Jews’ Hospital, Mile End. Engraved by Thomas Prattent. View of the façade of the Jewish Hospital in Whitechapel, East London, with key to the left and right explaining the function of the rooms within the building.

(ANGLO-JUDAICA).

London, 1790

Engraving.

Rubens 788.

Founded in 1806 this institution was less of a hospital and more focused on providing a form of training to the poor, the elderly and male and female juveniles. Those that went there for rehabilitation were called “inmates”. Their parents had to be members of one of the three major synagogues in London (the Great, the Hambro’ or the New) and to have been born in London or lived there for the past ten years. Thus there was neither a focus on recent immigrants, nor on the destitute living on the streets. The Jews’ Hospital was established for the children of the “respectable” poor. For an examination as to how the working of such an institution was viewed within the Jewish community of the time, see M. Rozin, The Rich and the Poor: Jewish Philanthropy and Social Control in Nineteenth-Century London (1999).