Quakers and Jews

As Tony Stoller noted in his introduction to a Special Issue of Friends Quarterly in 2015, ‘[t]he relationship between Quakers and Jews has a very long history indeed’. His contribution, which discussed recent fractures in the relationship, positioned the divisions in contrast to a ‘heritage of involvement’ shared by the groups. This article, and the Presidential address on which it is based, seeks to add to such analyses by offering an overview of trends in shared Jewish and Quaker history, focussing on their position as religious minorities, at times severely persecuted, and certainly stereotyped in ways which led at times to claims by those in power that Jews and Friends were almost interchangeable.