Jews In England Research Articles

Christians and Jews in Angevin England: The York Massacre of 1190, Narratives and Contexts ed. by Sarah Rees Jones and Sethina Watson (review)

Reviewed by: Christians and Jews in Angevin England: The York Massacre of 1190, Narratives and Contexts ed. by Sarah Rees Jones and Sethina Watson Paul Brand Christians and Jews in Angevin England: The York Massacre of 1190, Narratives and Contexts. Edited by Sarah Rees Jones and Sethina Watson. (Rochester, NY: York Medieval Press in association with Boydell Press. 2013. Pp. xx, 351. $90.00. ISBN 978-1-903153-44-4.) The first Jews to settle in England arrived not long after the Norman Conquest of 1066, and the medieval phase of Anglo-Jewish history came to an end in 1290 with the expulsion of all of its members other than those who had converted to Christianity. The final decade of the twelfth century looks to have been a major turning-point in this relatively short history. This was the first time serious violence occurred against Jewish communities not just in London but also in at least seven other towns in East Anglia, the Midlands, and York. The present volume is the outcome of a 2010 conference held in York that examined the wider context of the York “massacre.” The first section of this volume is rather misleadingly titled “The Events of March 1190.” Three of the section’s five papers do indeed focus on providing an immediate context for them: they are Joe Hillaby’s paper on the attacks on Jewish communities elsewhere in 1189–90; Nick Vincent’s paper on the literary sources behind William of Newburgh’s chronicle account of the York massacre; and Sarah Rees Jones’s paper on what is currently known about the transformation of York into a major royal center postconquest, Jewish settlement in York from the 1170s onward, and the local inhabitants fined for the York attacks. But Robert Stacey’s important paper specifically rejects the traditional connection made between the 1189–90 Jewish killings and the creation in 1194 of a network of official registries (chests) for records of Jewish loans and the emergence of the Exchequer of the Jews in 1198 and argues that both are connected with something rather different: the assertion of a new royal jurisdictional monopoly over the Jewish community. The second section (“Jews among Christians in medieval England”) includes a characteristically thought-provoking paper by Paul Hyams on some of the barriers to social contact and trust between Jews and Christians in medieval England, a fascinating paper by Eva de Visscher using Hebrew and Hebraist texts from pre-1290 England to reconstruct how Christian readers learned Hebrew, and a paper by Pinchas Roth and Ethan Zadoff looking at the evidence for Talmudic study in England, with a particular focus on Rabbi Elijah Menahem. The third section (“Representations”) has an interesting paper by Heather Blurton on the chroniclers’ use of biblical and other narratives of the destruction and expulsion of the ancient Israelites as a model for their description of the violence against Jews in England, another by Matthew Mesley on a miracle story allegedly involving a blind and dumb Jewish woman at the tomb of St. Remigius of Lincoln and her subsequent conversion, and one by Carlee Bradbury on the visual tradition in English art of the [End Page 623] period from 1190 onward of dehumanizing a Jew present at the funeral of the Virgin Mary. The volume as a whole makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of the Jewish community in medieval England and its relationship with the Christian population and English royal government. Paul Brand All Souls College University of Oxford Copyright © 2015 The Catholic University of America Press

