History of the Jews in Australia

Based on Wikipedia: History of the Jews in Australia

In 1788, eight Jewish convicts stepped off the First Fleet onto the shores of a land that would become Australia. They had been transported from England to Botany Bay—shackled, exiled, and marked as criminals. Two hundred and thirty years later, their descendants and the descendants of waves of immigrants who followed would number somewhere between one hundred thousand and a quarter million people, forming one of the most successful Jewish communities in the world.

This is a story of remarkable transformation.

Convicts and Chains

The British Empire had a problem in the late eighteenth century. Its American colonies, once a convenient dumping ground for criminals, had just won their independence. Prisons were overflowing. The solution? Ship convicts to the other side of the world, to a vast southern continent that Captain James Cook had claimed for Britain just eighteen years earlier.

The First Fleet—eleven ships carrying about fifteen hundred people—arrived at what is now Sydney in January 1788. Among them were at least eight Jews, though the exact number is impossible to know. Transportation records didn't note religion, and many Jewish convicts likely concealed their identity. Over the next sixty years, historians estimate that more than a thousand Jews would be transported to Australia as convicts.

Who were they? Mostly working-class men from London. The average age was twenty-five, but some were as young as eight years old. Only seven percent were women—half the rate of female convicts in the general population. They came for crimes ranging from petty theft to more serious offenses, caught up in an English legal system notorious for its harsh punishments.

One of the most colorful was Ikey Solomon, whose life of crime in London's underworld would later inspire Charles Dickens's character Fagin in Oliver Twist. Another was Esther Abrahams, who arrived on the First Fleet at just fifteen or sixteen years old, having been sentenced to seven years' transportation for stealing lace. She would go on to become the common-law wife of Lieutenant George Johnston, one of the colony's most powerful men, and live to see her grandson become mayor of Sydney.

Building a Community from Nothing

Life for Jewish convicts in early Australia was complicated by more than just the harsh conditions all convicts faced. The Church of England was the established religion of the colony, and every convict—Catholic, Jewish, or otherwise—was required to attend Anglican services on Sundays. Education was controlled by the Anglican church until the 1840s. For people trying to maintain their Jewish identity, the barriers were significant.

But they persisted.

The first organized Jewish activity in Australia was, fittingly, about death. In 1817, a group of Jews in Sydney formed a Chevra Kadisha—a burial society, one of the foundational institutions of any Jewish community. The Hebrew term literally means "holy society," and such organizations ensure that the deceased receive proper Jewish burial rites. Three years later, William Cowper allocated land for a Jewish section within the Christian cemetery, created specifically to bury a man named Joel Joseph. A consecrated Jewish cemetery wouldn't be approved until 1832.

Religious services began around 1820, conducted in private homes by Joseph Marcus, one of the few convicts who actually had substantial Jewish knowledge. The community was tiny and scattered. But in 1827 and 1828, things began to change. Merchants—free settlers, not convicts—started arriving in greater numbers, bringing both respectability and resources. A man named P. J. Cohen offered his house for services, and regular Sabbath and holiday worship began.

Then came a pivotal moment. In 1830, Reverend Aaron Levi arrived from England. He had been a dayyan—a judge on a religious court—and he brought something the community desperately needed: legitimate religious authority. Under his guidance, the congregation purchased a Torah scroll, services became more regular, and what had been informal gatherings transformed into something that could properly be called a Jewish community. By 1832, they had organized themselves formally, appointing Joseph Barrow Montefiore as their first president.

The first Jewish wedding in Australia took place around this time, uniting Moses Joseph and Rosetta Nathan. Three years later, a man known only as Mr. Rose arrived from England to serve as chazzan (cantor), shochet (ritual slaughterer), and mohel (circumciser)—the three essential religious functionaries a Jewish community needs to maintain itself.

Gold, Growth, and a Great Synagogue

The 1841 census captured a moment in time: Jews in New South Wales accounted for sixty-five percent of all Jews in Australia, though they made up barely half a percent of the total population. Melbourne had established its own congregation that same year. Hobart followed in 1845, Launceston in 1846, Adelaide in 1850.

Then gold changed everything.

The Victorian Gold Rush of the 1850s drew immigrants from around the world. Jewish immigrants poured in, and for the first time, they outnumbered native-born Australian Jews. Many initially settled in rural areas, near the goldfields. Communities sprang up in Geelong, Bendigo, and Ballarat. But over the following decades, a pattern emerged that would shape Australian Jewry for generations: the drift toward the cities.

The pull was partly practical—Jewish life requires community. You need ten adult men for a minyan, the quorum required for communal prayer. You need a shochet if you want kosher meat. You need teachers for your children, a burial society for your dead. In a rural town with a handful of Jewish families, maintaining these institutions was nearly impossible. But there was also fear—the fear of assimilation, of children growing up without Jewish peers, of families slowly dissolving into the broader culture.

