The website of the Friends of Bath Jewish Burial Ground

Our new book is the result of four years in-depth research by Christina Hilsenrath, chair of trustees, assisted by other members of Friends of Bath Jewish Burial Ground.

It provides a fascinating and detailed picture of Bath's Jewish community, their personal lives, their synagogues and their Burial Ground, since 1700 when the town began to be a magnet for London society as a fashionable health spa.

Hardback | 220 pages 

Available online at £20 + £5 UK delivery, or from local independent bookshops in Bath.

Pre-order a copy

Jews in Bath

In 1772, Joseph Sigmond, a young Jewish man exiled from his home in the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, arrived homeless and penniless in Exeter. Advised to study dentistry, by the early 1800s he had opened a surgery in Edgar Buildings, Bath.

Just round the corner in Bartlett Street was Jacob Abrahams, an optician, and if Joseph wanted to discuss the latest dental techniques he could do so with rival dentist Soloman Abraham Durlacher in Union Street. Maybe Joseph’s wife Catherine was a client of Betsy Duralcher, a chiropodist. She could buy her shoes from Figgins and Moses, her jewellery from Henry Moore, and her furs from J Isaacs. In the evening perhaps the Sigmonds went to a concert given by John Braham, one of the most celebrated opera singers of the times or to one of the masked balls that Joseph sponsored.

These Jewish health professionals, artists, craftsmen and traders were the beginning of the small community of Jews from central Europe who, fleeing conflict, persecution and poverty, made Bath their home. The city with its famous hot springs was a place of genteel residence, attracting fashionable visitors with money to spend setting up their houses for the season, visiting the optician or dentist and shopping for jewellery and clothes.

This book brings alive the individuals and families who lived, worked and worshipped in the city, together with the history of their synagogues and Burial Ground. It not only reveals an untold part of Bath’s history, but is the first comprehensive account of one of the few provincial Jewish communities in England and Wales, a history hitherto under-researched and rarely told.


The book covers the history of the Jewish community, identifying individual histories within a wider context of Anglo-Jewish history. Plus a detailed history of the two synagogues that the community supported, and of the Burial Ground just outside the city that was the starting point for the whole project.

There are extensive appendices listing community leaders, trades and professions, outlying communities, as well as ancillary research into tangental Jewish associations within Bath.

View the contents page.


Some page spreads from the book:


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