David Woolf Marks

Reverend David Woolf Marks (22 November 1811 – 3 May 1909) was a Hebrew scholar and minister. He was the first religious leader of the West London Synagogue, which seceded from the authority of the Chief Rabbi, where he advocated a quasi-Karaite philosophy.

Marks was born in London. His father was a merchant named Woolf Marks and his mother's name was Mary. Marks senior died when his son was but nine years old, in July 1821, and the child was sent to attend Jews' Free School, where he soon emerged as a prodigy. He spent most of the tutoring other pupils in Hebrew, while studying advanced material at night. He supported himself by iterating Kaddish for the soul of a deceased man and reading the Bible for the blind wife of Rabbi Solomon Hirschell, thus becoming his confidant. He earned a hundred pounds, a vast sum at the time, when the School's principal died and he replaced his for a while. That money sufficed to sustain him for five years in Hirschell's boarding school at Hammersmith, where he taught various subjects. In 1831 he abandoned this career to serve as assistant reader at the Western Synagogue, St Alban's Place, Haymarket. He was named assistant reader and secretary to the Seel Street Liverpool congregation in 1833.

During the 1820s, some intellectuals among Anglo-Jewry were influenced by the bibliocentric convictions of Anglican society, which regarded Testament alone as sanctified and scorned the Jews for valuing the Talmud. In 1833, Isaac D'Israeli published an anonymous pamphlet, The Genius of Judaism. He wrote that the rabbis, "the dictators of human intellect", deceived the people and had them accept the Talmud, a "prodigious mass of contradictory opinions... casting their people into the bondage of ridiculous customs." He praised the Karaites, "these Jewish protestants... the most rational Jews." In 1842, Abraham Benisch also praised them. Similar ideas permeated the upper strata of Anglo-Jewish society, though their actual knowledge of Karaism was scant. Jakob Josef Petuchowski suggested these opinions reflected an old current, prevalent among the Western Sephardim, many of whom were descended from Crypto-Jews who overtly practiced Christianity for generations and were unfamiliar with the Oral Torah. Haham David Nieto had to publish tracts in its defence over a century earlier.

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