An untold story of visual legacy: Jews in colonial Australia, 1842-1872

The history of Jews in Australia started unceremoniously. Jewish convicts, about a dozen of them, were among the first transportees arriving from Portsmouth, England. The First Fleet landed on 26 January 1788 in what is today the Sydney Harbour but what was then Port Jackson in the new British penal colony. By 1820, free Jewish settlers began to arrive, often to join a convicted or pardoned relative. Jewish lives merged civilly with the governing society - a phenomenon essentially unknown in other countries. The 1828 census recorded some 100 Jews in the colony, with more than half living in Sydney. Yet, within a decade, the community`s numbers and standing improved. In 1842, a group Jewish emancipists and settlers laid the foundation stone to the first synagogue designed and built in the colony. A few months later, 180 years ago, two pairs of magnificent Dutch silver rimmonim were shipped to Sydney, possibly representing the first documented Jewish ecclesiastical import into the Australian colonies. Furthermore, within three decades, in 1872, the Jewish community in Sydney, then counting over 4,000, entered its `golden age`, purchased a larger land lot and was ready to build a new and larger gold-sandstone synagogue which will bring the city on a par with London, Paris and Prague of the 1870s. In this paper I present results of my research into the visual legacy and architecture in three decades of formative changes of the Sydney Jewish community, 1842-1872, which - in essence – laid the ground for the vibrant Jewish identity of today, when some 120,000 Jews live in Australia.