Front matter (continued 2)

The anti-Jewish feeling that grew up from the causes that have just been described called into existence new institutions and measures designed for the purpose of humbling the Jews and checking the growth of Judaism. In compliance with the cruel request of Innocent, most of the monarchs of Europe compelled their Jewish subjects to wear a badge.⁠[195] Local church councils, which hitherto had contented themselves with the attempt to enforce the old prohibition against the employment by Jews of Christian servants and nurses, now went further, and forbade Christians to allow the presence of Jews in their houses and taverns, to feast or dance with them, to be present at the celebration of their marriages, their new moons, and their festivals, and to employ their services as doctors.⁠[196] The Popes of the latter part of the thirteenth century appointed Dominicans in various countries of Europe to perform the duty of preaching to the Jews, and of holding inquisitions into their heresies, in the hope that with the help of the secular power they might stamp them out.⁠[197]⁠

In England the relation of the Jews to the Christians underwent somewhat the same changes as in Continental Europe. Before the thirteenth century the Jews in England had, as has been said above, been free from molestation by the Church,⁠[198] and their chief danger had been from the brutality and greed of the disorderly populace, of desperate outcasts, and of marauding Crusaders.⁠[199] The first great attack made on them by any constituted power came from Stephen Langton, who, not content with passing at his Provincial Synod a decree which, in accordance with the regulations of Innocent, enforced the use of the badge and prohibited the erection of new synagogues, went so far as to issue orders that no one in his diocese should presume, under pain of excommunication, to have any intercourse with Jews, or should sell them any of the necessaries of life. The Bishops of Lincoln and Norwich issued the same orders in their dioceses.⁠[200] Many other bishops in the reign of Henry III. did their best, partly by legislation in their diocesan synods and partly by the use of their personal and spiritual influence, to check intercourse between Jews and Christians.⁠[201] Of course the king’s guardians, in the interest of the royal income, a considerable part of which was derived from the Jewry, interfered to prevent the measures of Langton and his colleagues from being carried into effect. And Henry, when he took into his own hands the work of government, while, on the one hand, he showed his sympathy with the fears of the Church by building a house for the reception of Jewish converts,⁠[202] and by lending the sanction of the civil power to the decree that ordered the use of the badge,⁠[203] nevertheless followed the example that his guardians had set, and protected the Jews against the aggression of the Church.

There were many reasons which might have caused Edward to sympathise more strongly than his father had done, with the anti-Jewish feelings of the Church. He was a pious man and a pious king, filled with a sense of his kingly duty towards “the living God who takes to himself the souls of Princes.”⁠[204] He was a Crusader, though the great crusading age was over, a founder of monasteries, a pilgrim to holy places; and through his confessors he was in close connection with, and under the influence of, the Dominican order.⁠[205] Some of his bishops were determined enemies of the Jews. John of Peckham, for example, the Archbishop of Canterbury, insisted at one time on the demolition of all the small private synagogues in London, at which the Jews were in the habit of worshipping after the confiscation of their great public synagogues at the end of the reign of Henry III.; at another time he demanded from the king the help of the temporal power against Jews who having once been converted to Christianity, wished to go back to their old faith; on another occasion he took the bold step of writing to the Queen concerning her business transactions with the Jews, solemnly warning her that unless she gave them up she could never be absolved from her sins, “nay, not though an angel should assert the contrary.”⁠[206] At Hereford, Bishop Swinfield was so determined to prevent intercourse with Jews that, when he heard that certain Christians intended to be present at a marriage feast to be given by some rich Jews of the city, he issued a proclamation threatening with excommunication any who should carry out their intention, and, when his proclamation was disregarded, he carried out his threat.⁠[207]⁠

