Notes from Limmud 2015

The Last Jew in the Tower

Ian Bloom

[Standard disclaimer: All views not in square brackets are those of the speaker, not myself. Accuracy of transcription is not guaranteed.]

Between 1066 and the expulsion in 1290, the Jews were for the most part tolerated, but from the mid-twelfth century, the blood libel accusations became common and became an excuse [lacuna, sc.: for persecution], in Gloucester in 1168, then Bury St Edmunds in 1181, Bristol in 1183, [lacuna] in 1192, Lincoln and Bedford in 1202, then Winchester, Norwich again in 1230, London 1244, Lincoln (the infamous case of Hugh) in 1255, London in the 1260s, and Northampton in 1279.

Also the attitude of the Crown towards the Jews changed from borrower (1070–1180) to revenue raiser through taxes and fines (1180–1275) to that of liquidator for the last fifteen years.

For the last hundred years, life grew progressively more dangerous for the Jews of mediaeval England. The Tower of England held hundreds if not thousands of Jewish prisoners. Some had sought protection from the London mob; others were imprisoned, some for not paying taxes quickly enough, or not being able to pay [at all].

King John levied a huge tax on England's Jews, all of whom were arrested; Henry III charged them eight thousand marks [a mark was two thirds of a pound], on pain of being hanged; Edward I passed a prohibition against moneylending in the 1270s. This led many Jews to coin-clipping. Perpetrators were caught, imprisoned, tortured and hanged.

The moneys extracted from London's Jews paid for 80% of the cost of all building work in the Tower until the expulsion.

Whilst the massacre at Clifford's Tower [in York in 1190] was the most visible event of the killing of Jews in English history, ten times as many Jews died in the Tower and its grounds over the course of two centuries.

The Tower of London was originally not designed as a prison. It's also been a royal palace, the Royal Mint, a zoo, a fort, and a tourist attraction. It was used as a jail in mediaeval times, during the reign of the Tudors, and during the First World War. By 1919, though, all the prisoners had been released or sent elsewhere.

So, who was the last Jew to be held in the Tower?

When the First World War ended, a Jewish man called Israel (Izzy) and his wife Bertha were living at 113 Cannon Street Road in Whitechapel. They were both born in London in 1890/91. They married in 1913. Each had four borothers and two sisters. Ishkey, Sheikey, Harold, Sorkey and Macksel on the one side, and Chuckney, Abkey, Denky, Gussie on the other.

Izzie was a jobbing tailor; he worked for [lacuna]. Bertha made cigarettes by hand in the local tobacco factory, for the currency of soldiers and prisoners—always necessary during peacetime, but essential in the war.

They were poor and lived as lodgers in other people's houses. Izzy resisted the call to join up voluntarily; but the terrible losses in the first year of the war forced the government to introduce conscription in March 1916. A second act two years later extended this to married men.

Izzy was called up in to the local garrison of artillery, then transferred to the King's Liverpool Regiment (despite having no connection with Liverpool). The KLR has a glorious history: formed in 1685, it served in the Indian mutiny in 1857. It lost over fifteen thousand men in the war. Its soldiers were awarded fifteen VCs from the Boer War to the end of the First World War. It merged with the Manchesters in 1958.

In late 1917 Izzy was transferred to the Labour Corps, which had only been formed in 1915 and would disbanded 6 years later. It had four hundred thousand men, more than 10% of the entire army. Under half were kept in the UK; [lacuna]

Its soldiers were rated under A1, which is why they were not sent to the front line. They did all the stuff that had to be done to keep the war machine going.

According to his discharge certificate, on 24 September 1921, Izzy had served overseas on active service. This gives rise to the first puzzle. If he enlisted on 24 January 1917 and served 2 years 149 days, that should give June 1919 as his discharge date! Why was he then only formally discharged over two years later, late in 1921?

A second question concerns the reason stated for his discharge, which was para. 3.9.2. of the xxv KR (King's Regulations). These were a collection of rules from 1791 as a guide to discipline and behaviour. The list of grounds for discipline is surprisingly long (it does not have a subparagraph 17, but two 16 and 25). Subparagraph 25 provided that services no longer being required was a reason for discharge.

