Chapter XXV

JEWS IN ENGLAND (_continued_).
(1216‒1290.)

=1. The Next Fifty Years.=――Throughout the minority and during the long reign of Henry III. (1216‒1272) things grew worse and worse for the Jews. The ‘_Hep, Hep_,’ had not sounded so often for the last century without leaving echoes. Even when and where the connection of the cry with the crusades had grown somewhat faint, it kept its full and terrible significance for the Jews. Church, and State, and people, all seemed to unite in oppressing them, and each to have its own separate cause and justification for oppression. The Church, which had grown fierce in its fanaticism, hated Jews simply as Jews, and persecuted them religiously. The State regarded them as a gold mine, to be worked as profitably, and with as little personal or familiar contact, as was possible. The populace, who were necessarily brought into closer relations with Jews than were either the priests or the barons, looked on them with a curious mixture of unwilling admiration and superstitious dislike. They could not but recognise that the superior intelligence and thrift of the despised Jews were at least among the causes which contributed to their greater wealth. It is not pleasant to have to acknowledge that one’s social inferiors are morally and intellectually superior to one’s self. The Jews of England at this period were very different from the Jews of Spain, but there are degrees of difference; low as they had fallen from the level of what Jews should be, they were yet far less ignorant and superstitious than were most of their neighbours. They prayed to God instead of invoking saints, and they trusted in temperance and cleanliness, rather than in doubtful ‘relics,’ to ward off physical ills. Their knowledge, however, like their religion, was often another danger to the Jews. If they tried to teach the child of some Christian neighbour, or succeeded in healing a sick person, or in helping a poor one, any such kindly ministration was more likely to be looked on with suspicion than with gratitude. Jews were compelled, too, in this reign to wear a distinctive dress, and how could the wearers of a white badge[27] move about among their fellows without a sense of aloofness which must have made any familiar and wholesome intercourse impossible? And often, in order that the royal treasury might be kept well filled, and the ‘protection’ of the king secured, the Jews were forced to prey upon the people. Their neighbours could not have liked them if they would, and thus, Jews were quite alone in the kingdom, left to themselves, without the chance of making a friend among the populace, or the priests, or the nobles.

=2. The Caorsini.=――Besides enmity and prejudice from Church and state, Jews had, what might be called, professional enemies in a class of money-lenders called the Caorsini. The Caorsini were originally bankers and collectors of the Pope’s revenue, and lived in the town of Cahors, in Italy. Then some of them came to England, and gradually developed into a regular and recognised craft of dealers in money. This, in a sense, was poaching on Jewish ground, and it was hard upon the Jews, because the Caorsini were not fair rivals in an equal and open competition. The Caorsini had the advantage in position, being, as it were, licensed dealers in money; and they had, further, no unpopularity of race to handicap them. Jews, to cover the grave risks to which their property was always exposed, had often to ask a higher rate of interest than contented the Caorsini. This angered the customers of both, and the competition introduced an unhealthy trade jealousy and distrust between the rival money dealers, which state of things pressed, of course, most heavily on those who were already burdened and weakened with the weight of prejudice.

=3. The First Jewish M.P.s.=――The constant quarrels between Henry and his barons exhausted the treasury, and new means of raising money had to be hit upon. The old accusation of crucifying Christian children was revived, and little Hugh of Lincoln served as pretext for a pretty extensive robbery. But this well-worn device was not wholly satisfactory, being necessarily confined to one locality at a time. In 1240 an entirely new mode was found of raising supplies. A Jewish Parliament was summoned. Writs were issued in due form, no reasons being given for the extraordinary proceeding. The larger towns were to return six Jewish representatives, and the smaller, two. When the newly elected members met, they were bluntly told their business, which was to collect, without the smallest delay, 20,000 marks[28] from among their co-religionists to replenish the royal treasury. The Parliament was then dissolved. These members, of the date 1240, are the very first Jewish M.P.’s in England.

=4. Another Device for raising Money.=――The supply of Jewish wealth still proved unequal to the constant demand for it, and a little later, Henry, who must have had a really original mind, thought out an entirely new scheme. The Jews, we must remember, were, by constitutional law, ‘his Jews.’ He had got money out of his property by every conceivable way known to conscienceless holders of property; now, why should he not sell it? Profits might be turned over afresh in fresh hands. So actually King Henry III. sold his Jews to his brother Richard, receiving 5,000 marks as their price, and, by the terms of this remarkable bargain, Richard, Earl of Cornwall, became the legal owner, with ‘all rights reserved,’ of all the Jews in the kingdom. The terms of the sale would seem, however, to have considered the property rather as leasehold than as freehold in its nature, for presently we find the king reclaiming ‘his Jews,’ and subsequently selling them again to the Caorsini.