Certain events that happened, or were said to have happened, in England in Edward’s lifetime, some, indeed, under his own observation, may well have seemed to him to justify the attitude of the Church. In 1275 a Dominican friar was converted to Judaism.⁠[208] In 1268, while Edward was in Oxford, the Chancellor, masters and scholars of the University, and the Parochial Clergy, were going in procession to visit the shrine of St. Friedswide when, according to a story that gained general credence, a Jew of the city snatched from the bearer a cross that was being carried at their head and trod it under foot.⁠[209] At Norwich, early in Edward’s reign, a Jew was burnt for blasphemy.⁠[210] At Nottingham, in 1278, a Jewess was charged with abusing in scandalous terms all the Christian bystanders in the market-place.⁠[211]⁠

Edward’s conduct could not but be influenced by the general tone of opinion in the Church, by the strong anti-Jewish feeling of some of his bishops, and by the follies, real or supposed, of the Jews themselves. In continuation of his father’s policy he made, throughout his reign, such contributions as, with his scanty means, he could afford, to the support of the House of Converts.⁠[212] He renewed the edict concerning the wearing of the badge, and extended it to Jewesses, whereas it had formerly applied only to Jews.⁠[213] In order that the Dominicans might be able to carry on in England the same efforts at conversion as they were already pursuing in France, Spain and Germany, he issued to all the sheriffs and bailiffs in England writs bidding them do their best to induce all the Jews in the counties and towns under their charge to assemble and hear the word of God preached by the friars.⁠[214] To meet the danger to religion that might arise from the blasphemous utterances of Jews, he ordered that proclamation should be made throughout England that any Jew found guilty (after an enquiry conducted by Christians) of having spoken disrespectfully of Christ, the Virgin Mary, or the Catholic faith, should be liable to the loss of life or limbs.⁠[215]⁠

Thus far, and no farther, was Edward prepared to go with measures for the suppression of Judaism as a religion. He believed that the Jews, so long as they remain Jews, lived in ignorance and sin, and he did what he could to help the friars in the effort to convert them. He believed that some among them were likely to make blasphemous attacks on Christianity, and he did what he could to keep them in check. But he believed that it was possible for them to live in peace and quietness, carrying on trades and handicrafts, among Christian neighbours in Christian towns. And it was to enable them to do so that he adopted the policy of 1275, and bade the Jews renounce usury, giving them at the same time permission “to practise trade, to live by their labour, and, for those purposes, freely to converse with Christians.” But, as we have seen, there were imposed on the Jews who attempted to avail themselves of this permission, legal disadvantages which wholly unfitted them for industrial competition with non-Jews, and compelled them to continue the practice of usury. That Edward recognised this fact is shown by the issue of the revised Statute of Usurers some years after 1275; but that measure was inconclusive and inconsistent with the rest of his policy. Sooner or later the conclusion would have forced itself on him that until the Jews were, by the acquisition of the right to become burgesses and gildsmen, enabled to enter into industrial competition on equal terms with Christians, all his efforts to make them traders instead of usurers would be wasted. He would then have had before him two alternatives. He might, on the one hand, have declined to sacrifice his seignorial rights over the Jews, whom he had described in the Statute of 1275 as “talliable to the king as his own serfs, and not otherwise,” and in that case he would have had to recognise that his whole Jewish policy was an impossible one. Or he might, on the other hand, have revoked the provision in the statute which forbade the Jews to be in “scots, lots, or talliage with the other inhabitants of those cities or burgesses where they remained.” Such a measure would have been a step in the only direction which could possibly lead to the success of his policy. But it would not by itself have been enough to secure success; for, when the legal difficulties of the Jews had been removed, there would still have remained the social difficulties which proceeded from the dislike in which they were held by the Church and the people; and, unless these difficulties also could be removed, so that the Jews might be in a position of social equality, as well as legal equality, with Christians, and associate with them in friendly intercourse, the king’s policy would be as far from success as ever. Which alternative Edward would have decided to adopt is, of course, a question we have no means of answering; but the decision was taken out of his hands by the interference, for the first and last time in English history, of the head of the Catholic Church in the relations between the Jews and the king.