“The Other Woman” – Eliza Davis and Charles Dickens

“The Other Woman” – Eliza Davis and Charles Dickens Murray Baumgarten (bio) The letters Eliza Davis wrote to Charles Dickens, from 22 June 1863 to 8 February 1867, and after his death to his daughter Mamie on 4 August 1870, reveal the increasing self-confidence of English Jews.1 In their careful and accurate comments on the power of Dickens’s work in shaping English culture and popular opinion, and their pointed discussion of the ways in which Fagin reinforces antisemitic English and European Jewish stereotypes, they indicate the concern, as Eliza Davis phrases it, of “a scattered nation” to participate fully in the life of “the land in which we have pitched our tents.2” It is worth noting that by 1858 the fits and starts of Jewish Emancipation in England had led, finally, to the seating of Lionel Rothschild in the House of Commons. After being elected for the fifth time from Westminster he was not required, due to a compromise devised by the Earl of Lucan and Benjamin Disraeli, to take the oath on the New Testament as a Christian.3 [End Page 44] And Eliza and her husband, James Phineas Davis, had in 1860 become the inhabitants of Tavistock House, purchasing it that year from Charles Dickens. In the eyes of the law, English Jews now received the same treatment, privileges and rights as Christian English folk. Yet the Jews were not exactly at ease in England. During the negotiations for his house, Dickens mentions to a friend, that “the purchaser of Tavistock will be a Jew Money Lender.”4 Three days later he writes, “If the Jew Money Lender buys (I say ‘if’ because of course I shall never believe in him until he has paid the money.)”. A month later he writes to Arthur Stone, “I hope you will find the Children of Israel, good neighbours” (Letters 9: 307). Slighting remarks, these. Yet Dickens also adds, that “Mrs. Davis appears to be a very kind and agreeable woman. And I have never had any money transaction with any one, more promptly, fairly, and considerately conducted than the purchase of Tavistock House has been” (Letters 9: 306–07). Praising Eliza Davis, Dickens overcomes the thrown-off comments he had made. Obtuse and unthinking, they derive from the lurking antisemitism and fear-ridden Jewish stereotyping of his era and culture. That stereotype Eliza Davis confronts in her forthright correspondence with Dickens when she notes that “there are other oppressions, <far> much heavier other things far sharper, than the fetters and goads of Damascus Lebanon or Russia” (Clark 1918, 17). How Literature Matters “Emboldened by your Courtesy,” Eliza Davis began her first letter to Charles Dickens on 22 June 1863, initiating a correspondence that would extend throughout the rest of his life and even beyond. It is one of the most sustained exchanges of letters we have between Dickens and someone outside his immediate circle. All her letters to Dickens bore her address: Tavistock House, while Dickens’s came from Gad’s Hill Place and Bradford, Yorkshire, where he was traveling as part of his reading tour. In 1870 after his death, the “Letters from a Jewess” as they were headlined, were excerpted in several newspapers, including The Observer, the Daily News, and The Jewish Chronicle. Like other diligent correspondents, Eliza Davis kept copies of her letters [End Page 45] and interleaved them with Dickens’s responses.5 At Eliza Davis’s death in 1903,6 the full set of letters was included in the Estate Sale and purchased by a friend who passed them on to Cumberland Clark, a journalist, traveler throughout the Empire, and man of letters.7 In 1918, Clark published the complete set of letters as Charles Dickens and His Jewish Characters.8 Dickens’s letters are included in the Pilgrim Edition; and the entire correspondence was republished in 1921 in The Dickensian. Since then the rethinking of Dickens’s achievement, and his public life, as well as the relative obscurity of this exchange, make the chance to revisit them and explore their impact a welcome opportunity. Cumberland Clark prefaces his 1918 publication of the letters with a brief statement, noting that the recent...

“Poor Old Palace-Prison!”: Jewish Urban Memory in Amy Levy’s “The Ghetto at Florence” (1886)

In an 1886 piece of travel journalism written for the London-based periodical The Jewish Chronicle , the Anglo-Jewish writer Amy Levy records some brief, witty observations on the history and current conditions of the Jewish ghetto at Florence. By writing from the narrative perspective of a self-identifying English Jew, Levy addresses in “The Ghetto at Florence” a history of Jewish exclusion and confinement represented by the ghetto, while also using this site to engage her complex attitudes towards Jewishness in the mid-1880s, in London. Rather than an accurate history of place, however, what is foregrounded in her article is self-reflexivity about ways of seeing and the effects of memory. This paper examines her uses of imaginative representation, race science, and the photographic gaze to attempt a tactile and affective encounter with the ghetto. In occupying a vexed space between extreme openness to imagined historical resonances alongside ironic detachment from the inadequacies of the present moment, she embodies the characteristically isolated subjectivity of the flâneur . She does so while contemplating the role of Jewishness in using the past to make sense of modern identity.

Christians and Jews in Angevin England: The York Massacre of 1190, Narratives and Contexts, edited by Sarah Reese Jones and Sethina Watson

Christians and Jews in Angevin England: The York Massacre of 1190, Narratives and Contexts, edited by Sarah Reese Jones and Sethina Watson. York, York Medieval Press and Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, The Boydell Press, 2013. xx, 351 pp. $90.00 US (cloth). On the night of 16 March 1190, in Passover week, a group of some 150 Jews sought refuge from an angry mob in Clifford's Tower, York. By morning, all were dead. Several of the unfortunate victims took their own lives rather than surrender to the fury of the attacking mob; others fell under the blows of the townsmen. In 1941, the Oxford-trained historian Cecil Roth explored briefly the events that led up to the brutal attack. His History of the Jews in England (Oxford, 1941) generated enthusiastic scholarly interest in this event and others like it. Before long, Barrie Dobson had authored several short studies of the York massacre in a series of pamphlets; these in turn helped to launch a generation of scholarship that sought to understand the experience of the Jews of England more generally over the course of the two hundred-odd years during which the medieval crown offered them protection. Roth and his early successors discovered that the attack on the Jews of York generated a great deal of discussion by medieval observers; indeed, a plentiful corpus of extant chronicle materials revealed that the slaughter of 1190 was but one event in a series of clashes that periodically disturbed relations between the Jews and their Christian neighbours throughout the realm. Roth's early explorations of the experience of the medieval English Jews soon formed the focus of vigorous historiographical debate. More important still, it encouraged scholars to undertake comprehensive studies of an enormous body of extant record material generated by the special status that was accorded the Jews at English law. In many respects, then, this collection of essays revisits well-trodden historical ground. Nevertheless, it offers an assessment of a single historical moment--and its aftermath--that is fresh, exciting and wholly original. The promise of the volume lies above all in its multidisciplinary approach to the terrible events of 1190. The book consists of some sixteen essays, plus a lengthy introduction and a conclusion. Several of the essays were originally delivered at a three-day conference held in York in 2010, the central theme of which was the massacre, its significance within the wider Anglo-Jewish world of the late twelfth century, and its legacy in later medieval England and Europe. As the editors' preface explains, the conference sought to reconstruct the mental, social, cultural, and confessional worlds in which the Jews of York lived, conducted business, made friends with, and fought, the Christians whose streets and public spaces they shared. It was also designed to highlight the potential inherent in the study of a single event by experts in fields as varied as history, archaeology, literary criticism, linguistics, exegetical studies, paleography, and museum studies. The volume of essays that the conference inspired more than accomplishes these goals. Ironically, perhaps, its most significant conclusion is that there are no simple explanations for the horrors that occurred on the night of 16 March 1190. …

