One of my sons recently pointed me toward the brilliant podcast History for the Curious by Rabbi Aubrey Hersh.
The first few episodes dealt with the origins of English Jewry and led me to wallow in a warm pool of nostalgia for the type of community in which I grew up, and which largely shaped who I am today.
It is one of the ironies of Jewish history that a people spread across continents remembers its sacred texts with precision, yet often forgets its own melodies. Torah is fixed; but the way Jews sing, pray and gather – that supple weave of custom, culture, and sound – is as vulnerable as any living organism. It can flourish, adapt, or quietly disappear.
Which is perhaps why this podcast caused me to contemplate not only the big questions of Jewish continuity, but about a far more obscure artifact of Jewish life: Minhag Anglia, the old Anglo-Jewish way of praying and behaving in shul.
Minhag Anglia
That dignified, faintly Victorian service of frock coats and choirs, English sermons and Singer’s Siddur, loyalist hymns and polished pageantry. Its melodies carried faint echoes of Hamburg, Amsterdam, and even Anglican cathedrals.
To many Israelis, this may seem like quaint ethnography, relics of a Diaspora era now overshadowed by louder religious cultures. And that may be true. Yet the story of Minhag Anglia is not really about Britain. It is about a deeper truth: Jews in every generation have shaped the societies around them – and been shaped by them in return.
Anglo-Jewish life began, like all Diaspora life, with immigrants.
The first organized community after Cromwell’s readmission in the 1650s was Spanish-Portuguese. Their synagogue, Bevis Marks, with its chandeliers and Iberian melodies, brought Western Sephardi warmth into England’s damp climate.
Soon after came the Ashkenazim: not the Yeshivish-sounding Eastern Europeans of stereotype, but a Central European blend shaped in Hamburg. The Hambro’ Synagogue, founded in 1707, explicitly followed “the Polish minhag as established in Hamburg,” linking London to the tri-community of Altona-Hamburg-Wandsbek. Minhag Anglia was never purely English; it was a European cocktail shaken in London’s docks.
The Great, New, and Hambro synagogues eventually merged into the United Synagogue in 1870 – an almost Anglican creation of Parliament. Out of this came the Singer’s Siddur (prayer book), presented to every bar mitzvah boy (and, sadly, often unused), and with it the codification of what later generations called Minhag Anglia.
BUT MINHAG Anglia was never just a way of praying. It was a culture.
It was the Rabbi’s elegantly balanced English sermon, the choir’s restrained harmony, and congregants standing ramrod-straight for “God Save the Queen.”
Serious without stridency, dignified without drama. For a century, it was the Judaism of the British middle class – and a symbol of their integration into the Empire.
Critics said it was too genteel, too assimilated, too bourgeois. Admirers said it captured something noble: that Judaism need not be loud to be loyal, nor flamboyant to be heartfelt.
Either way, it could only have been born in England: a cultural negotiation between Jewish immigrants and their adopted home. Northern-European melody met Westminster decorum. It was, unapologetically, Jewishly British.
Today, Minhag Anglia is in retreat. English Jewry is smaller, flanked by dynamic haredi (ultra-Orthodox) communities on one side and progressive or secular institutions on the other. The old middle – the polished United Synagogue Orthodoxy of the 1950s – is fading.
Many shuls now use Israeli or American melodies. Cantors who knew the old traditions have passed away. Younger rabbanim, trained in Israeli yeshivot, bring different rhythms. The Singer’s Siddur, once the most widely used prayer book in the English-speaking world, has been usurped by the new boy on the block – the American Artscroll.
And yet: when something dies, we must ask what we lose.
Not theology – Minhag Anglia never claimed halachic superiority – but memory: a unique Jewish language of prayer and belonging. A reminder of how Jews once lived inside a civilization and contributed to it with confidence.
In an age when Diaspora communities worry about survival, and Israelis worry about unity, the old Anglo-Jewish voice reminds us of a different Jewish instinct: the instinct to adapt, to integrate without erasing, to harmonize without dissolving.
Our ancestors in England forged a minhag unmistakably theirs – imperfect and not eternal, but beautiful.
And this has always been the Jewish way.
Spain gave us Ladino and Andalusian brilliance.
Vilna gave us cold intellectual fire.
Morocco brought warmth and rhythm.
Every community absorbed something of its surroundings. And every community gave something back. This is not assimilation; it is enculturation – the Jewish art of taking the best of the world and sanctifying it.
Which brings us to today.
For the first time in two millennia, most Jews live not as a minority within someone else’s civilization but in our own land, shaping our own culture. Israel is a laboratory of Jewish civilization. Moroccan poems at national ceremonies, Carlebach tunes on Fridays, Yemenite melodies from a tent in Ofakim, Galician chazanut sung by a new oleh (immigrant) from Brooklyn.
A new minhag – Minhag Eretz Yisrael, Land of Israel Custom – is emerging.
It will evolve. It will be messy. But it will be ours.
The tragedy would be to treat old Diaspora accents as irrelevant. Israel’s song will be richer if it absorbs the music of Jewish London, as it has absorbed the sounds of Baghdad and Casablanca, Kyiv, and Addis Ababa. A people that forgets its past melodies risks flattening its future ones.
May the old tunes not be lost, and may the new ones be worthy of the land giving them birth.
The writer is a rabbi and physician. For more of his work, visit: rabbidrjonathanlieberman.substack.com and youtube.com/@rabbidrjonathanlieberman.