At the end of 1286, Honorius IV. addressed to the Archbishops of Canterbury⁠[216] and York⁠[217] and their suffragans the following bull:—

“We have heard that in England the accursed and perfidious Jews have done unspeakable things and horrible acts, to the shame of our Creator and the detriment of the Catholic faith. They are said to have a wicked and deceitful book, which they commonly call Thalmud, containing manifold abominations, falsehoods, heresies, and abuses. This damnable work they continually study, and with its nefarious contents their base thoughts are always engaged. Moreover, they set their children from their tender years to study its lethal teaching, and they do not scruple to tell them that they ought to believe in it more than in the Law of Moses, so that the said children may flee from the path of God and go astray in the devious ways of the unbelievers. Moreover, they not only attempt to entice the minds of the faithful to their pestilent sect, but also, with many gifts, they seduce to apostasy those who, led by wholesome counsel, have abjured the error of infidelity and betaken themselves to the Christian faith; so that some, being led away by the treachery of the Jews, live with them according to their rite and law, even in the parishes in which they received new life from the sacred font of baptism; and hence arise injury to our Saviour, scandal to the faithful, and dishonour to the Christian faith. Some also who have been baptised they send to other places, in order that there they may live unknown and return to their disbelief. They invite and urgently persuade Christians to attend their synagogues on the Sabbath and on other of their solemn occasions, to hear and take part in their services, and to show reverence to the parchment-scroll or book in which their law is written, in consequence of which many Christians Judaise with the Jews.

“Moreover, they have in their households Christians whom they compel to busy themselves on Sundays and feast-days with servile tasks from which they should refrain. And so they cast opprobrium on the majesty of God. They have in their houses Christian women to bring up their children. Christian men and women dwell among them; and so it often happens, when occasion offers and the time is favourable to shameful actions, that Christian men have unblessed intercourse with Jewish women and Christian women with Jewish men.

“Yet Christians and Jews go on meeting in each others’ houses. They spend their leisure in banqueting and feasting together, and hence the opportunity for mischief becomes easy. On certain days they publicly abuse Christians, or rather curse them, and do other wicked acts which offend God and cause the loss of souls.

“And although some of you have been often asked to devise a fitting remedy for these things, yet you have failed to comply. Whereat we are forced to wonder the more, since the duty of your pastoral office binds you to show yourselves more ready and determined than other men to avenge the wrongs of our Saviour, and to oppose the nefarious attempts of the foes of the Christian faith.

“An evil so dangerous must not be made light of, lest, being neglected, it may grow great. You are bound to rise up with ready courage against such audacity in order that it may be completely suppressed and confounded and that the dignity and glory of the Catholic Faith may increase. Therefore by this apostolic writing we give orders that, as the duty of your office demands, you shall use inhibitions, spiritual and temporal penalties, and other methods, which shall seem good to you, and which in your preaching and at other fitting times you shall set forth, to the end, that this disease may be checked by proper remedies. So may you have your reward from the mercy of the Eternal King. We shall extol in our prayers your wisdom and diligence. Let us know fully by your letters what you do in this matter.”

X.—The Effects of the Clerical Opposition.

Edward was too religious to disregard the wishes of the Pope, expressed thus formally and solemnly and with the utmost strength of language. And he had special reasons for paying heed to the words of Honorius IV., on whose money-lenders he was dependent for loans, and whose predecessor had, by the exercise of his spiritual powers, secured for him a tenth part of the goods of the clergy of England.⁠[218] From the moment of the issue of the bull, the policy inaugurated by the statute of 1275 was doomed. For of the two alternatives that Edward would have had before him in any further Jewish legislation that he might have undertaken—the alternatives of the abandonment of the policy of 1275, or the extension of it by further measures for the assimilation of the status of Jews to that of Christians—the Church now demanded that he should at once adopt the former. It demanded that the Jews of England should live isolated from the Christians; and this they could do only so long as they kept to pursuits, such as usury, for the practice of which they required no connection with the organisation of a gild or a town.

