Bevis Marks Synagogue: Britain's Oldest Working Synagogue

Why is it significant?

Step through the gateway and the roar of the City drops away. In front of you stands a plain red-brick building with tall round-headed windows. No dome, no towers, nothing on the outside to tell the street what it is. That was deliberate.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Step through the gateway and the roar of the City drops away. In front of you stands a plain red-brick building with tall round-headed windows. No dome, no towers, nothing on the outside to tell the street what it is. That was deliberate. When this synagogue opened in 1701, Jews had been back in England for less than fifty years, and they had learned that discretion was a way of surviving.

England had expelled its Jews in 1290, under Edward I. They were allowed to return quietly in the 1650s, in Oliver Cromwell's time, after an Amsterdam rabbi, Menasseh ben Israel, came to London to plead their case. The first to come were Sephardim, families whose ancestors had fled Spain and Portugal, many of them merchants trading through Amsterdam. Bevis Marks was their great house of prayer, and the builder was a Quaker called Joseph Avis. The story goes that when the work was finished he handed back his profit, refusing to make money from building a house of God.

Inside, if you ever get the chance, it feels like stepping into a Dutch painting of the seventeenth century. Brass chandeliers from Amsterdam hang low over dark oak benches, and on special nights they are still lit with candles. Some of those benches are older than the building, carried over from the congregation's first little synagogue nearby. Tradition says that twelve columns stand for the twelve tribes of Israel, and that Queen Anne herself gave an oak beam for the roof.

This is the oldest synagogue in Britain still in use, and services have gone on here through the Blitz and through the IRA bombs of 1992 and 1993, which blew out windows across this part of the City. The family of Benjamin Disraeli belonged to this congregation, until his father fell out with its elders and had his children baptised. In those years a practising Jew could not sit in Parliament... so without that quarrel, Britain might never have had Prime Minister Disraeli.

So the story of newcomers in the East End begins with a building that tried very hard not to be noticed. Leave the courtyard, turn north-east, and cross into Middlesex Street, a road that almost everyone in London still calls by its old, cheeky name.