On 16 March 1190 the Jewish community of York committed mass suicide to escape being tortured to death by a mob whipped into anti-Semitic frenzy by pro-Crusade propaganda.
The Norman invaders had brought the first Jewish communities into England to fulfill a special economic role as moneylenders. The Jews were even given a special status as wards of the crown, “which allowed them, for example, freedom of the king’s highways, exemption from tolls, the ability to hold land directly from the king.”
The monarchy also guaranteed the Jews of England “physical protection in any of the vast network of royal castles built to assert Norman authority over the kingdom.” The soldiers and castle guards were always on standby to keep the Jewish populace safe from medieval hate crimes. Anglo-Saxon Christians in England considered the Jews as profoundly and unchangeably ‘alien’, tools of the Normans, and were prone to try to murder they Jewish neighbors. They also resented their fiscal debts to the people they falsely accused of having killed Jesus Christ.
*FYI: Joshua bar Joseph was actually crucified by ROMANS.*
Under King Henry II, the Jews of England experienced a ‘golden age’, due to the king’s “firm centralized organization” that “restored stability and order, and renewed the shattered economy”. Rather than pay “Christian moneylenders, particularly syndicates in Lombardy and Cahors,” the king turned to Jewish financers to help him. Henry II protected his Jewish bankers, and in turn the Jewish bankers oiled the Anglo-Norman economy with the credit and cash it needed to function smoothly.
During this time, major Jewish fortunes were made, so much so that when famous Jewish money-lender and merchant, “Aaron of Lincoln died in 1186, he had such wealth that a separate exchequer was set up just to evaluate the extent of Aaron’s holdings in property and pledges for the purposes of death duties, one of the crown’s major ways of capitalizing on the prosperity of its Jews.”
Although the Jews of England were safe from pogroms under the early Norman and Angevin kings, they paid for heavily for this protection. The Jews were heavily taxed and the crown often ‘borrowed’ from them liberally and without much regard for repayment.
The Jews were also subject to what we would now recognize as ‘hate crimes’ by the local populace. The medieval populace was resentful of Jewish wealth, and although they loved borrowing money from the Jews, they hated paying it back. Christian debts, as much as Christian theology, spurred anti-Semitic feeling.
This anger at the Jews financial success eventually bubbled up into a generalized belief in the bullshit known as blood libel, where it was rumored that Jews ritualistically murdered non-Jews for Jewish rites, particularly Christian children, and especially for Passover.
In March of 1144 a 12 year old boy, know as William of Norwich, was murdered. William was supposedly lured into the home of a Jewish man named Eleazar, where he was sacrificed to provide the blood needed for Passover. The tale of the boy’s murder grew in the telling, and was eventually turned into a ‘true-crime’ novel, The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich by Thomas of Monmouth. According to Monmouth’s account, the Jews shaved the boy’s head, and then “stabbed it with countless thornpoints, and made the blood come horribly from the wounds they made. . . some of those present ad judged him to be fixed to a cross in mockery of the Lord’s Passion.”
Jewish persecution was prevented in the hysteria after William’s death by the actions of the local sheriff, John de Chesney, and the legal protections of King Stephen. Although at least one Jewish man was murdered and the blood libel continued for decades (now centuries), no pogroms were committed. Later accusation of ritualistic murder – such as those of Harold of Gloucester (d.1168), Robert of Bury (d. 1181), and Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln (d.1255) – unfortunately resulted in massacres of the Jews in several cities.
Anti-Semitic sentiments were stoked in 1189, when King Richard I was crowned and declared that he would be his intention to go on a Third Crusade to ‘save’ the Holy Land from Muslim rule under Saladin. This caused rioting and attacks on Jewish communities in many major cities.
When riots against the Jews started up in York in early March of 1190, they “were egged on by members of the local gentry called Richard Malebisse, William Percy, Marmeduke Darell and Philip de Fauconberg. These men saw the riots as an opportunity to wipe out the extensive debts they owed to Jewish money-lenders in the city.”
An accidental house fire was the opening Richard Malebisse to incite a mob to attack the Jews who had obviously set the fire for nefarious reasons of their own, starting with the home of the Widow Baruch, whose husband (known as Benedict of York) had been killed at King Richard’s coronation. Coincidently Benedict of York was man to whom Malebisse was particularly indebted. Benedict of York’s widow and their children were reportedly burned alive when the mob set fire to the home.