For a time Edward could take no decisive measures, since when the bull reached England, he had left for Gascony.⁠[219] In that province nothing had apparently as yet been done to satisfy the demand made by the Council of Lyons, in 1274, that alien usurers should no longer be tolerated in the land of Christians. It was hopeless to try to enforce in a distant dependency the policy that had been beset in England with so many difficulties, and had now incurred the direct opposition of the Church. The only alternative was expulsion, a measure that on French soil suggested itself the more naturally, since two French kings had practically adopted it already. Before he returned home, Edward issued an order that all Jews should leave Gascony.⁠[220]⁠

The application of the same measure in England was a more serious matter, since the English Jews were doubtless a much larger community than those of Gascony. But, determined not to tolerate them as usurers, and convinced of the hopelessness of his efforts to change them into traders, Edward had no alternative but to treat them as he had treated their coreligionists in Gascony.

No doubt he was influenced in his resolution by the members of his family and court. His wife and mother and various of his officers had been in the habit of receiving liberal grants from the property and forfeitures of the Jews.⁠[221] They must have known that this resource was decreasing steadily, and was not worth husbanding, and they must have welcomed a measure which would bring into the King’s hands a fairly large amount of spoil capable of immediate distribution. And, probably, some of the ecclesiastical members of the court felt, as his mother certainly did,⁠[222] a religious hatred of the Jews and a religious joy at the prospect of their disappearance.

XI.—The Expulsion.

Of the course of events for the first few months after Edward’s return to England, very meagre accounts have come down to us. His searching inquiry into the conduct of the judges during his absence⁠[223] must have taken up most of his time and energy. As soon as he had meted out punishment to those whom he had found guilty of corruption, he turned to the Jewish question. On the 18th of July, 1290, writs were issued to the sheriffs of counties, informing them that a decree had been passed that all Jews should leave England before the feast of All Saints of that year.⁠[224] Any who remained in the country after the prescribed day were declared liable to the penalty of death.⁠[225]⁠

Every effort was made by the King to secure the peace and safety of the Jews during the short period for which they were allowed to remain, and in the course of their journey from their homes to the coast, and from the coast to their ultimate destination. The sheriffs were ordered to have public proclamation made that “no one within the appointed period should injure, harm, damage, or grieve them,” and were to ensure, for such as chose to pay for it, a safe journey to London. The wardens of the Cinque Ports, within the district of whose jurisdiction many of the Jews would necessarily embark, received orders in the same spirit as those that had been addressed to the sheriffs of the counties. They were to see that the exiles were provided, after payment, with a safe and speedy passage across the sea, and that the poor among them were enabled to travel at cheap rates and were treated with consideration.⁠[226] These general orders were reinforced by the issue of special writs of safe-conduct for individual Jews.⁠[227] The exiles were allowed to carry with them all of their own property that was in their possession at the time of the issue of the decree of expulsion, together with such pledges deposited with them by Christians as were not redeemed before a fixed date. A few Jews who were high in the favour of royal personages, such as Aaron, son of Vives, who was a “chattel” of the King’s brother Edmund,⁠[228] and Cok, son of Hagin, who belonged to the Queen,⁠[229] were allowed before their departure to sell their houses and fees to any Christian who would buy them.

On St. Denis’s Day all the Jews of London started on their journey to the sea-coast.⁠[230] The treatment that they met with was not so merciful as the king had wished. Many of the richer among them embarked with all their property at London. At the mouth of the Thames, the master cast anchor during the ebb-tide, so that his vessel grounded on the sands, and invited his passengers to walk on the shore till it was again afloat. He led them to a great distance, so that they did not get back to the river-side till the tide was again full. Then he ran into the water, climbed into the ship by means of a rope, and bade them, if they needed help, call on their Prophet Moses. They followed him into the water, and most of them were drowned. The sailors appropriated all that the Jews had left on board. But subsequently the master and his accomplices were indicted, convicted of murder, and hanged.⁠[231]⁠

