From Saltash you can see Plymouth across the Tamar, and somewhere in that grey riverside sprawl of dockyard and terraces sits a building most of the city walks past without noticing. That is rather the point. The Plymouth Synagogue on Catherine Street was finished in 1764, and it is the oldest surviving synagogue built by Ashkenazi Jews anywhere in the English speaking world. Its congregation had been gathering in private rooms since the 1740s, and when they finally raised a permanent house of prayer they placed the entrance not on the street but at the back, in what amounts to a garden.

Sharman Kadish, the leading authority on Britain’s Jewish buildings, has argued that the discreet siting was deliberate. A visible synagogue in eighteenth century England risked the kind of mob violence that routinely visited other houses of worship outside the established Church. So the builders gave their shul the plain face of a Nonconformist meeting house, a Cornish slate roof, and a door........

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