1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook by Danny Danziger

punished the rioters, hanging three, and he allowed a Jew who had pretended to convert to Christianity to escape death, to return to the faith of his fathers. But after the king left England for France, with the crusade as his goal, more anti-Semitic riots and murders occurred in 1190 in Lynn, Stamford, Norwich and Bury St Edmunds. Crusades, with their reminders of Christ’s crucifixion, tended to stimulate anti-Jewish sentiment; a crusading vow was an expensive commitment and the plundering of Jews sometimes seemed an all-too-appropriate way of raising the cash. The killings of 1190 reached a climax at York. Jews took refuge, as they often did, in the royal castle, Clifford’s Tower. A mob led by some of the local gentry, crusaders among them, and urged on by a fanatical hermit, mounted an assault on it. When the Jews realised they could hold out no longer, most of the men killed their wives and children, then committed suicide. Those families who did not opt for the ancient Jewish tradition of self-martyrdom surrendered when they were promised that their lives would be spared if they accepted Christian baptism. Once they left the castle they were killed. The mob then rushed to York Minster where the records of debts owed to Jews were stored and there, in the nave of the cathedral church, they made a bonfire of them. ‘As for these people who were butchered with such savage ferocity’, said the Yorkshire historian William of Newburgh, writing in the nearby priory of Newburgh, ‘I unhesitatingly affirm that if they had truly wished to be baptised, then baptised or nor, they found acceptance in God’s eyes. But whether their wish for baptism was genuine or feigned, the cruelty of those who murdered them was deceitful and utterly barbarous.’ As far as it could – which wasn’t very far – the government punished those responsible for the York massacre, and over the next few decades Jews returned to the city until, once again, it contained one of the richest communities in England.
    Anti-Semitism and religious discrimination meant that the position of the Jews remained vulnerable everywhere in Latin Christendom. Philip II of France (usually known as King Philip Augustus) began his reign in 1180 by expelling Jews from Paris and confiscating their property. When he returned from crusade in 1192 he had eighty Jews found guilty of ritual murder and burned at the stake in Brie. In 1215 Pope Innocent III at the Fourth Lateran Council in Rome decreed that Jews and Muslims were ‘to be publicly distinguished from other people by their dress’. In 1218 the council governing England on behalf of the boy-king Henry III ordered ‘all Jews to wear on the outer part of their clothing two strips on their breast made of white linen or parchment so that Jews may be distinguished from Christians by this visible badge’. This, it was argued, was to stop a person of one faith from unwittingly having sex with someone of another. A ‘certain deacon’, name unknown, certainly knew what he was doing, however, when he fell in love with a Jewish woman; he circumcised himself for her sake. He was defrocked on the orders of a Church council chaired by Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury, held at Oxford in 1222, then taken outside the city walls and burned. In practice, the pope’s rules on distinctive dress for Jews were commonly set aside in England. In return for money the king was happy to exempt individuals or communities from the obligation to wear the Jewish badge. On this and related matters his view was that churchmen ‘have nothing to do with our Jews’. Before the end of the thirteenth century, though, the Crown’s financial demands had pressed its Jewish sponges so hard that little more could be squeezed out of them. In 1290 Edward I expelled them from his kingdom, to general English applause. It was not until England had a new kind of ruler, in the shape of Oliver Cromwell, that they were allowed to return.

CHAPTER