One body of the exiles set sail for France. During their voyage fierce storms swept the sea. Many were drowned. Many were cast destitute on the coast that they were seeking, and were allowed by the King to live for a time in Amiens.⁠[232] This act of mercy, however, called forth the censure of the Pope, and the Parlement de la Chandeleur, which met in the same year, decreed that all the Jews from England and Gascony who had taken refuge in the French king’s dominions should leave the country by the middle of the next Lent.⁠[233] Another body, numbering 1,335, and consisting, to a great extent, of the poor, went to Flanders.⁠[234] The only known fact that we have to guide our conjectures as to the ultimate place of settlement of any of those who left England is that, in a list of the inhabitants of the Paris Jewry, made four years after the Expulsion, there appear certain names with the additions of l’Englische or l’Englais.⁠[235] It may well be that many Jews from England, speaking the French language, were able, in spite of the Act of the Parlement de la Chandeleur, to become merged in the general body of the Jews of France, who were many times as numerous as those of England had been.⁠[236] Many, too, may have thrown in their lot with their 850,000 coreligionists of Spain.⁠[237]⁠

The property that the Jews left behind them in England consisted of such dwelling-houses, and other houses, as remained to them in spite of the strict conditions imposed by the Statute of 1275, of the synagogues and cemeteries of their local congregations, and of bonds partly for the repayment of money, and partly for the delivery of wool and corn for which the price had been paid in advance. All fell into the hands of the King,⁠[238] except, possibly, the houses in some of those towns, such as Hereford, Winchester, and Ipswich, of which the citizens had by the purchase of manorial rights become entitled to all fines and forfeitures.⁠[239] The annual value of the houses, as shown in the returns made by the sheriffs, was, after allowance had been made for the right of the Capital Lords, about £130. The value of the debts, as shown in the register made by the officers of the Exchequer, was about £9,100, but the amount for realisation was diminished by the King’s resolve to take from the debtors, not the full amount for which they were liable, and which, under the amended statute of the Jewry,⁠[240] could include three years’ interest, but only the bare principal that had been originally advanced. Even this was not fully collected; payment was, by the King’s permission, delayed, and confirmations, made in 1315 and 1327, of the renunciation of interest, show how long some of the debts remained outstanding. Edward III. finally gave up the claim to all further payment.⁠[241]⁠

It was ordered that the houses should be sold and the proceeds devoted to pious uses.⁠[242] But it appears that they were nearly all given away to the King’s friends.⁠[243]⁠

XII.—The Necessity for the Expulsion.

The Expulsion was not the act of a cruel king. The forbearance which marks the orders to the officers who were charged with the execution of the decree had been shown by Edward many a time before, when he protected Jews against claims too rigorously enforced, and ordered that his own rights should be waived where insistence on them would have deprived his debtors of their means of subsistence.⁠[244]⁠

Nor was it prompted by greed. It is true that immediately after it, and according to the account of many chroniclers, as an expression of gratitude for it, the Parliament voted a tenth and a fifteenth.⁠[245] But this cannot have been a bribe offered beforehand, for the writs announcing the decree were issued on the fourth day after that for which the Parliament was summoned.⁠[246] It is impossible to suppose that in so short an interval the question was brought up, the policy chosen, the price fixed, and the decree issued. It is equally impossible that Edward’s conduct should have been affected by the prospect of the confiscation of the small amount of property that the Jews left behind them.

The Expulsion was a piece of independent royal action, made necessary by the impossibility of carrying out the only alternative policy that an honourable Christian king could adopt. And the impossibility was not of Edward’s making. It was the result of many causes, and the knowledge of it had been brought home to him by many proofs. The guesses of our contemporary, and all but contemporary, authorities who take on themselves to explain his action, show how many were the obstacles before which he had to confess himself vanquished. In one chronicle the Expulsion is represented as a concession to the prayer of the Pope;⁠[247] in another, as the result of the efforts of Queen Eleanor;⁠[248] in a third, as a measure of summary punishment against the blasphemy of the Jews, taken to give satisfaction to the English clergy;⁠[249] in a fourth as an answer to the complaints made by the magnates of the continued prevalence of usury;⁠[250] in a fifth as an act of conformity to public opinion;⁠[251] in a sixth, as a reform suggested by the King’s independent general enquiry into the administration of the kingdom during his absence, and his discovery, through the complaints of the Council, of the “deceits” of the Jews.⁠[252]⁠

