Review: Anthony Julius’ “Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England”
Review: Anthony Julius’ “Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England” [Part One]
January 19, 2013 — 93 Comments
Andrew Joyce
Accompanied by much publicity, 2012 saw the publication in paperback of Anthony Julius’ Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England. The paperback followed on from the successful performance of the hardback, which had come out under the imprint of Oxford University Press in 2010. As in so many other cases, much of the book’s success had little to do with its scholarly merit and more to do with a great deal of ethnic networking. For example, Philip Roth labelled Julius’ 827-page literary tumbleweed “an essential history” written by a man with “scholarly integrity”, while Harold Bloom at the New York Times Book Review gushed that “Julius is a truth-teller, … I am grateful for his calm balance … and extraordinary moral strength.”
The book achieved its greatest success in Britain, where despite comprising only around 0.5% of the British population, Jews managed to get positive reviews of Julius’ book in almost every single major British newspaper and magazine. At London’s Financial Times the review was written by James Shapiro, an academic who specializes in trying to dismantle Shakespeare, either by denouncing him as an anti-Semite or, paradoxically, claiming that he never wrote any of the works attributed to him. At The New Republic the review was written by Jonathan Freedland, who also writes for The Guardian and The Jewish Chronicle. Freedland also publishes fiction under the name Sam Bourne, in which his plots invariably revolve around Nazi sympathizers and eugenicists. At the New Statesman praise this time came from Jonathan Beckman who also writes for The Guardian and the The Jewish Chronicle. At the Telegraph the review was written by Gerald Jacobs, another Jewish Chronicle stalwart. At the Independent the review was written by Bryan Cheyette, an academic who specializes in portraying White societies as having a neurotic hatred of Jews. At The Guardian, the review was penned by none other than Antony Lerman, a former Director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research.
Over the course of a number of essays examining this book, I hope to demonstrate that despite the effusive praise of the text as “scholarly,” “balanced,” “calm,” “judicious,” it is in fact an amateurish effort, laden with falsehood and misrepresentation, and underpinned by Julius’ own paranoid worldview — a worldview shared and perpetuated by his many Jewish cheerleaders. In this, the first essay, I hope to delve into Julius’ background, and to some extent his mind, to demonstrate his links to Frankfurt School ideology, his role in defending and furthering Jewish interests, and his implicit hatred and suspicion of White culture. Only by first tackling Julius can we hope to better understand the warped worldview from whence this strange and contorted history derives. Subsequent essays will take each of Julius’ major chapters, explore its content and, by using scholarly mainstream sources, utterly deconstruct Julius’ arguments and expose his myths for what they are.
A Portrait of the Activist as a Young Man.
Anthony Julius, who is a lawyer and not an historian, first came to prominence in 1996 when he was unveiled as Princess Diana’s divorce lawyer. Although Julius writes in Trials of the Diaspora that Diana “was interested in Jews, but had no idea about them,” he was chosen primarily because as a Jew he was seen as “an outsider, someone whom the British establishment would regard as ‘unclubbable,’ someone who couldn’t be ‘gotten to.”[1] Julius performed his function well, and was handsomely rewarded by Diana. D.D. Guttenplan writes that “her patronage made him the most famous lawyer in Britain. She also made him executor of her will.”[2]
Julius is deeply connected to his identity as a Jew and has demonstrated a commitment to the defense and advancement of Jewish interests throughout his life. Much of this has been driven by a paranoid outlook and a deep suspicion of non-Jews. This worldview, it can be clearly seen, was adopted from his father and paternal grandmother. Writing in the brief autobiographical introduction to Trials of the Diaspora, Julius writes that his grandmother corresponded frequently with her brother in South Africa, always “a limited set of variations on a single theme: they had been lucky so far, but disaster, to be inflicted on Jews by the Gentile world, was imminent.” He continues that “though my grandmother never spoke in a hostile way about non-Jews, it was always clear when it was a non-Jew about whom she was speaking. The tone would invariably have a quality of wariness, as if she was concerned she might be overheard. She took it for granted that Jews and Christians were divided by unbridgeable differences. If she wanted to indicate that a person was Jewish she would say that he was ‘unserer‘ (‘one of us’); if Gentile, he would be ‘zeyricher‘ (‘one of them’).”
