The Jewish Year Book 1896 — British Jewry Year Book - Digital Download or CD-ROM

Product Description

Published from the offices of The Jewish Chronicle, the first edition of The Jewish Year Book (1896/5656) is the definitive snapshot of British Jewry at the height of the great immigration wave from Eastern Europe. Often described as "the who's who of Victorian Anglo-Jewry," this beautifully detailed directory records the rabbis, ministers, wardens, presidents, and committee members of virtually every Jewish congregation, charity, and institution in Britain — and across the British Empire.

Whether your ancestors were city dignitaries or East End tradesmen, this yearbook places your family in their community context at a precise moment in time.

Why Genealogists Need This Book

Filling the Census Gap: The 1896 Year Book falls exactly midway between the 1891 and 1901 censuses — a notoriously difficult decade for Jewish research. Thousands of immigrant families arrived, moved within London's East End, anglicised their surnames, or simply eluded the enumerator between these two returns. This directory preserves community-record spellings of names and confirms exactly where people worshipped, worked, and volunteered in 1896..

Beware copy-paste trees. Jewish genealogy has centuries of "yichus inflation" — embellished pedigrees claiming descent from King David or famous rabbis, with even published works later exposed as fabricated. This Year Book is the antidote: a contemporaneous record compiled by the community itself, cross-checkable against census and civil registration records. Build your tree on documents, not folklore.

What's Inside — Section by Section

• The Jewish Calendar (5656–5657) — festivals, fasts, Sabbath commencement times, and weekly Torah readings
• Jewish Population Statistics — numbers for Britain, the Empire, and worldwide Jewry
• The Chief Rabbinate & Beth Din — Chief Rabbi Dr Hermann Adler, dayanim, and ecclesiastical courts
• London Synagogue Directory — the United Synagogue, Federation of Synagogues, Spanish & Portuguese (Sephardi) congregations, and the Reform Synagogue, listing ministers, chazanim (readers), presidents, and wardens
• Provincial Congregations — Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, Glasgow, Cardiff and beyond
• Colonial & Empire Congregations — South Africa, Australia, Canada, India, the Far East
• Board of Deputies of British Jews — full officer and member lists
• Anglo-Jewish Association & Conjoint Committee — foreign affairs representatives
• Charities & Institutions — Board of Guardians, Jews' Free School, Jews' College, Norwood Orphanage, Jewish hospitals, almshouses, the Temporary Shelter, and the Protection of Girls & Women societies
• Friendly & Burial Societies — essential for tracing working-class ancestors
• Jewish Education — schools, colleges, and scholarships
• Honours & Public Life — Jewish MPs, peers, lord mayors, mayors, knights, magistrates, and military officers
• The Jewish Press — newspapers and periodicals of the community
• Literary & Social Societies — the Maccabaeans, Jewish Lads' Brigade, and clubs
• Obituaries of the Year — deaths of prominent community members
• Shechita & Kosher Administration

The alphabetical arrangement of congregations, officers, and institutions makes navigating the scanned pages quick and intuitive.

Famous Names You'll Find

• The Rt Hon. Lord Rothschild — first Jewish peer in the House of Lords
• Samuel Montagu MP — founder of the Federation of Synagogues (later Lord Swaythling)
• Sir Julian Goldsmid — veteran Liberal MP (died January 1896)
• Chief Rabbi Dr Hermann Adler
• Rev Simeon Singer — translator of the Authorised Daily Prayer Book
• Rev Dr Moses Gaster — Haham of the Sephardi community
• Israel Zangwill — celebrated author of Children of the Ghetto
• Colonel Albert Goldsmid — founder of the Jewish Lads' Brigade
• Benjamin L. Cohen MP and Arthur Cohen KC MP

Format & Technical Details

Choose your format: Instant digital download (PDF) or CD posted to your door 

scanned images of the original 1896 volume 

Easy navigation — alphabetical directory structure means you can browse by congregation, town, or name without complex searching 

OCR on the fly — modern PDF readers perform text recognition automatically as you open the file; simply select, copy, and search any passage 

Translate instantly — desktop browsers with built-in Google Lens can translate the Hebrew and Victorian English text into your language 

Text-to-speech — have entries read aloud on desktop PCs

CD contains the identical PDF — no installation needed, works in any disc drive