By the end of the nineteenth century, most rural Jews had relocated to Sydney or Melbourne.

Sydney's growing community needed a home worthy of its ambitions. They found it on Elizabeth Street, opposite Hyde Park, where the Great Synagogue was consecrated in 1878. It stands there still, one of the finest examples of Victorian-era synagogue architecture in the world, its ornate interior a testament to a community that had traveled from convict ships to civic prominence in less than a century.

Melbourne, meanwhile, had become the largest Jewish center in the country—a position it has held ever since. A religious court, the Beth Din, was established there in 1866, giving the community formal authority to rule on matters of Jewish law.

The Ashkenazi Majority and the Sephardi Exception

A word about Jewish demographics. The vast majority of Australian Jews, from the earliest convicts to the present day, have been Ashkenazi—Jews whose ancestors lived in Central and Eastern Europe and who share distinctive religious customs, Yiddish cultural heritage, and genetic markers. The term comes from the medieval Hebrew word for Germany.

But there was a brief Sephardi moment. Sephardi Jews—whose ancestors were expelled from Spain and Portugal in 1492 and settled around the Mediterranean—also immigrated to Australia in the mid-nineteenth century. For about twenty years, they maintained their own congregation with their own traditions. Some Sephardi families rose to prominent positions in the community. But their numbers were always small, and by 1873 the congregation had disbanded, its members absorbed into the Ashkenazi mainstream.

The Sephardi story would have a second chapter, but not until after World War Two.

Federation and Belonging

When Australia's six colonies federated into a single nation in 1901, Jews were there at the creation. By this point, an estimated fifteen thousand Jews lived in the new country. From the very beginning, they were treated as equal citizens—free to participate in economic and cultural life, free to worship as they chose, free to rise as high as their abilities would take them.

This was not a small thing. In contemporary Europe, antisemitism was endemic. Jews faced legal restrictions, social discrimination, and periodic violence. The Dreyfus Affair had just convulsed France. Pogroms were ravaging the Russian Empire. Yet in Australia, Jews encountered remarkably little prejudice. They were a tiny minority—never more than one percent of the population—but they were accepted in ways that would have seemed miraculous to their European cousins.

Why? Historians have offered various explanations. Australia was a young society, still forming its identity, less encrusted with ancient prejudices. It was a nation of immigrants, where nearly everyone came from somewhere else. Its culture, while certainly British in origin, was shaped by the egalitarian ethos of the frontier. Whatever the reasons, Australian Jews found something precious: a place where they could be fully Jewish and fully Australian at the same time.

Refugees and Resistance

The twentieth century brought catastrophe to European Jewry and transformation to Australian Jewry.

The first wave came in the 1890s and early 1900s: refugees fleeing pogroms in Russia and Poland. These Eastern European Jews were different from the established community. They were more religiously observant, more working-class, more likely to speak Yiddish. They settled primarily in Melbourne, while Sydney remained dominated by more secular Jews from Western and Central Europe. This divide—Melbourne as the center of Orthodox Judaism, Sydney as more liberal—persists to some degree even today.

Then came the Nazis.

When Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, Jews began desperately seeking escape. The Australian government's response was, at best, ambivalent. Officials were hesitant to admit large numbers of refugees. But in 1938, Australia allotted fifteen thousand visas for "victims of oppression." About seven thousand Jews managed to use these visas before World War Two broke out and the program ended.

Seven thousand. Out of six million who would die.

The war years brought a painful irony for some refugees. Jews who had fled Nazi Germany arrived in Australia with German passports—and were promptly classified as enemy aliens. The sculptor Karl Duldig, his artist wife Slawa, and their two-year-old daughter Eva (who would grow up to become a top Australian tennis player) were among those interned. They spent two years in Tatura Internment Camp, one hundred and eighty kilometers north of Melbourne, surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers, guarded by armed soldiers. They had escaped the Nazis only to be imprisoned by the country that had offered them refuge.

The most notorious case involved the Dunera. In 1940, about twenty-five hundred German and Austrian refugees—including seventeen hundred and fifty Jews—were shipped to Australia and immediately sent to an internment camp in Hay, a remote town in western New South Wales. Many of these "Dunera boys" were artists, scientists, and intellectuals who would go on to make remarkable contributions to Australian life. But first they had to survive the voyage itself, during which British guards subjected them to systematic abuse and theft, and then years of internment in the Australian outback.

After the Holocaust

The end of World War Two revealed the full horror of what had happened in Europe. Six million Jews had been murdered. Entire communities had been erased. Survivors emerged from concentration camps and hiding places with nowhere to go—their homes destroyed, their families dead, their countries often still hostile.

Australia changed its immigration policy. The previous Anglo-centric approach gave way to acceptance of large numbers of continental Europeans, including Jewish survivors from displaced persons camps. The Jewish population, which had been about twenty-three thousand in 1933, nearly tripled to sixty-one thousand by 1961.