The Cultural Discourses on the 16th-Century English Jews and Christopher Marlowe’s Representations: The Jew of Malta

The Cultural Discourses on the 16th-Century English Jews and Christopher Marlowe’s Representations: The Jew of Malta

Trading Freedom in the Russian Empire: The Extent to Which Russia Attempted to Solve the Jewish Question by Granting Jews Rights Only in Scenerios that Economically Benefited the State

Ever since its first known usage during the so-called "Jew Bill" controversy concerning the naturalization process for English Jews in the 1750s, the term Jewish Question has connoted a fairly simple, straightforward idea: How should a state craft policies to "properly" handle its Jewish population. However, its inherent subjectivity and the sheer multitude of possibilities ensured that no correspondingly simple, straightforward answer to the Jewish Question was offered in any country throughout Europe. Mired in centuries-old religious strife, constantly shifting boundaries and mounds of legislation, Russia's encounter with the Jewish Question stands out as one of the most complex— capable of perplexing even its most dedicated and knowledgeable scholars. Given this track record of bewilderment, historian Simon Dubnow questioned Tsar Alexander III's request for the formation of the High Commission for the Study of Existing Laws on the Jews in early 1883, which followed two years of heavy anti- Jewish pogroms centered in southwestern Russia. As a student of history, the quick-witted Dubnow recognized that the group better known as the Pahlen Commission faced a "Sisyphus task" that previous "bureaucratic creations" in Russia had promptly abandoned due to the perceived impossibility of the task. Despite these well documented difficulties, one member of the Pahlen Commission single-handedly drafted an explanation of the Jewish Question that belied its perceptions as an endlessly confusing labyrinth of religion and policy.

Rabbi Nathan Adler and the Formulation of the Chief Rabbinate in Britain, 1845-1890

The paper investigates the role Rabbi Nathan Adler played in the institutionalisation of the English Chief Rabbinate. It focuses on his appointment to Chief Rabbi and on his activities in instituting the various roles of Chief Rabbi in the post-emancipation Anglo-Jewish community. Rabbi Adler's complicated relations with early Reform Judaism in England are also dealt with. When Rabbi Adler came to London he had an image of Reform Judaism as he knew it in Hanover, where he came from. In a short period he understood the uniqueness of the English Reform Movement, and adjusted his politics towards it accordingly. Continuing the dominance of German Rabbis heading the English Chief Rabbinate, Rabbi Adler brought with him to England a new mode of modern German Rabbinate, established in the mid nineteenth century. Rabbi Adler adapted, with considerable success, the German model to the British reality. Rabbi Adler was a very close associate of Sir Moses Montefiore. Their close relationship was an important factor in Rabbi Adler's success in the formulation of the Chief Rabbinate in the nineteenth-century United Kingdom.

Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England: Legally Absent, Virtually Present (review)

