Ireland's Encounters With Anti-Semitism

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                  

Count George Noble Plunkett (3 December 1851 – 12 March 1948) was an Irish nationalist politician, museum director and biographer, who served as Minister for Fine Arts from 1921 to 1922, Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1919 to 1921 and Ceann Comhairle of Dáil Éireann (head of parliament of Ireland)  in January 1919.

During July 1921 Count George Noble Plunkett, Dáil minister for foreign affairs, wrote a long letter to Éamon de Valera. In it Plunkett warned the Sinn Féin 

leader that republicans should be wary of too close a relationship with ‘the Jews’.  

Anglo-Irish Treaty:  Signed on December 6, 1921, this treaty established the Irish Free State as a dominion within the British Empire. The treaty gave the 26 counties of Ireland a parliament and significant fiscal autonomy.  Plunkett must have been feeling pretty frisky.  

Plunkett was influenced by religious anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories regarding Jewish power and anti-immigrant sentiment. But does his letter tell us anything about republican attitudes more widely? Anti-Semitism in Ireland remains a controversial subject. In one narrative, the 1904 Limerick ‘pogrom’ looms large, while the anti-Semitism of Sinn Féin’s founder Arthur Griffith and the IRA’s dealings with Nazi Germany are linked to modern-day republican hostility to Israel.

Starting with 1904:  The Limerick boycott, also known as the Limerick pogrom, was an economic boycott waged against the small Jewish community in Limerick, Ireland, between 1904 and 1906. It was accompanied by assaults, stone throwing and intimidation, which caused many Jews to leave the city. It was instigated in 1904 by a Redemptorist priest, Father John Creagh. According to a report by the Royal Irish Constabulary, five Jewish families left Limerick "owing directly to the agitation" while another 26 families remained.

A small number of Lithuanian Jewish tradespeople, fleeing persecution in their homeland, began arriving in Limerick in 1878. They formed an accepted part of the city's retail trade, centred on Colooney Street (now Wolfe Tone Street). The community established a synagogue and a cemetery in the 1880s. Easter Sunday of 1884 saw the first of what were to be a series of sporadic violent antisemitic attacks and protests. The wife of Lieb Siev and his child were injured by stones and her house damaged by an angry crowd for which the ringleaders were sentenced to hard labour for a month. In 1892 two families were beaten and a stoning took place on 24 November 1896.

In 1903, a reception was held in Limerick to mark the emigration of Bernard Wienronk to South Africa. The former Mayor of Limerick John Daly was asked to preside. He proposed a toast on the night to "Israel a Nation" Many details about Limerick's Jewish families are recorded in the 1901 census that shows most were pedlars, though a few were described as drapery dealers and grocers.

Many Lithuanian Jews had moved to Ireland, including our relatives, the Goldfus/Goldfoot line. They had first gone to Great Britain, then Ireland, and finally South Africa, where my grandfather had chosen the USA instead.  

My grandfather, Nathan Goldfus/Goldfoot, left Ireland  on June 9, 1893 and headed for Winnipeg, Canada.  Nathan had been living at 13 Arbutus Place, South  Circular Road, Dublin Ireland in 1893 when he married Lena Goldberg.  He must have divorced her, for he met our Bubba, Zlata Jermulowski, born in Lazdijai, Suwalki, Lithuania, but had eventually moved to Poland.  She finally got to  the USA through Idaho.                               

                        Ashkenazi   Yitzhak (Isaac) HaLevi Herzog (1921-1936)

I found this about the address where Nathan lived: ( "I (not my grandfather)  was born in 1949 in a nursing home located just down the street at 102 South Circular Road, Portobello, (now renumbered as no. 18), which house had been the home of the President’s father, the first Chief Rabbi of Ireland, Isaac Herzog, throughout the 1920s. (He later moved the short distance to 33, Bloomfield Avenue for the remaining years of his ministry here before becoming Chief Rabbi of Eretz Israel.) I was accordingly born in the same house where Chaim Herzog spent most of his Dublin childhood and where his gifted brother, the late Ya’acov Herzog, had been born in 1921."  