The extreme level of this suspicion is demonstrated when Julius discusses an incident, involving what he and his father perceived to be an anti-Jewish remark, that he recalls from when he was around eight or nine. Julius was travelling with his father, Morris, and one of his father’s business partners on a train. At some point the business partner, whom Julius refers to simply as ‘Arthur’ began talking at length about his daughter. ‘Arthur’ continued: “Do you know Morris, she has got a special little friend, a Jewish girl, and we had the girl over for tea last weekend. I must say, the child has got the most beautiful manners.” There was silence, and shortly thereafter Arthur left the compartment to go to the dining car. With Arthur now gone, Julius’s father exploded, he “turned to me fuming. ‘Did you hear what he said? I am supposed to be impressed that he actually had a Jewish girl over to his house for tea? And that she had beautiful manners?” The young Julius asked “What are you going to do Daddy?” Morris remained silent and the matter was never brought up again. To this day, Julius remarks, he has “reflected many times” on “my father’s failure to confront Arthur.” I must confess to reading Arthur’s remarks several times in an effort to understand how this remark, obviously intended as a nicety towards a Jewish colleague, could be interpreted as hostile or mocking. Obviously one must partake of the unsurer/zeyricher worldview for this to become in any way logical.
While studying English literature at Cambridge University between 1974 and 1977, Julius placed himself “among those Jews who have sought out anti-Semitism.” He began writing about Jews and instances of alleged anti-Semitism in English literature, turning towards heavy criticism of some of the best English writers. He admits to becoming part of a “radical faction” which emerged in the humanities at that time, and that he was heavily influenced by his reading of “Freud … and the line of Western Marxist thinking that can be traced from the Austro-Marxists through to Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School.” His faction “staged confrontations” with supporters of rationalism in the faculty, and he states that his group’s idiom was “one of critique rather than celebration” and that “there was a politics attached to this set of positions.”
After graduating Julius went to law school and, when he finished there, he started his career as an ethnic activist by becoming chief lawyer to the British Board of Deputies of British Jews, an organization comprising elements of both the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League. In 1983 he successfully defended the Board of Deputies when it was sued by a Conservative Party candidate. The Board of Deputies had conducted a propaganda campaign, distributing flyers in the candidate’s constituency during a General Election detailing his previous involvement with the National Front, an association the Board of Deputies claimed was evidence of the man’s anti-Semitism. In 1992, after he was expelled from Canada, David Irving applied for access to the documents which provoked his expulsion under Canada’s Access to Information Law. Among these documents “Irving claimed, was a dossier on his activities compiled by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and sent to the Canadian authorities. Irving wanted to sue for libel, but Julius, who acted for the Board, said that Irving was ‘sadly too late’ in filing the proper papers.”[3]
After Princess Diana died and after leaving his wife for the daughter of one of his clients, Julius next hit the headlines with the 2000 David Irving libel trial. When Deborah Lipstadt published her Denying the Holocaust in 1999, she quickly found out that Irving was suing her for libel through the British courts. Lipstadt turned to the Board of Deputies for advice and they recommended none other than their own Anthony Julius. Strangely, in Trials of the Diaspora Julius omits most of his history with the Board of Deputies, and leaves out entirely his 1992 encounter with Irving. Instead he writes that “to find myself in a major set-piece fight with a Holocaust denier was the purest chance.” [4] Julius was put in charge of the ‘discovery’ element of the trial. Julius relished the opportunity to pore over Irving’s private papers, because it offered him the chance to “control the course the proceedings took.” He wanted to run the trial “as if it was a history seminar and Irving was a rather unintelligent student.” Of course, in my present series of essays, I propose to school Mr. Julius, who is not only unintelligent when it comes to his own history writing, but is an agenda-driven employer of falsehood and misrepresentation — an amateur, and a charlatan.
