‘Gasping for comprehension’: The Plantagenet monarchy’s treatment of the
Jews
By Gareth Russell
While writing my latest book A
History of the English Monarchy: From Boadicea to Elizabeth I, there were
very few stories that affected me more than the Diaspora under Edward I. Between 1290 and 1656 there were
no Jews in England – or, at least, none who could admit to it. In November
1290, Edward I had the entire Jewish community expelled from England in an
event known as the Diaspora. Prior to this, Jews had no civil rights in
thirteenth-century England; only Christians had rights in relation to their
ruler. As a result, Anglo-Jewry existed as a unique legal class that was
offered protection by the Sovereign but not by the letter of the law.
Unfortunately,
royal protection was not always efficacious. Anti-Semitic riots had erupted
during the festivities for Richard the Lionheart’s coronation in 1189 and King Richard
was severely criticised by the clergy for allowing Jews who had been forced to
convert to Christianity during the violence to return to their old religion.
When Richard went on Crusade, the absence of their kingly protector left the
Jews particularly vulnerable and massacres of local Jewish communities occurred
at Stamford, Bury St Edmunds and Lynn. The Jewish community in Lincoln were
granted sanctuary in the royal castle, but during the celebrations for Passover
their co-religionists in York were not so lucky. They were surrounded in Clifford’s
Tower by a baying mob who demanded that they either convert to Christianity or
perish. Imitating the actions of the Jewish martyrs at the fortress of Masada
in the first century AD, the Jews of York chose mass suicide over falling into
the hands of their enemies. Those few who did not were butchered within minutes
of leaving their place of shelter.
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| Clifford's Tower, York, 2014. |
There
were some medieval English Christians who objected to the persecution of the
Jews. The Bishop of Lincoln criticised Simon de Montfort’s cruelty towards them
during the reign of Henry III by reminding him that the Jews ‘are a wandering
people [...] they are fugitives from their proper home, that is Jerusalem, they
wander through uncertain stopping places and flee from fear of death’. But the majority
of medieval Christians believed sympathy to be wasted on the non-believer. In
1234, Pope Gregory IX argued that there was strong theological justification
for discriminating against the Jews, because the Gospel according to Saint John
made it quite clear that the Jews were forever stained with the blood of
Christ. Despite the fact that the Jewish community made up less than a quarter
of a percent of the overall English population in the thirteenth century,
anti-Semitism was widespread, as were stories of Jews participating in human
sacrifice or the kidnapping and murder of Christian martyr-children.
Christians, so it was claimed, were the real victims and it was their way of
life that was being threatened.
In
contrast to this consensus of clerical and popular paranoia, the English royal
family struggled to define their policy towards the Jews on both a personal and
political level. Queens were likely to be particularly familiar with
high-ranking English Jews due to a levy known as the queens-gold, a tax that
had originally been created by Henry I to supplement the income of his second
wife, Adeliza of Louvain. It meant that an extra ten percent was added to any
fine owed to the Crown by a Christian over the value of ten marks, as well as
on any tax paid by the Jews.
However,
in a climate of hatred, considerable popularity could be won by any sovereign
who took a stand against the Jewish community. Shortly after his coronation,
Edward I decreed that all Jews should be removed from any estates that had been
granted to the Queen Mother in her widowhood. Eleanor of Provence had
apparently made this request herself, since she did not want any contact with
sin imperilling the salvation of her soul. This led to the eviction of Jewish
communities in Marlborough, Gloucester, Worcester, Andover, Bath, Guildford and
Cambridge. Later in the same year, Edward implemented that Statute of the
Jewry, which forbade Christians to live near Jews, implemented a special new
tax on every Jew above the age of twelve, restricted where Jews were allowed to
live and, amongst other provisions, declared that when in public every Jew over
the age of seven had to wear a yellow badge, known as the tabula, measuring six inches by three. In 1287 all Jews were
expelled from English territory in Gascony and on 18 July 1290, the policy was
extended to England. In the midst of the wedding celebrations for his daughter
Mary, who was marrying the Duke of Brabant, King Edward issued a decree
banishing all the Jews from his kingdom. They were given just over three months
to pack up their lives and leave in time for the Feast of All Saints, which falls
on the first day of November.
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| Persecution of Jewish people was an ongoing feature of
medieval life |
Some
of those in the elite who had maintained relatively friendly relations with the
Jews, like the King’s younger brother Edmund, his wife Queen Eleanor of Castile
and the Archbishop of York, tried their best to secure safe passage out of
England for their former associates. Desperate to prevent a triumphalist pogrom
against the émigrés, Archbishop John
le Romeyn of York threatened any Christian caught in his diocese molesting or
harming the Jews as they left with excommunication. Prince Edmund managed to
obtain a special license for a Jewish gentleman called Aaron fil Vives to sell
his houses and rents in London, Canterbury and Oxford to Christians and Queen
Eleanor begged Edward to grant Hagin fil Deulecresse, the Jewish Archpresbyter,
a similar permit. He did so on the grounds that Hagin was ‘the Jew of his
dearest consort Eleanor’.