Reviewed by: Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England: Legally Absent, Virtually Present Lawrence Besserman Miriamne Ara Krummel. Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England: Legally Absent, Virtually Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. xix, 243. $85.00. Long in gestation, this study has more strengths than weaknesses. The principal strength of Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England is that it surveys an impressive variety of texts and images from the twelfth century through the fifteenth and illuminates the theme of Jewish otherness in medieval England and the theme of the “Other” in medieval Christian Europe in general. Using postcolonial insights (via the work of Foucault, Homi Bhabha, and others), Miriamne Krummel starts out by linking the mimicry and displacement of Judaism in a contemporary anti-Judaic cartoon with the same ambivalent movement of mimicry and displacement in medieval anti-Judaic supersessionism. Setting the stage, Krummel writes: “Reading Jewishness through the intersection of imaginative and archival works enables me to see that English Jews were not at all absent from medieval English society as was commonly believed—a belief that is ever losing currency among contemporary medievalists” (8). This is promising, but in fact Krummel’s “spectral” Jews receive most of the attention. To be sure, the Rolls are helpfully scanned for the “presence” of absent Jews in place-names that refer to “superseded” Jewish ownership. But for Krummel (following Biddick, Fradenburg, Kruger, and others), Jews are either “absent” or “erased,” or present mainly in archival memory. Fortunately, Krummel also sees past the specters and adduces evidence of actual Jews present after the 1290 expulsion, citing records in the Patent Rolls that prove that “the English land [sic] and its Court [End Page 416] probably welcomed Jews so long as the King desired their presence” (12). Acknowledging that England was not entirely Judenrein or “Jew-clean” after 1290, Krummel’s thesis is that “neither the 1290 Expulsion nor scriptural typology completely prevented living Jewishness from appearing on the medieval English landscape” (14). How could that happen? Their lands had been expropriated, their presence outlawed—Where was “living Jewishness” to be found? Krummel suggests answers to these questions that will enliven the scholarly conversation. In Chapter 1, Krummel explicates Edward I’s Statute of Jewry (1275) and the “racialist impulses in eight thirteenth-century English pictorials [i.e., manuscript illustrations] and one fourteenth-century doodle” (23). As previous scholars have noted, these and similar images and statutes all coincide in defining Jews as bestial, the quintessential, less-than-human “Other.” Krummel’s contribution is to introduce a postmodern perspective on these familiar anti-Semitic stereotypes by way of theories of agency, the body, the gaze, the panopticon, hybridity, and essentialism. Chapter 2 treats the liturgical poetry (Heb. piyyutim) of Meir, son of Elijah of Norwich (fl. c. 1290), focusing especially on Meir’s “Put a Curse on My Enemy.” This text reflects Meir’s “attempt to reclaim agency and to become a witness to his own experiences” (63). Catastrophes call up memories of earlier catastrophes. As Krummel says, “[r]e-seeing and re-membering the 1290 English Expulsion of the Jews through the enormity of the twentieth-century Holocaust are not so much myopic as they are inevitable” (65). Juxtaposing these two Jewish traumatic events may indeed “complicate our understanding of both periods,” but the awkwardly expressed claim that it does so “by giving us a glimpse of a medieval Jews’ [sic] internalization of invisibility and trauma in Meir’s piyyut” (66) falls flat. In this chapter, page after page repeats large portions of Krummel’s 2009 article on Meir of Norwich, partially revised but often cited word for word, and not listed in the bibliography (see Miriamne Ara Krummel, “Meir b. Elijah of Norwich and the Margins of Memory,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 27.4 [2009]: 1–23). In Chapter 3, on Mandeville’s Travels and the “postcolonial moment” (Tomasch), Krummel provides a sensitive reading of a uniquely intriguing text, “in which Jewishness appears only as deeply buried within the Caspian Mountains” (69). Throughout his travelogue, Mandeville [End Page 417] expresses, as Krummel shrewdly says, “a simultaneous fascination with and a repulsion to difference” (69). If this chapter errs on the...

Jews and crypto-Jews in sixteenth and seventeenth century England

There are many narratives, some old, some relatively recent, covering the presence of crypto-Jews and Jews in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I have tried, specifically with non-specialists and general readers in mind, to give an overview of that story here. Given this essay ’s origin as a public lecture commemorating the 350th anniversary of the tacit readmission of Jews to England in 1656, my account has a particular focus on developments during the English Revolution of 1641–60, though it is also positioned within a more ambitious grand narrative recounting the Jewish, crypto-Jewish and Jewish apostate experience in England from the Norman Conquest to the Restoration. While I have drawn on my own research – notably on Judaizing, readers familiar with the material will see that my text is also greatly indebted to a number of important scholars in the field of Anglo-Jewish history; something fully acknowledged in the endnotes. Indeed, there is another story to tell, namely how from the mid-nineteenth century scholars of Anglo-Jewry, desiring acceptance within British society and the legitimation of their distinctive history, collectively constructed a narrative of gradual social assimilation and communal unity. But that these histories were themselves written against a background of religious and racial prejudice, exclusion, marginalisation, tensions and conflict, as well as the disturbing continuity of antisemitic tropes, is itself revealing. Intended as a companion piece to this article, my discussion of the evolution of Anglo-Jewish historiography will appear elsewhere shortly.