Julius has a problem with truth and accurate representation, and this emerges very early in his book. In one section of his Introduction Julius states that his book is much needed because Jews are under threat in Britain today; there are Jews being “chased down roads in London with shouted slanders and insults.” But, and this is common throughout his book, Julius has a habit of exaggerating threats, and implying extremism as very turn. Major violence is always ‘just around the corner.’ In its most extreme form, Julius writes that “it would seem that the closed season on Jews is over.” I wanted to give Julius the benefit of the doubt so I consulted the annual reports of the Jewish ‘Community Security Trust.’ At first I was surprised to see that ninety-two “violent anti-Semitic assaults” had been carried out — although in a country of around sixty million people this is a miniscule figure.
However, when I actually looked at the details of these “assaults” it became clear that there was a discrepancy between what I would view as a “violent physical assault” and that employed by the Community Security Trust. On page thirteen of the report, we can actually see that one of these “violent physical assaults” involved children “throwing water” at the children of their Jewish neighbors. Fifty-four of the ninety-two incidents involved nothing more than “eggs being thrown,” and around ten involved fights between schoolchildren. No data is given on the rest, though the overwhelming theme here seems to juvenile behavior not in keeping with the level of threat implied by various Jewish bodies. Certainly, in its entire history, the Community Security Trust has never had to report anything like the death of Kris Donald, a 15 year old White British child, who was abducted by Imran Shahid, 29, his brother Zeeshan Shahid, 28, and 27-year-old Mohammed Faisal Mushtaq, taken two hundred miles from his home, stabbed thirteen times, then doused with gasoline and burned alive in what the courts agreed was a “racially-motivated murder.”
Consider the Judeo-centric obsession of Julius, who weeps that anti-Semitism “is the background noise against which we make our lives.” Consider the kind of psychology at work in the mind of someone who found the time to become irate when Penguin decided, following victory in the Irving case, to donate its proceedings to a cancer charity. Julius writes that he “took the donation to be a rejection of what they took as our specifically Jewish perspective. Everyone suffers from cancer; it is no respecter of ethnicity. The donation felt like a snub.” Consider the schizophrenic fanaticism at work in the activities of someone who admits on the one hand that anti-Semitism “has not exposed me to any harm — indeed, it has been almost wholly free of risk of any kind,” and yet on the other states that “I have a sense of the malignity of many of the current attacks on Jews and Jewish State … and a strong sense of the persistence in this country of an obdurate, harsh anti-Semitism.”
Much of Julius’ book is built on such contradictions, as well as an overwhelmingly negative view of the non-Jewish world. Even his use of texts is indicative of his worldview. One of his favorites is Bernard Lewis’ Semites and Anti-Semites (1986). Lewis’ book is rejected as polemic by most serious scholars. Joel Beinin wrote in his review of the book for the Middle East Report back in 1987 that Lewis “appears to have adopted a more openly polemical writing style and a paranoid view of the world which is at points profoundly out of touch with reality.”[5] (Bernard Lewis is something of an exemplar of Jewish ethnic activist masquerading as scholar.) Like Julius’ book, which adopts a grating moralistic tone throughout, Lewis’ book has “a certain judiciousness of tone, and judiciousness is the appearance not the reality of objectivity.” It is agenda-driven polemic dressed up as scholarly exploration. As will be seen, when Julius senses that his arguments are at certain points particularly weak, he grasps for the infantile assurance found in name-calling. For example, Julius never succeeds in coming to anything but a ridiculously capacious definition of ‘anti-Semitism,’ and, when he finds it difficult to understand precisely why at certain points in history some Jews have been disliked by some non-Jews, he resorts to describing the phenomenon with words such as “muck,” and “a sewer.” Such words, common throughout the text, are not altogether out of place — the book stinks.
