In the 1750s, Jews had no political rights in England, and in particular were not allowed to purchase property. As country members of the
Great Synagogue, they traded as
pedlars and
hawkers. Small groups coalesced around safe Jew-friendly lodging houses where they organised temporary
minyanim to observe the
Shabbat. Liverpool was a focus for the first Jewish settlement in the
North West of England, with communities in Cumberland Street who moved in 1775 to a room in Turton Court. Manchester was expanding rapidly, and in 1758 one family in trade became prosperous enough to acquire a private carriage. Manchester became an increasing important market, and
Liverpool-based Jewish hawkers worked in Manchester in the week, returning to Liverpool to celebrate Sabbath. The Manchester press was anti-Semitic. Jews traditionally traded in
slop, jewellery and
calligraphy and became
pawnbrokers,
quack doctors, seal cutters,
engravers,
watchmakers and miniature painters. The trades were profitable, but a miscreant could use the same skills for forgery,
lockpicking and
fencing stolen goods. In Manchester, there was a fear of travelling plagiarists who could reveal the profitable secrets of the cotton industry to foreign rivals and seduce cotton workers to take their skills abroad. ''Prescott's Manchester Journal'' of 1774 warned: :''several JEWS and OTHER FOREIGNERS have for some months past frequented the town under various pretences and some of them have procured Spinning machines, looms, dressing machines, cutting knives and other tools used in the manufactures (sic) of fustians,
cotton velvets,
velveteens and other Manchester goods. ... And frequent attempts have been made to entice, persuade and seduce artificers to go foreign parts out of His Majesty's dominions... (This) will be the destruction of the trade of this country, unless timely prevented.'' No Jew was ever convicted. The presence of increasingly wealthy slop dealers and hawkers was noted, and in 1788 jeweller Simon Solomon and flower dealer Hamilton Levi took shops in Long Millgate and
Shudehill.
Settlement About fourteen Jewish families settled in Manchester in 1786; their first synagogue was a rented room at Ainsworth Court, Long Millgate. Lemon and Jacob Nathan, Aaron Jacob, Isaac Franks, Abraham Isaac Cohen and his son Philip and Henry Isaacs and his sons formed the nucleus of group who leased a burial ground in 1794 and by 1796 had begun worshipping in an upper chamber room on Garden Street at Withy Grove. Aaron Jacob was the reader and
shochet and Jacob Nathan was the overseer. Jews settled in streets around the synagogue. The wars against the French caused difficulties for them, particularly the
Aliens Act 1793 which restricted their movement. Wolf Polack, a pawnbroker of Shudehill, was deported for undisclosed breaches of the Act in 1800. ''Wheeler's Manchester Chronicle'' supported the Act and encouraged readers to inform on them. The community was generally stable. Samuel Solomon, who bought a plot at the burial ground, marketed the miracle cure
Balm of Gilead and Solomon's Drops for curing imperfections of the skin caused by an impure state of the blood. He purchased a mansion in
Kensington, Liverpool, which he called Gilead House, and an estate on
Mossley Hill for a family mausoleum.
Nathan Meyer Rothschild of
Frankfurt was sent to Manchester by
his father in August 1800. He had spent three months in London with
Levi Barent Cohen to learn English commercial practice. He arrived with £20,000 and took offices in Brown Street to circumvent English agents on the continent and obtain English textiles at source at the lowest prices. He identified three profitable areas: raw materials, dyeing, and manufacturing. He traded dye and cotton for the finished product which was shipped via
Hull,
Leith and London to
Hamburg. Blockading by the French when the war recommenced made this task increasingly difficult. Rothschild had a house in Downing Street,
Ardwick, a neat suburb favoured by the merchants of the town. At least fifteen German merchants moved to Manchester between 1800 and 1806, eight of whom were Jewish, but Rothschild was the only one to take a seat at the synagogue and conform to all its rites and ceremonies. Rothschild's money was probably responsible for securing Rabbi Joseph Crool and the walling of the burial ground. In 1805, he obtained a London office and spent less time in Manchester, as the family business shifted from trading towards finance. He married Levi Barent Cohen's daughter and through her sister established links with
Moses Montefiore and the
Sephardi banking and finance community in
Amsterdam. He moved in 1809 to a spacious town house on
Mosley Street, with a large
warehouse on Back Mosley Street. The property was sold in 1810, and he left Manchester in 1811.
