→ Hangings at Tyburn, p. 51
SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE SYNAGOGUE, Bevis Marks and Heneage Lane
What is now Britain’s oldest synagogue was built in 1701 on the site of the Abbot of Bury St Edmunds’s town house with its entrance on the side of the building as the City authorities were worried about the reaction of non-Jews walking past a synagogue door. Bevis Marks was opened for Iberian Jews whom Oliver Cromwell had officially allowed to return to England in 1656. (The community’s first synagogue, on nearby Creechurch Lane, no longer exists.)
Bevis Marks’s register of births includes that of Benjamin D’Israeli (later Disraeli) in 1804. Despite his Jewish conception, the future Tory prime minister was baptised at St Andrew’s, Holborn, after his father rowed with the synagogue authorities. The baptism allowed Disraeli to become a Member of Parliament and later prime minister. Services are still held in Portuguese, as well as Hebrew.
THE TEMPLE
The Inner and Middle Temple, two of London’s four Inns of Court where lawyers live and work, takes its name from the Knights Templar, a body of French warrior monks, founded in 1129, who protected pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land. Gradually the Knights Templar became ever more powerful until Pope Clement V disbanded them in 1312 and handed their assets to their rivals, the Knights Hospitaller (the Order of St John of Jerusalem). They now became wealthy landowners, buying this estate in London which they leased to lawyers. The Knights Hospitaller themselves had their possessions seized by the English Crown in 1539.
Unofficially the Templars still exist, controlling affairs through their semi-secret offspring organisation, the Freemasons. In recent years various individuals and esoteric groups claiming to represent the Templars have emerged, mostly because of the publicity given to them by the success of the Dan Brown novel The Da Vinci Code. It remains to be seen whether they will try to claim ownership of Temple Church, especially now that a body calling itself the Association of the Sovereign Order of the Temple of Christ has launched a court case in Spain, demanding that the Pope ‘recognise’ the seizure of their assets worth some €100 bn.
→ The Knights Templars in Warwickshire, p. 188
TEMPLE BAR
The historical boundary between the ancient cities of London and Westminster, marked by a statue where the Strand meets Fleet Street, was the site of the Pope-burning ceremonies of the late seventeenth century. Every year on 17 November, the anniversary of the accession of Elizabeth I, an effigy of the Pope, seated in his chair of state, would be carried through the local streets in mockery of the papal coronation ceremony, by people dressed as Catholic clergymen. When the train reached Temple Bar bonfires were lit and the ‘Pope’ was cremated.
TEMPLE CHURCH, Inner Temple Lane
Since the early twenty-first-century publication of Dan Brown’s religious thriller The Da Vinci Code, much public interest has centred on Temple Church, London’s oldest Gothic building, which features in the novel. The church was built from 1160–85 in the style of the Church of the Sepulchre in Jerusalem. A door in the north-west corner of the choir leads to the penitential cell where knights who had broken Temple rules were imprisoned and in some cases starved to death. One such wrongdoer was the deserter Adam de Valaincourt, who was sentenced to eat meat with the dogs for a whole year, to fast four days each week, and to appear naked every Monday at the high altar, where the priest would publicly reprimand him.
→ Rosslyn Chapel, p. 274
TEMPLE OF MITHRAS, 11 Queen Victoria Street
A Roman temple 60 foot long and 26 foot wide built by the Walbrook stream and dedicated to the light god, Mithras, was discovered in 1954 when the ground was dug up for the construction of an office block. The worship of Mithras, which began in Persia in the first century BC and was open only to men, was carried out in caves, Mithraea, one of which was excavated in London near the site now occupied by Mansion House. The artefacts are housed in the Museum of London.
The East End
The East End has long been the most impoverished part of London, where residents have often turned to religion to ease their predicament. In medieval times the land bordering the East End and the City of London was marked with a line of monasteries, priories and nunneries – Holy Trinity Priory Aldgate, St Katharine’s, Minories and Eastminster – all of which vanished with the dissolution of the religious houses in the mid-sixteenth century.
The Bubonic Plague that hit this part of London especially hard in 1665 was seen by locals as a religious punishment foretold by a comet which had passed over the capital the previous December to signify that God was unhappy with London’s behaviour. During the Plague clerics explained that it was the punishment outlined in the Old Testament Book of Chronicles in which the Lord smote ‘the people, children, wives and all goods [causing] great sickness by disease’. Plague victims often didn’t wait to die but threw themselves into pits like the one in St Botolph’s churchyard, Aldgate, as noted by Daniel Defoe in his Journal of the Plague Year.
At the height of the epidemic a Stepney man, Solomon Eagle, one of a group of Quakers known for holding fasting matches with Anglican priests and stripping in churchyards to prove their true piety, strode through the area naked, a pan of burning charcoal on his head, proclaiming awful Bible-inspired warnings. Another man paced the streets of Whitechapel crying out like Jonah: ‘Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’, likening London to the immoral city threatened with destruction in the Book of Jonah. A man wearing nothing other than a pair of underpants wrapped around his head was seen throughout the East End wailing: ‘O! the Great and the Dreadful God!’ Outside a house in Mile End a crowd gathered as a woman pointed to the sky, claiming she could see a white angel brandishing a fiery sword, warning those who could not see the vision that God’s anger had been aroused and that ‘dreadful judgments were approaching’.
For centuries the East End was the place where refugees fleeing religious persecution arrived in London, disembarking from boats that moored near the Tower. In the seventeenth century Huguenots (French Protestants) escaping a Catholic backlash settled in the East End’s Spitalfields and soon seamlessly assimilated into the local community. In the early nineteenth century Irish (mostly Catholics) turned up in large numbers and, after facing initial hostility, took root in parts of the East End near the Thames, where they eventually assumed control of who worked at the docks. Later that century came a large number of Jews fleeing the pogroms of eastern Europe. They met hostility not just from gentiles but from the Jewish establishment which had partly anglicised itself to win acceptance and was now embarrassed by the influx of chassidic Jews dressed in ritual garb and speaking Yiddish.
Gradually during the twentieth century the Jews moved away from the East End, where now barely a synagogue remains. Since the 1970s the area has become increasingly colonised by immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, mostly Muslims from Bangladesh, who have changed the religious face of the area.
Jacob the Ripper?
When a number of East End prostitutes were murdered in 1888 by an unknown assailant, who later claimed to be ‘Jack the Ripper’, blame fell on the Jews who had begun to move into the area in large numbers that decade. No gentile could have perpetrated so awful a crime, many locals mused, ignoring the fact that only two Jews had been hanged for murder since the return of the Jews to England in the 1650s. Even the police blamed the Jews. Sir Robert Anderson, the assistant commissioner of police at the time of the murders, once claimed that they had been ‘certain that the murderer was a low-class foreign Jew. It is a remarkable fact that people of that class in the East End will not give up one of their number to Gentile Justice.’ Or as the Jewish commentator Chaim Bermant put it in the 1960s: ‘If Jack the Ripper was a Jew, then one can be fairly certain that