And thus we have come to grasp at least what is necessary for us to proceed. In the next essay, we will move on to an examination of the text itself, taking on Julius’ extensive chapter on “Medieval English anti-Semitism.” We do so now with a clearer picture of our author, we can better predict some of his arguments and stances, and we are to some extent familiar with the types of sources that he is prone to use.
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[1] D.D. Guttenplan The Holocaust on Trial: History, Justice, and the David Irving Libel Case (London:2001), p.84.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] J. Beinin “Review: Semites and anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice” Middle East Report, No. 147, (1987), p.43.
Review: Anthony Julius’ “Trials of the Diaspora” [Part 2]: “Medieval English Anti-Semitism”
January 21, 2013 — 3 Comments
Andrew Joyce
In part one of this essay we laid the groundwork for an examination of Anthony Julius’ Trials of the Diaspora by considering the background of the author, his background as a follower of the Frankfurt School, and his role in defending and advancing Jewish interests. We now move on to a discussion of the historical content of the text. The following analysis will first provide the reader with Julius’ narrative of the Jewish experience in medieval England. The latter half of the essay will be devoted to dissecting his narrative, and pointing out its myriad flaws, misrepresentations, and fabrications.
Julius on Jews in Medieval England.
Julius sets out his history of Jews in medieval England by establishing a common theme in Jewish ethnic activist history writing — complete Jewish passivity and the employment of what I term ‘the victim paradigm.’ As I explained in my earlier work on the 19th century Russian disturbances, “it is the notion that Jews stand alone in the world as the quintessential ‘blameless victim.’ To allow for any sense of Jewish agency — any argument that Jews may have in some way contributed to anti-Jewish sentiment — is to harm the perpetuation of this paradigm.” To Julius, the history of Jews in medieval England is one in which an innocent Jewish population is victimized by “a predatory State, an antagonistic Church, and an intermittently but homicidally violent populace” (p. xli). Julius writes that the period witnessed “a war against the Jews” (p. xli). The lives of the Jews, from the moment of their settlement in the country in 1066, were according to Julius “always difficult, often intolerable” (p. xli).
Julius paints a portrait of a community like any other, diverse in its interests and occupations. Certainly, admits Julius, there were “some great financiers,” but money-lending played no great part in Jewish life, and there were also “physicians, traders, goldsmiths and ballad-singers” (p. 106). Julius claims that “they were not segregated from their Christian neighbors” (p. 107). He urges us to avoid “the misconception that the typical Jewish milieu is a commercial one, and that Judaism itself is especially hospitable to moneymaking” (p. 123).
Julius attributes the first serious disruption to this precarious existence to the appearance of the “blood libel,” which according to Julius emerged out of the irrationality and inherent malice of the Christian population (p. 123). The Crown then joined in and “turned the extorting of money from England’s wealthiest Jews into a project” (p. 123). Observe the victim paradigm at work when Julius argues that “the history of medieval English Jewry is thus in large measure the history of the persecution of medieval English Jewry” [original emphasis] (p. 123). He states that “in medieval England, Jews were defamed, their wealth was expropriated, they were killed or injured, they were subjected to discriminatory and humiliating regulation, and they were, finally, expelled” (p. 108). Violence “came from above and below” (p. 108), “neither Jewish life nor Jewish property was ever wholly secure from attack. … Even their most commonplace, least consequential, of social encounters with Christians was freighted with danger for Jews” (p. 119). Victimhood, passivity, lack of agency.
Julius argues that the State victimized Jews by supporting “extortion, by judicial sanctions for false charges, by its tacit support for mob violence and its refusal to prosecute the murderers of Jews” (p. 119). The Church “practised violence and incited others to violence by its pursuit of persecutory legislation, by its preaching, and by other coercive measures” (p. 119). Mob violence was “radical, merciless, and quite often skillfully directed” (p. 119). Julius offers no references, citations, or evidence in support of these claims.
