Joshua Jacob (1801–1877), born in Clonmel, began as a respected Quaker and prosperous Dublin tea merchant. By the late 1830s, however, he denounced what he saw as Quaker “backsliding” and “worldliness”. His fiery protests against “mammonism” and modern habits—such as newspapers,clocks, and mirrors—led to his severing ties with the Quakers in 1838.
Jacob founded a separatist sect known as the White Quakers(or “White Friends”), who embraced extreme simplicity and communal living. Theywore plain, undyed white clothing, often went barefoot, and banned luxuries like carpets, silverware, and even bed curtains. Their homes were stripped of decoration and painted white; furniture was coarse and minimal. They practiced vegetarianism, daily bathing, and manual labour, aiming to live in a state of constant spiritual readiness. Meetings were held in Dublin, Waterford,Mountmellick, and Clonmel, long a Quaker stronghold.
The sect’s eccentricities shocked Victorian society. Novelist William Thackeray described seeing “white Quakers and Quakeresses in whitehats, clothes, shoes, with wild maniacal-looking faces, bumping along the road.” Critics accused them of free-love after Jacob divorced his wife Sarah and entered a spiritual “marriage” with Abigail Beale in 1843. Their communal experiments included a house in Dublin and later an estate at Newlands,Clondalkin, envisioned as a utopian paradise—but plagued by scandal,desertions, and legal battles over property.
Jacob’s refusal to return money from a disputed inheritance landed him in Dublin’s Marshalsea prison on 10 January 1843 where he spent over three years. During which time he continued directing the sect and publishing fiery pamphlets. Allegations of nudity and bizarre public “tests”—such as ordering wealthy women to eat porridge barefoot on the steps of the Bank of Ireland—cemented their reputation for fanaticism.
By the 1850s, famine, internal strife, and ridicule had reduced the movement to a handful of followers. Jacob later converted to Catholicism and died in 1877. Though short-lived, the White Quakers remain one of Ireland’s most colourful religious experiments—an audacious attempt by a Clonmel-born prophet to restore Quaker purity through radical, eccentric means.
Sources:
https://www.thurles.info/category/history/page/22/
https://www.dib.ie/biography/jacob-joshua-a4247
James Gregory, ‘Some Account of the Progress of the Truth asit Is in Jesus': The White Quakers of Ireland. Published in Quaker Studies,Volume 9, Issue 1, pp68-94.
