by Paul Johnson
even the testimony of their historian, whose books they have in Hebrew and consider authentic, they will not accept about Christ. But Master Robert, the Prior of St Frideswide at Oxford, whom we have seen and was old and trustworthy…was skilled in the scriptures and knew Hebrew. He sent to diverse towns and cities of England in which Jews have dwellings, from whom he collected many Josephuses written in Hebrew…and in two of them he found this testimony about Christ written fully and at length, but as if recently scratched out; but in all the rest removed earlier, as if never there. And when this was shown to the Jews of Oxford summoned for that purpose, they were convicted, and confused at this fraudulent malice and bad faith towards Christ.80
The tragedy of this Christian line of argument was that it led directly to a new kind of anti-Semitism. That the Jews could know the truth of Christianity and still reject it seemed such extraordinary behaviour that it could scarcely be human. Hence the notion that the Jews were quite different to ordinary people, an idea reinforced by their laws about food, slaughtering, cooking and circumcision. There were stories that the Jews had concealed tails, suffered from a bloody flux, had a peculiar smell—which instantly disappeared when they were baptized. This in turn led to reports that Jews served the devil—which explained everything—and communed with him at secret, vicious ceremonies.
An accumulation of anti-Jewish feeling seems to have built up for some time before the preaching of the First Crusade at Clermont-Ferrand in 1095 unleashed it. The wave of crusading fervour had been provoked by countless stories of Christians being ill treated in the Holy Land. The Moslems were the chief villains of these tales, but Jews were often included as treacherous auxiliaries. It was an age of Christian fundamentalism, which produced a reformed papacy and rigorist orders like the Cistercians. Many believed the end of the world and the Second Coming were imminent. Men wanted to win themselves grace and remission of sin urgently. The assembling of a mass of armed men in north-west Europe provided opportunities for all kinds of antinomian behaviour and produced a breakdown in normal order. Men sold up to pay their crusading expenses. Or they borrowed money. They expected debts to be cancelled. The Jews, one of the few groups with working capital—ready cash—were in an exposed position. It is worth nothing that even fervent crusaders did not attack the Jews in their own neighbourhoods, whose inhabitants they knew to be ordinary people like themselves. But once on the march, they readily turned on the Jews of other cities. Then the Christian townspeople, caught up in the frenzy and the lust for loot, would sometimes join in. Local rulers were taken by surprise at the sudden fury and lost control.
We have an account of the massacres by the twelfth-century Jewish chronicler Rabbi Solomon ben Samson.81 They began in Rouen in France and in the spring of 1096 spread to the Rhineland cities. As the crusading host, often no better than a mob, gathered, any Jewish community on its line of march was in jeopardy. The Bishop of Speyer stopped the rioting quickly by using force and hanging the ringleaders: ‘For he was a righteous man among the gentiles, and the Ever-Present brought about the merit of our deliverance through him.’82 The Archbishop of Cologne did the same. But at Mainz the Archbishop had to flee for his own life. The Jews tried to fight but were overcome. The males were massacred or forcibly converted. Children were slaughtered to prevent them being brought up Christians, and the women, holed up in the archbishop’s castle, committed mass suicide—over 1,000 perished in all. The ancient, rich and populous Jewish communities of the Rhineland were destroyed, most Jews being killed or dragged to the fonts. Others, dismayed by the sudden, inexplicable hatred of fellow townsmen, scattered. They had learned that protective charters were no more use than (as they put it) ‘parchment for covering jars’.