In 1936, he testified in front of the Peel Commission in London and participated in 1939 in the "London Conference of 1939" between Jews and Arabs from Mandatory Palestine, convened by the British government.

During the Arab Revolt, he called, together with other rabbis, for adherence to the Havlagah policy of the Haganah and for avoidance of acts of revenge.

Nathan left this address, at least 4 months later after February 21, 1893 when he married Lena.                                      

Genealogy of Herzog:  Isaac, 11th President of Israel -2021.  Son of former Israeli president Chaim Herzog, he is a lawyer by profession and had served as Government Secretary from 1999 to 2001.  He is the first son of an Israeli president to become president himself.

The first Chief Rabbi of Ireland, Isaac Herzog,   was born and raised in Ireland and his mother was born in Egypt; their families were of Eastern European Jewish descent (from Poland, Russia, and Lithuania). He has two brothers and a sister. His paternal grandfather, Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, was the first Chief Rabbi of Ireland, a post he held from 1922 to 1935, and Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel from 1936 to 1959. The third foreign minister of Israel, Abba Eban, was his uncle.

Herzog served as rabbi of Belfast from 1916 to 1919 and was appointed rabbi of Dublin in 1919. A fluent Irish speaker, he supported the First Dáil and the Irish republican cause during the Irish War of Independence, and became known as "the Sinn Féin Rabbi".

Isaac (Yitzhak) "Bougie" Herzog was born in Tel Aviv. He is the son of Major-General Chaim Herzog, who served two terms as the Sixth President of Israel from 1983 to 1993, and Aura Ambache, founder of the Council for a Beautiful Israel. 

On 21 November 2024, the UN-backed International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. Herzog condemned the ICC's decision, saying, "It ignores Hamas’s cynical use of its own people as human shields. It ignores the basic fact that Israel was barbarically attacked and has the duty and right to defend its people. It ignores the fact that Israel is a vibrant democracy, acting under international humanitarian law, and going to great lengths to provide for the humanitarian needs of the civilian population."

Mary Therese Winifred Robinson (Irish: Máire Mhic Róibín; née Bourke; born 21 May 1944) is an Irish politician who served as the seventh president of Ireland, holding the office from December 1990 to September 1997. She was the country's first female president. In 2009, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama, the highest civilian honour awarded by the US.  The award was criticised by American and European Jewish groups, while others offered support. Parties opposed included the 1. AIPAC, 2. Anti-Defamation League, 3. European Jewish Congress, and 4. John Bolton, former US Ambassador to the UN. Bolton stated that those in the administration who recommended her either ignored her anti-Israel history, or missed it entirely.  Mary Robinson welcomes the decision by International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan to apply for arrest warrants against Hamas leaders and Israel's Prime Minister and Defence Minister. 

The Durban Review Conference, also known as Durban II, was a United Nations World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) held in Geneva, Switzerland from April 20–24, 2009: Durban’s racism-turned-racist conference that disgraced the UN.” "To many of us present at the events at Durban Conference-- , it is clear that much of the responsibility for the debacle rests on the shoulders of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, who, in her role as secretary-general of the conference, failed to provide the leadership needed to keep the conference on track.

 For example, Robinson failed to confront the odious anti-Israel language adopted at the Tehran pre-conference of February 2001:

By appearing to condone the Asian conference’s efforts to place the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the agenda of the World Conference, she betrayed its intentions and emboldened those intent on using the conference for their own political purposes. From that moment the conference began to take a dangerous trajectory that became ever more difficult to correct.

Mrs. Robinson’s intervention with the assembled delegates later in the same day left our delegation deeply shocked and saddened. In her remarks, she advocated precisely the opposite course to the one Secretary Powell and I had urged her to take. Namely, she refused to reject the twisted notion that the wrong done to the Jews in the Holocaust was equivalent to the pain suffered by the Palestinians in the Middle East. Instead, she discussed “the historical wounds of anti-Semitism and of the Holocaust on the one hand, and…the accumulated wounds of displacement and military occupation on the other.”

Resource:

Update:  One of Fox News hosts briefly mentioned this topic.  He said he was Irish and ashamed because of their antisemitism.  That Irish newscaster’s name is Brian Kilmead!