DICKENS'S “JEWISH QUESTION”: PARIAH CAPITALISM AND THE WAY OUT

The story – we might almost saylegend – of how Dickens came to make the character of Riah inOur Mutual Frienda benign figure and a deliberate revision of Fagin, underworld denizen ofOliver Twist, is well known. In 1860, an Anglo-Jewish couple, J. P. and Eliza Davis, bought Charles Dickens's London home, Tavistock House. Dickens remarked to his personal secretary, William Wills, that he could not recall any “money-making dealings . . . that have been so satisfactory, considerate, and trusting” (Johnson 487). This expression of relief and slight surprise that the sale of his property to a Jewish family was without complication followed on Dickens's suspicion, crudely expressed earlier in the negotiations, that the “Jew Money-Lender” (as he referred to J. P. Davis) would not come through on the deal (Stone 243). But, though the Davises proved surprisingly cooperative in this phase of the transaction as far as Dickens was concerned, Mrs. Davis did ultimately have a complaint to register with the great writer and delivered it politely in a letter three years later. It was not about the house or the terms of purchase but rather about the character of Fagin, created by Dickens in 1837, some twenty-six years earlier. English Jews, she told him, had taken offense at this portrayal of one of their people and believed Dickens had done them a “great wrong” by offering the greedy, thieving, child-corrupting, sausage-eating criminal as representative of their “scattered nation” (Lane 98). Still, she added, while the author lived he might conceivably “justify himself or atone” for this deed. Apparently contrite and unaware of feeling any of the prejudices his portrait of the London fence might convey, Dickens declared in a letter back to Mrs. Davis that he had only “friendly feelings” for the Jews. His contrition did not end there. For the novel he was then beginning to write, Dickens would create a beneficent Jewish character, Riah, friend to the river dredger's daughter, Lizzie Hexam, and her misshapen companion, the dolls’ dressmaker, Jenny Wren. As the late-nineteenth century Anglo-Jewish poet and novelist Amy Levy put it, Dickens “trie[d] to compensate for his having affixed the label ‘Jew’ to one of his bad fairies by creating the good fairy Riah” (Levy 176).

'Nothing Specifically Jewish in Athletics'? Sport, Physical Recreation and the Jewish Youth Movement in London, 1895–1914

Between 1880 and 1914, London became the permanent home for thousands of Jewish immigrants hailing from Eastern Europe. This paper explores the significant role played by sport and physical recreation in the so-called 'Anglicisation' of the Jewish immigrant children within a newly created network of youth clubs and social and sporting organisations. While many established English Jews believed that introducing and promoting British sport among the 'alien' children was an effective means of 'Anglicisation', sections within the Jewish community soon began to fear that the focus on physical recreation was undermining traditional Jewish culture and contributing to a 'drift' towards religious indifference and apostasy.

Invisible in Oxford: Medieval Jewish History in Modern England

Medieval Anglo-Jewish history has only very recently begun to be included in scholarly histories of England and is still relatively absent unless the history is specifically concerned with the Jews of England. Unfortunately, the relative invisibility of medieval Jewish history in British historical scholarship is mirrored in the semi-scholarly "public face" of British history as it is represented in historical and heritage materials, guidebooks, memorials, and other informational sources for travelers and history in England. While it is often the nature of heritage groups to sanitize and homogenize the past, the degree to which this is done with regard to the medieval Anglo-Jewish past requires response and action, particularly in the context of an alarming world-wide rise in antisemitism. If knowledge is an essential context for understanding and tolerance, more visible and accurate accounts of medieval Jewish history are a necessary first step towards effecting social change.

“JEWISH TRAFFICKING” AND LONDON JEWS IN THE AGE OF MIGRATION

There are excellent accounts of the Jewish response to “trafficking” in women for prostitution during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but recent analyses of the white slavery phenomenon have raised new questions. This article concerns the response of Jews in England, and specifically the motivations and activities of those who founded the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women (JAPGW). The JAPGW set the model for initiatives carried out by Jewish communities throughout the British Empire and was a primary contributor to internationalisation of the issue on the part of the League of Nations after the First World War. The JAPGW’s motivations were complex: they involved a particular religious outlook, the response to antisemitism and assumptions along lines of class and gender. In addressing “Jewish trafficking”, Britain’s established Jewish community sought to take ownership of what it meant to be a Jew in British society.

