Isaac Rosenberg was born at what was then 5 Adelaide Place, St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol.
In the late nineteenth century, Eastern European Jews were fleeing economic persecution and violence In 1882, Chief Rabbi Dr H. Adler described the terror in Russia: ‘that the Jews should be restricted more and more in every trade and profession, and that the schools were to be closed against their children, and that they should be degraded.’ He reported ‘pillaging’, ‘woundings, and butchery’. Dr Adler asked that ‘the great heart of England’ be ‘mightily stirred’. In Bristol, John Levy, Secretary of the Anglo-Jewish Association, organised fund-raising amongst the existing Jewish community to sponsor Jewish refugees. The Jewish refugees arriving in Bristol were poorer than their ‘Westernised’ counterparts already living in Bristol, who had begun to work and live alongside and in Genteel society. The newer arrivals worked as pawnbrokers, boot makers, bakers, and dressmakers. The Great Depression in England (1873-1896) drove up unemployment amongst manual workers, and anti-Semitism reared its head: intellectual Jewish refugees were accused of promoting terrorism and socialism, while labouring Jews were accused of devaluing traditional trades and ‘racial dilution’. In August 1905, the Conservative government passed the Aliens’ Act, the first legislation to control immigration.
Barnett Rosenberg fled Moscow for Bristol to avoid conscription into the Russian army, where Jews were commonly abused. He worked as a hawker, and his wife, Hacha, took in laundry. On the twenty-fifth of November 1890, Hacha gave birth to their second son, Isaac Rosenberg. Barnett signed his name on Isaac’s birth certificate as an ‘X’. Isaac would grow up to be one of England’s most significant war poets and artists. He died on the western front in 1st April 1918. His work is held at the Tate Modern and the National Portrait Gallery, and his poetry stands with that of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen’s.
