Manchester, one of England’s biggest metropolitan areas, is home to the largest Jewish community in the country outside London, numbering around 30,000 people.
They live in the city alongside an even larger population that identifies as Muslim, which makes up one-fifth of the city’s 550,000 citizens.
The result, said Graham Stringer, a lawmaker in northern Manchester whose district includes the synagogue, is a city with “a very large Jewish community next to a very large Muslim community.”
By and large, relationships between different ethnic and religious groups in the city are excellent, Mr. Stringer said in an interview with BBC Radio Manchester. However, he added that “there are always extreme people who want to damage those relationships and want to, in this case, damage Jews and the Jewish community.”
Like other metropolitan centers in Britain, Manchester has absorbed waves of immigration over the centuries from across the globe. Jews began arriving in the city in the 18th century, and the Jewish population rapidly grew beginning in the late 19th century when those fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe settled in the city, then booming thanks to trade and industrialization.
That pattern continued in the 20th century as antisemitism took root in parts of Continental Europe and Nazism gripped Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.
In the second half of the century, after the decolonization of the British Empire and the creation of the Commonwealth — an association of many states almost all of which were previously under British rule — migrants from around the world entered the Britain legally. That remained true even after restrictions were introduced in 1971 on the right of Commonwealth citizens to settle in the country.
When Uganda, a former British protectorate, expelled Asian residents in 1972, Britain decided it had a responsibility to welcome them. People migrated to Manchester legally from dozens of other countries as well, including Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Kosovo and Albania. And the diversity of the city’s population has drawn people from many more countries to make their homes there.
In 2017, a suicide bombing attack on an Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena cast a spotlight on the city’s Libyan community, because the parents of the perpetrator, Salman Abedi, had emigrated from Libya. As a teenager in 2011, Mr. Abedi had spent time in Libya as the government of Colonel Qaddafi tottered, joining his father, who was part of a group of combatants in the civil war known as “the Manchester fighters.” The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack on the concert.
In a document outlining a strategy to improve relations between disparate communities, designed to cover the years 2023-26, the Manchester City Council noted that social cohesion “can be profoundly influenced by local, national and international events and politics.”
It added that the presence of bad actors seeking to sow division was “nothing new” but said that “an increase in segregated and disconnected communities together with the impact of social media can mean that misinformation and rumors can rapidly inflame community tensions.”
Stephen Castle is a London correspondent of The Times, writing widely about Britain, its politics and the country’s relationship with Europe.
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