Between the expulsion of England’s Jews by Edward I in 1290 and the ‘Resettlement’ that began in the 1650s, London officially had no Jewish population. In fact, a few Sephardim (Jews from the southern European, Middle Eastern and North African portions of the diaspora) settled in London and other British cities from the late-C15, especially from the 1490s when thousands of Jews were expelled from Spain and Portugal. Some of these were, or became, very wealthy through trade, and a handful achieved great influence at court as financiers and economic advisers; nevertheless, Jewish religious practice was still not officially tolerated, and Jews who died in London had to be buried in parish churchyards under the Anglican rite. Under the Protectorate, a group of leading British Jews petitioned Oliver Cromwell to grant them extended civil rights, including the conduct of religious services and the burial of the dead – a request that Cromwell seems tacitly to have accepted. There followed a large influx of Sephardi Jews into London, mainly from the Iberian peninsula where persecution by the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition continued.
Jewish law, like Roman law, forbids burials within the walls of a city. Prior to 1290, London's Jewish population had buried its dead just outside Cripplegate; the first post-Resettlement burial ground, the Velho (old) cemetery, was established in 1657 a mile and a half to the east of Aldgate, on the site of a former orchard in what was then known as Mile End Old Town. An adjacent site, on what is now Alderney Road, was used from 1696 as a cemetery by London’s growing Ashkenazi (eastern European Jewish) community. The Velho was by this time nearly full, and the site for a second, much larger Sephardi burial ground – another former orchard, about 400m to the east of its predecessor – was leased in 1726. The first burials at this, the Novo or Nuevo (new) cemetery, took place in 1733, and in that year a mortuary chapel or ohel was built near the southern entrance. Over the next hundred and fifty years, virtually all Sephardi burials in London took place here, including those of Diego Pereira, Baron Aguilar (1699-1759), financier and adviser to the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa; the merchant Benjamin D'Israeli (1730-1816), grandfather and namesake of the great Victorian prime minister, and Daniel Mendoza (1764-1836), celebrated prizefighter and author of the first English boxing textbook.
In the mid-C19 further expansion was necessary, and a further 1.7 acres were added to the east, between the pre-existing cemetery and the Regent's Canal, in 1855. Those buried in this section include the comic actor David Belasco, alias David James (1839-93); Joseph Elmaleh (1809-86), chief rabbi of Mogador and Austrian consul in Morocco, and several prominent members of the wealthy and prestigious Montefiore family. But by the end of the century London’s more affluent Sephardim had moved away from the City and East End, their place taken by the great influx of poor Ashkenazi refugees from eastern Europe, and in 1897 the Novo was effectively superseded by a new Sephardi burial ground at Hoop Lane in Golders Green. The north-eastern part of the Novo remained open for adult burials until 1906, and for child burials until 1918, with a dwindling trickle of ad-hoc interments continuing into the 1970s.
The area immediately to the west of the Novo had, meanwhile, become the home of Queen Mary College, the successor to the ‘People’s Palace’ of 1887 and by now a part of the University of London. The college too had outgrown its site, and negotiations to acquire and develop the now-defunct cemetery were under way from the 1940s, although legal obstacles – and objections by some members of the Jewish community – delayed the purchase until 1972. The ‘old’ (1733) part of the Novo was cleared, with the remains of about 7,000 people carefully excavated and reburied on college-owned land near Brentwood in Essex. The 1855 portion of the cemetery, its occupants more recently deceased and hence more likely to have living relatives, largely escaped redevelopment, becoming a fenced-off enclave surrounded by the new library and faculty buildings of the expanded college, which holds a 999-year lease on the site. Its boundaries were re-landscaped in 2011 by Andrew Abdulezer of Seth Stein Architects, in collaboration with the Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation of London.