Keeping the Faithful
Keeping the Faithful: Poverty, Welfare and Cohesion in the Sephardic community of Georgian London
Ali Erginsoy's presentation examines the philosophical and institutional framework, practice, and experience of poor relief in the late eighteenth century Sephardic community of London and asks how policy and actuality around poverty and welfare affected community cohesion.
Concentrated in a small area near Bevis Marks Synagogue in the Aldgate and Whitechapel areas of the capital, the community numbered around two thousand individuals throughout the period. The Synagogue’s leadership operated a voluntary system of poor relief independently of the Old Poor Law that had to navigate the impact of external shocks like war and subsistence crises, the changing composition of the community through immigration, and the lure of the ‘parish’ alternative. The presentation looks at how the Congregation’s welfare policy adapted to these stimuli and charts the evolution from a traditional conception of Jewish charity as righteous behaviour and justice, to a more Anglo-Protestant one based on morality and industriousness. It compares the scale and nature of Sephardic poverty with that of the surrounding non-Jewish population in the metropolis and locates the Sephardic experience in the historiographical debate around the ‘economy of makeshifts’. Questioning the assumptions of some historians about the forces holding the community together and pulling it apart, it proposes a fresh concept of ‘gravity of place’ to understand this dichotomy. Through the lens of poverty and welfare, the presentation tells the story of the community’s transformation from a primarily Portuguese Jewish one to a distinct branch of Anglo-Jewry
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