“Pride and humiliation hand in hand Walked with them thro’ the world where’er they went; Trampled and beaten were they as the sand, And yet unshaken as the continent.”
In the first place it is to be noticed that the Jews, as a race, are particularly pledged to preserve their burial-places. This is not a law among them—so I have been told by the Chief Rabbi—but a binding obligation handed down from the most ancient times, and any disturbance of the burial-grounds which now exist is not permitted. No doubt it was totally beyond their power to prevent the “Jews’ Garden” from being covered with streets, its very size and position rendered it practically impossible to preserve, and it was probably annihilated during one of those periods when the Jews were expelled from England. Another exception which proves the rule is at Oxford, where the Botanic Garden, which dates from 1622, was made on the site of the Jewish burial-ground.
They also strictly observed the sanitary laws respecting burial laid down for them, and their cemeteries have not been overcrowded. Burial is only allowed at 6 feet from the surface of the ground, and only one body is in each grave, one coffin not being placed above another; and this rule has been carried out in the Jewish burial-grounds in London—again with one exception.
In the very large, old graveyard in Brady Street, Bethnal Green (formerly called North Street), there are walls running through it, and the southern half is higher than the northern half, having quite a hilly appearance. The following is the explanation. This half of the ground was originally allotted to “strangers,” Jews who belonged to no special congregation. About thirty years after it was full, a layer of earth, 4 feet in depth, was added to the ground, and it was used over again. As the coffins were again placed 6 feet from the surface, there still remained 4 feet of earth between them and the old ones beneath. As a result of this curious and interesting arrangement, there may be seen, in several cases, two gravestones standing up back to back, which represent the two graves below them. Here lie buried, with other members of the family, Nathan Mayer de Rothschild, the founder of the English house of Rothschild, Asher and Benjamin Goldsmid, and many another Jew famous on ’Change.