It's a Family Affair at Manchester Jewish Museum

11th July 2011

Categories: Modern History News

Manchester Jewish Museum’s new exhibition tells the story of nine Jewish families who came to Manchester over a period of over 150 years from a variety of countries and for many different reasons.

Since the early 19th century Manchester’s Jewish community has consisted of people who originated from all over the world and whose reasons for coming to Manchester were many and varied. There were Germans who arrived during the late 18th century in search of economic opportunities not available to them in Germany. A little later Manchester proved attractive to German and Dutch merchants seeking to export Manchester cotton goods to their home countries. From the mid-1840s these were followed by immigrants from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires seeking an escape from enforced poverty, discrimination and violence. Around the same time Sephardi merchants from the coastlands of the Mediterranean arrived to seek a share in Manchester’s profitable overseas trade.

By the late 19th century Jewish Manchester consisted of families from at least twenty European and Middle-Eastern nations. This number was further increased by the arrival of 6,000 refugees from Nazism in the 1930s, Holocaust survivors after 1945 and Egyptians, Hungarians and Iranians in the 1940s and 50s.

Manchester Jewry is now Manchester’s most cosmopolitan ethnic minority. In a cosmopolitan city, such as Manchester, social harmony can only exist when mutual respect develops between community groups. To respect each other we must understand each other. Part of this understanding is awareness that each minority, whatever its shared characteristics, will also be divided within itself. It is these divisions as much as their common way of life which explain how members of that group live and their communities develop. A minority group drawn together through a shared religion, whether that religion is Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism or Judaism, may also be multi-national, socially diverse and religiously divided. It is these divisions, as much as their shared aims, which help to explain the institutions that they establish, where they live, their internal tensions and the ways in which they relate to other members of society. This exhibition draws on the experiences of Manchester Jewish families to illustrate the kinds of diversity which characterise all ethnic minorities.

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