Each of these statements gives us some information as to the nature and extent of the failure of Edward’s policy. None gives the true cause, for none sets before us the true position of the Jews and their relations with their neighbours. It is true that it was the bull of Honorius that finally compelled Edward to give up his attempt to assimilate the position of the Jews to that of Christian traders. It is true, no doubt, that his mother had from the first dissuaded him from generous treatment, and, perhaps, had induced him to lessen the chance of the success of his policy by asserting his right over them as over his serfs.⁠[253] But the bull of the Pope and the personal influence of the Queen-mother were alike unnecessary. If Edward had waived all his rights, if the Church had in his reign relented towards the Jews instead of increasing its bitterness towards them, both acts of generosity would have come too late. The same causes that had made the Jews accept the position of royal usurers at the end of the eleventh century, and of royal chattels at the end of the twelfth, made it impossible for them to give up either position at the end of the thirteenth. From the moment of their arrival in England they had been hated by the common people. They never had an opportunity of acquiring interests in common with their neighbours, or of entering their social or industrial institutions. Isolation brought with it danger. For the sake of safety they had to accept royal protection; and their protectors long held them in a close grip, until one at last refused to tolerate them under the same conditions as had satisfied his predecessors. But to have given them their freedom would only have been to expose them to the old dislike and the old danger. If Edward had allowed them to become citizens, and had set at naught the bull of Honorius, he would have seen the English towns refusing to support his policy and denying to the Jews the right to join the gild merchant, to learn trades and to practise them, and to enjoy the protection of municipal laws and customs.

For towards all new-comers, of whatever race or religion, the English burgesses of the Middle Ages showed a spirit of unyielding exclusiveness.⁠[254] But the feeling against the Jews was far greater than that against any other class. Every reference to them in English literature, before the Expulsion and long after it, shows its strength and bitterness. “Hell is without light where they sing lamentations,” says one poet of them.⁠[255] Another who, writing a few years after the Expulsion, mentions the massacre at the coronation of Richard I., finds in it nothing to wonder at, and nothing to regret. To him it is only natural that “The king took it for great shame, That from such unclean things as them any meat to him came.”⁠[256] The chroniclers of the time refer to them again and again, and always in the same tone of dislike. “The Jews,” says Matthew Paris, in his account of one of the most cruel of Henry III.’s acts of extortion, “had nearly all their money taken from them, and yet they were not pitied, because it is proved, and is manifest, that they are continually convicted of forging charters, seals and coins.”⁠[257] “They are a sign for the nation like Cain the accursed,” he says elsewhere.⁠[258] The eulogist of Edward I., when he recounts the great deeds of his hero, tells with pride and without a word of pity how “the perfidious and unbelieving horde of Jews is driven forth from England in one day into exile.”⁠[259] And just as no punishment that they can suffer is regarded as too heavy for their sins, so no story of their misdoings, whether it be of the murder of Christian children, of insults to the Christian religion, or of fraud on Christian debtors, is too improbable or too brutal or too trivial to be repeated.⁠[260]⁠

The popular hatred showed itself in deed as well as in word. The massacres of 1190 were imitated on a small scale at intervals during the sojourn of the Jews in England. Braziers and hosiers, bakers and shoemakers, tailors and copperers, priests and Oxford scholars were all ready to take part in the looting of a Jewry.⁠[261]⁠

Nor was there any influence exercised by the higher classes to make the populace less intolerant. A great lady declared that it was a disgrace for one of her rank to sit in a carriage in which a Jewess had sat.⁠[262] A great noble thought it a good jest, when a Jew on his estate fell into a pit on a Friday, to order that he should not be helped out either on the Jewish Sabbath or on the Christian, in order that the absurdity of the Mosaic legislation might be demonstrated—at the cost, as it resulted, of the Jew’s life.⁠[263]⁠

