Israel in Europe

by G. F. Abbott

♦1189♦

Where prejudice is, pretexts for persecution are not wanting. A favourable opportunity for the expression of public feeling was offered by the coronation of Richard Coeur de Lion. Richard was the first English King who took up the cross against the infidels, and his reign was appropriately inaugurated by an anti-Jewish demonstration. The Jews were by royal edict forbidden to show their unchristian countenances in the Abbey during the ceremony. But some of them, armed with rich gifts from their people to the King, presumed to take up their station outside the Church. The street was thronged with the servants and retainers of the barons and knights who assisted at the coronation, as well as by a miscellaneous mob, drawn thither by curiosity. The foreign faces of the Jews were soon detected by the fanatical crowd, in holiday mood, and were at once made the marks of insult and riot. The wretches tried to escape; the populace pursued them; and one at least was obliged to save his life by baptism. Later in the day a rumour got abroad that the King had ordered a general slaughter of the Jews. The alleged command found many persons only too ready to carry it out. All the Jews that happened to be out of doors were cut to pieces, without remorse and without resistance, while those who had wisely remained at home were attacked by the zealous and greedy crowd, who broke into their houses, murdered the inmates, plundered their effects, and ended by setting fire to the Jewry. The riotous and avaricious instincts of the populace once roused, the havoc spread far and wide, and the city of London soon became a scene of pillage and rapine, in which no invidious distinction was made between Christian and infidel, but all were impartially robbed who were worth robbing. The King’s endeavours to bring these atrocities home to the guilty resulted in the discovery that the punishment would involve so great a number that, after having hanged three offenders, he was forced to desist. The very magnitude of the crime saved its authors.

Nor did the excitement terminate in the capital. The good news of the massacre of the Jews travelled to the provinces, and everywhere found the field ready to receive the seed. All the principal towns in England swarmed at that time with Crusaders preparing for their expedition. The sight of these warriors stirred the martial and religious spirit of the people, and, when they started the campaign against the Crescent by falling upon the native Jews, they found numerous and enthusiastic auxiliaries among the burgesses, the priests, and the impoverished gentlemen. Indeed, how could any one refuse to help in the destruction of God’s enemies, who in many cases also happened to be the assailants’ creditors? In York the immediate excuse for an attack was a certain Joceus, who, being forcibly baptized in London on the day of Richard’s coronation, on his return home renounced the creed thrust upon him and thereby earned the odium of apostasy. Accompanied by a number of his co-religionists the hunted man sought refuge with all his treasures in the castle. The mob, incited by a fanatical Canon and led by the castellan, laid siege to the castle. The Jews had recourse to desperate measures. Some of them, acting on the heroic advice of a Rabbi, killed their own wives and children, flung the corpses from the battlements upon the besieging crowd, and then prepared to consign the castle and themselves to the flames. The others capitulated, and were massacred by the mob, at the instigation of a gentleman deeply indebted to them. Then the crowd, headed by the landed proprietors of the neighbourhood, all of whom owed money to the Jews, hastened to the Cathedral, where the bonds were kept, and burnt them on the altar, under the benedictions of the priests.

Like deeds were perpetrated at Norwich, Bury St. Edmunds, Lynn, Lincoln, Colchester, and Stamford, and in all these places, as in London, the King’s officers found themselves powerless to prevent or punish. Richard, however, could not afford to have his Jews butchered or driven out of the country. He, therefore, issued a charter, confirming to the wealthiest among them the privileges which they had enjoyed under his predecessors: the privilege of owning land, of bequeathing and inheriting money-debts, of moving to and fro in the country without let or hindrance, and of exemption from all tolls. In return for his protection, the King claimed a closer supervision of their property and profits. His Treasury was to know how much they had, and how much they made. Staffs of Jewish and Christian clerks, appointed in various parts of the country, were to witness their deeds, enter them into a special register, and see that three copies were made of every bond: one to be placed into the hands of a magistrate, another into those of some respectable private citizen, and a third to be left with the Jew. Debts due to the Jews were really due to the King, and might not be compounded or cancelled without his consent. Disputes between Jews were to be settled at the royal Courts, and, in a word, a severe and vigilant eye was to be kept on the Israelites and their money-bags.

