Anglo-Jewish Architects, and Architecture in the 18Th and 19Th Centuries1
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Anglo-Jewish Architects, and Architecture in the 18th and 19th Centuries1 By Edward Jamilly Introduction ENGLISH Architecture, like so many other facets of life and development in these Islands, is remarkable for the easy absorption of quite virile foreign elements. These alien influences have, in the course of time, become so assimilated into the native stream that their origin is forgotten and the results come to be accepted as peculiarly English. The successful export today of English tailoring products and quality textiles, the skills that are taught by the Royal School of Needlework and reach their highest expression in such works as Queen Mary's carpet may perhaps be traced to the weaving traditions brought by Huguenot refugees, like the Courtaulds, from France and the Low Countries. The national monuments ofWestminster Abbey give us the names of those who revived the art of sculpture in 18th century England, men such as Rysbrack, Schee makers, Roubiliac, Delvaux, leMarchand, names from Flanders and France; in the applied arts numerous English country houses pay tribute to the skill of Italian and French craftsmen and decorators?Tijou's lovely ironwork at Chatsworth and Hampton Court, the plasterwork and paintings of Cipriani, Zucchi, Angelica Kauffman and others. So it was in architecture?the essence of English Romanesque came with William the Norman, and many a Gothic church speaks the linguafranca; East Anglia owed much of its regional character to building styles imported with a king fromHolland and to the wool trade with Baltic and Hanseatic ports ; Renaissance in England was inspired by the earlier movement in Italy and later in its development took account of French models as well, whilst countless public buildings would lack their classical facades but for the rediscovery of Greek and Roman antiquities. It is against such a back cloth that the Jewish contribution may be sought. Little wonder perhaps that with so strong a power of assimilation in England the mark of a community numerically small and deprived for so many centuries of the opportunity to practise the plastic arts should be hard to find. Indeed, it would be miraculous if, dispersed among so many countries, the Jews had letained any particular influence for architecture, the most regional of arts and sciences, dependent for its forms as much upon thematerial and climate of a locality as the culture of the community from which it springs. Whilst in the field of universal learning there are notable physicians, sages, writers, astronomers, and the long practice of usury during theMiddle Ages produced goldsmiths and bankers, agents and men of commerce, there is not a single architect of note up to the beginning of the 19th century. If it possessed no architects of its own the Jewish community had still need of buildings, both private and communal; whereas secular architecture could follow the normal practice of its place and time, for religious buildings this community was excep? tional in having to rely on men of other faiths to interpret its ancient ceremonies and provide them with fitting surroundings. Mediaeval Europe had many synagogues well-adapted internally and functionally planned to the form of service and customs of 1 Paper read before the Jewish Historical Society of England on 8th March, 1954. 127 Jewish Historical Society of England is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to Transactions Jewish Historical Society of England ® www.jstor.org 128 ANGLO-JEWISH ARCHITECTS, AND ARCHITECTURE IN THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES the time; only too often the exteriors lacked proper dignity and full flowering of architec? tural treatment, due probably to the desire, in an age of massacre and pogrom, for concealment of their purpose and unobtrusive siting. Jewish life and buildings in England up to the time of the banishment of 1290 has been the subject of previous studies and I am concerned in this paper to deal with the period immediately following resettle? ment under the Commonwealth, when conditions were at last favourable to the develop? ment of fitting buildings for the community. 18th Century Let us first examine some of the initial difficulties which must affect a synagogue building project at the end of the 17th century. Restoration had followed Common? wealth, a Dutch king was now on the throne and the security of the Jewish settlerswas unimpaired in spite of these constitutional changes. Indeed, William had brought in his train a fresh influx of settlers. It was to be another 150 years, however, before they were to be given entry to the higher posts in the country, and among their civil disabilities was that of land tenure. In old congregational records, the sites of synagogues are often found to be held by non-Jewish Trustees or leased on short terms; even as late as the Regency Jewish wills show a reluctance to disclose ownership of freeholds, which