6. Some Ironical Legislation.—The State at this period showed also some care, although it must be confessed of a somewhat unpractical kind, for the moral condition of the Jewish portion of its property. The Jewish habit of ‘usury’ is gravely condemned by the statute-book of this date, and advice offered that manufacturing and agricultural arts should be followed by Jews instead of, or besides, their all but universal pursuit of retail trade. At the same time new taxeswere imposed, and the old statute, which forbade Jews to hold ‘real’ property of any sort, remained unrepealed. So the good advice was somewhat ironical, and the concern expressed for outraged morality sounds a trifle hypocritical. For how were men who might not hold an inch of land to feel any interest in sowing and in planting it? and how could artisans or labourers, working at a small wage, earn a tithe of the tolls and the taxes which alone gained for Jews the right of existing at all? Whilst legislation compelled men to dwell apart and to dress apart, and claimed, at its own caprice, an unjust share of their earnings, it forced such men into mean occupations, and made it difficult to them to follow even these in an upright and honourable fashion.
7. Dishonest Jews.—In truth, the terrible pressure put on the Jews for money, drove many of them into dishonest ways of obtaining it. The vast sums continually demanded could not possibly be raised in any legitimate way. In their dreadful straits, Jews clipped and adulterated the coin of the realm. Although, in strict equity, those who called for money, which they knew quite well could not be honestly come by, really caused this crime, and were as guilty in some respects as those who perpetrated it, still, two wrongs never yet made one right, and no amount of poverty is any justification whatever for dishonesty. It is better to starve than to steal, to be shunned than to cheat. There is, therefore, no cause for complaint in the fact that fraudulent practices, whenever discovered, were punished in the severest manner. In November1279, all the Jews in the kingdom were arrested, on a tolerably substantial charge against some of them, of having clipped and adulterated the coin. Many non-Jews were likewise arrested, but their punishments, when found guilty, were of a much less severe sort than were pronounced upon the Jews. On this occasion, eighty Jews were executed in London alone.
8. Efforts at Conversion.—Although their wealth was the chief interest which Jews possessed for those in authority, yet their conversion was always a secondary object, and was never quite lost sight of. It served sometimes as the excuse, and sometimes as the occasion, for a little extra persecution. During the reign of Edward I., Pope Honorius IV. issued a bull denouncing usury and fraud, which, all men would agree with him, are practices quite justly to be denounced. But Pope Honorius went further; he denounced them as Jewish practices, and took the occasion to speak strongly against the Jewish religion generally and the Talmud in particular. This bull of his was issued especially for the guidance of the Archbishop of Canterbury and of the English clergy, and it was supplemented by an English statute of about the same date, which compelled Jews, under penalties, to attend places where Dominican friars preached proselytising sermons. Whether these sermons checked usury or promoted conversion may be doubted, but such compulsory attendances must in any case have provoked bad feeling, and, further, put the Jews into a false position with the priests and the populace.
9. Expulsion of Jews from England.—At last the wrongs and miseries of the Jews in England reached their climax. Heavy pressure from his clergy was brought to bear upon King Edward, and towards the end of the year 1290, he signed an edict which ordered every Jew in his kingdom, under penalty of being hanged if he remained, to leave England on November 1. All debts owing to Jews were cancelled, and only strictly portable property was to be carried away by them. Homes had to be broken up; old folks, sick folks, little children, to all of whom roughness and shifts and changes might mean agony or death, were not considered. The decree was absolute and unconditional, and none were exempt from it. King Edward was not wholly responsible for the barbarous act, nor personally vindictive in its execution, yet it seems to have been carried out with circumstances of peculiar cruelty. The safe-conducts granted by the king were not always respected. One party of refugees was left stranded on a desolate part of the coast at the mercy of the incoming tide, whilst the master of the vessel they had chartered sailed away with their poor belongings. Of the 15,000 or 16,000 Jews (accounts vary as to the exact numbers) who were expelled from England in 1290, very many perished on their outward bound journey, some by accident and illness, some, it may be feared, by more or less of direct cruelty. The survivors were deposited at the nearest foreign ports. Thence, they made their way inland to such places in Central Europe as still permitted Jews to lead sad lives under State ‘protection.’
BOOK III.
100–1500.
STARLIGHT.
[a]לְךָ יוֹם אַף לְךָ לָיְלָה]
PSALM lxxiv. 16.
‘Then stars arise, and the night is holy.’