Much of Julius’ polemic on this period concerns the “blood libel,” a phenomenon he completely fails to contextualize or explain. He relies on dismissing it as “the paradigmatic instance of a total fabrication,” without asking why a local population would a) fabricate evidence against Jews in the first place and b) why it took the form it did and emerged when it did. Since answering such questions are key to the understanding of any historical issue or period, Julius’ entire section on this is flawed not only factually, but methodologically. He attributes the anti-Jewish riots of 1189–1190 to “a broad enthusiasm for the Crusades” (p. 119), without offering grounds for making such a statement, and writes provocatively that he imagines the crowds of non-Jews “robbing, raping, burning, and killing — all the time, self-righteously” (p. 119).
The Crown, argues Julius, weighed down England’s Jews with “burdensome taxation,” levied on the basis of personal greed and a malicious theology which deemed them “God’s rejected people” (p. 125). They were subject to the whims of kings who would request vast loans and tallages [a kind of land tax]. The English Church persecuted Jews by telling Christians not to use Jewish doctors, by telling them not to borrow money from Jews, and by the priestly engagement of Jewish religious figures in theological debates. Edward I was particularly nasty, states Julius, because he “issued instructions to Jews to attend Dominican sermons” (p. 139).
Julius writes that in 1290 Edward I expelled a “weakened” and “intimidated” Jewish population from England, once it was no longer financially useful to the Crown. A depressing and, for the uninstructed reader, a pity-inducing narrative indeed.
But an entirely false one.
Jews in Medieval England.
Even back in 1894 there was a sufficient amount of this documentation for W. Bacher to write that “no country in Europe possesses for the history of the Jews in the twelfth century so rich a stock of documentary material as England”[1] Despite the availability of vast amounts of primary documentary evidence, Julius consulted not one original source for his discussion of medieval English Jews, instead borrowing heavily and selectively from other writers. As G.R. Elton, the great English rationalist historian, said in his classic The Practice of History (1961) “knowing what other historians have written is vital to a proper job” but “the first demand of sound historical scholarship must be stressed: it must rest on a broad-fronted attack upon all the relevant material.”[2] Julius doesn’t just fail to tackle all of the relevant material that has been unearthed in the course of centuries – he doesn’t tackle any of it. With the exception of one or two entries, Julius’ list of over one hundred footnotes for his discussion of Jews in medieval England consists exclusively of books written in the 1980s and 1990s by historians of the kind described by Elton as purveyors of “anti-positivist criticisms” – that is, a school of historians who claim theory trumps evidence, and thus for whom it is “virtually axiomatic that historians never work with the materials of the raw past.”[3] Of course, anti-positivism was the major strain of Frankfurt School thought which infected the writing of academic history in the 1960s, and persists to this day.[4] Its proponents believe in conducting their research in the realm of the imagination rather than the archive.
Let us first deal with Julius’ claim that this Jewish community was diverse in trade and profession, and that money-lending was a very minor part of it. Unlike Julius, A.M. Fuss consulted the available records and information for his 1975 article on “Inter-Jewish Loans in Pre-Expulsion England” and concluded that English Jews “were primarily engaged in money-lending, rather than trade or commerce. … In fact the charters issued by Kings John and Richard specifically provide protection for their money-lending activities.”[5] P. Elman writes in the Economic History Review that “the obvious function of the Jews in regard to the general population was that of money-lending.”[6] B. Lionel Abrahams used vast quantities of archival evidence in his 1894 Arnold Prize-winning article on “The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290″ and was able to conclude on the basis of this evidence that when the Jews first settled in England “they brought with them money, but no skill in any occupation except lending it out at interest.”[7] Another article states that there is no evidence, among this abundant literature, “to suppose that the English Jews of this period got their living in any considerable numbers in any other art or craft. … It is therefore probable that the capital with which the community started in the country was very considerable.”[8] In the thousands upon thousands of pages of documents we have on this community (the residential data, the taxation information, the details of their personal accounts etc.) we don’t find a professionally diverse and dispersed population, but instead a close-knit, inter-related, and extremely well-organized group of money-lenders and financiers. Julius would not like us to have the “misconception that the typical Jewish milieu is a commercial one,” so he shamelessly distorts the historical record. As to whether this is a deliberate distortion, in his discussion of ‘occupational diversity’ he cites page twenty-six of H.G. Richardson’s The English Jewry under Angevin Kings (1960). The previous page, that is page twenty-five, gives a lengthy description of the vast Jewish money-lending enterprise.[9]
