At the National Level: Scottish Jewry

Using extensive genealogical and demographic data from the Two Hundred Years of Scotland’s Jews: Profiling the Immigrant Experience project new light has emerged on Jewish migration both to and through Scotland and the processes which helped form the local communities. The project, conducted on the initiative of the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy, uses on-line demographic and genealogical sources and its results challenge many long-held assumptions about the history of this immigrant community. Censuses, from 1841, and birth and death registrations, from 1855, confirm both the transitory nature of the early community, and its rapid growth, even as major transmigration to the United States continued.

Marriage records show the geographical origins of the community, mainly covering a large arc of territory between Riga and Warsaw. Detailed analysis of population movements show the patterns of community formation in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and in the seven smaller regional communities. In producing accurate data on community size a sharp decline in community numbers from the last third of the twentieth century can be identified. Other sources have illustrated the processes of acculturation and successful integration. Recently digitised newspapers and court records have revealed Jewish community life in Edinburgh in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, thirty years before the establishment of the modern community. The study data has been linked to form a national ‘Family Tree’ for Scotland’s Jews which indicates both a high degree of intra-marriage and that more than half of the country’s Jews are related to one another.