Bishops supported with eagerness the charge of child-murder repeatedly brought against the Jews,⁠[264] though Popes and Councils had declared it to be groundless⁠[265]⁠; and the judge who showed the greatest eagerness for the punishment of the Jewish prisoners who were accused on the monstrous charge of having murdered Hugh of Lincoln, was a man who was held in especial honour by his contemporaries as a scholar and “a circumspect and discreet man.”⁠[266]⁠

Thus the Christians were not likely to endure the Jews as neighbours and fellow-workers, and the Jews, even if they had been permitted, would have been as little willing to live the life and follow the ordinary pursuits of citizens. It was not that they loved usury as a calling. On the contrary, they entered willingly into all those professions that gave them the opportunity of being their own masters and living according to their own fashion. Many of them were physicians, and among the most esteemed in Europe.⁠[267] In Italy, where the municipal and gild organisations were easier to enter, and less narrow and exacting in their constitution, than those of England,⁠[268] they worked at trades.⁠[269] In Sicily, under Frederic II., some Jews were employed as administrators, and many more were agriculturists.⁠[270] In Rome, one was treasurer of the household of Pope Alexander III., and in Southern France another filled the same office under Count Raymond, of Toulouse.⁠[271] In Austria, they were the financial ministers of the Archduke,⁠[272] and in Spain, one was chamberlain to Alphonso the Wise, and many others were in the service of the same king.⁠[273] In England, some Jews were attached to the Court of Henry III., and treated with special favour; others were useful and valued adherents of Richard, King of the Romans,⁠[274] and, after the prohibition of usury, others, as we have seen, became corn-merchants, and wool-merchants.

But the whole character of the Jews, their religious beliefs, and their national hopes, were such as to make repellent to them those close relations with Christians and Englishmen which would have been necessary if they had entered into the feudal or municipal organisations of the Middle Ages. Though there was no religious obstacle to prevent them from entering a Gild, still they could not, without violating their religion, eat at a Gild feast, or take part in its religious ceremonies. Their teachers, like those of the Church, warned them against social intercourse with the Christians, “lest it might lead to inter-marriage.”⁠[275] They did not speak the English language.⁠[276] They remained willingly outside the national and municipal life.

Their isolation caused them no sorrow. Rather must it have been dear to them as a sign that they were faithful members of the one race to which in truth they belonged, the race of Israel. The interests that filled their mind were those that were common to them, not with the inhabitants of the country in which they lived, but with their brethren in faith and race scattered throughout the world. The rapidity and copiousness with which the stream of Jewish literature poured forth in the Middle Ages, showed how unfailing was the strength of the Jewish life which was its source. In Southern Europe the Jews waged among themselves fierce controversies over problems such as were suggested by the support that some of their Rabbis gave, or appeared to give, to the Aristotelian doctrines of the eternity of matter and the uncreativeness of God.⁠[277] Among the English Jews, and in the communities of Northern France with whom the English Jews were in continual communication, literature, though less controversial and engaged with less deep questions, sufficed, nevertheless, even better to provide continual and engrossing interest for the orthodox. There were read and written, down to the last years before the Expulsion, commentaries and super-commentaries on the Bible and the Talmud, lexicons and grammars, treatises on ritual and ceremonial. The Rabbis discussed what blessings it was right to use on all the occasions of life, on rising in the morning, or on retiring to rest at night, on eating, on washing, on being married, on hearing thunder.⁠[278] The English Jews were strict observers of the ceremonial law,⁠[279] they made use in daily life of the minutiæ of Rabbinical scholarship, they drew up their contracts “after the usage of the sages,”⁠[280] and thus, like all the Jews of mediæval Europe, they were continually reminded, in the pursuit of their ordinary interests and occupations, that they were a peculiar people. How proud they were of the position is shown by the poetical literature which, as preserved in the Jewish prayer book, is the most precious legacy that mediæval Judaism has left us. It was common to Jews in all lands; it commemorated all the sorrows of their nation, and gave expression to all their hopes. It made them feel that, scattered as they were, they yet had a destiny of their own, and it banished from their minds, as a counsel of baseness, the thought of making themselves one with the “Gentiles” around them. It reminded them that exile and persecution, and ultimate triumph were the appointed lot of Israel, and that the same teachers who had prophesied that the Chosen People should suffer, had also prophesied that in the fulness of time they should be redeemed. They knew that in the hour of danger and persecution there had never been wanting martyrs to testify in death to the unity of God and to the Glory of his Name. And they could not doubt that the Lord of Mercy and Justice would mete out due recompense to the oppressors and the oppressed.⁠[281]⁠