Julius claims that Christians and Jews were living side by side and that they enjoyed the little things in life together until the psychotic Christian population became homicidal. B. Lionel Abrahams paints a rather different picture. Using town plans and residential data, he found that Jews “occupied, not under compulsion, but of their own choice, a separate quarter of each town in which they dwelt.”[10] He writes that they “rejected meat as unfit for themselves, but considered it good enough to be offered for sale to their Christian neighbors.”[11] They lived as “semi-aliens, growing rich as usurers, and observing strange customs.”[12] They stood outside of the feudal society, built on an aristocratic militant confraternity, itself founded on oaths and fealty.[13]
Julius complains about heavy, relentless, and burdensome taxation and loans squeezed from the Jews, though I very much doubt he has ever laid eyes on the relevant documents. P. Elman, who has, writes that “apart from the quasi-regular and normal legal sources of income, which the English as much as the Jews were required to pay, the king claimed from a Jews a number of occasional contributions, especially loans and tallages. In the thirteenth century, which is the vital period for our purpose, the loans were insignificant in number and amount [emphasis added].”[14] Further, there “is no evidence of the levy of any collective tallage upon them until the year 1168, and then the number did not exceed 5,000 marks.”[15] When the tallages were brought in, they only applied to land that Jews had seized in lieu of the unpaid loans of the barons (see below). Further, Jews were excused from Crown taxes[16] and unlike the Christian population, in their movement around the country transacting business Jews were “free of all tolls and dues.”[17]
If we were to have before us today a thirteenth-century English peasant, he would find much to dispute in Julius’ claim that it was the Jew who stood at the bottom of the social and economic ladder. In fact it has been well established that Jews occupied the position of a privileged elite, under royal protection. B. Lionel Abrahams, upon examining centuries of royal charters concluded that “from their first arrival in the country, they had enjoyed a kind of informal Royal protection.”[18] Later, Henry II “gave and secured to the Jews special privileges so great as to arouse the envy of their neighbors,”[19] granted them the use of their own courts, and “placed them under the special protection of the royal officers in each district.”[20]
In charging high rates of interest and preying upon the indebtedness of the lesser barons and the freeholders, Jews were successful in acquiring vast numbers of estates, which the king then gradually acquired by accepting them in lieu of tallages.[21] The Jews had a free rein to carry on their regular, and highly profitable, money-lending activities as long as they continued in a mutually beneficial partnership designed to facilitate “the transfer of land from the small landowners to the upper stratum.”[22] Unsurprisingly, Jews thus came to be seen as a hostile elite. They were viewed as such not just by the peasantry but by the barons, who chafed under their interest rates and at their inability to strike at those under royal protection. Irven Resnick writes in a 2007 article for the respected journal Church History that Jews were the “agents of hated royal fiscal policies,”[23] as well as the usurers of the masses. The Crown was aware of this and took measures to increase security for Jews. A lot has been made about Jews first having to wear a badge identifying them at this time. What is far less often publicized is that these badges were first introduced by the English Crown, according to an article in the Jewish Quarterly Review, to better “facilitate their recognition by their protectors.”[24] This partnership stands quite opposite to the picture painted by Julius, in which the Crown would even refuse “to prosecute the murderers of Jews.”[25] In fact this statement is itself a complete fabrication. One of the most notable things about the expulsion was that during the event itself, and long after the Crown viewed the Jews as useful, there remained a gratitude for services rendered. Zefira Rokeah writes that the Crown “endeavored to ensure the safe passage of Jews during the expulsion itself and punished those who robbed them or abandoned them to their death.”[26] Julius knows this of course — he cites several times, though selectively, from the exact chapter I have just quoted from.[27]
Julius claims that the English Church was inherently bent on persecution because it viewed Judaism as a heresy, and in doing so gives Jews an entirely passive role. In this he borrows heavily from mainstream Jewish writing on this subject,[28] and he cites extensively from Zefira Rokeah who is one of the main proponents of this notion. For example she writes that “England was among the most orthodox countries in religious matters. Heresy was both exceedingly rare and decisively dealt with when it appeared. It was not found necessary to import the Inquisition into England, although the Dominicans were present and capable of acting as its agents.”[29]
There is one basic and fundamental problem with the Jewish rationale on this however. Heresy can only be committed by ‘one of the flock’ and Jews were never seen as part of the flock. In fact, compared with the heresies of sects like the Cathars, which flourished at this time, Abrahams writes that “Jewish unbelief was seen as harmless.”[30] Put simply, the Jews were outsiders of no import or concern to the Church.
