Jews

Jews have a long, but by no means continuous, history in Ireland. Scattered references to their presence have been discovered between the 11th and 13th centuries. In 1290 Jews were expelled from the dominions of the English crown, though there are stray references thereafter to individuals, including some refugees from Spain and Portugal in the 16th century. Jews began to resettle in England from 1656 and had reappeared in Ireland by the 1660s. Dublin had a rabbi by 1700, and a Jewish cemetery opened in 1718. By the mid‐18th century Cork also had an organized community. Jews were by now sufficiently numerous, or at least noticeable, for their status to become a political issue. Proposals to permit their naturalization were debated in the Irish parliament on four occasions between 1743 and 1747, but rejected each time. A British act of 1753, which would have permitted naturalization in both Great Britain and Ireland, was repealed after eight months due to hostile agitation. The Irish Naturalization Act of 1784 explicitly excluded Jews, a provision repealed only in 1816.

The Jewish presence in Ireland remained a volatile one, highly responsive to economic and other circumstances. From the 1690s Dublin had attracted a group of wealthy merchants originally based in London; most of these, however, returned to England during the depressed years of the late 1720s. At the end of the 18th century the Dublin community largely collapsed, due partly to conversion and intermarriage with Christians, but also to emigration at a time of political unrest and economic uncertainty. In 1818 there were said to be only two Jewish families in the city. From the 1820s a new Jewish population appeared, of German and Polish origin but coming to Ireland via England. A high proportion were goldsmiths, silversmiths, and watchmakers, or dealers in tobacco, cigars, and snuff. In 1874 Lewis Harris (1812–76), merchant and jeweller, stood successfully for election to Dublin corporation. Overall numbers remained small: the census recorded 393 Jews in 1861 and only 285 in 1871. From the 1880s, however, there arrived a much larger group of immigrants from eastern Europe, mainly refugees from persecution in Tsarist Russia. By 1901 Jewish numbers had risen to 3,769. This influx of mainly poor eastern Europeans encouraged a degree of anti‐Semitism, notably in Limerick, where inflammatory preaching by a Redemptorist priest, John Creagh, inspired a two‐year boycott of the city's Jewish shopkeepers and traders.