Yesterday, municipal officials in the United Kingdom’s capital decided to block real-estate developers’ plan to build two massive skyscrapers next to the Bevis Marks synagogue. Writing just before the vote, Tom Holland argues that it would be wrong “to put a building that for over 300 years has served London as a great symbol of light permanently into shadow.” He explains the building’s history and significance:
The Jews who in 1699 signed a contract with a local Quaker to construct the synagogue, and in 1701 opened it to worshippers, were anxious to tread carefully. Bevis Marks was not London’s first synagogue, but it was the first to have been built in the city for over four centuries. The Jews had been expelled from England back in the reign of Edward I; only in 1655 had Oliver Cromwell, tipping the nod to a rabbi from Amsterdam, given them discrete permission to return.
Over the half century that followed, the number of Jews in London steadily grew. Their presence there portended a new future for the city: one that was resolutely outward-looking, multicultural, welcoming to the world. It was a turning point, in short, not just in the history of the Jews in England, but of England itself.
Bevis Marks synagogue, then, is a place freighted with beauty for everyone today who lives in London. . . . [It] is Britain’s single most historically significant monument to the role played by Jews in national life. For that reason alone it deserves the protection from developers that is rightly granted to St Paul’s [cathedral].
No other synagogue in Europe has held continuous services for longer than Bevis Marks; . . . it serves as a symbol for Jews across the continent that light can indeed endure amid darkness. How, then, [could London] possibly allow it now to be cast into shade?
Read more on City A.M.: https://www.cityam.com/bevis-marks-synagogue-city-of-london-corporation/