The anti-Semitic ideology and folklore which helped to detonate the first crusader riots proved to be simply the plinth on which a vast superstructure of hostile myth and rumour was built. In 1144 there occurred an ominous incident at Norwich in East Anglia, then the richest and most populous area in England. There had been few if any Jews in Anglo-Saxon England. They came, along with many other Flemish immigrants, in the wake of William the Conqueror’s invasion. Half of them settled in London, but Jewish communities sprang up in York, Winchester, Lincoln, Canterbury, Northampton and Oxford. There were no Jewish quarters, but usually two Jewish streets, one for well-to-do Jews, the other for the poor: thus in Oxford, near St Aldates, there was Great Jewry Street and Little Jewry Lane.83 Jews built themselves good houses, often of stone for security. Indeed at Lincoln two twelfth-century Jews’ houses (one perhaps used as a synagogue) survive, among the earliest in England to do so.84 Norwich, which was settled by Rhineland Jews, did not have a large community: 200 at most, out of a total Jewish population in England which, at its maximum, was not more than 5,000. But its activities have been thoroughly explored by the researches of V. D. Lipman.85 In Norwich the Jews lived near the market-place and castle (for safety), but were interspersed with Christians. Their chief activity was moneylending on the security of lands and rents. They were also pawnbrokers. Some English Jews were doctors.86 As in some other towns of the seventeen settled by Jews in England, there was one outstandingly rich family, the Jurnets. They can be traced through five generations. They had business partners in London, travelled, operated on a national scale and handled very large sums. Their big stone house in King Street was set apart from those of the other Jews. They patronized Talmud scholars and some were scholars in their own right.87
In 1144 this little community was the centre of an appalling accusation. On 20 March, shortly before Easter and Passover, a boy called William, son of a substantial farmer and apprenticed to a skinner, disappeared. He was last seen going into a Jew’s house. Two days later, on the Wednesday of Holy Week, his body was found east of the city in Thorpe Wood, ‘dressed in his jacket and shoes with his head shaved and punctured with countless stabs’. Our knowledge of the details comes primarily from a hagiography, The Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich, compiled by Thomas of Monmouth, a monk of Norwich Priory, shortly afterwards.88 According to Thomas, the boy’s mother Elvira and a local priest called Godwin accused the Norwich Jews of murder, saying the crime was a re-enactment of Christ’s passion. Later, Christian maidservants working in a Jewish house said the boy was seized after synagogue service, gagged, tied with cords, his head pierced with thorns, then bound as if on a cross, his left hand and foot nailed, his side pierced and scalding water poured over his body—they claimed they saw this through a chink in the door. A group of Jews were accused of the sacrilege before an ecclesiastical court. But the local sheriff claimed they were king’s property, refused to let them stand trial, and hustled them to safety in Norwich Castle.
At this point the first miracles connected with the boy’s body began to take place. Initially the local church authorities, like the secular ones, were hostile to the whole story. But two years later a monk who favoured the cult was appointed Bishop of Norwich and it is significant that his formal election in the priory was made the occasion for an anti-Jewish demonstration. The same year Eleazir, a local Jewish moneylender, was murdered by the servants of one Sir Simon de Nover, who owed him money. Slowly the legend expanded. The ritual murder of a Christ-substitute at Easter fitted the official view that the Jews knew the truth but rejected it. Then it was pointed out that the day the murder was discovered, 22 March, was the second day of the Jewish Passover. For this the Jews, as was well known, made special unleavened bread. One anti-Semitic tale was that all Jews suffered from haemorrhoids ever since they had called out to Pilate, ‘His blood be upon us and upon our children!’ They had been told by their sages that they could be cured only through ‘the blood of Christ’—that is, by embracing Christianity—but they took the advice literally. To get the necessary blood, with which to make their curative Passover bread, they had to kill a Christ-substitute every year. One Theobald of Cambridge, a convert from Judaism, married this tale to the murder of William and alleged that a congress
of Jews in Spain picked out by lot, every year, the town where the ritual murder must take place and that in 1144 the lot fell on Norwich.89 Thus from this one crime flowed two distinct, but intermingled, accusations against the Jews—the ritual murder charge and the blood libel.90
This episode was particularly devastating to Jewish security because William, by the very nature of his ritual death, acquired an element of Christ’s sanctity and power to work miracles. So they flowed—and each was a further proof of Jewish malice. Canonization, not yet centrally controlled by Rome, was conferred by popular clamour. And, since the body of a saint of this exciting type brought wealth to the church which owned it, by attracting pilgrims, gifts and endowments, accusations of ritual murder tended to be made whenever a child was killed in suspicious circumstances near a settlement of Jews—at Gloucester in 1168, Bury St Edmunds in 1181 and Bristol in 1183. The preaching of a new crusade always brought anti-Semitic sentiment to the boil. The Third Crusade, launched 1189-90, in which England figured largely because Richard the Lionheart led it, whipped up mob fury already aroused by the ritual murder charges. A deputation of wealthy Jews attending Richard’s coronation in 1189 was attacked by the crowd, followed by an assault on London’s Jewry. With the approach of Easter the next year, pogroms broke out, the most serious being at York, where the wealthy Jewish community was massacred, despite taking refuge in the castle. Norwich, of course, was one victim, a chronicler recording: ‘Many of those who were hastening to go to Jerusalem determined first to rise against the Jews…. So on 6 February all the Jews who were found in their own houses in Norwich were slaughtered; some had taken refuge in the castle.’91
This was another milestone in the destruction of Latin Jewry. The rise of organized heresy in the twelfth century led an increasingly authoritarian and triumphalist papacy to look with suspicion on any non-orthodox form of religious activity, not least on Judaism. The greatest of the medieval centralizers, Innocent III (pope 1198-1216), enacted a series of anti-Jewish decrees at the Fourth Lateran Council, 1216, and gave his sanction to the creation of two preaching orders, the Dominicans and Franciscans, specifically charged with consolidating the orthodox faith in the cities. The Dominicans were further mandated to put down heresy by inquiring into doubtful practices, interrogating and trying suspects, and handing over to the secular power for punishment those found guilty.
