There and Back Again
by Moritz Draschner
A Short Account of Jews in England
You might be unaware, but Jewish communities around the world have just started celebrating Hanukkah (or the Festival of Lights). People sometimes falsely call it the “Jewish Christmas,” but it’s really a holiday that commemorates the re-establishment of the Temple in Jerusalem after it had been desecrated by Hellenistic invaders. Since the date of this blog post fits so well, I thought I’d use the opportunity to introduce you to one of the topics I’ve been working on over the past couple of months: Jews and antisemitism in medieval England. Don’t worry, though—I’ll not bore you with the differences between medieval understandings of Jewish and Christian scriptures, or horrify you with details of how Jews were heavily antagonised and sometimes brutally murdered for performing their faith. Instead, I’ll stick to the basics and tell you the equally tragic and fascinating story of how the Jews came to England, lived there for a while, and were finally pushed away again.
Like so many things, everything probably started with the Norman Conquest in 1066. I say “probably” because we don’t know for certain if no Jews existed in England during the Roman occupation or the first centuries of Germanic settlement. A reasonable assumption is that a very small number of Jews might have lived in Roman England but that they left Britain together with everyone else in the fifth century. There is no evidence of a Jewish presence for the entire period between the arrival of the Angles and Saxons and that of the Normans, but we do have written records of Jewish settlement from around 1070 onwards.
Now, the narrative of the arrival of the first Jews usually goes like this: William the Conqueror is believed to have invited Jewish merchants from Normandy over to his newly adopted home because he needed his own tax collectors. You may have heard the prejudice that Jews only ever work as usurious, greedy money-grubbers, and this was not an invention by the English: Jews had already been pushed towards the margins of French society where many of them had to resort to working as money handlers because they weren’t tolerated in most more traditional professions. Obviously not all of them worked with coins, but that’s how prejudice is born!
I think you can see where this is leading: the Jews were not only immediately recognised as immigrants and part of the invading force by the early English. They were also associated with money—a touchy subject in Christian circles and the one thing that made them valuable to the monarchy, an institution that wasn’t exactly popular either. In fact, the crown actively protected the Jews from antisemitic troublemakers as long as they did their business in the king’s interest.
The Jews couldn’t rest easy for long, though, because of course their special treatment had a catch: if you are officially enabled to collect large quantities of coins, naturally you’ll end up with quite a fortune yourself—indeed, the richest person in medieval England was a Jewish financier called Aaron of Lincoln. King Edward I probably didn’t quite like the idea of a whole bunch of Jews potentially rivalling his own riches, so he reversed his predecessors’ policies by taxing them to finance his war efforts until most of them ended up in poverty. In the end, the Jews’ association with money and greed was only one of the absurd reasons they were officially expelled from England in 1290. Most of them travelled back to where their ancestors had come from, but the situation in France had developed very similarly, which meant that they had to face expulsion yet again—a mere 16 years later…
Although this blog post turned out kind of depressing (sorry about that!), I hope that I was able to peak your interest a little. If that’s the case, feel free to follow this link to learn how the Church of England reacts to its ancestors’ antisemitism 800 years later, and once you’re done with that, light a candle on your imaginary menorah, spin an imaginary dreidel, and eat an imaginary latke—happy Hanukkah!