues. Could a member of one transfer his allegiance to another? Could he arrange for his son’s bar mitzvah or daughter’s wedding to take place at another? Issues like these had a tendency to create local arguments, requiring much diplomacy to restore neighbourly relations.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century there had been periodic attempts to establish a broader framework of synagogue co-operation. In 1804 the three leading City congregations, the Great, the New and the Hambro, had come together to discuss programmes of joint action. In 1835 they agreed a “New Treaty” covering such matters as welfare for the “foreign poor,” synagogue membership and an agreement not to poach members from one another, division of the profits from the London Board of Shechitah and sharing the expenses of maintaining the London Beth Din. The Treaty was an important landmark in the evolution of Anglo-Jewry’s communal infrastructure, and paved the way for the formation, a quarter of a century later, of the Jewish Board of Guardians, the forerunner of today’s Jewish Care.

It was also the first move towards a “United Synagogue.” The leadership of the three congregations had already realised that something more than local Congregationalism was needed if Anglo-Jewry was to establish a coherent plan for its development. In particular, the need to finance and build places of worship in the new areas of Jewish population called for a pooling of resources and an amalgamation of the strengths of the extant communities if they were to become the midwives of an enlarged and geographically more diffuse London Jewry. So, when Chief Rabbi Adler entertained his guests to breakfast in the sukkah in 1866, more than sixty years of debate and negotiation had prepared the ground for consideration of an effective joining of forces between the various congregations.

There can be little doubt that, useful though the encouragement of the Chief Rabbi was, much of the momentum and most of the detailed execution fell to the lay leaders of the synagogues involved. Two men in particular, Lionel Louis Cohen and Dr. Asher Asher, played a crucial role. Cohen, a leading figure in the Great Synagogue, had been a prime mover in the formation of the Jewish Board of Guardians in 1859. He threw himself into the new challenge of a union of synagogues with immense energy. His obituary in the Jewish Chronicle records that “So indefatigable was he in doing work for the Congregation that it was a matter of frequent occurrence for him to leave a meeting of the Synagogue at eleven o’clock at night, and to forward by the first post the following morning eight or ten folios of closely written manuscript on the subject of the meeting.” It was he who formulated the first draft of Principles for the new organisation in 1868 and who defended it most effectively before the Charity Commissioners.

Dr. Asher Asher had been Medical Officer of the Board of Guardians and in 1866 became the Secretary of the Great Synagogue. Needless to say, a scheme to unite synagogues had to run the gauntlet of much suspicion and hostility. The smaller communities were anxious that they were handing over their destinies to the already overbearing presence of the larger and more established congregations. Ageing and declining congregations were concerned that they might be paving the way for their own closure. The negotiations required considerable diplomacy, tact and attention to detail, and this Dr. Asher provided. The partnership of Asher and Cohen was formidable and won the day. The Jewish Chronicle summed up their respective contributions in the judgement that “if Lionel Cohen was the spirit that animated the movement, Asher Asher was the right hand that brought the movement into working order.” And so, on 14 July 1870, the United Synagogue came to be. It had been the outcome of a long process of gestation. It owed much to relatively minor causes, above all the desire to find some more constructive way of resolving the frequent arguments between the larger congregations as to who was responsible for what. It owed much, too, to the general temper of Anglo-Jewry in the Victorian age, established, patrician, and dominated by a relatively small group of individuals, the “Cousinhood,” who shared with Victorian society as a whole a sense of noblesse oblige. To this extent it was as much an English as a Jewish phenomenon.

But it also carried within it the spirit of Chief Rabbi Adler, an unusually broad-minded and far-sighted religious leader. A rabbinic scholar of international repute, he was the author of Netinah le-Ger, a pathbreaking commentary to Targum Onkelos, an Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible. Unusually for his time, he had also acquired an extensive secular education at the university cities of Gottingen, Würzburg and Erlangen. Before coming to England he had already served as Chief Rabbi of Oldenburg and then Hanover. But it was as a man of action, a communal planner and strategist, that he left his great mark on Anglo-Jewry.

Almost as soon as he had been inducted into office, he conducted a survey of all the congregations under his aegis, one of the first research exercises of its kind. This quickly revealed a community in a state of religious disarray. Orthodox practice was uneven, often lax. Only half of the congregations possessed a mikvah. There were few Jewish schools. Synagogue attendance was generally low. Adler saw the need for strong and centralised direction to raise the standards of Jewish observance throughout the community.

In 1847 he published his Laws and Regulations for all the Ashkenazi Synagogues in the British Empire. In 1855 he oversaw the creation of Jews’ College as a school and eventual training centre for a home-grown ministry. He was an active proponent of a central welfare agency, the Board of Guardians. Through his pastoral tours he established personal contact with the congregations under his authority, and through his personal prestige he emerged as the undisputed religious representative of the Jewish community.

What Adler achieved, through methods that were sometimes authoritarian, was in effect the creation of a kehillah, a communal structure that spanned and transcended the individual congregations, and gave Anglo-Jewry as a whole a sense of direction and collective identity. Within a month of taking office he had already notified Jewish communities throughout the British Empire of what was to be his agenda:

Educational establishments, “from those which are calculated for infants…up to such as are to extend their salutary influence to the future, by training proper and efficient teachers.”

Houses of worship: “It is necessary that quiet and decorum, dignity and solemnity, should prevail there during divine worship, so that it may awaken the fear of the Lord, foster feelings of devotion, and promote brotherly union.”

“Institutions which are of a purely religious character, and those which are established for the furtherance of charity and benevolence, for the cherishing of industrious habits and useful activity among our co-religionists.”

This was nothing less than the translation into a community-wide strategy of the three great pillars on which the sages had said that “the world stands:” on Torah, Jewish education, avodah, Jewish worship, and gemilut hasadim, acts of compassion and welfare. More than anyone else, Adler had laid the foundations that were to shape Anglo-Jewry for a hundred and fifty years, giving it an institutional framework and a set of priorities that defined its collective existence.

Organisationally, the creation of the United Synagogue was the work of an exceptional group of lay leaders. But spiritually it was the natural extension of Chief Rabbi Adler’s vision of kehillah as something larger than a loose collection of congregations. It meant many congregations working together for the health of the community as a whole. Jewish religious life has often been fractured and debilitated by an excess of parochialism, each group working for its own narrow ends without regard to the welfare of the whole. This can sometimes produce pockets of lively and intense local spirituality. But it leaves the weaker and more isolated congregations without help, and the totality of the community without direction, unable to plan and provide for its future needs. It was this that Adler fought, and fought successfully. The formation of the United Synagogue was one of his notable achievements.

At the last meeting of the delegates before the United Synagogue Bill received its Royal Assent, the gathering expressed their hopes for the new body they were bringing into being:

In conclusion, the Delegates congratulate the congregations on the accomplishment of the Act of Union, which they regard as a most important event in the Communal life, calculated to increase the harmony and stability of the whole community, and to assist in the fulfilment and development of its sacred duties. They are convinced that union is strength, and that though each congregation can no more shine as a minor constellation, combined, they can and will diffuse light and warmth, in a degree formerly impossible, among the community.

Their sense of moment was well-justified. Experience had taught them that it is easier for congregations to divide and multiply than to unite. For a rare moment in Jewish communal affairs, better sense prevailed. A sense of kehillah had overcome local territorial imperatives. Five synagogues – eventually to become sixty-six – had joined hands and pledged themselves to work together. A hundred and twenty-five years later, the achievement is still worthy of celebration.