♦1199–1216♦

John, Richard’s miserable successor, whose reign brought nothing but ruin to himself and shame on his country, found it expedient to continue towards the Jews the lucrative generosity initiated by better men. The oppression of the Jews was a monopoly of the crown, and John made it quite plain that he would not tolerate any rivals. He invested Jacob of London with the dignity of Chief Rabbi over all the Jewish congregations throughout England and styled him his “dear, dear friend,” warning his subjects that any insult or injury offered to him would be regarded by the King as an insult to himself. He extended to the whole colony the favours and immunities granted to a privileged few by Richard, and, like him, accompanied this act of grace with an even more rigorous control of their affairs. The Jews had to pay dearly even for this limited and precarious protection. The sole difference between the treatment of them on the part of the King and that meted out to them by his subjects was that the latter despoiled them spasmodically, the former systematically. It was no longer a question of occasional contributions, such as the £60,000 wrung from them by Henry II., and like impositions levied to defray the expenses of Richard’s Crusade, but a steady and unsparing bleeding: tallages, inheritance duties and a heavy percentage on all loan transactions, in addition to confiscations and general fines, or fines for breaches of the law, with which the King would now and again diversify the monotony of normal brigandage. The procedure was perfectly immoral and yet perfectly legal. The King’s treasury was replenished out of the pockets of men who were as absolutely his as his own palaces, and whom he could sell or mortgage as any other property, according to his convenience. Even the King’s commissioners—Jews deputed to collect the tallage—had power to seize the wives and children of their own co-religionists. It is computed that at this period the Jews contributed about one-twelfth of the whole royal revenue.

♦1210♦

But John’s cruelty was boundless as his meanness. Not content with ordinary measures of extortion, he suddenly ordered all the Jews—men, women and children—to be imprisoned and forced to yield all they possessed. Thus by one fell swoop were snatched from them the fruits of a life’s laborious accumulation, and many were brought to the verge of starvation. Men and women, until yesterday opulent, were seen begging from door to door in the day time, and at night prowling about the purlieus of the city like homeless and hungry curs. Those who were suspected of being the owners of hidden treasure were tortured until they confessed, and, in the case of a Jew of Bristol, at least, a tooth a day was found an efficient test of a Jew’s squeezability. Grinder after grinder was drawn from his jaw in horrible agony, till the victim, after having lost several teeth, paid the 10,000 marks demanded of him. By such a fiscal policy the King’s protégés were made to feel the full weight of royal favour. But even this condition of serfdom and occasional torture was preferable to the lot that was in store for them in the future. John, whatever his own standard of humanity might have been, when the citizens of London threatened an attack upon the Jews, stood boldly forth in their defence, and told the Mayor and burgesses that he held them responsible for the safety of the Jews, vowing a bloody vengeance if any harm befell them.

♦1216–1272♦

Henry III. was as exacting as his predecessors; but he lacked the firmness by which some of them had prevented their subjects from trespassing on the royal preserves. Under his weak rule the nobles and the towns grew in importance. The decline of the King’s prerogative and the increased power of the subjects were alike fatal to the Jews. The burgesses hated them as the instruments of royal avarice and as interlopers in a community for the freedom of which they themselves had paid a heavy price to King or lord paramount. Their exemption from municipal burdens, and their independence of municipal authority irritated their fellow-townsmen. The constant interference of the King’s officers on behalf of the King’s serfs was resented as a violation of privilege. These grievances, reasonable enough, were intensified by religious rancour, and by that antipathy which the English, perhaps more than any other, bourgeoisie has always displayed towards foreigners. The Jew’s isolation also added to his unpopularity, and all these causes, acting upon the minds of the townspeople, gave rise to frequent acts of aggression. The Kings, as has been seen, had always found it hard to curb popular license, each attempt at repression, each measure of precaution, only serving to embitter the ill-feeling towards those on whose behalf these efforts were made. ♦1234♦ Under Henry III. the wrath of the burgesses broke out again and again in many towns, notably at Norwich, where the Jews’ quarter was sacked and burnt, and the inhabitants narrowly escaped massacre, and at Oxford, where town and gown joined in the work of devastation and pillage.