But the welcome was not universal. An undercurrent of antisemitism surfaced. The Returned Services League—the powerful veterans' organization—and other groups published cartoons urging the government to restrict Jewish immigration. The government refused to fund Jewish refugee resettlement, insisting it was the Jewish community's responsibility. Organizations like the Save the Children's Scheme and the Jewish Welfare Guardian Scheme stepped in, bringing three hundred and seventeen orphaned Jewish children from Europe in the years after the war. Boys were placed in hostels with other Holocaust survivors; girls went to orphanages.

These survivors and their children would reshape Australian Jewry. Many were highly observant, and day-school attendance rose steadily. They brought with them the weight of what they had witnessed—and a fierce determination to rebuild.

New Arrivals, New Communities

The postwar period also saw the emergence of a new Sephardi community, though the story is complicated by Australia's racial policies.

Until the 1960s, Australia maintained what was bluntly called the White Australia policy, restricting immigration from non-European countries. This affected Mizrahi Jews—those from Middle Eastern and North African communities—who were generally not permitted to enter. But the Suez Crisis of 1956 created a refugee emergency in Egypt, and a number of Egyptian Jews were allowed in.

Gradually, advocacy from Jewish communities persuaded the government to change course. By 1969, when Iraqi Jews faced severe persecution—their property confiscated, their movements restricted, some publicly executed—Australia granted refugee status to those who could reach the country. Over the following decades, Jews from across the Middle East would join the Australian community, adding new traditions, new cuisines, and new perspectives to a community that had been almost entirely Ashkenazi.

Thousands of highly observant Jews also arrived from South Africa, settling primarily in Perth on Australia's west coast. They brought their own distinctive culture—shaped by the unique experience of being Jewish under apartheid—and built one of the most cohesive Jewish communities in the country.

Counting Jews

How many Jews live in Australia today? The honest answer is: nobody knows for certain.

The 2021 census recorded about one hundred thousand people identifying as Jewish by religion. But only twenty-nine thousand identified as Jewish by ancestry. These numbers don't add up because identity is complicated. Some people consider themselves Jewish by religion but not ethnicity; others the reverse. Many have Jewish ancestry but don't identify with the community at all.

Demographers estimate that the actual number of Jews in Australia—including those who don't identify as such—is probably around one hundred and twelve thousand. But given more than two centuries of immigration and the extent of intermarriage and assimilation, as many as two hundred and fifty thousand Australians may have Jewish ancestry without knowing it or acknowledging it.

What is certain is that Jews make up about half a percent of the Australian population—a tiny minority by any measure. Yet their impact has been vastly disproportionate to their numbers, in business, academia, the arts, law, medicine, and public life.

The Shape of Community

Modern Australian Jewry is concentrated in two cities: Melbourne and Sydney. Melbourne has the larger community—roughly sixty thousand people—and remains the center of Orthodox Jewish life in Australia, with an extensive network of day schools, synagogues, and communal organizations. Sydney's community of perhaps forty-five thousand is more diverse religiously, with significant liberal and secular populations alongside Orthodox congregations.

Smaller communities exist in Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, and other cities, but the gravitational pull of Melbourne and Sydney is strong. The same dynamic that drew Jews from rural goldfields to cities in the nineteenth century continues today: Jewish life requires critical mass, and smaller communities struggle to maintain institutions.

The Australian Jewish community today is overwhelmingly Ashkenazi, with Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews comprising a minority. Many families trace their arrival to the postwar refugee wave; Holocaust survivors and their descendants form a significant portion of the community. There are also substantial numbers whose families arrived more recently—from South Africa, the former Soviet Union, and Israel itself.

A Particular Success

What makes Australian Jewry distinctive is not its size but its character. This is a community that has achieved something rare in Jewish history: deep integration into the broader society without significant loss of identity. Australian Jews have been prime ministers' advisors, High Court justices, university vice-chancellors, and captains of industry. They have also maintained vibrant religious and cultural institutions, high rates of in-marriage compared to other diaspora communities, and strong connections to Israel.

The journey from convict ships to this present moment spans barely more than two hundred years—a blink of an eye in Jewish history. Those eight Jews who stepped off the First Fleet could not have imagined what their descendants and successors would build. They were criminals in chains, transported to the end of the earth. Their legacy is a community that has found, in this distant southern land, something their ancestors in Europe could only dream of: a home where Jews could live fully, freely, and without fear.

Or so it has been. The recent attacks mentioned in the news remind us that nowhere is entirely safe, that antisemitism can surface even in the most tolerant societies. The story of Jews in Australia is not finished. It continues to be written, shaped by forces both within and beyond the community's control. But the foundation laid by those convicts and early settlers—their determination to maintain identity against all odds, their ability to build community from nothing—that foundation remains.