***** update on Republican party anti-Semitism in Ireland: https://www.politico.eu/article/in-ireland-sinn-fein-embraces-palestinians-and-shuns-israel/

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/jewish-fenians-and-anti-semites-the-jewish-role-in-the-irish-fight-for-freedom-1.4526074

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Noble_Plunkett#:~:text=Count%20George%20Noble%20Plunkett%20(3,D%C3%A1il%20%C3%89ireann%20in%20January%201919.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Robinson

https://unwatch.org/something-about-mary/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1921_in_the_United_Kingdom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limerick_boycott

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitzhak_HaLevi_Herzog#:~:text=Herzog%20served%20as%20rabbi%20of,%22the%20Sinn%20F%C3%A9in%20Rabbi%22.

https://theelders.org/news/mary-robinson-welcomes-iccs-pursuit-accountability-israel-palestine-conflict

Hypocrisy In Dublin, Ireland Shown As Ripe For BDS

 Nadene Goldfoot    

Adapted from Tibor Krausz, TAKING ON BDS, The Jerusalem Report     

                        Ireland exhibiting so much anti-Semitism Against Israel                                 

Hypocrisy has been alive and well in Dublin, Ireland's capitol, for me to see that BDS beliefs  exist in some citizens.  Dublin was the home for my  Grandfather, Nathan Abraham Goldfus/foot for a short while after entering England for a quick trial.  He was a Jewish immigrant from Telz, Lithuania, a place many Jews had left in the late 1800s that wound up in Dublin.  I don't think they chose Dublin for their Guinness, but for possible opportunities and to escape from anti-Semitism in Lithuania. 

A self-styled Sacha Baron Cohen film-maker, also Jewish, went to Dublin for a test, like Cohen has done so often.  It reminds me of the Prophet Elijah going to people's homes during Passover to test their reactions to his presence. He comes to redeem us.  I hope we are worthy.  We're ready for Elijah with a glass of wine just for him.   Sacha isn't there to redeem, but certainly to expose them for what they are.  

                                        

Only this time it was Ami Horovitz, a Jewish American New York film-maker  who also writes satirical-style like Cohen to play the part of Elijah visiting and talking with people.  His mission was to see for himself what local supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement were doing in Europe involving  the anti-Israel campaign whose goal is to isolate Israel politically, economically and culturally.  

Ami Horowitz is an American documentary filmmaker.   He is the writer, producer, and director of Ami on the Streets, a satirical short film series made for Fox News. Horowitz co-wrote, co-directed, and starred in the 2009 documentary U.N. Me, a critical examination of the United Nations.   A native of Los Angeles, Horowitz graduated from the University of Southern California with majors in political science and philosophy.   Horowitz's mother is from Israel.   He is a Modern Orthodox Jew, Democrat, and spent a year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.  

He pretended to be a sales-agent for such places as Iran, Sudan and North Korea, countries that have terrible reputations in the human-rights areas. Dublin citizens didn't bat an eye.  These countries didn't bother them at all, but when he mentioned Israel-Oy Vey!  Then he immediately heard loud boos from them.  So he even highlighted the horrors from the 3 countries he said he represented and it still didn't matter.  These Irish hypocrites didn't care;  they'd do business with them, but not from Israel.

It reminds me of a response I've seen in children when I taught K through grade 2.  One child would fall out of his seat on purpose to get attention most likely, and then all the children copied him and also fell out of their seats.  We humans seem to have a sheep-like quality similar to antelopes in a herd.  They all react together, even if running to the edge of the cliff.  Leaders of any sub-group- exposed to BDS without any education about Israel react, and everyone reacts together.  They could be the parents in a family, the leader in the neighborhood;  all are sheep.  No one is a leader away from the cliff or stops to do research on just what BDS is.  Anti-Semitism is strong in Dublin.