But in 1919 a new para, 28, demobilisation, was introduced. Why then was Izzy's discharge reason the 1912 reason and not demobilisation, as hundreds of thousands of men were demobilised after the war?

Since the regulations encourage prompt release, "on the day on which soldier completes engagement or as soon after as possible," the answer might lie in what is alleged to have happened in the intervening period of time, which the speaker was unable to have pinpointed the date of, despite enquiries at multiple institutions.

Between 60-70% of the records relating to privates in the First World War were kept in London and were destroyed in the Blitz. Even if they survived, they wouldn't necessarily include details of the lives of non-officers.

So what did happen? The oral history, sometimes vague and inconsistent, provided by members of Izzy's family, is as follows:

His decision in the summer of 1921 to throw his brother-in-law Charlie down the stairs and out of their East End house was a mistake. Charlie had been responding to his wife Gertie's prompting to do something after a row with Bertha. Gertie had said speak to Izzy. She meant Charlie to tell Izzy not to talk to Bertha like that.

Charlie felt that despite his reservations, he should do what Gertie said. But Izzy was not to be criticised in his own home by his brother-in-law, and told Charlie to mind his own business. Voices were raised. Eventually Izzy decided enough was enough. He grabbed Charlie by the lapels, threw him down the stairs and manhandled him out of the door.

Gertie was humiliated when Charlie told her what had happened. Gertie had never much liked Izzy. She was fond of her sister-in-law, and her children Gerald and Lily, but not Izzy. She pondered what to do. Her resentment grew rather than diminished over the next few days, then decided—without consulting with anyone else—and told a policeman that when Izzy's last leave ended, just before the war ended, he did not return to his unit in France.

Soon after the Armistice, hundreds of thousands of troops came home. Their arrival coincided with the Spanish flu pandemic. The unremarkable absence of a private from the Labour Corps was not a problem for anyone given the pandemic.

The police said they couldn't do anything, but called the MPs [military police], based nearby in the Tower of London, who asked her to repeat her story. She said Izzy had been conscripted in 1917 and sent to France. In the late autumn of 1918, Izzy had been sent home on leave and never returned to the front. What she didn't report was that Izzy's father Harris, who had died by September 1920, who knew that war was a dangerous business, and anyway Izzy had a little boy he'd hardly seen, told him to stay put, and Izzy took his advice and stayed put.

Faced with her story, the MPs felt they had no choice but to investigate. (The MPs go back to the twelfth century when the Earl Marshal ensured the barons fulfilled their obligations to the Crown.)

His unit confirmed that Izzy had not returned from leave, and although the war was over, this was either desertion, a capital offence, or he had gone AWOL. The MPs came for him. The neighbours saw him being taken away. He had to be taken to a military jail; the nearest one, half a mile away, was where the MPs were based, at the Tower of London.

Izzy would have been kept in a cell in the prisoners' soldiers' block in the Tower, and was kept for a few days. During the war, eleven Germans were executed there convicted of spying. The Household Fo[word incomplete] guards at dawn [executed] 306 for desertion of cowardice. (The Germans, for comparison, executed 48, the Canadians 23, ???s 13, New Zealand 5 and the US and Australia no one.)

Although Izzy had no one to pull strings for him, it seems the Army had no appetite left for court-martialling a lowly private after the war had ended; so they decided to end the matters quietly with a discharge under the old regulations that were in force when he should have been discharged. [lacuna] British War medal and Victory medal awarded to all surviving soldiers.

Izzy was probably the ver[y last Jew held in the Tower], since after his release, the Tower stopped [acting as a prison. Decades later,] Rudolf Hess was held there for four days, and the Kray twins briefly in 1952, for avoiding National Service.

Izzy died of a matter heart attack outside Warr[lacuna, perhaps -en Street Station] on his way home from work in 1948; he was fifty-nine. Bertha died in 1979; she was eighty-seven. Only one photo exists of them together. They had five children in twelve years. Gerald, born in 1916, is now ninety-nine; all of the other children have now died.

All of the eleven grandchildren, including the speaker, saw Bertha regularly when they were growing up, but she never spoke about her husband to any of them, far less talk about his incarceration in such exalted company as Sir Thomas More, Anne Boleyn and Mary Queen of Scots, who were all executed there, and Elizabeth I and Sir Robert Walpole, who were merely imprisoned there.

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