Fascinating article in the Independent charting the ebb and flow of Judiasm in the UK over the centuries; some choice paragraphs:

Independent

When people ask writer Ashley Perry where his family is from, he replies “Britain”. If they ask where his grandparents came from, he gives the same reply. When the more persistent ask where his great-grandparents or great-great-grandparents came from, the reply is still “Britain”.

[…]

In the Middle Ages, lending money with interest – usury – was considered a sin and forbidden to Christians. But medieval monarchs found it useful that Jews were allowed to engage in the practice. The outsiders financed royal consumption, adventures and wars – and made themselves rich in the process.

[…]

In 1218, in what became the precursor of anti-Jewish laws all over the world, Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, made Jews wear a badge – an oblong white patch of two finger-lengths by four – to identify them. Barons, to whom Jews lent money, encouraged the mob responses to such claims, in which Jewish homes were ransacked and records of their debts were destroyed.

[…]

By 1290 the inevitable happened when Edward I – who had found an alternative source of finance in the Italian merchants known as the “pope’s usurers” – banished the Jews from England.

For more than 300 years no Jew, officially, existed in the country. It was not until Charles I was beheaded that the Jews felt safe to return. Then, in 1656 a Dutch Jew named Menasseh ben Israel, petitioned Oliver Cromwell to allow his people to return.

Cromwell, a devout Puritan and a man of common sense, could see the attraction of allowing them back. For a start, there was the popular belief that the Second Coming of Christ could not occur until Jews existed in all the lands of the earth.

[…]

During the Jacobite rising of 1745 they showed particular loyalty, offering finance and volunteering for the corps raised to defend London. Their investment provided one-twelfth of the nation’s profits and one-twentieth of its foreign trade.

As a reward, what was known as “The Jew Bill” was introduced in 1753 to allow them to be naturalised as British citizens. It was passed by the House of Lords, though it fell in the Commons with the Tories making great outcry against this “abandonment of Christianity”.

…so so forth; the whole thing is well worth a read, and it spun a new light for me on the BNP’s claims about “Muslim Mortgages”, and the forgiveness-lubricated Christian balance between piety and liquidity.