How sad.  It was quite a center of refuge for Jews such as my grandfather.  I have found many of our Goldfus-Goldfoot ancestors living there and in a few other Irish cities.  Jews had a good reputation there, too, I thought.    Why has this changed?  I have the book, Jewish Ireland-a social history  by Ray Rivlin that tells about life there.  It starts with the 1880s when Orthodox Russian Jews, forced to flee Tsarist persecution, began arriving in Ireland without any means of support, little secular education, and  no understanding of English.  They started life as peddlers and grew to become professionals and entrepreneurs  and took active parts in Irish life; their civil war and other major conflicts.

• Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, Chief Rabbi of Ireland from 1919 to 1937, later of Palestine and Israel.

• Chaim Herzog was an Irish Jew, sixth President of Israel and British World War II veteran. During and after his service in the British Army, he was also known as "Vivian Herzog" ("Vivian" being the English equivalent of the Hebrew name "Chaim")
• Justice Henry Barron, Irish Supreme Court judge 1997-2003
• In 1956, Robert Briscoe became the first Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin, although he was not the first Jewish Mayor in Ireland. That title belongs to William Annyas, who was elected Mayor of Youghal, County Cork in 1555.  This could be because England had expulsed all Jews from 1290 to 1655;  365 years.  So Jews found refuge in Ireland.  
• Joe Briscoe (son of Robert Briscoe), member of the Jewish Representative Council (predating Israeli Embassy) and Commandant in the Irish Army
• Daniel Day-Lewis, actor.  

Anti-Semitism existed in Dublin as well in the early 1880s.  Placards in 1886 urged people to have no truck with the foreign Jews of recent arrival.  Letters following screamed against the Jewish presence.  Social justice was non existent.  

There are no protests today against human-rights violators;  not even a global boycott such as people of North Korea, Iran or Sudan.  Only Israel ticks so many off because of this movement of BDS propaganda, something the Nazis were so good at.  They have learned a new mantra:  Palestinians are good;  Israelis are evil.

The BDS movement was modeled on the African National Congress-led boycott of apartheid-era South Africa.  The BDS movement grew out of the UN's World Conference Against Racism in Durham, South Africa in 2001.  This turned into a notorious hate-fest against Jews and their state of Israel.  

BDS was conceived  only one year after Prime Minister Ehud Barak had offered historic concessions making me grimace in pain at the thought of it,  to the PLO head terrorist, Yasser Arafat.  Arafat, thank G-d, turned the offer down as he wanted ALL of Israel, and launched the 2nd Intifada instead.  It was a brutal uprising that included many suicide bombings and other attacks against Israeli citizens.  I guess with all that planning of his, he couldn't resist the chance.  

"The BDS movement is funded largely by European governments through a variety of participating NGOs and is  to enfranchise Palestinians by turning their oppressors into a global pariah."  

BDS activists insist that Israel alone is responsible for the lack of peace between Israelis and Palestinians and seek to coerce the Jewish state into making more and more unilateral and unreciprocated concessions through an unreciprocated global campaign of political, economic and cultural isolation.  

Just how long did the war go on in Ireland between the Catholics and the Protestants?  Or between England and Ireland?    As I see it, the people are of the same religion with a few differences.  The differences between Jews and Muslims may be slight to Christians, as we both believe in the ONE G-d viewpoint, but we have vast differences otherwise, that is just beginning to break down in the areas of culture and education and what's right and what's wrong.  Wikipaedia points out that "The Troubles (Irish: Na Trioblóidí) were an ethno-nationalist period of conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted about 30 years from the late 1960s to the late 1990s.  I think it's lasted much longer, especially between problems between England and Ireland.  Great neighbors, what?  Is this what Israel has to look forward to?  

Nicholas Dyrenforth, a Jewish-Australian academic, who is a co-author of "Boycotting Israel is Wrong," with Philip Mendes, said, "BDS is a war on Israel by means other than violence with the same aim of ending Israel's existence and reversing the wars of 1948 and 1967."  I guess I'm not being paranoid.  It's obvious to many of us about the lying propaganda BDS spews forth.  I'm sick of viewing  a deaf ear from many about its evil intentions.  