As an additional manifestation of Christology, Innocent launched a new cult of the eucharist. This in turn created yet another layer of anti-Semitism. In 1243, near Berlin, the Jews were accused of stealing a consecrated host and using it for their own evil purposes. This practice too fitted into the Christian view that the Jews knew the truth but fought against it. They did indeed believe that the host was Christ’s body: that was why they stole it and tortured it, making it relive Christ’s sufferings, just as they stole Christian boys and murdered them in fiendish rituals. As with all conspiracy theories, once the first imaginative jump is made, the rest follows with intoxicating logic. After 1243, cases of host-stealing were reported all over Latin Europe. They came to light, according to court cases, because the host in its agony produced miracles: it rose into the air, provoked earthquakes, changed into butterflies which healed cripples, gave forth angels and doves or—most commonly of all—screamed in pain or cried like a child.92
No plausible evidence to justify any of these slanders has ever been produced. Some accusations may have been the result of a genuine misunderstanding. For instance, in 1230 Jews were accused of forcibly circumcising a five-year-old boy in Norwich. Jews were imprisoned and fined when the case finally came to court in 1234, and it seems to have provoked a violent attack on Norwich Jews by citizens the following year. Around 1240 several Jews were hanged in connection with this case. The most likely explanation is that members of the same Jewish family were reclaiming the son of a convert.93 But most charges against Jews were pure inventions, and whenever a genuine ecclesiastical inquiry was held, its findings always exonerated the Jewish community.94
The slanders must, of course, be seen against the background of Jewish moneylending. It affected a very wide social spectrum. Evidence from thirteenth-century Perpignan in the south of France shows that villagers formed 65 per cent of the borrowers, though they borrowed only 43 per cent of the total sums; townsmen were 30 and 41 per cent; knights and nobles 2 and 9; clergy 1 and 5 per cent.95 The pattern in England was much the same. Large religious houses and the higher nobility used the Jews but on a comparatively small scale. The big borrowers in both countries were the needy rural gentry—the class most likely to lead a wave of anti-Semitic activism. A squire with name and prestige but no money, and about to lose his lands, was just the man to whip up a mob. The whole of history teaches that money-lending leads to trouble in rural societies. A Jewish betrothal contract from thirteenth-century England shows that money lent at interest was expected to bring in not less than 12.5 per cent a year.96 This does not seem much by medieval standards. Unfortunately, as Lipman points out, lenders had very complex transactions among themselves, often forming syndicates, with layers of borrowing; and all activities were complicated by Judaic rulings, efforts to evade them, Christian rulings, and efforts to evade them too. The net effect was to raise the ultimate rate of interest the borrower had to pay and above all to produce a legal situation of such density that accusations of robbery were almost bound to ensue in the event of any dispute. Internal Jewish as well as Christian courts handled these matters. The records show: ‘Judas, Jew of Bristol, owes two ounces of gold for an inquisition made in a chapter of the Jews whether a Jew ought to take usury from a Jew’; or again Abraham ben Joshua of York told the ‘Justices of the Jews’ that ‘a Jew may take usury by a Christian hand, and if it seems unjust to his opponent, let him go before the masters of his law in chapter and implead him there, because matters of this sort touching his law ought not to be corrected elsewhere’.97 A city merchant could understand these things but not a rustic knight.
