page_title: Religion in the United Kingdom
section_title: Judaism
hierarchical_section_title: Religion in the United Kingdom / Judaism
caption_attribution_description: English: Singers Hill Synagogue, 26 Blucher Street, Birmingham, England, seen from the southwest
context_page_description: Religion in the United Kingdom, and in the countries that preceded it, has been dominated for over 1,000 years by various forms of Christianity. Religious affiliations of United Kingdom citizens are recorded by regular surveys, the four major ones being the national decennial census, the Labour Force Survey, the British Social Attitudes survey and the European Social Survey.
  According to the 2011 Census, Christianity is the majority religion, followed by Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism and Buddhism in terms of number of adherents. Among Christians, Anglicans are the most common denomination, followed by the Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists. This, and the relatively large number of individuals with nominal or no religious affiliations, has led commentators to variously describe the United Kingdom as a post-Christian, multi-faith and secularised society.
  The United Kingdom was formed by the union of previously independent countries in 1707, and consequently most of the largest religious groups do not have UK-wide organisational structures.
context_section_description: The Jewish Naturalisation Act, enacted in 1753, permitted the naturalisation of foreign Jews, but was repealed the next year. The first graduate from the University of Glasgow who was openly known to be Jewish was in 1787. Unlike their English contemporaries, Scottish students were not required to take a religious oath. In 1841 Isaac Lyon Goldsmid was made baronet, the first Jew to receive a hereditary title. The first Jewish Lord Mayor of the City of London, Sir David Salomons, was elected in 1855, followed by the 1858 emancipation of the Jews. On 26 July 1858, Lionel de Rothschild was finally allowed to sit in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom when the law restricting the oath of office to Christians was changed. (Benjamin Disraeli, a baptised, teenage convert to Christianity of Jewish parentage, was already an MP at this time and rose to become Prime Minister in 1874.) In 1884 Nathan Mayer Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild became the first Jewish member of the British House of Lords; again Disraeli was already a member.
  British Jews number around 300,000 with the United Kingdom having the fifth largest Jewish community worldwide. However, this figure did not include Jews who identified 'by ethnicity only' in England and Wales or Scottish Jews who identified as Jewish by upbringing but held no current religion. A report in August 2007 by University of Manchester historian Dr Yaakov Wise stated that 75 per cent of all births in the Jewish community were to ultra-orthodox, Haredi parents, and that the increase of ultra-orthodox Jewry has led to a significant rise in the proportion of British Jews who are ultra-orthodox.
caption: Singers Hill Synagogue, Birmingham, England.
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