In 1290, King Edward I expelled all Jews from England, ending over a thousand years of fractious cohabitation: Jews had provided essential but socially unacceptable services such as trade and money-lending, and resentment had often brimmed over into violence. Jewish people remained barred from the Kingdom thereafter, until the Interregnum in 1649.

During the Interregnum, Protestant advisers to Oliver Cromwell claimed that the coming of Jesus Christ would follow the conversion of English Jews; meanwhile, a Dutch rabbi claimed that the Messiah would come after Jews returned to England. Christians and Jews therefore both wanted Jewish people back in the country, and the Whitehall Conference in 1655 gave the legal go-ahead.

The Restoration saw conditions for Jews improve gradually, though controversy surrounded the first Jewish MP, Lionel de Rothschild, whoo had to wait eleven years to take up his seat, in 1858. Persecution abroad led to mass immigration to Britain, and ultimately to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, on British-run lands in former Ottoman Syria.

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