Expulsion—England’s Jewish Solution (review)

Reviewed by: Expulsion—England’s Jewish Solution Suzanne Bartlet Expulsion—England’s Jewish Solution, by Richard Huscroft. Stroud, UK: Tempus Publishing Ltd., 2006. 191 pp. $29.95. This is a very readable book long overdue as an up-to-date account of the history of the medieval Jews in England. It covers the entire duration of their stay from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, totalling less than 200 years. Huscroft has read widely all the current books on the subject and has produced an easily read yet thoughtful assessment of the immigrants’ ability to [End Page 240] adjust and thrive in the changing conditions of their new environment, and to cope when their adoptive countrymen turned on them and eventually ejected them. He recounts how they came, escaping from persecution and murder, some of it at the hands of Crusaders on their way to the Holy Lands, while others were attracted by the business opportunities that they heard were on offer in Britain. Jews came from France, Germany, Italy and one from as far away as Russia. Kings from Henry II, Richard, and John to Henry III appreciated the financial benefits they offered and gave them Royal protection in exchange for the taxation they could be pressured to pay to the Throne. They were seen as the king’s serfs by the barons, who resented the riches and the independence it brought him even while they formed part of the many the perpetrators were severely punished really hold up, as after several customers who borrowed heavily from Jewish moneylenders paying interest. Violence first surfaced at King Richard’s coronation in 1190, and then spread to many of the provincial cities. The tragedy of Clifford’s Tower in York, where Jews committed mass suicide to escape the mob, is well known. One of Huscroft’s few mistakes is to place the main persecutor, Richard Malebisse, as Constable of York Castle instead of one John Marshall. Neither does the statement that years even Malebisse got his estates back and was knighted. The thirteenth century witnessed increasing persecution and maltreatment, although many Jews became very prosperous in the first half, some working closely with the king. Simon de Montfort led the attacks on foreigners and the Jews, and after his defeat and death at Evesham in 1265 left a legacy of bitterness and antisemitism that smoldered on, fueling attacks on Jewries, which climaxed in the massacre of the coin clipping pogrom of 1278/9. While examining the reasons for the decline of wealth in the thirteenth century that precipitated the downfall of the entire community, Huscroft seems to underestimate the importance of the coin-clipping trials, which literally decimated Jewry. Over 269, out of a total of about 2,000–3,000 Jews, among them some of the most prosperous leading members of the community, were hanged, and the remainder severely impoverished by having to pay heavy fines and support the surviving dependents of the executed. As the survivors struggled to regain a foothold for some sort of recovery from this heavy loss, they were repeatedly knocked back by King Edward’s efforts to stamp out their money dealings, to turn them into farmers and merchants, and to persuade them to convert to Christianity. Their recovery was impossible in the face of these demands during the twelve years left to them. While this is a lucid and well informed account, there is a flaw. The problem lies with the title. This book deals with the Expulsion itself only in the last 24 pages, and although it can be argued that the seeds of that ejection can [End Page 241] be found throughout their stay, “Expulsion” implies that the most outstanding moment was the events of 1290. Not only would this be an injustice to the account of their lives, it’s also an injustice to the book itself, as the author highlights the great contribution they made to the country. It’s an interesting thought that without the Jews many of our great monasteries and some of our cathedrals might not have been built at least to the standard that we can still see when we view their remains today. It isn...

A Provocative Blind Spot: Orientalism and Charlotte Tonna's Judah's Lion

With the publication of Orientalism (1978) Edward W. Said initiated a profound shift in the relations between critical approaches to literary culture and the study of European imperialism. Central to Said's argument and his subsequent analysis is his identification of a clear, precise division between East and West or Orient and Occident. I question the extent to which this geographical paradigm works for the study of representations of Jewish people and history in Charlotte Tonna's Judah's Lion (1843). Drawing from both Zionist and imperial narratives, Tonna's Evangelical novel depicts the journey of an English Jew, Alick Cohen, to the Holy Land where he is so thoroughly moved by the powerful presence of British imperial interests there that he converts to Christianity. In order to understand this novel's depictions of Jewish history and culture imagined in relation to the British imperial arena, I suggest that we must think within and beyond Said's East/West divide, reading the relations between Semitic and Orientalist discourses as another grid through which European identity emerges. Unlike Said's argument in Orientalism, I maintain that Judah's Lion functions as a Western Christian discourse that draws from rather than against an Orientalized Jewish narrative of the return to a land that was wrongly taken. It is a discourse that is relevant to Orientalism, but not wholly explained by it.

SHEILA DELANY (ed.), Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings. Pp. xi + 258 (The Multicultural Middle Ages). New York and London: Routledge, 2002. 65.00 (ISBN 0 415 93882 1).

THE challenges faced by the contributors to this volume are exemplified by its title: the field of ‘Medieval English Literature’ not only deals almost exclusively with texts written in English by Christians, but also tends to focus on a single author, Geoffrey Chaucer. By the time Middle English poetry flowered during the reign of Richard II, the Jews had been expelled from England for nearly a hundred years. The essays in this volume attempt to explain the so-called ‘absent presence’ of the Jews, a continuing preoccupation among Chaucer and his contemporaries with anti-Judaic conventions; yet the actual English Jews are almost absent here too. The Jewish community that left England in 1290 had its cultural and intellectual centre in Northern France, and insular Jewish authors left behind relatively little compared to their great continental counterparts; their story is part of the narrative of ‘multicultural’ Anglo-Norman history written in French, Latin, and of course Hebrew. These essays, then, are hemmed in with artificial boundaries, addressing a Jewish absence within the more general absence of Anglo-Norman culture from the study of ‘Medieval English Literature’.