                                                  

Omar Barghouti, the leading light of BDS, was born in Qatar where hatred comes from their radio to all the Arab countries through their religious leader, Yusuf al-Qaradawi.   Omar was a founder of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.  He has the chutzpa of calling Israel a racist "apartheid" state, yet, ironically, is happy to be a PhD student at Tel Aviv University.  How 2-faced can you get?   He received the Gandhi Peace Award in 2017. Oy,oy vey!!   He has made no secret of the BDS campaign's ultimate goal to turn Israeli Jews into a tolerated minority in their new Arab state of Palestine.  In other words, he envisions the same fate for Israeli Jews that he accuses them of having perpetrated on Palestinians.  

Shame on the Gandhi Peace Award people.  They should see through this veil of pretense of human rights and see for what it is-propaganda to destroy Israel.  And I thought I was a gullible person!  They are no better than the Dublin hypocrites.  It's a pandemic!  

Resource: 

The Jerusalem Report, July 13, 2015, Taking On BDS by Tibor Ksrausz

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ami_Horowitz

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacha_Baron_Cohen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles#:~:text=The%20Troubles%20(Irish%3A%20Na%20Triobl%C3%B3id%C3%AD,1960s%20to%20the%20late%201990s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Briscoe_(politician)#:~:text=In%201956%2C%20Briscoe%20became%20the,Youghal%2C%20County%20Cork%20in%201555.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Irish_Jews

https://www.chabad.org/holidays/passover/pesach_cdo/aid/504495/jewish/Why-Is-Elijah-the-Prophet-Invited-to-the-Seder.htm

Irish Jews: Where Did They Come From?

Nadene Goldfoot                                        

Jews may have lived in Ireland in the 12th and 13th centuries, but none were there after the expulsion of all Jews in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland in 1290.  Jews weren't allowed to return to Great Britain's England until 1655.  That's 365 years of being kept away and forced to find other lands to live in.  " Oliver Cromwell permitted Jews to return to England in 1657, over 360 years after their banishment by Edward I, in exchange for finance." 
                                                                     

Dublin-River Liffey

Entering Ireland after 1655 were a few Anusim or Marranos, as they were distastefully called then.  These were former Jews who were forced to leave Spain or convert to Catholicism and so moved to Portugal who only needed a year or two to catch up to that dictum and did the same thing to them. They converted but kept their Judaism hidden from Christians.   They settled in Dublin after 1660-under the guise of Christianity, perhaps.  More arrived as military purveyors after the 1689 revolution.  The original settlers of Sephardis were joined by Ashkenazim.  By the 18th century, this group of Jews declined.  In 1816 only 3 Jewish families remained in Dublin with a few others in other parts of Ireland.

Something happened causing Jews to enter Ireland in 1822.  Then Ireland suffered in the Great Potato Famine from 1845 to 1852.  It was in all of Europe in the 1840s.   By 1880 there were 400 Jews living in Ireland, 90% in Dublin.  My grandfather was to follow around 1893 from Lithuania via England.  Many of these later Jews were from Lithuania and had lived in England first.

 Their number had grown with the emigration from Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century, and they spread out with communities appearing in Cork, Waterford, Limerick, Belfast and of course, Dublin.
                                                                       

Yitzhak HaLevi "Isaac" Herzog, 1st Chief Rabbi of Ireland
(b: December 3, 1888; d: July 25, 1959) age 70. 

A chief rabbi was chosen in 1918 after the First World War who was Yitzhak Halevei Herzsog.  "Rabbi Herzog was born in Łomża, Poland, the son of Liba Miriam (Cyrowicz) and Joel Leib Herzog. He moved to the United Kingdom with his family in 1898, where they settled in Leeds. His initial schooling was largely at the instruction of his father who was a rabbi in Leeds and then later in Paris. Later he attended the University of London, where he received his doctorate. His thesis, which made him famous in the Jewish world, concerned his claim of re-discovering Tekhelet, the type of blue dye once used for the making of Tzitzit.  A fluent speaker of the Irish language, he supported the First Dáil and the Irish republican cause during the Irish War of Independence, and became known as "the Sinn Féin Rabbi".^[ He went on to serve as Chief Rabbi of Ireland between 1922 and 1936, when he immigrated to Palestine to succeed Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook as Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi upon his death."

