CHAPTER IX
THE JEWS IN ENGLAND
The first mention of Jews on this side of the Channel is said to occur in the Church Constitutions of Egbert, Archbishop of York, towards the middle of the eighth century; the second in a monastic charter of some hundred years later. But they do not seem to have crossed over in any considerable force till the Norman Conquest. ♦1066♦ Among the foreigners who followed William to his new dominions were many families of French Jews. Their ready money and their eagerness to part with it rendered them welcome to the king and his barons. The former received from them advances, when his feudal dues were in arrear; the latter had recourse to the Jew’s money-bag whenever the expense of military service or the extravagance of their life made a loan necessary. To men of lower rank also, such as litigants who were obliged to follow the King’s Court from county to county, or to repair to Rome in order to plead their cases before the Pope’s Curia, the Jew’s purse was of constant help. No less useful was the Jew to the English tax-payer. In those days of picturesque inefficiency taxes were levied at irregular intervals and in lump sums. The subject, suddenly called upon to pay a large amount at short notice, was only too glad to borrow from the Jew.
However, such intercourse with the Gentiles, high and low, notwithstanding, the Jews formed in England, as they did on the Continent, a people apart. In each town the synagogue formed a centre round which clustered the colony. Newcomers gravitated towards the same centre, and thus spontaneously grew the Jewries of London, Norwich, York, Northampton, and other English cities. These Jewish quarters were the King’s property and, like his forests, they were outside the jurisdiction of the common law. But, while their judicial and financial interests were under royal control, the Jews were allowed full liberty of worship, were permitted to build synagogues and to conduct their religious affairs under their own Chief Rabbi, thus constituting a self-governing and self-centred community. The literary activity of the Jews during their sojourn in England reveals a marvellous detachment from their environment. Commentaries and super-commentaries on the Old Testament and the Talmud, learned treatises on minute points of ritual and ceremonial, discussions on the benedictory formulas that are appropriate to each occasion of life: on rising in the morning, or lying down at night, on eating, washing, on being married, on hearing thunder, and a myriad other profound trivialities—such was the stuff that their studies were made of. And whilst Norman and Saxon, Celt and Dane were being welded into one English people, Israel remained a race distinct in face, speech, domestic economy, deportment, diet of the body and diet of the soul.
The singularity of the Jews’ habits, their usury, the wealth accumulated thereby, and the ostentatious display of it, must from the very first have evoked among the English feelings of distrust and jealousy, dislike and contempt, such as at a later period inspired a genial poet to pronounce that “Hell is without light where they sing lamentations.” But during the first century of their residence in the country they seem to have suffered from no active manifestation of these feelings. William the Conqueror favoured them, and William Rufus actually farmed out vacant bishoprics to them. ♦1087–1100♦ The latter prince’s easy tolerance of Judaism is denounced by the monkish historians in many quaint tales, which, though meant to throw light on William’s irreligion, also serve to illustrate his sense of humour. At one time a Jew, whose son had been lured to Christianity, went to the King, and, by means of prayers and a present of sixty marks, prevailed upon him to lend his assistance in recovering the strayed lamb. The King did his utmost to carry out his part of the contract, but, on finding the youth obdurate, told the father that inasmuch as he had failed he was not entitled to the present; but inasmuch as he had conscientiously striven to succeed, he deserved to be paid for his trouble, and he kept thirty marks. On another occasion William summoned some Christian theologians and some learned Rabbis to his presence, and, telling them that he was anxious to embrace that doctrine which upon comparison should be found to have truth on its side, he set them disputing for his own entertainment.
The King’s good-natured attitude was even shared by his antagonists. St. Anselm, the Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, for example, and other eminent ecclesiastics, in their efforts to convert the Jews, did not overstep the limits of argument; at times of peril churches and monasteries afforded an asylum to the effects and to the families of Jews; no attempt was made to poison the relations, such as they were, between the two elements; and there are instances of Jews helping the monks with prayers and otherwise in their efforts to resist the encroachments of Archbishops, and even of Jews drinking with Gentiles.
