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.