Yes, I hear you cry- no! He can’t possibly be writing another article on something Semitic! Moshe Dayan save us! But yes. I am, dear friends. Before you traipse away muttering under your breaths as to how things used to be, let me decant some old style Wessex knowledge into your proverbial goblets.
Ever been to Winchester? No? Well, I have. Well, I live here, so of course I have. On my early days as a Winchestrian/Wykhamist (will someone please tell me which one is correct, please?) I stumbled across the *now refurbished* city library, and the warren of streets extending behind. Therein I found Green’s, whose coffees often lie in temptation’s way whenever I happen to walk down Jewry Street.
Strange name, I wondered to myself, in a county who the rest of the South percieve as a fox-hunting land of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. But as well as the first Catholic Church to be built in England after the reformation, Winchester had quite a few good yiddischer mensch in its time.
My local Shul is Bournemouth. As a friend of mine once said (and I quote, so don’t pull a Pope Benedict hater on me, guys!) ‘So you go to synagogue in Bournemouth! Ha ha, it’s a test of faith!’. Not that I agree with him. Well, admittedly Bournemouth is 95% geriatric, but overall it’s a good little place. Now I’m rambling. You see why it’s called The Musings Various? You get your pennies worth here, children.
So, Jewry Street. The Jewry of Winchester extended all the way from Westgate to Friarsgate and around the City Walls. That’s roughly an eighth or thereabouts or the Old City, if I’m not much mistaken. Sadly there’s not much left, which is surprising for a town which has a named street after the Jewry- thereby stating that it must have been pretty substantial. A brief look in the City Archives was interesting, and revealed that there was a Synagogue there, but it was destroyed in the 13th century. Guess I’m just eight hundred years too late. Sad. Either way, we Winchestrian Jews have decreased from a whole district to eight families. And me. Geven Amoz Iz A Shtetl. And no, that’s Yiddish, not some real-ale fuelled unintelligible Hampshire dialect, for those of you not *shrieks in League of Gentlemen voice* local!
Mehmet. 12.