Meanwhile, the Continent was undergoing the spiritual travail which resulted in the tremendous explosion of the Crusades. England, as a member of the Catholic family of nations, and in many ways under Continental influence, could not long remain deaf to the cry which rang throughout Christendom. The unsettled condition of the country under the first three Norman kings, and the convulsions to which it fell a prey under the fourth, had hitherto prevented England from responding to the Pope’s call in an adequate manner; but the religious fever was infectious, and on reaching England it translated any vague sentimental dislike of the Jews that may have existed into an open and determined hostility, which led to deeds of violence such as had already disgraced the Continent.
The atrocious charge of sacrificing Christian children and using their blood in their mysterious Passover rites, or in medicine, is now for the first time heard under the definite form which has since become familiar; and the English town of Norwich seems to be entitled to the unenviable credit of its birth. The populace of that city was one day, in 1144, horrified by the rumour that the Jews had kidnapped and murdered a boy, named William, for the purpose of obtaining his blood. A renegade Jew brought forth the libel, and the local bishop adopted it. The sheriff considered the evidence insufficient, and refused to sanction a trial before the Bishop’s Court. But the people, encouraged by the clergy, took the law into their own hands, and, despite the sheriff’s efforts to protect the Jews, many of the latter were slaughtered, while the rest fled in fear for their lives.
♦1155–1189♦
Within the next thirty-four years the same blood-accusation recurred at Gloucester and Bury St. Edmunds, and led to a similar catastrophe.[65] But during the reign of Henry II. anti-Jewish feeling, with the last exception, was firmly checked. That King, renowned in history as “the greatest prince of his time for wisdom, virtue, and abilities,” followed in the footsteps of William the Conqueror and William Rufus, and, in the opinion of the monastic chroniclers, sullied his otherwise stainless character by the favour which he showed to the Jews. He delivered them from the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts and granted to them the privilege of settling their disputes in their own Beth Din, or Religious Tribunal, and of burying their dead outside the cities in which they dwelt. Henceforward the Jews were to be regarded as the King’s own chattels, and to enjoy the protection of the King’s officers, as they did in Germany, and on the same terms.
Royal favours, of course, are never granted without an equivalent. The wealth of the Jews, being moveable and concentrated in few hands, was much more accessible to the King than that of his Christian subjects. They were, accordingly, made to pay more than the latter. When, in 1187, Henry levied a contribution, he received from the Jews alone nearly one-half of the whole amount, they contributing one-fourth of their property (£60,000), while the Christians one-tenth (£70,000). But, though the King’s Exchequer was the richer for the King’s clemency, the Jews enjoyed the right to live and grow wealthy. England was not a loser by this toleration of the children of Israel. Their ready money, despite the high rates of interest at which it was lent, supplied a powerful stimulus to industry and to architecture. Many a castle and cathedral owed their existence to Jewish capital. And not only the means of erection but also models for imitation were due to the Jews, who by their example taught the rude English burgesses the superiority of a stone house over a mud hovel, as is shown by the buildings at Bury St. Edmunds and Lincoln which still bear the name of “Jews’ houses.” Indeed, in this and subsequent reigns we hear marvellous tales of Jewish opulence and magnificence, such as that of Abraham fil Rabbi, Jurnet of Norwich, and Aaron of Lincoln, and even of unwelcomed proselytes to Judaism. Both these blessings, however, material prosperity and religious popularity, proved curses in disguise to their possessors. The riches of the Jew could not but rouse the cupidity of mediaeval barons, and his dissent the bigotry of mediaeval priests. Moreover, it would have been contrary to all the laws of probability and human nature had the Jews been left unmolested much longer in a land where the crusading spirit was abroad, where the popular hatred of the Jew had been recently fanned by abominable calumny and by royal favour, and where the civil authority was so frequently set at naught by feudal lawlessness. Last and most ominous sign, the Jews by an Act, passed in 1181, were forbidden to keep or bear arms.