The Latest Liturgy of Liberal Judaism in England

In the history of Progressive Jewish liturgy, Britain’s Liberal movement has, in spite of its relatively small numbers, played a unique role. For one thing, it has taken cognisance of the liturgical traditions of both of the two main centres of Progressive Judaism: Germany and the United States of America. (Britain’s Reform movement, by contrast, has preferred to do ‘its own thing’, with little reference to what has been done elsewhere.) For another thing, its publication in 1967 of Service of the Heart marked the beginning of a new trend, which has since manifested itself throughout the Progressive Jewish world.

William of Norwich and the Expulsion of the Jews

In the last issue of Folklore I examined the legend of Saint William of Norwich and attempted to revaluate its place in the blood libel legend (Bennett 2005). In that paper I sought to tackle some of the more folkloric questions, such as, firstly, whether there is any essential difference between the primary source and the legend we now know and, if so, what its significance is, and secondly whether it is really the case that this was the first recognisable instance of the blood libel legend. In this follow-up note, I briefly consider the rather more historical question of whether this and similar accusations were responsible for the persecution of Jews in England and their expulsion from the country at the end of the thirteenth century? I am a folklorist, of course, and straying into the realms of historical analysis makes me nervous. I offer this note in the hope that it might be the first of several discussions of this folklorically important question. Although the case of El Santo Nino de la Guardia mentioned in the earlier article undoubtedly was the excuse for the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, [1] I have come to the personal conclusion that we are wrong to lay too much of the blame for the persecution of Jews in medieval England on these sorts of accusations. I think it is very probable that, in medieval England at least, accusations of Jewish child murder were part of anti-Jewish feeling rather than a primary cause of it. To be sure, prior to 1144 the Jewish community in Norwich had been the largest outside London, or the wealthiest, [2] but by the expulsion of 1290 there were perhaps only fifty or sixty Jewish people left in Norwich (Lipman 1967, 38). There is also evidence of continuing hostility between Jews and Christians in that city. This burst into flame in 1230 when Jews were accused of forcibly circumcising a Christian boy. [3] The case rumbled on over several years and led to a citizen's attack on Jews in 1235, involving beatings and arson (Lipman 1967, 59-64). There were further disturbances there in 1238 (possibly related to the circumcision case). It is true, too, that subsequent incidents in which Jews were accused of ill-treating children here and elsewhere must have been based on some prior rumour. It seems obvious that the most famous case of all, that of Hugh of Lincoln, owes a great deal to Thomas of Monmouth's Life of William of Norwich, and M. R. James has estimated that in three further English cases (those at Gloucester, Bury St Edmunds and Bristol) distinct links to Norwich can be established. At Blois in France, also, where there was an accusation in 1171, it seems there were Norwich connections, since Bishop Eborard died there and may have brought the legend of William with him (James 1896, lxxvi). The cases at Gloucester, and particularly that at Winchester in 1192 (see James 1896, lxxvi), seem also in some respects to be similar to Thomas's story. However, two other things were going on during this time that we tend to overlook and, for me at least, provide a more convincing backdrop to anti-Jewish feeling. These are crusader enthusiasm and changes in the monarch's attitude towards Jews and hence in their political situation--in brief, war, religion and money, the unholy trinity so often responsible for human suffering. I do not have the expertise to discuss these questions in any detail; all I want to do is to draw on the scholarship of others to indicate where the tensions lie, and hope that other contributors to this journal will be able to correct and refine my understandings. Let me begin with money. The crucial change seems to have been in the way successive English monarchs exploited Jewish wealth. Very much simplified, it seems that whereas the monarchs up to the reign of Stephen relied on Jewish capital to finance large projects, and therefore encouraged and supported them, from the reign of Richard I the Jews began to be seen (in Cecil Roth's phrase) as royal milch cows, an almost infinitely exploitable cash resource. …

Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings (review)

