Introduction
In the 52nd issue of the Sheffield Jewish Journal in November 1956, David Brown noted: ‘I do not think that the Journal readers are as yet surfeited with the history of the local community.’ This observation is still valid and the research for this project has unveiled stories of a complex and bustling community, fully engaged with all aspects of local life.
You are invited to experience these stories, voices and sounds while walking in the footsteps of a diverse community that had a decisive impact on our city. This walk will take you through the streets of Sheffield’s city centre, from Figtree Lane to West Bar Green, from Campo Lane and North Church Street to Silver Street and Lee Croft.
As you walk, stories and sounds will be triggered through GPS technology to paint a picture of a time long past but one of crucial importance to the development of the Jewish community in Sheffield and of the city itself as a multicultural space.
You can start your walk at any point on the map, but in order to enjoy a chronological history of the Jewish community in the city we invite you to start in Figtree Lane and listen to stories of the earliest recorded moments of the community, when in the 1780s two brothers, Philip and Isaac Bright, decided to make Sheffield their home.
While the earliest evidence shows Solomon Myer, who kept his own Shochet and encouraged the growing number of Jews settled in the city to attend service in his Union Street house, as the Father of the Sheffield community, it was in Figtree Lane and in the streets around the imposing space of Paradise Square that the early history of the Sheffield Jewish community took shape.
However, this was also a period when antisemitic ideologies were clearly present in Sheffield. Isaac Ironside was a leading figure in Sheffield Chartism, who in 1846 was elected to Sheffield Town Council representing Ecclesall. He famously spoke alongside Ebenezer Elliott, the Rotherham poet and Corn Laws activist, in a mass meeting at Paradise Square that introduced the Charter to the people of Sheffield. On 12 January 1848 he published an opinion piece in the Sheffield Independent against the city’s Jewish inhabitants, arguing that they do not work, and that if Lord John Russell’s Bill to remove all civil disabilities from the Jews of Britain passes, the Government will be in the hands of the Jews, especially Mr Rothschild.
A local reader responded to Ironside’s comments in the same newspaper, noting that ‘a person who possesses considerable influence over a certain portion of the inhabitants of this town, should show himself so lamentably misinformed as to the real nature of a political measure of our own times and days, is a most deplorable fact, not excusable, in my estimation, in a councillor.’
(Sources: Sheffield Independent, 22 January 1848, accessed through the British Newspaper Archive; David Brown in Sheffield Jewish Journal, Issue 52, November 1956, and Eric Lipson in Sheffield Jewish Journal, Issue 50, Tercentenary Issue, 1956)
