The history of the Jews in Scotland goes back to at least the 17th century. It is not known when Jews first arrived in Scotland, with the earliest concrete historical references to a Jewish presence in Scotland being from the late 17th century. Most Scottish Jews today are of Ashkenazi background who mainly settled in Edinburgh, then in Glasgow in the mid-19th century. In 2013 the Edinburgh Jewish Studies Network curated an online exhibition based on archival holdings and maps in the National Library of Scotland exploring the influence of the community on the city.
According to the 2011 census, 5,887 Jews lived in Scotland; a decline of 8.7% from the 2001 census., The total population of Scotland at the time was 5,313,600, making Scottish Jews 0.1% of the population.
Middle Ages to union with England There is scant evidence of a Jewish presence in medieval Scotland. In 1180, the Bishop of Glasgow forbade churchmen to "ledge their benefices for money borrowed from Jews". This was around the time of anti-Jewish riots in England and so it is possible that Jews may have arrived in Scotland as refugees, or it may refer to Jews domiciled in England from whom Scots were borrowing money.
In the Middle Ages, much of Scotland's trade was with Continental Europe, with wool of the Borders abbeys being the country's main export to the Low Countries. Scottish merchants from Aberdeen and Dundee had close trading links to Baltic Sea ports in Poland and Lithuania. It is possible, therefore, that Jews may have come to Scotland to do business with their Scottish counterparts, but no direct evidence of that exists.
The late-18th-century author Henry Mackenzie speculated that the high incidence of biblical place names around the village of Morningside near Edinburgh might indicate that Jews had settled in the area during the Middle Ages. This belief has, however, been shown to be incorrect, with the names originating instead from the presence of a local farm named "Egypt" mentioned in historical documents from the 16th century and believed to indicate a Romani presence.C J Smith, Historic South Edinburgh, Edinburgh & London 1978, p. 205: "At the distance of less than a mile from Edinburgh there are places with Jewish names—Canaan, the river or brook called Jordan, Egypt—a place called Transylvania, a little to the east of Egypt. There are two traditions of the way in which they got their names: one, that there was a considerable eruption of gypsies into the county of Edinburgh who got a grant of these lands, then chiefly a moor; the other, which I have heard from rather better authority, that some rich Jews happened to migrate into Scotland and got from one of the Kings (James I, I think it was said) a grant of these lands in consideration of a sum of money which they advanced him."
17th–19th centuries
Paulus Scialitti Rabin (fl. 1655) was a Hebrew and Oriental Languages teacher who was granted permission to reside in Edinburgh and practice his trade on account of converting into Christianity. Rabin immigrated from England when Scotland was forcibly annexed to Oliver Cromwell's "Commonwealth", which granted freedom to practice Judaism. Multiple accounts of conversion of early Jewish immigrants in Scotland, including Rabin, Alexander Amadeus and, temporarily, Julius Conradus Otto, demonstrate that adopting Christian faith was a required tool for social mobility. Jewish teachers and lecturers were some of the first to be recognised by Scottish authorities. Rabin resided in Scotland before the first recorded Scottish Jew, David Brown. On account of his conversion, Rabin does not hold the status.
The first recorded Jew in Edinburgh was one David Brown who made a successful application to reside and trade in the city in 1691.
Most Jewish immigration appears to have occurred post-industrialisation, and post-1707. Oliver Cromwell readmitted Jews to the Commonwealth of England in 1656, and would have had influence over whether they could reside north of the border. Scotland was under the jurisdiction of the Jewish Naturalisation Act, enacted in 1753, but repealed the next year. It has been theorised that some Jews who arrived in Scotland promptly assimilated, with some converting to Christianity.
Unlike their English contemporaries, Scottish university students were not required to take a religious oath. Joseph Hart Myers, born in New York, was the first Jewish student to study medicine in Scotland; he graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1779. The first graduate from the University of Glasgow who was openly known to be Jewish was Levi Myers, in 1787. In 1795, Herman Lyon, a dentist and chiropodist, bought a burial plot in Edinburgh. Originally from Mogendorf, Germany he left there around 1764 and spent some time in Holland before arriving in London. He moved to Scotland in 1788. The presence of the plot on Calton Hill is no longer obvious today, but it is marked on the Ordnance Survey map of 1852 as "Jew's Burial vault".
The first Jewish congregation in Edinburgh was founded in 1817, when the Edinburgh community consisted of 20 families. The first congregation in Glasgow was founded in 1821. Much of the first influx of Jews to Scotland were Dutch and German merchants attracted to the commercial economies of Scottish cities.
Isaac Cohen, a hatter resident in Glasgow, was admitted a burgess of the city on 22 September 1812. The first interment in the Glasgow Necropolis was that of Joseph Levi, a quill merchant and cholera victim who was buried there on 12 September 1832. This occurred in the year before the formal opening of the burial ground, a part of it having been sold to the Jewish community beforehand for one hundred guineas.D Daiches, Glasgow, Andre Deutsch, 1977, pp. 139–140 Glasgow-born Asher Asher (1837–1889) was the first Scottish Jew to enter the medical profession. He was the author of The Jewish Rite of Circumcision (1873).
