Customize Consent Preferences

We use cookies to help you navigate efficiently and perform certain functions. You will find detailed information about all cookies under each consent category below.

The cookies that are categorized as "Necessary" are stored on your browser as they are essential for enabling the basic functionalities of the site. ... 

Always Active

Necessary cookies are required to enable the basic features of this site, such as providing secure log-in or adjusting your consent preferences. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data.

No cookies to display.

Functional cookies help perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collecting feedback, and other third-party features.

No cookies to display.

Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics such as the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

No cookies to display.

Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.

No cookies to display.

Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with customized advertisements based on the pages you visited previously and to analyze the effectiveness of the ad campaigns.

No cookies to display.

The Chuts

Dutch Cigar Makers’ Sabbath meal, C19 • Sandys Row Archive

This fantastic photo, from the Sandys Row Archive, is of a family of Dutch cigar makers celebrating a Sabbath meal in London’s East End in the nineteenth century. From the 1840s onwards nearly a small group of pioneering Dutch Jews (about 50 families), mainly from Amsterdam, settled in an area in West Spitalfields known as the Tenterground, which was named after the open land used by cloth makers who stretched their fabric on wooden frames known as tenters. The Tenterground was developed in the seventeenth century and encompassed the streets of White’s Row, Wentworth Street, Bell Lane and Rose Lane (which no longer exists). Hugeunot silk weavers erected homes and workshops there in the eighteenth century, which became occupied by this small tight-knit Dutch immigrant Jewish community, known as “the Chuts.” These little known of Dutch Jewish settlers pre-date the mass migration of Ashkenazi Jewish migrants who fled persecution in the Pale of Settlements and arrived in their thousands to the area from 1880s onwards. The Dutch immigrants who established Sandys Row Synagogue were economic migrants seeking a better life, rather than refugees fleeing persecution.

‘The Chuts’ had their own practises and customs, which were different to other Ashkenazi Jewish groups. They refused to join any of the existing synagogues, renting instead a small room in a building on Whites Row, which served for a while as a prayer room and meeting place. Most of the newly arrived Dutch Jews were skilled workers, predominately involved in the trades of cigar and cigarette making, diamond cutting and polishing, slipper and cap making. Skills were passed on from generation to generation, making this small community of about a thousand people extremely self sufficient. Many small workshops were opened up in and around the Tenterground area, including the streets of Artillery Passage, Frying Pan Alley and Sandys Row.

Read more here.

 

Discover more Hidden Treasures

Hidden Treasures: Celebrating the documents, photos and artefacts in British archives that tell the story of Jews in Britain