Salomons

The Salomons lineage belongs to that Jewish financial aristocracy of London which, at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, knew how to combine mercantile success with civic engagement. Originating from the Ashkenaze community established in the City — around St Mary Axe, the historic heart of London's Israelite trade — the family embodies the transition from a Judaism tolerated but legally disqualified to a Judaism fully emancipated, integrated into the institutions of the kingdom. Its name remains inseparable from the struggle for the political emancipation of British Jews.

The present work traces this ascent through the cardinal figure of Sir David Salomons (1797-1873), whose itinerary constitutes, in itself, a chronology of the successive conquests of Jewish citizenship: the shrievalty, municipal magistracy, the aldermanship, the parliamentary seat, the mayoralty of London. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica and the Jewish Encyclopedia, he was the first English Jew to hold each of these offices, making his biography a legal precedent as much as a family memory [Jewish Encyclopedia ; Encyclopaedia Judaica]. We shall also follow the posterity of the house — the hereditary barony, the estate of Broomhill, the learned heir David Lionel Salomons — in order to restore the complete trajectory of a dynasty. Where the archive speaks, we listen to it; where tradition supplements, we note as much.

The Salomons family is rooted in the Israelite trading community of the City of London at the end of the eighteenth century. David Salomons was born in London, the son of Levy Salomons of St Mary Axe and Frant, in Sussex, and of Matilda de Metz of Leiden, who married in 1795. The father's presence in the St Mary Axe district immediately places the family home at the nerve centre of Jewish finance and commerce in London.

The father's standing is consistently attested by reference directories. David Salomons was born in London, the son of Levi Salomons, a prominent Ashkenaze stockbroker; he became a member of the Stock Exchange in 1823 and an underwriter at Lloyd's in 1834. The Jewish Encyclopedia specifies the father's place within the community: he was the second son of Levi Salomons, one of the foremost Jewish merchants in London at the end of the eighteenth century. These convergent documentary sources — Encyclopaedia Judaica, Jewish Encyclopedia and biographical notice — firmly establish the milieu of origin: an Ashkenaze bourgeoisie of the City, involved in brokerage, insurance, and high finance.

The union of Levi Salomons and Matilda de Metz, originally from Leiden, also connects the family to the wider network of Jewish diasporas in the United Provinces, of which London was the natural commercial extension. It was in this environment — schooling in London and then in Totteridge, followed by training in City business affairs — that the vocation of the son took shape, destined as he was to become the standard-bearer of emancipation [Jewish Encyclopedia].

Before becoming a civil rights activist, David Salomons was an accomplished financier. He followed his father into business and established himself among the major players in the field. Salomons was one of the founders of the London and Westminster Bank — today NatWest — and a member of the London Stock Exchange.

His rise within the institutions of the City began with the obtaining of the rights of urban citizenship. Admitted in 1831 by the Coopers' Company as a freeman and liveryman of the City of London, he became in 1835 the first Jewish sheriff of London and Middlesex, and a special Act of Parliament was passed to dispel any doubt as to the legality of the election. This dual dimension — banking success and entry into the City's livery companies — provided the social and patrimonial foundation without which the subsequent political struggle could not have been waged.

The founding of the London and Westminster Bank, one of the first joint-stock banks in the capital, bears witness to a spirit of financial innovation. Membership of the Stock Exchange from 1823 and of Lloyd's in 1834 completes the portrait of a man fully embedded in the workings of nascent Victorian capitalism [Encyclopaedia Judaica]. It was armed with this economic respectability that Salomons was able to stand for municipal office and, by his candidacy alone, lay bare the contradiction between civic merit and the confessional oaths that barred Jews from access to it.

The year 1835 marks the first precedent. On 24 June 1835, David Salomons became the first Jew to be successfully elected to the office of sheriff. But election did not amount to exercise: the office remained locked behind a confessional oath. In 1835, he was elected sheriff of the City of London; he was, however, prevented from taking office, because the mandatory oath of office contained Christian affirmations of faith.

This is where family memory and the parliamentary archive answer each other exactly. To officially occupy his post as sheriff, David was required to swear an oath; his candidacy had initially met with opposition. The obstacle was removed by a targeted legislative intervention: the special act of Parliament mentioned by the Jewish Encyclopedia was passed to secure the legality of the election [Jewish Encyclopedia]. This exceptional mechanism inaugurates a method that would repeat itself throughout Salomons's career: forcing practice forward, then compelling the law to adjust to the fait accompli.

The significance of the episode extends beyond the individual. By obliging the legislature to rule on the case of an elected Jew, Salomons transformed a personal difficulty into a constitutional question. The barrier of the oath — those words "on the true faith of a Christian" that sealed exclusion — now became a public issue, debated in the open. The shrievalty of 1835 is therefore not merely a promotion: it is the first wedge driven into the edifice of confessional incapacities.