In 1878, Jewish Hannah de Rothschild (1851–1890), the richest woman in Britain at the time, married Scottish aristocrat Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, despite strong antisemitic sentiments in court and the aristocracy. They had four children. Their son, Harry, became Secretary of State for Scotland in 1945 during Winston Churchill's post-war caretaker government.
To avoid persecution and pogroms in the Russian Empire in the 1880s, many Jews settled in the larger cities of Britain, including Scotland, most notably in Glasgow (especially the poorer part of the city, the Gorbals, alongside Irish and Italian immigrants).Pupils at Queen's Park Secondary 1936 (Scottish Jewish Archives Centre), The Glasgow Story Smaller numbers settled in Edinburgh and even smaller groups in Dundee (first synagogue founded in 1878 and cemetery acquired in 1888) and Aberdeen (synagogue founded 1893). Small communities also existed for a time in Ayr, Dunfermline, Falkirk, Greenock, and Inverness. Russian Jews tended to come from the lands in the west of the empire known as the Pale of Settlement, in particular Lithuania and Poland, many using Scotland as a stopping post en route to North America. This explains why Glasgow was their favoured location. However, those who were not able to earn enough to afford the transatlantic voyage ended up settling in the city.R Glasser, Growing Up in the Gorbals, Chatto & Windus, 1986 In 1897, after the influx, the Jewish population of Glasgow was 6,500. The writer Jack Ronder depicted his own family's experience in the book and TV series The Lost Tribe.
This second influx of Jews was notably larger than the first, and came from Eastern Europe as opposed to Western European countries like Germany and the Netherlands. This led to the informal distinction between the Westjuden, who tended to be middle-class and assimilated into Scottish society, and the much bigger Ostjuden community, consisting of poor Yiddish-speakers who fled pogroms in Eastern Europe. The Westjuden had settled in more affluent areas such as Garnethill in Glasgow where Garnethill Synagogue was built between 1879 and 1881 in Victorian Romanesque style. It remains the oldest active synagogue in Scotland and now houses the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre and Scottish Jewish Heritage Centre. The Ostjuden in contrast mostly settled in slums in the Gorbals. This led to the building in 1901 of the South Portland Street Synagogue, also known at various times as the South Side Synagogue, the Great Synagogue and the Great Central Synagogue, regarded for many years as the religious centre of the Jewish community until its closure and demolition in 1974.
20th and 21st centuries
Immigration continued into the 20th century, with over 9,000 Jews in 1901 and around 12,000 in 1911. Jewish life in the Gorbals in Glasgow initially mirrored that of traditional shtetl life; however, concerns around this being a contributing factor to a rise in antisemitism led to the established Jewish community establishing various philanthropic and welfare organisations with the goals of offering assistance to the refugees, including support in assimilating into Scottish society. Similarly the Edinburgh Jewish Literary Society was founded in 1888 for the purpose of teaching British culture to the Jewish immigrant population of Edinburgh and is still active today, albeit with a different focus. The passing of the Aliens Act 1905 and the onset of World War I led to a substantial decrease in the number of Jewish refugees arriving in Scotland.
In Edinburgh, the appointment of Rabbi Dr. Salis Daiches in 1918 was the catalyst for the unification of several disparate communities into a single Edinburgh Hebrew Congregation serving both the established anglicised Jews and the more recent Yiddish-speaking Eastern European immigrants. Daiches also worked to foster good relations between the Jewish community and wider secular society, and under his influence funds were raised for the building of the Edinburgh Synagogue, opened in 1932, the only purpose–built synagogue in the city.
Refugees from Nazi Germany and the Second World War further augmented the Scottish Jewish community, which has been estimated to have reached over 20,000 in the mid-20th century. By way of comparison, the Jewish population in the United Kingdom peaked at 500,000, but declined to just over half that number by 2008.
Whittinghame Farm School operated from 1939 to 1941 as a shelter for 160 children who had arrived in Britain as part of the Kindertransport mission. It was established in Whittinghame House in East Lothian, the family home of the Earl of Balfour and the birthplace of Arthur Balfour, author of the Balfour Declaration. The children were taught agricultural techniques in anticipation of settling in Palestine after the war.
The practising Jewish population continues to fall in Scotland, as many younger Jews either became secular, or intermarried with other faiths. Scottish Jews have also emigrated in large numbers to England, the United States, Israel, Canada, Australia and New Zealand for economic reasons, as other Scots have done. According to the 2001 census, 6,448 Jews lived in Scotland. According to the 2011 census, 5,887 Jews lived in Scotland, a decline of 8.7% from 2001. 41% (2,399) of Scottish Jews live in the local authority area of East Renfrewshire, Greater Glasgow, making up 2.65% of the population there. 25% of Scottish Jews live in the Greater Glasgow suburb of Newton Mearns alone. Many Jewish families slowly moved southwards to more prosperous suburban areas in Greater Glasgow, from more central areas of Glasgow over the generations. Glasgow city itself has 897 Jews (15% of the Jewish population) living there, whilst Edinburgh has 855 (also 15%). The area with the least Jewish people was the Outer Hebrides, which reported just 3 Jews (0.05%) living there.