 1936 would have been a very hard time to live in Jerusalem as they had had terrible riots resulting in many deaths in 1929 spurred on by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini.  Again, he had to face a new language in that people in Palestine were speaking Hebrew, which is conversational Hebrew, differing from Biblical Hebrew where you read or sing the language.  Being brilliant and only 48 years old, he handled it well, I imagine.  

By  1990, the Jewish population had risen to 1,600 with most Jews living mainly in Dublin, which is the Republic of Ireland.    Northern Ireland had 400 who lived mainly in Belfast.  I found my Goldfoot family on the 1901 and 1911 census in Dublin.
                                                                             

b: August 5, 1872 Telsiai, Lithuania d: July 19, 1912 Portland, Oregon USA

My grandfather, Nathan Abraham Goldfus/foot, must have anglicized his name in England.  The reason for leaving Lithuania may have been to escape the Russian draft.  He was of age.  He and other Jews spoke Lithuanian and Yiddish, using Yiddish among themselves.  Then they had to try to pick up a little English in England, and by moving to Ireland, had to also learn another dialect.  For instance, Marriage Certificate is written as Deimhniu Posadh in Irish.  Ireland is written as Eire.  Name is Ainm.  Surname is Sloinne.  Occupation is Sli Bheatha.  Civil Status is Stadas Sibhialta.

Nathan, born in 1872,  married a Lena Goldberg in Dublin on Tuesday, February 21, 1893 at the age of 21.  By June 14, 1893 he was at the Londonderry Port on the ship, Parisian,  headed for Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada alone.  He must have been 20 years old at least when he embarked on his voyage.   It happened in the Registrar's Office in Dublin instead of by a rabbi, so I wonder if it wasn't an arranged marriage to help him stay in the country.  He lived at 13 Arbutus Place and was listed as a commercial traveller.  That's where I found another Goldfoot  next door who no doubt was a relative.  Maybe it was a rooming house.  His father was listed on the marriage certificate as Morris Goldfoot who was deceased but had been a distiller. I believe he died in November 1878 when Nathan was 6 years old and was possibly raised by another Goldfoot, Chaim Itzak.(Abraham Chaim Goldfus) his uncle.  Oddly, Nathan will die in 1912 in Oregon in a horse and wagon accident and leave my father, Moses-Morris,  fatherless at the age of 4.

 I found other Goldfoots living on Harcourt Street in Fitzwilliam; Victoria Street in Wood Quay, Hillview Street in Clifton, Antrim, Grand Parade and South Mall  in Cork, Townland Street in DED,   Clanbrassil Street in Dublin was the street of Kosher delicatessens and stores where the owners lived in the back part.  It was on the south side of the River Liffey and was the hub of Jewish Dublin.

Lena had lived at 38 Warren Street in Dublin and her father was Naftolee Goldberg, also deceased and he had been a cap maker.  Goldfoots aren't mentioned in Rivlin's book, so Jews didn't know everyone in their community, but Herzog did live on the same street as Nathan.

Most of the Jews of Dublin left Ireland and immigrated to South Africa, mainly in Johannesburg.  My grandfather left the families and immigrated to the USA through the ship, Parisian heading for Winnipeg.  In Winnipeg, there is also a Jewish population.  Languages spoken by them have been "English (among Ashkenazis) · French (among Sephardis) · Hebrew (as liturgical language, some as mother tongue) · Yiddish (by some as mother tongue and as part of a language revival) · and other languages like Russian.  Jews have had to be multi-lingual.  The language I hear in South Africa by my South African cousin is very English with a strong accent.

No records are required for movements within the British Isles countries (England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Isle of Man, and Channel Islands). Records were not required for free emigrants to the United States until 1773, to Canada until 1865, or to Australia, New Zealand, the British West Indies, or South Africa until the twentieth century. No countrywide, official record  was kept for people leaving Ireland.

Immigrants to Ireland came primarily from elsewhere within the British Isles or from continental Europe by way of England. Specific groups of immigrants included refugees from various wars (such as the French Revolution), Huguenots, Germans, and Jews. Ireland kept no official immigration records, so you must rely primarily on (1) English records of immigrants who passed through England on their way to Ireland and (2) emigration records of the country from which your ancestor moved.

