Englishmen now regard such tales as but the vestiges of a long passed-by period; you listen to it with a smile as belonging to the “olden time;” and because such base calumnies are no more brought against the Jews in this your highly-favoured and enlightened country, you may think it ill-timed to rake up acts of fanatics of the dark ages, which have long since been buried in oblivion. But it is not so in the other countries of Christendom; the same incredible charges are even now brought against the Jews, and are also believed. Not longer than five years ago, the Jews of Damascus suffered greatly because of such accusations. Only eighteen months since, a poor Jewish blacksmith in Lithuania, in Poland, was incarcerated in consequence of such a charge, and was on the point of being transported to Siberia, when the zealous Christians of the nineteenth century, of that province, who brought the accusation, quarrelled amongst themselves, which discovered the real culprit, who was a Christian by profession, and perpetrated the murder on a young girl, in order to accuse the Jew.
In the annals of the reign of Henry the Second, we read of the same charge being brought against the Jews twice. In the sixth year of that reign, the act is stated to have been perpetrated at Gloucester.
The ecclesiastics were already debtors to the Jews, and therefore began to charge them with usury, which was on all occasions held up by the clergy to be a crime of the greatest magnitude; though, when the same ecclesiastics wanted money, they did not scruple to trust those sinners with the vessels of their churches; for, in the records of this reign which have come down to us, we find it stated among other things, that a Jew of Bury St. Edmund’s, Sancto by name, was fined five marks for taking in pledge from the monks of that place certain vessels dedicated to the service of the altar. Another Jew of Suffolk, Benet by name, was fined twenty pounds for taking some consecrated vestments upon pawn.
A curious story is also related by Hoveden and Brompton, respecting William de Waterville, the Abbot of Bury. He was deposed for having entered the church at the head of a band of armed men, and taken thence the arm of St. Oswald, the martyr, to pawn it to the Jews.
One of the claims advanced by King Henry against Archbishop Thomas à Becket, was in respect of a sum of £500, for which that prince had been surety for him to a Jew.
All those things coming to light, however, could not fail to swell that animosity against the Jews which had already existed in the breasts of the clergy, who even now regarded them with particular abhorrence. They seized, therefore, every opportunity of prejudicing the people against them, and rendering them the objects of general detestation. Fox, the martyrologist, favours us with a list of admonitions which was given to King Henry the Second, and in that list we find him required by the bishops “to banish all the Jews, allowing them to take with them sufficient property to pay their travelling expenses.” What “tender mercies!”
During the reign of Henry the Second, the Jews were subjected also to severe exactions from the crown; on one occasion a tallage of a fourth part of their chattels was levied upon them. When ambassadors were sent over to the king by the Emperor Barbarossa, to induce him to take part against Pope Alexander in a schism which then existed in the Church of Rome, respecting the right of succession to the papal chair, the sum of 5,000 marks was demanded of the Jews, to be applied for the purpose of enlisting the emissaries to the king’s interest.[1] This sum was directed to be paid without delay, and those who refused to contribute were immediately banished from the country. Besides these demands upon the body of the Jews generally, individuals amongst them were also compelled to pay sums to a large amount.
[1] – Henry II., King of England, and Louis VII., King of France, held respectively councils of their clergy in July, 1161, for the purpose of taking into consideration the pretensions of Alexander III. and Victor IV., both of whom claimed the papal throne. The monarchs met at a general council in Thoulouse, in August, and agreed to acknowledge Alexander as Pope.—W. Neubrigen, L. 2, c. 9.
We read of a Jew of Gloucester, Josce by name, who was fined for supplying the Irish rebels with great sums of money.
However, King Henry, in the twenty-fourth year of his reign, was pleased to show the Jews some slight indulgence. He allowed them to have cemeteries at the outside of every town they inhabited, for until that time they had only one place of interment, which was near London, in the parish of St. Giles Cripplegate, commonly designated in ancient deeds “The Jews’ Garden.”