The struggle continued on the terrain of urban magistracy. The office of alderman — the City's aldermanic bench — resisted longer than the shrievalty. An ardent champion of Jewish emancipation, both national and municipal, Salomons played a leading role in the campaign to abolish the last Jewish disabilities; in 1835 he was elected Sheriff of London; having been twice refused, he was finally elected alderman in 1847.

This perseverance — two rejections before the election of 1847 — illustrates the man's methodical tenacity and the resistance of the institutions. The conquest of the aldermanic office opened the way to the magistracy and, beyond that, to the highest municipal dignity. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, Salomons was the first English Jew to become in succession sheriff, magistrate, alderman, Member of Parliament, and Lord Mayor of London: an enumeration that marks, office by office, the fall of the barriers [Jewish Encyclopedia].

The culmination came in 1855 with the mayoralty of London, celebrated by the Israelite community itself. The Special Collections of the University of Southampton hold a copy of a resolution, in Hebrew, from the West London Synagogue of British Jews congratulating David Salomons on his elevation to the high and important dignity of Lord Mayor of the City of London, in November 1855. This document, written in the sacred tongue, seals the alliance between the civic achievement of the notable and the collective pride of a community that saw one of its own accede to the foremost office of the capital of the Empire.

The founding act of parliamentary emancipation played out in 1851, when Salomons, elected as a Member of Parliament, took his seat in the Commons without being able — or willing — to swear the Christian oath. The difficulty lay in a precise formula within the oath of abjuration. The Act permitted the omission of the words "on the true faith of a Christian," but the interpretation of this provision for Jews remained contested, as the closely argued debates in the Chamber attest.

Salomons based his argument on judicial precedent. Whether or not the words "on the true faith of a Christian" had been introduced before the reign of James II, the oath was administered upon some symbol, book or relic closely connected to the Christian religion — hence the fundamental incompatibility he invoked. In support of this, he noted that the law already equated a Jew's oath with that required: the fact of taking the said oath by persons professing the Jewish religion, in the same manner as Jews are admitted to give evidence before courts of justice, shall be deemed a sufficient taking of the oath of abjuration.

The Commons debated the matter to the point of examining imperial precedents, notably colonial ones. The question was whether acts suppressing the civil disabilities of Jews in Canada necessarily had to be submitted to Parliament and approved by the Queen; this question was at length considered by the Duke of Wellington and the legal advisers of the Crown. By sitting and voting despite the prohibition, Salomons exposed himself to sanctions, but inscribed in the official record a demonstration of the absurdity of the confessional oath. His act of 1851, even more than his municipal offices, constitutes the founding case of British Jewish political emancipation [Hansard, 21–28 July 1851].

The struggle of David Salomons found its institutional crowning in elevation to the dignity of baronet and in the transmission of a lasting heritage. Sir David Salomons, 1st Baronet (22 November 1797 – 18 July 1873), was a major figure in the nineteenth-century struggle for Jewish emancipation in the United Kingdom; he was the first Jewish sheriff of the City of London and Lord Mayor of London. The creation of the baronetcy consecrated, through the hereditary title, the lineage's definitive entry into the establishment of the realm.

The family extended its influence beyond the City, toward Kent, where the house of Broomhill, near Tunbridge Wells, became the patrimonial seat of the Salomons. The title passed to the next generation, and the heir, David Lionel Salomons, distinguished the house in an entirely different domain: that of applied sciences and technical innovation, bearing witness to the metamorphosis of a dynasty of emancipating financiers into patrons of progress. This continuity — from the militant banker to the learned baronet — confers upon the lineage a remarkable coherence, in which the opening of political institutions extends into the opening of fields of knowledge [David Salomons, biographical notice]. Family memory, here, rests on solid evidence, even though not every patrimonial detail has been exhaustively documented; we therefore present it as probable, where the main narrative remains established.

The history of the Salomons reads like an epitome of British Jewish emancipation. From an Ashkenaze household on St Mary Axe to the Mansion House, from a City stockbroker to a baronet of the realm, the lineage traversed in two generations the distance separating legal toleration from full citizenship. The strength of this case lies in its nature as a precedent: each office won by David Salomons — sheriff in 1835, alderman in 1847, Member of Parliament in 1851, Lord Mayor in 1855 — compelled English law to acknowledge what fact had already imposed.

His parliamentary gesture of 1851, in particular, remains the founding moment: by taking his seat without swearing the Christian oath, he transformed a confessional incapacity into a constitutional debate, opening the way for the reforms that at last allowed Jews to sit in their own right. The family thereafter extended this heritage into the nobility and the sciences. The Great Book of the Salomons is thus that of a house in which the Memory of a struggle and the archive of an emancipation merge into a single narrative, exemplary above all others for the History of the Jews of England.