In the early years of Church-Jew interaction, relations were actually positive. We know from documents that the English Church was borrowing money at interest from the Jews, “pledging church vessels, books, and vestments as security for their loans; even relics were used in this way. … The Jewish financier Aaron of Lincoln alone financed building projects in nine Cistercian abbeys as well as the cathedrals of Lincoln and Petersborough.”[31] Relations eventually ceased not because of theological differences, but under the direction of the bishop of Lincoln who complained that interests levels for these loans had become “exorbitant.”[32] J.M. Rigg concluded following a survey of Church correspondence that “religion had little or nothing to do with the expulsion,”[33] and that “the clergy of England during the period under review evinced far less hostility to the Jews than the laity.”[34] When the laity began to suffer under Jewish usury, relations further deteriorated, and the Church moved to end Christian-Jewish contact altogether. When these efforts failed and Jews had spread into new towns across England, protected by royal guards, tensions grew. Because an attack on the Jews was seen as an attack on the king, some pretext had to be sought. A religious pretext, which might offer the protection of the Church, was thought viable, and in this atmosphere the allegation of ritual murder emerged. Gillian Bennett, a fine historian of medieval England and an expert on the use and reception of folklore, concluded in 2005 following years of research into these allegations that “where accusations of ritual murder where made in this period … it is more probable that they were cause celebres around which anti-Jewish feeling could crystallize, rather than the cause of anti-Semitism in the first place.”[35] A pretext — a ‘safe’ pretext under which one could forge an attack on a hostile, heavily protected elite. Of course, the peasantry under-estimated the reaction of the sovereign — following a riot against Jews in York in 1190, many rioters were hanged by orders of the king.[36]
Thus, rather than Julius’ “war on the Jews,” the period saw the partnership of Crown and Jew against the barony and the peasantry. Only when the cautious Edward I ascended the throne did the situation change. The barons were becoming increasingly restless — a restlessness that Edward was sure would eventually target him. During the interregnum of Henry II and Richard I, the brief period before the new king declared ‘the peace,’ successful raids had been carried out by the barons on the archae — heavily guarded buildings which housed records of what they owed Crown and Jew.[37] Tallages consistently revealed the astonishing level of Jewish wealth, and as J.M. Rigg states: “Doubtless the discovery this made of their opulence had grown, had much to do with the outbreak of anti-Semitism which followed.”[38] Edward thus decided to cut his losses while the going was good — for both him and the Jews. As Rigg concluded, given the realities of the period “it would be absurd to find fault with him for dismissing them from the country. … Nay, it is even probable that their expulsion was a blessing in disguise.”[39]
One final point: if Jews had such a terrible time in medieval England, perhaps Mr. Julius can explain why only twenty years after the ‘expulsion’ Jews started petitioning for their return?[40]
Andrew Joyce’s review of Trials of the Diaspora will continue at a later date.
[1] W. Bacher, “The Jews of Angevin England: Documents and Records from Latin and Hebrew Sources,” Jewish Quarterly Review, 6:2 (1894), 335-374 (p.335-6).
[2] G.R. Elton The Practice of History (London, 1961), p.88.
