SOUTHAMPTON

SOUTHAMPTON, major port in S. England. Its small medieval community was expelled in 1236 (Runceval, a house owned by the Jewish financier, Benedict of Winchester, was excavated in the 1960s). During the 16th century, Marrano agents boarded ships docking at Southampton to inform Marrano refugees from Portugal whether it was safe for them to proceed   to their destination in Flanders. The modern community dates from 1833, though individual Jews lived in Southampton in the late 18th century and some were navy agents during the Napoleonic Wars. A split in the early congregation was settled soon after the appointment of nathan marcus adler as chief rabbi of Anglo-Jewry in 1844. Later Southampton was the port largely used by Jews traveling to and from South Africa. In 1969 the Jewish population numbered 150, out of a general population of 210,000. In the mid-1990s the Jewish population numbered approximately 105. According to the 2001 British census, there were 293 declared Jews in Southampton. It had an Orthodox synagogue. The University of Southampton has emerged as one of the major academic centers of Jewish history in Britain and contains the Parkes Library, which holds a number of important collections of Anglo-Jewish material. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: C. Roth, The Rise of Provincial Jewry (1950), 100; JYB; Roth, England, index. (Vivian David Lipman / William D. Rubinstein (2nd ed.)