Background Jewish people had been
expelled from England in 1290 by edict of
Edward I, with their assets seized and their religious sites (including cemeteries) destroyed.
Spain and
Portugal issued similar edicts in the 1490s which demanded all Jews choose between converting to
Catholicism or
exile, which led to the emergence of "
Marranos"—Jews who pretended to be
Christians in public while still practicing their real faith in private. The Marranos were a frequent target of suspicion, investigation, and violent discrimination by both the state (via the
Inquisition) and the general public, and over the following decades many of
Iberia's Sephardic Jewish merchants used their resources to flee to more tolerant cities in
Protestant northern Europe—especially
Amsterdam. By the early 17th century a small number of merchants had also moved to London, where—even though the edict of 1290 remained in place—attitudes towards
the immigrant Marranos had slightly softened in the wake of the
English Reformation (as well as towards other forms of Christian
non-conformity), though they still had to pretend to be Spanish Catholics in public, and
antisemitism was still widespread. The question of whether and how much the state should tolerate Judaism was an issue within the broader debates over religious freedoms that contributed to the outbreak of the
Wars of the Three Kingdoms in 1639, and it remained the subject of a
pamphlet war after the establishment of
the Protectorate by
Oliver Cromwell in 1653. While some advocates for readmitting the Jews to Britain did so as part of a wider argument for religious tolerance and freedom of conscience, most did so because they believed it was a necessary precondition of
their eventual conversion to Christianity, and therefore also
the end times. Cromwell was broadly sympathetic to arguments for readmittance, though there remains debate over whether his motivations were primarily theological (as a
millenarian), economic (believing that Jewish merchants would help revive the English economy post-war), or political (as part of a strategy to steal Dutch trade, and because Jewish merchants had become valuable sources of
foreign intelligence). This led to Cromwell convening the
Whitehall Conference in December 1655, which established that with
the fall of the monarchy the royal edict of 1290 was no longer in effect, and that therefore there was no longer a ban on Jews living in England. However, the Conference failed to agree on new laws protecting the religious freedom of Jewish people. From 1650 onwards these families met weekly to worship together in secret at the Spanish Embassy under the leadership of
Antonio Fernandez Carvajal, a wealthy Portuguese-born merchant who had relocated to London in 1635. On 13 March 1656 one of the congregation's members—
Antonio Rodrigues Robles, a Portuguese-born merchant who traded goods between London and the
Canary Islands—had his two ships seized in the
Port of London after
the outbreak of war between Britain and Spain, and he was charged with being an enemy national. During the court proceedings he successfully defended himself by revealing his secret Portuguese-Jewish identity—a revelation which also forced the city's Sephardic community into the public eye. Alarmed for their safety, the heads of six of the city's Jewish merchant families (Manuel Martinez Dormido, Abraham Coen Gonsales,
Simon de Caceres, Domingo Vaez de Brito, Isak Lopes Chilon, and Carvajal) went with Menasseh to deliver a petition to Cromwell demanding protections for their commercial interests from seizure, but also the right to practice Judaism in the privacy of their own homes, as well as a number of other religious freedoms—including the right to have their own burial ground. This marked the beginning of the permanent
resettlement of Jewish people in England.
First post-resettlement cemetery In 1657, Antonio Fernandez Carvajal and Simon de Cacares paid for a 14-year lease on two-thirds of an orchard in
Mile End—which at that time was a small
hamlet more than a mile east of the City of London—for use as a cemetery by the synagogue's congregation. The first burial—of the wife of Isaac de Brito—took place shortly after the cemetery was consecrated in 1657. Antonio Fernandez Carvajal was himself the second person to be buried there, dying on 10 November 1659 during surgery to remove
gallstones.
Samuel Pepys, who had been operated on by the same surgeon, attended a
Sabbath service at the Creechurch Street synagogue on 3 December during the congregation's
period of mourning. There were relatively few burials in the cemetery in its first few decades—only five by 1660, and only 76 by 1683 (a rate of fewer than three per year). This was due to the fact that many of the pre-resettlement Marrano families already had members buried in Catholic cemeteries elsewhere whom they preferred to be buried alongside. Only one-third of the Jews known to have been living in England at the time of the resettlement (prior to 1659) went on to be buried in the cemetery, and burials only began to accelerate towards the end of the 17th century as post-Marrano generations grew older.
Closure shows the Velho Cemetery (left, "Jews Old Burying Ground") on Mile End Road. The
Novo Cemetery ("Jews New Burying Ground") is on the right. By the early 18th century there were more than 600 Jewish people living in London—both Sephardic and Ashkenazi—and it became clear that the small cemetery would soon be full. In 1726 a three-acre orchard 400 metres to the east was leased to become the
Novo ("New" in Portuguese) Cemetery, while the original burial ground became known as the Velho ("Old") Cemetery. The Sephardic community also managed to finally purchase the
freehold for the Velho Cemetery outright in 1737 for £200 (roughly £38,000 in 2024, adjusted for inflation), securing its safety from sale or redevelopment. The Hebra Geumilut Hasadim Hospital continued to operate after the cemetery's closure, and in 1793 it was absorbed into another Sephardic hospital—Beth Holim, originally founded on
Leman Street in 1747 as a place for "Sick Poor, Lying-in Women, and Asylum for the Aged." The new Beth Holim Hospital operated exclusively as a retirement home at the Mile End site for decades, and the cemetery at its rear was maintained as a garden for residents, with trees, paths, and seats. == Modern site ==