[3] Ibid, p.79.
[4] J. Marcus, Foundations of the Frankfurt School of Social Research (New Brunswick, 1984), p.15.
[5] A.M. Fuss “Inter-Jewish Loans in Pre-Expulsion England” Jewish Quarterly Review, 65:4 (1975), 229-245 (p.229).
[6] P. Elman, “The Economic Causes of the Expulsion of the Jews in 1290″ The Economic History Review, 7:2(1937) 145-154 (p.145).
[7] B. L. Abrahams, “The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290″ Jewish Quarterly Review, 7:1 (1894), 75-100 (p.76).
[8] “The Jews of England in the Thirteenth Century,” Jewish Quarterly Review, 15:1 (1902), 5-22 (p.10).
[9] See H.G. Richardson, The English Jewry under Angevin Kings, (London, 1960), p.25.
[10] B. L. Abrahams, “The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290″ Jewish Quarterly Review, 7:1 (1894), 75-100 (p.76-7).
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid, p.78.
[13] “The Jews of England in the Thirteenth Century,” Jewish Quarterly Review, 15:1 (1902), 5-22 (p.7).
[14] P. Elman, “The Economic Causes of the Expulsion of the Jews in 1290″ The Economic History Review, 7:2(1937) 145-154 (p.145).
[15] “The Jews of England in the Thirteenth Century,” Jewish Quarterly Review, 15:1 (1902), 5-22 (p.10).
[16] Ibid, p.11.
[17] B. L. Abrahams, “The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290″ Jewish Quarterly Review, 7:1 (1894), 75-100 (p.84).
[18] Ibid, p.78.
[19] Ibid, p.81
[20] Ibid.
[21] P. Elman, “The Economic Causes of the Expulsion of the Jews in 1290″ The Economic History Review, 7:2(1937) 145-154 (p.145).
[22] P. Elman, “The Economic Causes of the Expulsion of the Jews in 1290″ The Economic History Review, 7:2(1937) 145-154 (p.145).
[23] Irven Resnick “Review: Expulsion: England’s Jewish Solution by Richard Huscroft” Church History, 76:3 (2007), 634-636 (p.635).
[24] “The Jews of England in the Thirteenth Century,” Jewish Quarterly Review, 15:1 (1902), 5-22 (p.14).
[25] Ibid.
[26] Z.E. Rokeah “The State, The Church, and Medieval England,” in S. Almog Antisemitism Through the Ages (New York, 1988), p.104.
[27] Julius, Trials of the Diaspora, p.654, 656, 657.
[28] See for example, D. Cohn-Sherbok, The Crucified Jew: Twenty Centuries of Christian Anti-Semitism (London, 1992), R.S. Wistrich, Anti-Semitism: The Longest Hatred (London, 1991), and M. Perry Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present (New York, 2002).
[29] Ibid, p.101.
[30] B.L. Abrahams “The Expulsion of the Jews from England (Concluded)” The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Apr., 1895), pp. 428-458, (p.458).
[31] Ibid, p.112.
[32] Ibid, p.113.
[33] J.M. Rigg “The Jews of England in the Thirteenth Century,” Jewish Quarterly Review, 15:1 (1902), 5-22 (p.19).
[34] Ibid.
[35] G. Bennett, “William of Norwich and the Expulsion of the Jews”, Folklore 116:3, 311-314 (p.313).
[36] J. Gillingham, Anglo-Norman Studies: Proceedings of the Battle Conference, Volume 25 (Woodbridge, 2003), p.145.
[37] B. L. Abrahams, “The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290″ Jewish Quarterly Review, 7:1 (1894), 75-100 (p.82).
[38] J.M. Rigg “The Jews of England in the Thirteenth Century,” Jewish Quarterly Review, 15:1 (1902), 5-22 (p.14).
[39] Ibid, p.21.
[40] Z.E. Rokeah “The State, The Church, and Medieval England,” in S. Almog Antisemitism Through the Ages (New York, 1988), p.118, note 6.
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