Herbert martin james loewe in Oxford

Abstract

One of the catalogues of the Hartley Library (at the University of Southampton) has the surprising entry: ‘MS 175 Oxford Minister’s Fund Papers, 1913–41’. It is surprising because after Rev. Moses H. Segal (who had become the minister of the Oxford Jewish congregation in 1901) left the city in 1909, there was no resident minister for the next thirty years. 1 The resident Jewish population was tiny, a mere handful of families, and it is unlikely that they could have afforded to pay a minister. It was only after the expansion of the community — because of evacuation from the major cities during the Second World War — that a minister came into residence. It proved to be a temporary appointment and he left in 1948. There has been no resident minister since. However, while the resident Jewish population for the first four decades of the twentieth century was small, the number of undergraduates increased and it was for these students that the ‘Oxford Minister’ was intended.