JEWS AND DEVILS: ANTI-SEMITIC STEREOTYPES OF LATE MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE ENGLAND

Abstract

In pictorial representation, the earliest extant English caricature drawings ofjews stem from the thirteenth century. The best known, which may serve as our example, is the group caricature by an anonymous court scribe that appears at the head of a vellum Tallage Roll from the year 1233, now in the Public Record Office London.1 Whatever may have been in the mind of the sketcher, we cannot be certain of the precise intention of his drawing, perhaps little more than a doodle in an idle hour, for the contents of the roll do not allude to it. The figure, however, at the centre of the sketch is identified as Isaac of Norwich, whose head surmounted by a crown has three faces, one full, the other two in profile, each of them protruding into a goatee beard. It has been suggested that a fourth face, behind the others, is to be understood, so that the crowned figure of Isaac is shown casting his eye over his possessions to the north, south, east and west.2 In his day, Isaac of Norwich (d. 1235), the son ofjurnet, was probably the wealthiest Jew in England and the drawing seems to allude both to the sphere of his influence and to his double dealing. For, some years earlier, Isaac is reported to have loaned huge sums of money to the abbot and monks of Westminster, despite the support they enjoyed of Pandulf, Bishop Elect of Norwich and former Papal Legate, a clergyman who had tried to have the Jews expelled from England.3 Also in the mind of the anonymous caricaturist may have been the tallaging of the Jewish community during the reign of Henry III, by which Jews were forced to pay considerable levies to the Crown. We know that Isaac owned taxable assets and land at Norwich, but in 1231 the King, in an unusual step, granted him freedom from being tallaged for the rest of his life, though the records show that even after this he was sufficiently rich to remain among the most heavily taxed.4 Below the three faces of Isaac is a complex tableau that has been described by Cecil Roth as 'the setting as it were of a contemporary miracle play', the drapery representing 'the stage, and the architecture ... that of the church