After Peterloo After the
Napoleonic Wars, there was rapid physical and economic expansion in Manchester. With the radical demands for political acceptance that saw the thousands on the streets at
Peterloo (16 August 1819) the Jewish question was increasingly less relevant. The Jewish community supported the status quo: Jacob Nathan signed the letter pledging to support the constables in the preservation of public peace. Passionate Anglicans such as
Hugh Stowell, rector of St Stephen's,
Salford, promoted the Anglican Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews rather than expulsion. The
Manchester Guardian, founded in 1821, was firm in its support for the rights of religious minorities. The fifteen most prominent Jewish families at the time were assimilated: it was a community of shop-owners with a small elite of merchants and manufacturers. In its number were fourteen clothes dealers, nine jewellers, five
quill and pencil retailers, five merchants, three hawkers, two
hatters, two
furriers, two dentists, two silk manufacturers, two fent dealers, an optician, a
pawnbroker, a furniture dealer and a rope maker. Trade was centred on the old town, but one family lived in Clarendon Street,
Chorlton-on-Medlock, in the southern suburbs, and one on Salford Crescent. Abraham Franklin had a shop in St Ann's Square, Mendelson on
King Street, Behrens and Gumpel lived on Mosley Street, Aaronson's surgery was in Princess Street, and Freeman, the miniaturist, had his studio in Brazenose Street, all the best addresses. These families formed the
oligarchy that ran the synagogue. Manchester had the fourth-largest Jewish community outside London. Abraham Franklin (born 1784) took over the leadership of the Halliwell Street Synagogue. He was the son of Benjamin Wolf Franklin, whose family had come to London via
Breslau from
Prague. He was adopted by his aunt, the wife of a silversmith, and started his working life as a hawker of watch glasses. He was apprenticed to a watchmaker, acquired a shop in 1807, and ascended the retail ladder. He was unwaveringly orthodox and socially and culturally English. He saw no need for religious reform and opposed the disreputable new wave of immigrant Jewish hawkers who he considered, with their broken English and lack of English commercial moral values, brought disrepute on the synagogue and settled Jewish traders. He spoke out for law and order, and sent a son to
Manchester Grammar School. To further the prestige and respectability of the community he sought larger accommodation, sermons in English and the formation of a choir and educational and philanthropic agencies. The 1832
cholera epidemic caused the wealthy to move from the city to outlying
Broughton and
Cheetham Hill, taking advantage of the new bridge over the
River Irk, and along Plymouth Grove to the south. Franklin called his new home Gesunde House. Alexander Jacob with Franklin's support formed the Manchester Hebrew Philanthropic Society in 1826, as the congregation accepted responsibility for the old and poor who, because of their dietary restrictions, could not use the
workhouse provisions of the
Poor law. Contribution was voluntary (a compulsory contribution would have had to be authorised by an Act of Parliament). Before the
1832 Reform Act Manchester had no Member of Parliament. The synagogue had to deal with the rootless poor that lived on the margins of society, un-anglicised pauper immigrants of the post-war years; The immigrants challenged the hard-won respectability that the community valued. Another social change was in tailoring. Second-hand clothes were not good enough for the middle classes and
bespoke tailoring was expensive. Around 1830, retail middlemen started to deal with customers and put out the work on a low-profit-margin system to
outworkers in
sweatshops. One of the most prominent of the retail middlemen was
Benjamin Hyam, who created modern mass market tailoring, where profit came from sales volume, not high prices. He claimed to make a complete suit within six hours for a fixed price in workshops attached to his shop. He advertised suits in the
Manchester Guardian with a money-back guarantee. His workforce was probably over 100. Hyam was ultra-orthodox and his shop closed at sunset on Friday. His influence was great, so that by 1836 seven of the synagogue seat holders had followed his example and traded as tailors. The conditions they imposed on their workers provoked a series of unsuccessful strikes in 1833 and 1834. Ready-made clothing was the inevitable consequence of such a production system, and Hyam was advertising this in 1836. ==Suburban plutocracy==