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Caroline Gurney of the University of Bristol has won the 2022 JHSE David Hyman Prize of £5000 for her work on Mapping Bristol’s Jewish Community, 1724-1881.
As part of her PhD research into Bristol’s Jewish community, Ms Gurney has created a database documenting some 1,600 Jewish individuals living in Bristol between 1724 and 1881 with extensive detail on sites where people lived and worked. These sites will be mapped as an information layer on Bristol City Council’s Know Your Place historical mapping website and will include links to further information about individuals and businesses. Mrs Gurney will present her work to the JHSE in the summer of 2022. The David Hyman Prize offers a maximum of £5,000 in a competition to be judged by the JHSE Awards Committee. The remit is for any research in the field of the history of Jewish communities in British port cities from the 1740s through to 1914. David Hyman (1930-2019) was an active and loyal member of the JHSE who left a bequest to the JHSE to promote research on the Port Jews of Britain. The JHSE honours this bequest through the David Hyman Prize. Caroline Gurney is a Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History (Historical Studies) at the University of Bristol. Her research explores the origins, demographic structure, lives, and relationships of Bristol's Jewish community during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her master's dissertation, The Alexander Family and the City of Bristol, 1798-1926, showed that it is possible to reconstruct the lives of a Jewish family in Bristol through in-depth research in primary sources, many of which had not previously been used for Jewish studies. Her doctoral research is using the same techniques to investigate the whole community, providing new insights into its composition, networks, lifestyle, and culture. There is growing evidence that Jewish communities in London and the provinces were closely interlinked. Detailed research into the Bristol community is therefore highly relevant to the history of Anglo-Jewry as a whole and is throwing new light upon the Jewish experience nationwide. About the JHSE