=5. Under Edward I.=――In 1272 the long, cruel reign of Henry ended; and if, like Herod, he had desired that the sound of Jewish weeping should be heard at his funeral, he could hardly have devised surer means of securing that satisfaction than his latest statute afforded. By this statute it was decreed that all real property possessed by Jews, in the form of land or houses, was to be wrested from them, and any mortgages held by them on securities of this sort were to be formally given up and confiscated to the Crown. Edward I. confirmed the unrighteous statute, and to show some aptitude for persecution beyond that of imitation, he made an order that the distinctive badge worn by the Jews, and hitherto white in colour, should henceforward be yellow.

=6. Some Ironical Legislation.=――The State at this period showed also some care, although it must be confessed of a somewhat unpractical kind, for the moral condition of the Jewish portion of its property. The Jewish habit of ‘usury’ is gravely condemned by the statute-book of this date, and advice offered that manufacturing and agricultural arts should be followed by Jews instead of, or besides, their all but universal pursuit of retail trade. At the same time new taxes were imposed, and the old statute, which forbade Jews to hold ‘real’ property of any sort, remained unrepealed. So the good advice was somewhat ironical, and the concern expressed for outraged morality sounds a trifle hypocritical. For how were men who might not hold an inch of land to feel any interest in sowing and in planting it? and how could artisans or labourers, working at a small wage, earn a tithe of the tolls and the taxes which alone gained for Jews the right of existing at all? Whilst legislation compelled men to dwell apart and to dress apart, and claimed, at its own caprice, an unjust share of their earnings, it forced such men into mean occupations, and made it difficult to them to follow even these in an upright and honourable fashion.

=7. Dishonest Jews.=――In truth, the terrible pressure put on the Jews for money, drove many of them into dishonest ways of obtaining it. The vast sums continually demanded could not possibly be raised in any legitimate way. In their dreadful straits, Jews clipped and adulterated the coin of the realm. Although, in strict equity, those who called for money, which they knew quite well could not be honestly come by, really caused this crime, and were as guilty in some respects as those who perpetrated it, still, two wrongs never yet made one right, and no amount of poverty is any justification whatever for dishonesty. It is better to starve than to steal, to be shunned than to cheat. There is, therefore, no cause for complaint in the fact that fraudulent practices, whenever discovered, were punished in the severest manner. In November 1279, all the Jews in the kingdom were arrested, on a tolerably substantial charge against some of them, of having clipped and adulterated the coin. Many non-Jews were likewise arrested, but their punishments, when found guilty, were of a much less severe sort than were pronounced upon the Jews. On this occasion, eighty Jews were executed in London alone.

=8. Efforts at Conversion.=――Although their wealth was the chief interest which Jews possessed for those in authority, yet their conversion was always a secondary object, and was never quite lost sight of. It served sometimes as the excuse, and sometimes as the occasion, for a little extra persecution. During the reign of Edward I., Pope Honorius IV. issued a bull denouncing usury and fraud, which, all men would agree with him, are practices quite justly to be denounced. But Pope Honorius went further; he denounced them as _Jewish_ practices, and took the occasion to speak strongly against the Jewish religion generally and the Talmud in particular. This bull of his was issued especially for the guidance of the Archbishop of Canterbury and of the English clergy, and it was supplemented by an English statute of about the same date, which compelled Jews, under penalties, to attend places where Dominican friars preached proselytising sermons. Whether these sermons checked usury or promoted conversion may be doubted, but such compulsory attendances must in any case have provoked bad feeling, and, further, put the Jews into a false position with the priests and the populace.

=9. Expulsion of Jews from England.=――At last the wrongs and miseries of the Jews in England reached their climax. Heavy pressure from his clergy was brought to bear upon King Edward, and towards the end of the year 1290, he signed an edict which ordered every Jew in his kingdom, under penalty of being hanged if he remained, to leave England on November 1. All debts owing to Jews were cancelled, and only strictly portable property was to be carried away by them. Homes had to be broken up; old folks, sick folks, little children, to all of whom roughness and shifts and changes might mean agony or death, were not considered. The decree was absolute and unconditional, and none were exempt from it. King Edward was not wholly responsible for the barbarous act, nor personally vindictive in its execution, yet it seems to have been carried out with circumstances of peculiar cruelty. The safe-conducts granted by the king were not always respected. One party of refugees was left stranded on a desolate part of the coast at the mercy of the incoming tide, whilst the master of the vessel they had chartered sailed away with their poor belongings. Of the 15,000 or 16,000 Jews (accounts vary as to the exact numbers) who were expelled from England in 1290, very many perished on their outward bound journey, some by accident and illness, some, it may be feared, by more or less of direct cruelty. The survivors were deposited at the nearest foreign ports. Thence, they made their way inland to such places in Central Europe as still permitted Jews to lead sad lives under State ‘protection.’