Reviewed by: Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings Lisa Lampert Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings, edited by Sheila Delany. New York: Routledge, 2002. 258 pp. $90.00. Chaucer and the Jews is an outstanding collection that brings together important reprintings with exciting new work. The fourteen essays present both richly historicized and theoretically sophisticated analyses of the figure of the Jew, recognized in so many of the contributions as a critical "absent presence" in the late medieval English imagination. As she outlines in her introduction, one of Delany's aims is "to recuperate a side of his [Chaucer's] work that has usually been veiled" (p. viii), entering the field of Jewish Studies through questions raised by study of Chaucer's work. This approach challenges readers to look beyond a narrow critical focus on the infamous antisemitism of Chaucer's "Prioress's Tale." This type of inquiry is exemplified in Colin Richmond's provocative and impassioned "Englishness and Medieval Anglo-Jewry," which urges readers to consider how "Jewish history permeates European history," and how "its absence from the history of . . . England tells us at once a great deal about Englishness" (p. 214). Richmond reviews key moments in English history and the writing of it, offering a revisionist look at the ways in which inclusion of Jewish history challenges cherished assumptions. Delany's own contribution to the volume takes such a path, investigating the overlooked setting of "The Prioress's Tale" in "Asye," which according to Delany, "likely includes . . . Central Asia . . . Turkey and the Arab regions" (p. 43). Delany's approach goes against the grain of much interpretation of the "Prioress's Tale," which often tends to remove it from history. Delany examines a broader geo-political frame, showing how the tale's setting reveals a concern with Islam and demonstrating how representations of Jews and Muslims are intermeshed in late-medieval English imagination. Delany makes the convincing argument that Chaucer would have been well aware of these political, economic, and military contexts, although she resists providing a definitive answer on Chaucer's own (ultimately unknowable) views. This critical connection between representations of Jews and Muslims is also found in Christine Rose's essay, which analyzes visual as well as theological and literary materials to show how the two evil mothers-in-law in the "Man of Law's Tale" evoke the figure of Synagoga, thus representing the Jews as a menace inextricably linked to Islam. William Jordan provides a careful study of the Pardoner's collection of unusual "relics," among them a sheep bone from a "Holy Jew." Jordan shows how such an item might have impressed the uneducated through drawing on the cachet of a "Jewish pedigree" that seems to hark back to the patriarchs. This "relic" would not, however, have fooled the more sophisticated, serving as yet another element through which the Pardoner's "vicious" nature and damning hypocrisy is revealed. [End Page 158] Jerome Mandel's essay unravels the puzzling reference to the "Jews werke" of Sir Thopas's hauberk in the "Tale of Sir Thopas." Mandel argues that the handiwork of Jews would be associated not with the type of workmanship necessary to create effective weaponry, but instead with decorative finery, generating a contrast sure to make Sir Thopas seem even more ridiculous to a knowing audience. In the last essay in the "Chaucer Texts" section, Sylvia Tomasch draws upon both postcolonial theory and cyberspace studies to develop the concept of the "virtual Jew." Before their 1290 expulsion, the Jews of England were subjects of "internal colonization," living as a dominated group within the country (pp. 75-6). Even after their exile, however, they retained a powerful "virtual" presence that grew from their previous historical presence. Drawing on a range of texts and contexts, Tomasch explores how this "virtual presence" reveals "integral connections between imaginary constructions and actual people" (p. 78), presenting a theoretical tool for understanding the nature and power of the Jewish "absent presence" in English history and in constructions of what constitutes "England" and "the English." After this wealth of readings based in Chaucer's writings, the volume then presents essays on important non-Chaucerian texts. Mary Dove demonstrates how...

'Reasons ... Theological, Political, and mixt of both': A Reconsideration of the 'Readmission' of the Jews to England

In I 655, Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel travelled to London in a bid to persuade Oliver Cromwell to readmit the Jews to England, more than 350 years after their expulsion by Edward 1. His mission gave rise to a heated debate, but it did not produce any conclusive results. Nevertheless, 'the readmission of the Jews' continues to have a ghostly afterlife in accounts of the history of Jews in England; in fact, it is often referred to as if it actually happened. Anglo-Jewish historians explain that although the Jews were not given formal legal status as English citizens, an informal readmission nonetheless occurred. They argue, moreover, that this was the culmination of Protestant philosemitism which had developed during the first half of the seventeenth century.This essay places the readmission debate in the context of a wider print controversy played out in an underexplored network of pamphlets and tracts. Commentators such as William Hughes and William Prynne argued about whether it was parliament or king that expelled the Jews in the thirteenth century, and consequently which body had the authority to readmit them now. Thus the readmission debate, traditionally regarded as an expression of Christian enthusiasm for Jews, is here placed in the broader context of the constitutional politics of the mid-seventeenth century.The debate is revealed, furthermore, to be a test case for arguments about different styles of law. Opponents of readmission who favoured common law such as William Prynne and Rice Vaughan presented their version of the history of the Jews in England as an example of good legal methodology, in opposition to supporters of readmission and canon law such as Hugh Peters. Common law was closely associated in the period with both parliament and a nascent sense of English national identity, and indeed this is the third factor considered here in relation to the issue of readmission. Ultimately, this essay suggests that 'the Jews' referred to in this Christian political and legal controversy were as much a symbolic argumentative tool as a literal people.