Scottish Visitor impressions to Paradise Square and the Talmud Torah (22 Paradise Square) in 1908

I fear I have misjudged Sheffield. Or, at all events, I have judged it prematurely and superficially. Before I emigrated from the North, people told me in tones of compassion that Sheffield was a great city and a wealthy, but it was very dirty. Indeed, they called it the ‘Suburb of Hell’. Nevertheless I came to Sheffield; and in a few days I thought I had summed it up. I became reconciled to the ugliness of the everlasting brick; I got accustomed to the blatant frivolity of Fargate of an evening; and I became indifferent to the annoyance of being splashed in mud from head to foot by motor cars, which, by the way, seem to be popular and very numerous here.

In a city of Sheffield’s size and industrial importance one expects to find a strong representation of Jews and I was led to believe that there was. Someone told me that there was a colony of Jews in Scotland Street; but I have been to Scotland Street, and traversed its whole length; and the usual signs of a Jewish colony were not visible. There were, however, indications of the presence of some Jews – evidently few – in the thoroughfare. At the door of a little boot repairer’s shop was a woman with a number of children playing round her. She was little and pallid of face, and her features – the curved nose, the soft dark eyes, the high, broad cheek-bones, the pendulous lower lip – proclaimed her Semitic origin. She looked careworn, and in her eyes was an expression which I could not fathom. Possibly it was wistfulness, or perhaps it was great sorrow, or it may have been – fear? But whatever it was, it seemed to me expressive of her state. She typified the condition of her race, the race which the hand of oppression had fallen heavily and left its mark. But the children who played around her, and those who played cricket in the roadway had no history – they had no careworn, anxious expression – not yet. They were much better clad and more healthy in appearance than the ordinary children of that quarter; their pink and white complexions and their merry laughter were pleasant to the eye and the ear.

Another woman I saw sitting at a window, and there again the same pallid complexion, and the same melancholy expression were evident. She was rocking a baby gently on her knees, and she looked listlessly out over the narrow street, with eyes that seemed to take no account of anything. Other women – not Jewish – were gossiping together in the roadway. But she was alone. The picture was a painful one; yet it is so common.

When I saw that there was no recognised colony of Jews, I went to seek information. I was told that there were about 1000 Israelites scattered throughout the city. They were mostly tradesmen and labourers; 300 were tailors, half that number were cabinet makers, and about 50 were shoe-makers, wood-carvers, hawkers, and labourers. They had two synagogues, one in which alien Jews worshipped until they learned the language, when they were transferred to the other synagogue, where the service is rendered in Hebrew but the sermon in English.

The community was admirably organised; many societies existed for the purpose of keeping the members of the community from pauperism. It is a boast with them that in the last 18 years only one Jewish person got anything from the public rates, and in that case a woman was allowed to go into the workhouse in order to bring her defaulting husband within the reach of the law. Then there was a working-men’s club – a splendid institution, I was told – and a school for religious instruction.

(Source: Sheffield Independent, Thursday 7 May 1908 and Wednesday 13 May 1908)