Two Jewish Burial Grounds
By JAMES POPE-HENNESSY .
ALTHOUGH it is common knowledge that Stepney and Whitechapel are the chief Jewish centres in London, it is not perhaps always realised for just how long'this has been so. Until a recent visit to the desolate Sephardic burial-ground at the rear of a building far up the Mile End Road, I, for example, had imagined that this area only acquired its present character during the great Jewish influx at the beginning of the last century. Yet this old burial-ground, dating from the period of the Commonwealth, is in fact the earliest Jewish cemetery in this country. It seems that when, after three hundred and sixty years, Cromwell rescinded the decree by which Edward I had for- bidden Jews to settle or trade in England, there was already in East London a small but active group of crypto-Jews, Marranos exiled from Spain and Portugal, who lived here under the guise of Roman Catholics, even attending Mass at the Spanish Embassy chapel. At the head of this group was the powerful and enterprising merchant and shipowner Antonio Fernandez Carnaval, who was invaluable to the Commonwealth Government as grain contractor for the armies and as a man able through his ships and his foreign contacts to obtain first- hand foreign intelligence for the Protector and his advisers. In J656, backed up by other influential Jewish merchants, Carnaval presented a petition to Cromwell begging leave to convert a house in Cree Church Lane (near Saint Katherine Cree) into a synagogue. They also asked if they might be allowed to pur- chase a piece of land for use as a burial ground. The syna- gogue was already being erected in the same year, and in 1657 the first burial, that of a widow de Brito, took place in the Mile End Cemetery, when the bell of Saint Katharine Cree was tolled, and a pall for the coffin lent from the same church. The new burial-ground was on the site of an orchard of one and a half acres, and containing forty fruit trees, which lay at the back of an inn, ' The Soldier's Tenement,' on the Mile End Road. This graveyard, long fallen out of use, survives intact today. To find the Mile End Cemetery is not entirely easy. Much of the surrounding area has been bombed, so that the number- ing of the houses—the cemetery lies at the back of No. 253— is no longer clear or consecutive, and the burial ground is so shut in by buildings that you can only guess at its whereabouts from glimpses of spindly plane-tree tops above slate roofs. To gain access to it you have to pass through the ground floor of a home for old people in the Mile End Road : the cemetery now seems indeed to serve as a kind of melancholy, flowerless garden or recreation place for the inhabitants of this home, and for a scattering of small children from the local cottages. A fair-sized piece of ground enclosed in high walls of smoke- darkened brick, the Sephardic burial-grourid is now in a sad, neglected and somewhat grimy condition. Many of the flat tombstones which lie in measured ranks amongst the grass and withered leaves are evidently seventeenth-century, and seem carved with skulls and symbols of mortality, as well as with the broken tree of life. A good number appear to be of marble, though now so dirty, and in the case of those under the tall plane trees, so smothered in green lichen as to be hard to decipher. Here and there a Portuguese name stands out, and at the far end of the cemetery a large stone carved with a winged cherub's head in relief, and dated 1684, has been let into the wall, and is now, rather late in the day, protected by a sheet of glass. Along the base of the walls, where earth has silted against them, broken pieces of engraved tombstones of the Cromwellian period jut up here and there. There is altogether something sad and yet somehow impressive about this forsaken Between August and October, 1953, Mr. Pope-Hennessy contributed to the Spectator a series of articles on post-war London. "Two Jewish Burial Grounds" is the second article in a further short series. Them articles are to be collected and, published in book form by Messrs. Constable. burial ground, which must have represented such progress to its triumphant founders, and now lies half forgotten in the light of a misty London winter afternoon, its tombstones broken and dirty, a damp little bonfire of dead leaves smouldering away in a corner, a child floundering vaguely about in the long un- tended grass.
A considerable contrast to the Mile End Cemetery is a second Jewish burial-ground which I visited oh the same, afternoon in the same part of London—that off Whitechapel High Street, and which, dating probably from the eighteenth century, is now also disused. This contains the tombs of Nathan Meyer Rothschild, the first of his name to settle in this country, and of his wife. To reach this burial ground you turn off the Whitechapel Road just beyond Whitechapel Station (coming from the west), and enter a small dingy street of brick buildings, some of them tall Victorian tenements, the rest little houses of an earlier period standing shoulder to shoulder in a row. At the corner of this street, Brady Street, a large brewery generates a sense of activity and life, its white dray-horses with lemon yellow favours in their manes clattering out from the main gate and, as it were, lighting up the drab grey street as they go by. You walk along Brady. Street until you come to number thirty-seven, open a low iron wicket gate into a yard, and ring a bell beneath a Gothic arch of blackened brick. The brown-painted gate beneath the arch is opened by a helpful old lady who lives in a house rather grandly labelled " The Lodge," and who ushers you through a narrow brick passage into a well-kept graveyard thronged with upright gravestones, with obelisks and sarcophagi bearing such names as Jessel, Solomons and Marks. At the back of the burial ground, and quite overshadowing it, runs a noisy railway viaduct, but even this does not entirely impair the general atmosphere of peace which hangs about this unexpected, almost hidden graveyard. Here the grass is lush and green, and there are narrow beds filled with frost-bitten plants which will no doubt bloom in the spring. There are no plane trees here, only some small and much-lopped limes and a few blackened thorn trees.
The tombs of Nathan Rothschild and his wife stand side by side near the centre of the cemetery, inside an iron paling. Each sarcophagus bears a lengthy inscription in Hebrew and in English, that on Baron Nathan's explaining that having " at an early age quitted the paternal roof he settled in England and engaged in vast and important transactions all of which proved under a beneficent Providence eminently successful." This remarkable man was, in fact, only twenty when he left his father's house in Frankfort-on-Main to come to England. One of the five sons of the first banker. Rothschild, Meyer Amschel, Nathan Rothschild achieved in England a position of respon- sibility and a reputation for financial wisdom quite as great as that of his father or of his brothers in Naples, Vienna, Paris and Frankfurt. Although the story that he concealed for some hours the news of the victory of Waterloo so as to speculate upon it has been proved false, it was through his intelligent arrangement in placing an agent at Ostend on the day of the battle that the first news of ,the victory was given to the English Government. He died in 1836 at the comparatively early age of fifty-eight, at the height of a career which had dazzled his English contemporaries, and it was of his vast undertakings— such as that by which he raised fifteen millions for the Govern- ment to compensate West Indian planters for the abolition of slavery—that Byron was thinking when he wrote in Don Juan : every loan Is not a merely speculative hit But seats a nation or upsets a throne.
Dying suddenly during a visit to Frankfort for the wedding of one of his sons, Rothschild was by his own wish brought back to his adopted country and buried in the secluded old graveyard in the heart of Whitechapel, and not far from the first of all Jewish cemeteries in England, that in the Mile End Road.
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