Jewish Community in Caerphilly, 2 December 1978

Description

This 1978 letter from G. G. Jones to David Jacobs offers a written account of the author's experiences of Jewish community in Caerphilly. He writes about the local antisemitic attitudes towards the Jews, including examples from local newspapers. In hindsight, Jones considers such attitudes strange, especially because there were very few Jewish people in Caerphilly.

He remembers an ironmonger referred to locally as Harris the Jew, who became a successful local businessman. Harris's son was a doctor in Trethomas after the Second World War. Jones also notes that during the First World War, a Caerphilly pawnbroker named Zigmond was fined for being an alien. Between the wars, a Jewish man from Cardiff called Shibko ran a pawn shop in Caerphilly. Jones wonders whether the negative attitudes towards Jews had to do with the humiliation related to pawning items, that is, to poverty and xenophobia.

Depository: Glamorgan Archives.