The
majority of English Jews were not so lucky. As one ship carrying the exiles
sailed up the Thames, the captain claimed that his ship had run aground on a
sandbank. To lighten the load as the vessel was re-floated, the Jewish
passengers were allowed off to stretch their legs on the bank. Once they had
disembarked, the captain and crew sailed away, leaving them to drown in the
incoming tide. Those who survived the Diaspora of 1290 were scattered to the
wind and Anglo-Jewish settlers were found in Amiens, Paris, Spain, northern
Italy, Germany, and even as far afield as Cairo. A London scribe reflected that
they had become ‘a fugitive people exiled from England for all time, always a
wretched people to wander anywhere in the world’.
Reflecting
on the importance of History is easy, but its applicability is an altogether
more fraught concept. The expulsion of the Jews in 1290, with all the cruelty
it showcased and the misery it entailed, certainly has an even more sinister
appearance in light of the Holocaust of the twentieth century. That the Nazi Holocaust
had nothing to do with Christian teaching should be obvious to all but the most
zealous and disingenuous of Christianity’s critics. What happened in the 1940s
was the result of a totalitarian political ideology and a perverted interpretation
of evolutionary science. However, simply because Christianity’s fundamental
teachings are the antithesis of the horrors found in Auschwitz does not mean
that it is automatically innocent of nurturing the long-term European
anti-Semitism that helped make Auschwitz or its sister camps possible.
For
centuries, the Christian faith taught that Jews were not only inferior to
Christians but also harmful – a tumour in the body politics. This was not a
view unique to Catholicism. The diatribes of Martin Luther and the pogroms
carried out by Russian peasants show that Protestantism and the Orthodox
churches were just as capable of vicious hatred against Judaism. Jews were
admittedly treated badly under the pagan Roman Empire and their religion was
mocked, but so too were many other peoples of the empire, none of whom endured
bitter persecution once the Roman Empire had vanished. Anti-Semitism as we know
it was encouraged and hideously magnified by medieval Christianity and it is
impossible to escape reaching that conclusion when examining the fate of the
Jewish community in thirteenth-century England.
Medieval
Christianity was an extraordinarily beautiful thing. It moulded some of the
noblest minds in European history. Its capacity to move the faithful towards acts
of courage, charity and compassion, the haunting beauty of its music, its art,
the brilliant and subtle complexities of its theology, the men and women who
sacrificed everything to live by its teachings, its cathedrals, built by
thousands of hands over the course of generations, are proof of the devotion it
inspired and the wonders it was capable of. In a violent age, it tried to
promote values like chivalry, mercy and honour. It preached strongly against
rape and canonised dozens of young women who had been its victims. And yet, it
condoned and even celebrated the persecution of the Jews. In 1943, even as the
Nazi Holocaust gathered its dread momentum, the historian Joshua Trachtenburg
wrote that ‘the most vivid impression to be gained from a reading of medieval
allusions to the Jews is of a hatred so vast and abysmal, so intense that it
leaves one gasping for comprehension’. Perhaps, in the end, the Diaspora’s
greatest lesson is not just of what was wrong with the thirteenth century or
medieval religion, but a reminder, if ever one was needed, of man’s inhumanity
to man, how readily he can justify it and the tragedies of the past.
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Thank you for an interesting post, Gareth!
Here's a description of the book from the publisher:
In A History of the English Monarchy, historian Gareth Russell traces the story of the English monarchy and the interactions between popular belief, religious faith and brutal political reality that helped shape the extraordinary journey of one of history’s most important institutions.
From the birth of the nation to the dazzling court of Elizabeth I, A History of the English Monarchy charts the fascinating path of the English monarchy from the uprising of ‘Warrior Queen’ Boadicea in AD60 through each king and queen up to the ‘Golden Age’ of Elizabeth I. Russell offers a fresh take on a fascinating subject as old as the nation itself. Legends, tales and, above all, hard facts tell an incredible story… a history of the English Monarchy.
ISBN: 978-84-943721-2-4 Pages: 322
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About the author:
Gareth Russell is an historian and
writer from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He studied Modern History at the
University of Oxford and completed a postgraduate in medieval history at
Queen’s University, Belfast. He is the author of two novels and three non-fiction
books, including his most recent book, A
History of the English Monarchy: From Boadicea to Elizabeth I. He is
currently writing a biography of Queen Catherine Howard.
Remember that if you'd like to win your own copy of the book leave a comment below with your email. Good luck!