Thus the memory of their past, and the commonplace occurrences of their daily life, continually strengthened the bonds that bound Jews together after twelve centuries of dispersion. In the thirteenth century of the Christian era, as in the first, they still regarded the Holy Land as their true home. Three hundred Rabbis from France and England went thither in 1211.⁠[282] There Jehudi Halevi ended his days.⁠[283] There Nachmanides taught that it was the duty of every Jew to live, and, true to his own lesson, he set out on his pilgrimage in the seventieth year of his age. And in his own and the next generation many Jews from Spain and Germany followed his example.⁠[284] A Jewish traveller of the Middle Ages says of certain of the communities of his coreligionists that he visited: “They are full of hopes, and they say to one another, ‘Be of good cheer, brethren, for the salvation of the Lord will be quick as the glancing of an eye:’ and were it not that we have hitherto doubted, and thought that the end of our Captivity has not yet arrived, we should have been gathered together long ago. But now this will not be till the time of song arrives, and the sound of the turtle-dove gives warning. Then will the message arrive, and we shall ever say ‘The Name of the Lord be exalted.’”⁠[285]⁠

Nowhere in Europe could such men have been content to live the life of those around them, to bind themselves with the ties of citizenship, to find their highest hopes on earth in the destiny of the town, or the country, in which they dwelt. They were but sojourners. They lived in expectation of the time when the Lord should return the Captivity of Zion, and they should look back on their exile as reawakened dreamers.

Without the privilege of isolation they could not live; and if in England the communities of the Gentiles had been open to them, they would never have entered them.

The Expulsion of the English Jews was an event of small importance alike in English and in Jewish history. In England the effect that it produced was barely perceptible. The loss of their capital was too slight to produce any economic change.⁠[286] The only class that benefited from their departure was the Florentine merchants, whose trade grew from this time even greater than before.⁠[287] Political results of importance have sometimes been attributed to the Expulsion. The victory of the towns over the King has been said to have been hastened by the loss of the financial support of the Jews.⁠[288] But it cannot have come any the sooner for the disappearance of a community from whom the King had long ceased to get any real help in his enterprises abroad, or in his struggles at home. The trading classes still complained after the Expulsion, as they had done before it, of the prevalence of the “horrible practice of usury, which has undone many, and brought many to poverty,”⁠[289] and the “horrible practice” prevailed none the less; and perhaps the poorer agricultural classes of England, the newly enfeoffed rent-payers, found, as did the corresponding class in France,⁠[290] that the expulsion of the Jews only compelled them to go to more cruel money-lenders than before. The coin was clipped as regularly after the Expulsion as before it, and the Christian goldsmiths were as rigorously treated as the Jewish money-lenders had been.⁠[291] The Church, which had helped to drive out the Jews, soon found itself in conflict with Christian heresy, compared with which Jewish unbelief was harmless.

The Jews, on their side, were driven from a land which thirty-five years earlier they had begged in vain to be allowed to leave.⁠[292] They went forth to join the far greater bodies of their countrymen in other lands, and with them to fulfil the career of sorrow that they had begun. The loss of their inhospitable home in England was but one episode in their tragic history. From France they were again to be expelled, despoiled and destitute.⁠[293] In Germany the blood-accusation met them as in England.⁠[294] In Spain popular massacres and clerical persecution were already preparing the ground for the Inquisition.⁠[295] The time was still far off when Jew and Christian could live side by side and neither suffer because he would not worship after his neighbour’s fashion. That time could not come until society was more heterogeneous, and the circles of interest of ordinary men wider, than they could be in the thirteenth century, until the citizen ceased to live his life, bodily and spiritual, within the walls of his native town, under the shadow of the Church.