Resource:  The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
Jewish Ireland, a social history, by Ray Rivlin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitzhak_HaLevi_Herzog
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles...Ireland, Protestant and Catholic war
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Expulsion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Canada
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
https://familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Ireland_Emigration_and_Immigration

England: Where Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews Came Together in Suffering

Notice that Jews were expelled from England for 365 years, from 1290 to 1655.  Why all the expulsions?  Because Jews were not Christians, that's why.  People had been taught to hate Jews.  

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                

      
There isn't much history of Jews living in England until the Norman conquest in 1066 after which a handful of financiers had followed William the Conqueror from the Continent of Europe where Jews had lived in France and Germany.   "William the Conqueror's victory at the battle of Hastings in October 1066 was followed by six years of campaigning, which irrevocably established the new king's grip on England. In the succeeding decades, the Norman kings and their followers expanded their power into Wales and Lowland Scotland.  Rashi, the Jewish biblical commentator,  lived in Troyes, France and Worms, Germany. (1040 to 1105 during this memorable period)."  

In the next generation, communities were established in London, York, Bristol, Canterbury and others.  They traded, lent money to the baronage, and above all, advanced funds for current needs on the security of the revenue to the Crown, which protected them.
                                             

2nd Crusade

1st Crusade

There were 2 Crusades led by the crown into Palestine to take Jerusalem from the Arabs who had taken it from the Romans who had taken it from the Jews, but the Crusaders killed Jews along with Arabs there.  Going through Europe on their way to Palestine, the Crusaders slaughtered Jews.

By 1144 a Ritual Murder accusation was brought against Jews in Norwich, but what did Englishmen know about Jews?  Nothing, since Jews abhor the idea of anyone eating blood of any animal let alone a human's blood.  It is so against the Laws of Kashrut (Jewish laws about food) that only certain portions of an accepted animal such as a cow can be eaten, and then by a lot of soaking in salt water to wash away any trace of blood plus cooking it to being over-cooked.  You'd think they'd stop to try to find out something more about Jews other than they had money to lend.
                                   

At the time of the 3rd Crusade of 1189-1190, there were riots all over the country along with much bloodshed of Jews, especially in London and York where their business bonds were burned.  One wonders if this wasn't led by the Crown so that they didn't have to pay back anything.  To avoid this from happening again, a system of registration of Jewish debts was set up in 1194 with Archae or chirograh chests in all the principal cities under the control of a central Exchequer of the Jews.  This made possible the systematic exploitation of Jewish resources by merciless taxation during the reign of  John (1199-1216) and Henry III (1216-1277).
                                                                         

Jewish home in Lincoln, England

The enforced sternness of Jewish creditors in taking their dues resulted in growing unpopularity evidenced in the Ritual Murder case of Hugh of Lincoln in 1255 and the attacks on Jews during the Barons' Wars of 1263-1265.  "Hugh was known as Little Saint Hugh to distinguish him from Saint Hugh of Lincoln, an adult saint. The style is often corrupted to Little Sir Hugh. Little Saint Hugh became one of the best known of the blood libel saints: generally children whose deaths were interpreted as sacrifices committed by Jews."  This was a form of anti-Semitism.  Non-Jews knew nothing about Jews as this shows.  No Jew would use blood of any human for any reason.  It is deplorably disgusting!  
                                                                               

1182 expulsion of French JewsIn the year 1290, the last of the 16,000 Jews expelled by King Edward I left England. King Edward had banned usury and forced Jews over the age of seven to wear a badge identifying them as Jews.  

 Italian bankers existed and were competitors now so the Jewish bankers were not really needed.  Their rights were progressively restricted from 1269 on, and in 1290, they were expelled from the country.    This followed the expulsion of Jews from France in 1182, almost 100 years earlier.  Medieval English Jewry probably never exceeded more than 5,000 Jews.  
                                                                                

Jews expelled from England in 1290

During this Middle Period from 1290 to 1655, a duration amounting to 365 years, no Jews lived officially in England.  By the 16th century, there was a Marrano colony in existence which was discovered and broken up in 1609.  (Marranos were former Jews who had converted to Christianity through force, and most still practiced Judaism as best they could, like not eating pork, not working on Saturdays, etc.)  
                                                                   

Finally, in  1655, Manasseh ben Israel went to negotiate with Oliver Cromwell for the readmission of the Jews.  He had only a partial success, but from then on, the presence of the new Marrano group was connived at and received official recognition in 1664.  

