Bevis Marks Services from 1841

These are pages from a Siddur for a general thanksgiving service held on Monday, the 15th of Adar, 5601 (March 8, 1841) in the Synagouge of Spanish and Portuguese Jews, Bevis Marks (in London), to commerate the success which attended Sir Moses Montefiore in his mission to the East.

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The synagogue of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Community, is the oldest Jewish House of Worship still in use in the country, and second built in this country after the expulsion of the Jewish Community by Edward I in 1290. There are records of Jews living in London since shortly after the Norman Conquest in 1066. (Old Jewry Street apparently dates from this period.) In 1290, Edward I expelled the Jews from all of England, but a few Jews trickled back into the country during the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. A full-scale return of the Jews took place only in 1656, after Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel, of the Amsterdam Portuguese Jewish community, petitioned Oliver Cromwell to allow Spanish and Portuguese Jews to enter from Holland and to practice their Judaism openly. The famous Sephardic Bevis Marks Synagogue was constructed in 1701 - its congregation had been praying in another building since the mid-seventeenth century.