As a result of the attack on Benedict of York’s home, Josce of York, one of the most respected men in Jewish community, rallied the surviving Jewish families to flee to Clifford’s Tower in York Castle. At the time, Clifford’s Tower was wooden … and therefore flammable.The constable of the castle allowed them to enter, since the king had ordered that the Jews were to be protected after several Jewish men were murdered at Richard’s coronation in 1189. The constable was clearly uninterested in the fate of the Jews who sought refuge with him though, so when he left Clifford’s Tower to talk to the sheriff, the Jewish refugees refused to readmit him back into the keep.
Doubtlessly hoping for some fat bribes, the constable was incence that he had been locked out of the castle. He went to sheriff John Marshall and claimed “that the Jews cheated him”. In response, Marshall brought the militia to support the mob in besieging the castle.
The siege continued until 16 March when the Jews’ position became untenable. Their religious leader, Rabbi Yomtob, proposed an act of collective suicide to avoid being killed by the mob, and the castle was set on fire to prevent their bodies being mutilated after their deaths. Several Jews perished in the flames but the majority took their own lives rather than give themselves up to the mob.
After the Jews had been slaughtered, Richard Malebisse and his co-conspirators went to York Cathedral and burned all the records of how much money they had owed their Jewish creditors.
King Richard was upset when he heard his orders had been defied and the crown’s Jewish bankers had been murdered. It wasn’t so much the murders, because they were only Jews after all, but that his subjects had disobeyed his royal commands. A crown inquest was ordered, and although those who were the most guilty in the atrocity had already escaped, at least 50 citizens who had participated were fined.
Since the financial loss was the king’s greatest concern, there “was also a change in the law which protected the interests of the king in any similar events. Richard I introduced a system whereby all debts held by Jews were duplicated to the Crown.” Murdering one’s Jewish creditor would no longer help your debts; the crown would come for it’s money.
The protections for the Jewish community steadily weakened under successive kings, mysteriously coinciding with how much the royal coffers owed Jewish moneylenders. Pogroms became steadily more common under Richard’s successor, King John. John’s son, King Henry III, created the Statute of Jewry in an effort to be a ‘better’ Christian king by harming the Jews. Finally, King Edward I, the great-grandson of the pro-Jewish King Henry II, ordered the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290, a hundred years after the massacre at Clifford’s Tower.
People who are fans of King Edward I, who was an excellent king if you were an English Christian and a tyrannical monster if you weren’t, often try to defend Edward for this atrocity against the Jews arguing that 1) it should be looked at in context and 2) not that many Jews got killed.
These people are ignorant of the history of Anglo-Norman Jews and get on my last nerve with their whinging about context without the proper context in which to whinge. It vexes me that I have to explain why attempted genocide or ethnic cleansing is ‘bad’ no matter what. Also, their excuses for King Edward often seem anti-Semitic, and although I am not Jewish, I despise anti-Semites with the same fervor with which I loath bigots of any stripe. Fie on them. With runny fie.
First, King Edward I’s expulsion of the Jews is worse in historical context. Yes, anti-Semitism was rife in Europe, but the Jews of England were, under traditional Anglo-Norman law, protected by the crown. It had been Edward’s job since his coronation to protect the Jewish community his progenitors had enticed to settle in England, and the king chose convenient bigotry over legal precedent.
Secondly, the reason so few Jews were killed in the exodus is that there were only a small number of Jews left alive in England due to Edward’s earlier shenanigans. Shortly after he became king, Edward issued the “Statute of Judaism” which meant that “under the conditions of life then existing in feudal England [he had] in principle expelled [the Jews] fifteen years before the final expulsion.”
King Edward also imprisoned most of England’s adult male Jewish population on charges of coin clipping and other bad acts in 1278, and “no fewer than 293 Jews were executed at London” during this judicial pogrom.
Jews would not officially return to settle in England until 1656, when Oliver Cromwell decided he hated them slightly less than the Catholics. They were treated as second-class citizens and were subjected to prejudice, but the Jews of Britain were never again driven out or slaughtered en masse on UK soil.