350 Years On Jews Celebrate

I did something unusual after last Sunday evening's service. I walked to my local synagogue. I had never been to the large Golders Green synagogue before but I had been kindly invited to a lecture marking the 350th anniversary of the readmission of the Jews to England and thought it would be good to go.
Here in the London Borough of Barnet we have one of the most ethnically diverse in the country and the one with most Jews. Some 40,000 live here (15% of the population). Sadly, despite efforts, our impact as a church on the community has been negligible.
About 350 (!), mostly Jewish, people gathered in the hall at the back of the synagogue for the lecture. It was quite formal, with Julia Chain (Commission for Racial Equality) in the chair, a word of welcome from local Rabbi Harvey Belovski, a vote of thanks from veteran local councillor Monroe Palmer and various local dignitaries present. We closed with the national anthem and the Hatikva.
The lecturer was a former Golders Green boy, the scientist and Master of Birkbeck, David Latchman [see pic]. He had been invited to speak as one with a life-long interest in Anglo-Judaism and a fine collection of Judaica, which he used to illustrate his interesting, well-judged and fluent lecture.

Amsterdam based Rabbi Menassah Ben Israel [see pic] was identified as the driving force behind what brought to an end 366 years of official exclusion in the time of Oliver Cromwell. Ben Israel used economic arguments but was largely swayed by messianic ones. An encounter with a Jew who claimed to have found the ten lost tribes in South America convinced him that the dispersion was now at its height and it was time to head for the corner of the earth (Angle Terre!). Messianic considerations of a more Christian sort moved others such as Cromwell's secretary John Sadler. See http://www.olivercromwell.org/jews.pdf Others, such as William Prynne, warned that re-admitting the Jews was a great mistake. The readmission came about not by Act of Parliament but when a Sephardic Jew was discovered to be living in London and was not expelled. Charles II reversed most Cromwellian policies at the Restoration but not this one and so the Jewish population slowly grew.
Having set the scene, Dr Latchman proceeded to give us some highlights from subsequent years

including various disputes among both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, the fascinating story of Lord George Gordon (1751-1793) [see pic], architect of the anti-papal Gordon Riots and eventual convert to Judaism and the life of Moses Montefiore (1784-1885) [see pic], whom Dr Latchman considers the greatest British Jew of all time. It was not until 1858 that Jews were allowed to sit in Parliament.
It was all fascinating stuff especially for someone as ignorant as I was of these things. What I would like to know more about was something that was hardly going to be addressed, the conversions of British Jews to the evangelical faith. I know that the late Leith Samuel had a Jewish background as do the well-known Bendor-Samuel tribe. I think David Barron was one famous 19th Century convert. Perhaps the singer Helen Shapiro is the best known British Messianic Jew of recent times. Humanly speaking such conversions would not have come about without this providence.