were often legally held through nominees. Under such conditions richer communities naturally proceeded with caution about the spending of any considerable sums ofmoney on property. The funds at the disposal of poor groups of alien Jewswere often somodest that they sufficed only to hire a room and later to use as a place of worship a converted building. Some congregations started as prayer-groups held in private houses; Nathan Henry's house in Southwark was used from 1799 by the founders of the Borough Synagogue, the Westminster (Western) congregation began in 1768 at "Wolf Liepmann's", whilst "Zender Falmouth's" minyan of pedlars was a characteristic provincial example of this practice in the 18th century. In more recent years there are several instances of the use of converted chapels, notably those freed by the preceding wave of immigrants, the Huguenots.1 Hence the scarcity of proper synagogues and the late date at which they were erected in relation to the number and sequence of communities established. Among other obstructions to free and full architectural expression was the sensitivity of the young Jewish community to the feelings and desires of its hosts ; the quarter in which the community settled and built its synagogue more often than not was dictated by a desire not to offend, or to appear obtrusive; Jewish cemeteries were sited where they were permitted to bury their dead; levies and concealed bribes were often considered prudent as the price of tolerance, and the power of the synagogue over the individual was extended even to his business transactions. Modest were the architectural exteriors formed out of this attitude ofmind. An interesting comparison is provided by the rich interior of Spiller's Great Synagogue in the City of London and its plain, almost Puritan 1 In 1867 the Sandys Row, Spitalfields congregation, a friendly society of Dutch Ashkenazi workingmen founded inWhite's Row in 1853, leased theFrench Huguenot Chapel inArtillery Lane, Bishopsgate (built c. 1700), thoroughly repaired and converted it in 1870. The Spital? fieldsGreat Synagogue (Machzike Hadath) today occupies yet another?a fine galleried building in Fournier St., Stepney, erected 1743, bought and converted in 1898?whilst the Western Synagogue, bombed out of its premises in Alfred Place, during World War II, found a temporaryhome in the formeremigre Chapel Royal (St. Louis of France, built 1799) in Carton St., W.l, which has been intelligentiy restored, ANGLO-JEWISH ARCHITECTS, AND ARCHITECTURE IN THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES 129 elevation. In some respects the cautious and subdued design of early synagogues find a parallel in the sober meeting-houses of the Protestant dissenters who, by the edict of a Catholic monarch in 1662 were driven into secrecy, and treated with intolerance for nearly a century. Both grew frommodest beginnings and were built simply around a congregational worship. Unlike the hostile conforming churchman, neither Jew nor Dissenter could look to any but his own congregants to subscribe the cost of buildings. It was not until themiddle of the 19th century, and the advent of full Jewish emancipation, that synagogue architecture tried to compete in external magnificence with churches. Lastly there remained the problem of achieving a Jewish expression in religious buildings designed and built through the agency of non-Jews. It was inevitable that many 18th century synagogues should follow stylistically the English Renaissance church and ecclesiastical architecture of the kind that has come to be called Georgian. Yet at the same time, their designers have achieved a difference of atmosphere, not altogether the result of ritual planning requirements, strangely evocative of age and permanence, a sonorous tradition ofworship and of those "ancient Hebrew fathers", to borrow thewords of Longfellow, who came from alien lands. These early synagogues are to my mind the best that have been built in England and their care and preservation should be the pride of the communities that own them; unhappily, their number is decreasing with the movement of congregations away from older residential areas and for other less creditable reasons. Some buildings thatwould be prized today have already disappeared and it should be the aim to record, ifnot arrest, the continual losses which are occurring. The Cathedral Synagogues The history and location of synagogues and communal buildings is the clearest record1 of the pattern of Jewish resettlement and community life in England during the 18th and 19th centuries, and falls naturally into three phases, the first of which is set in London. The initial settlement of Sephardim from Amsterdam, Rouen, Bordeaux, Bayonne and Hamburg, following Menassah-ben-Israel's petition to Cromwell led to the establishment of the first synagogue in a house in Creechurch Lane, City of London in 1656, later extended by leasing a second house and converting the two into one building; plans and a description were the subject of a previous paper before this Society2.