Oliver Cromwell 1599-1658, "General and Lord Protector."Oliver Cromwell was an English military and political leader and later Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland.  I daresay he was not welcome in Catholic Ireland.  

The original Sephardi community was now populated by Ashkenazi immigrants from Germany and Central Europe who established their first synagogue in London in 1690 and then spread to the rest of the country.  

They found there were no more important restrictions on the Jews, and no ghetto system was enforced as in Europe.  After 365 years, violence against them was a thing of the past, even the JEW Bill controversy of 1753 lead to no serious molestation.  "During the Jacobite rising of 1745, the Jews had shown particular loyalty to the government. Their chief financier, Sampson Gideon, had strengthened the stock market, and several of the younger members had volunteered in the corps raised to defend London. 

Possibly as a reward, Henry Pelham in 1753 brought in the Jew Bill of 1753, which allowed Jews to become naturalized by application to Parliament.   It passed the Lords without much opposition, but on being brought down to the House of Commons, the Tories made protested against what they deemed an "abandonment of Christianity." The Whigs, however, persisted in carrying out at least one part of their general policy of religious toleration, and the bill was passed and received royal assent."   After being allowed to enter England in 1690, they were not allowed to become citizens for 63 years!  
                                                                          

"Sir Moses Haim Montefiore, 1st Baronet, FRS (Leghorn, Italy, 24 October 1784 – 28 July 1885) was a British financier and banker, activist, philanthropist and Sheriff of London. Born to an Italian Jewish family, he donated large sums of money to promote industry, business, economic development, education and health amongst the Jewish community in the Levant (modern day Israel)."

By the 19th century, Sir Moses Montefiore was active as a knighted Jew.  He took a leading part in Jewish philanthropy. 
                                                                                  

 Baron Lionel Nathan de Rothschild was a British banker and politician. He became the first practising Jew to sit as a Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom.

 From 1829 onward,  reasons to hold back the Jews were erased, partly from his good works and Lionel de Rothschild was admitted to parliament in 1858.  From 1881, the older community was strongly reinforced by an immigration of refugees from Russian pogroms.  They soon adapted themselves to the English Jewish way of life under the Chief Rabbi, Board of Deputies of British Jews, and in London, the United Synagogue.  Coming from Russia's Pale of Settlement, they would have been observing the Orthodox way, only to find that England had gone either conservative or reformed in most cases.  

New communities of importance existed in Leeds, Glasgow, Manchester and other places. 
                                                                           

 More Jews arrived from Germany in 1933 to 1939 which helped to stimulated a weak and short-lived organized anti-Semitic movement.  England was the only important European country to escape the Nazi persecutions of the Holocaust, but the air bombardment of the principal cities and scattering of the Jewish population changed and weakened the traditional Jewish life in many cases.
                                                                              

My grandfather (1870-1912) Nathan Goldfus moved to England from Lithuania before 1900 and anglicized his name to Goldfoot.  He then moved to Dublin, Ireland where he found some Lithuanian relatives, and after a few months hopped a boat to Canada and finally reached Council, Idaho of all places.                               

The Jewish population of Great Britain with Northern Ireland included is estimated to have been 330,000 in 1990.  It dropped by 2011 to 263, 346.  I had met several English Jews in Israel from 1980-1985 who had made aliyah when I had, too.  Evidently they were allowed to have dual citizenship like us Americans, but I remember one friend from England who was under the assumption that if he accepted Israeli citizenship he would lose his English citizenship, and that he didn't want to do. I guess he had misunderstood the rules.   An American couple I knew did give up their American citizenship.  

Resource:  The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia; England
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_country
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Jews
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Norman_Conquest.aspx
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Saint_Hugh_of_Lincoln
Update: http://best-citizenships.com/dual-citizenship-countries.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_of_Lincoln