List of British Jewish nobility and gentry

The British nobility consists of two sometimes overlapping entities, the peerage and the gentry. The peerage is a legal system of largely hereditary titles, granted by the Sovereign. Under this system, only the senior family member bears a substantive title (duke, marquess, earl, viscount, baron). The gentry are untitled members of the upper classes, however, exceptions include baronets, knights, Scottish barons and lairds.

The history of the Jews in Britain goes back to the reign of William I. The first written record of Jewish settlement in England dates from 1070, although Jews may have lived there since Roman times.[1] The Jewish presence continued until King Edward I's Edict of Expulsion in 1290. After the expulsion, there was no Jewish community, apart from individuals who practised Judaism secretly, until the rule of Oliver Cromwell. While Cromwell never officially readmitted Jews to Britain, a small colony of Sephardic Jews living in London was identified in 1656 and allowed to remain. The Jewish Naturalisation Act of 1753, an attempt to legalise the Jewish presence in Britain, remained in force for only a few months. Historians commonly date Jewish Emancipation to either 1829 or 1858 when Jews were finally allowed to sit in Parliament. The first Jewish knight was Sir Solomon de Medina, knighted in 1700, with no further Jews being knighted until 1837, when Queen Victoria knighted Moses Haim Montefiore; four years later, Isaac Lyon Goldsmid was made a baronet, the first Jew to receive a hereditary title. In 1885 Nathan Mayer Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild, became the first Jew to receive an hereditary peerage.