Isaac Henriques Sequeira

Isaac Henriques Sequeira was born in Lisbon to a family of well-connected physicians. His forebears had been forcibly converted to Christianity under the Inquisition, but he himself appears to have been drawn back to his Jewish roots. London, with its growing Jewish population and general tolerance of the faith, offered a safe haven in a capital rich with opportunities. He migrated here sometime in the 1760s, becoming a popular medical practitioner among the nobility and the gentry.

His marriage at Bevis Marks Synagogue in 1773 to Esther Lopes Pereira connected him to a number of settled Sephardi families with properties in Islington (for example the Basevis, the Delvalles, the Lindos and the Samudas) and he took up residence initially in the vicinity of Canonbury House. Soon afterwards he moved to Barnsbury Place, an extensive property to the west of Upper Street, where Sutton Dwellings stand today. By coincidence, its southern boundary, marked today by what is now Barnsbury Street was where Barnsbury Hall – the community hall in which the North London Synagogue originated – would be built a century later.

Albert Hyamson quotes a member of the Montefiore family, aged 13 when Sequeira died, remembering him as ‘a tall, thin man with white hair and a very pompous manner. He always dressed in a snuff cutaway coat and white stockings, and carried a fine, gold-headed cane’, the badge of the medical profession in England. Sequeira’s portrait by Gainsborough, which hangs in the Prado Museum in Madrid, shows a man of less showy bearing, and it is hard to know which comes closer to the truth.