SCOTLAND

SCOTLAND, northern part of Britain. Although there are records of applications by individual Jews for rights of trade and residence in Edinburgh as early as 1691, and there is reason to believe that a short-lived congregation was established there in 1780, the first organized Jewish community in Scotland,   that of Edinburgh, was not established until 1816. It was followed shortly by that of Glasgow. The mass immigration from Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries brought many Jewish settlers to Glasgow, but comparatively few to Edinburgh. Of the 15,000 Jews living in Scotland in 1971, all but some 220 resided in Glasgow (13,400) and Edinburgh (1,400). The remainder were distributed in Dundee (84), Ayr (68), Aberdeen (40), and Inverness (12). In the mid-1990s the Jewish population of Glasgow dropped to approximately 6,700 and that of Edinburgh to approximately 500. According to the 2001 British census, there were 4,224 declared Jews by religion in Glasgow, 763 in Edinburgh, 30 in Aberdeen, and 22 in Dundee. There is a Scottish Council of Jewish Communities, and a range of Jewish institutions, especially in Glasgow. Dr. Kenneth Collins has written widely on the history of Scottish Jewry in such works as Aspects of Scottish Jewry (1987), which he edited. Relations between Jews and non-Jews in Scotland have always been harmonious. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: A. Levy, Origins of Scottish Jewry (1959); C. Bermant, Troubled Eden (1969), 54–59.