Kings in theory, and often in practice, stood to benefit enormously from a large and busy Jewish community. In twelfth-century England, the Angevin kings undoubtedly did well out of rich Jewish lenders. There was a special Exchequer of the Jews, which ran chests in each town with a Jewish community. Each chest was run by two Jews and two Christians, who kept a record of all debtbonds. At headquarters there was one Jewish as well as Christian judges, and a rabbi to advise.98 The king in effect took a cut of all Jewish business transactions, and he needed to know who owed what Jew which money. When Aaron of Lincoln, the most successful Jewish financier in medieval England, died in 1186, a special exchequer was set up to deal with his estate. By one of those ironies which glitter through all Jewish history, Aaron had financed the vast expansion programme of the ultra-rigorist Cistercian order by lending them the then-colossal sum of 6,400 marks in return for mortgages. The king inherited his debts, though some were resold to his son Elias.99
If windfalls like this had occurred more often, the kings of England would certainly have kept the Jewish communities in being. But Aaron’s prosperity antedated the great anti-Semitic outbreaks of the 1190s, which destroyed the community in York and other places.100 Thereafter it became steadily more difficult for English Jews to make money. The anti-Jewish code of the Lateran Council in 1215 added to their burden. In England the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, one of the architects of Magna Carta, which itself had an anti-Jewish clause, tried to organize a boycott of Jewish business. The Jews were in economic decline in England throughout the thirteenth century. Aaron of York, who told the chronicler Matthew Paris he had paid the king over 30,000 marks, died impoverished in 1268.101
Under Edward I, a former crusader and a hammer of the Celts with an insatiable need for cash, the decline accelerated. To some extent the Jews’ role as lenders to the great had been taken over by the Knights Templar of Jerusalem and their European Commanderies, the first real Christian bankers. The Jews had been pushed downmarket into small-scal
e lending, coin-changing and pawnbroking. For Edward, it was no longer profitable enough to milk the Jews systematically; he was tempted to go in for the kill and a quick seizure of their assets. In 1275 he passed an anti-Jewish statute, making usury illegal; the crime was later linked to blasphemy, a yet more serious offence. In 1278 groups of Jews were arrested throughout the country. Many were taken to the Tower of London. One chronicler says 300 were hanged. Their property went to the crown and the sum realized tempted Edward to go further. The next stage was to accuse Jews of habitual coin-clipping. A dozen were hanged in Norwich for this offence. Finally, in the late 1280s, Edward found he needed a large sum in cash to ransom his cousin Charles of Salerno. He confiscated the property of his Gascony Jews, expelling them completely in 1289. The next year, alleging widespread evasion of the law against usury, he threw them out of England too, grabbing all of their assets. The richest Jew in Norwich yielded £300. Jews in eleven different towns produced a total of £9,100, of which eighteen families provided about £6,000. It was a disappointing haul, but by this time the Jewish community had shrunk to only half its maximum size—there were only 2,500 left to expel.102
By this time medieval Christian governments saw themselves as confronted with a ‘Jewish problem’, to which expulsion was a ‘final solution’. It had been tried before: in part of the Rhineland in 1012, in France in 1182, in upper Bavaria in 1276. The device worked in England, more or less, because of the Channel barrier, but in Continental Europe, with its thousands of straggling lordships, expulsion was difficult to enforce. None the less, governments were under constant ideological pressure to take anti-Jewish measures. Innocent III had argued in his Lateran decrees that, because of their unscrupulous use of money power, the Jews had reversed the natural order—the free Christian had become the servant of the Jewish slave—and government must restore nature by imposing disabilities.103 So governments tried. From the twelfth century onwards, Jews became less useful to princes. Their trading and money-handling skills had been acquired by Christians. The age was a notable one for founding new towns, but the Jews were no longer needed as urban colonists—the Christians could do that for themselves. So authority looked less benignly on the Jewish presence which, thanks to the blood and ritual murder libels, became a source of frequent rioting They also, quite genuinely, began to fear the Jewish contribution to the spread of disturbing ideas. In the later Middle Ages, heresy was often linked to radicalism. Heretics occasionally had contact with learned Jews, who discussed scriptural texts with them and lent them books. The Jews always had books, often ones regarded by authority as subversive. When the church seized them, the Jews would ransom their books, like slaves. When their York community was massacred in 1190, they managed to get their books to Cologne, to be sold to the Jews there.104
