 and welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's event. My name is Elana Tahan, and I'm the lead curator of Hebrew and Christian Orient collections at the British Library. In association with our partners, Jewish Book Week, we are presenting today a panel, exploring the presence of Jewish people in England during the medieval period. This is one from a program of events supporting our exhibition, Hebrew Manuscripts, Journeys of the Written Word. This exhibition provides a snapshot of the range and richness of Hebrew manuscripts in the British Library's collection, and reveals the power of the written word to bring people together. Just a little housekeeping before we get started. If you have any questions during the event, you can submit them using the question box below. A selection of questions will be presented to the panel towards the end of the event. Use the menu above to provide us with feedback about the event and also to donate to the British Library. The British Library is a charity. Your support helps us open up a world of knowledge and inspiration for everyone. You'll find social media links below this video in case you want to continue the conversation on other platforms. You can also find out more about this event and read short biographies of our speakers. Today's panel features Professor Nicholas Vincent and Professor Anna Sapir Abulafia, and it is shared by Dominic Selwood. Dominic is a historian, barrister, author, and journalist. He writes on history for the Daily Telegraph, the independent, the spectator, and the range of other papers and periodicals. Now, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, we'll turn the time over to Dominic. The experience of Jews in medieval Europe was mixed and tragically, often not a happy one. Regularly viewed as responsible for rejecting and killing Christ, they were frequently blamed when disaster struck, either for causing it maliciously or for provoking God to anger and retribution. The first Jewish communities came to England at the invitation of William the Conqueror. They settled in key cities where they were prominent as merchants and financiers. But in 1290, Edward I, crusader king who had campaigned in the Holy land, expelled all Jews from his kingdom, and there was to be no return until the time of Oliver Cromwell four centuries later. The legacy of the 220-year Jewish presence from William to Edward is still all around us in street names, in the archeology of synagogues and burial grounds, and in mountains of records in the archives. Here to discuss as many aspects of this as we can are two scholars of immense learning and insight on this subject. Professor Anna Sapir Abulafir is a fellow of Lady Margaret Hall Oxford and holds the university chair in the study of the Abrahamic religions. Before Oxford, her journey included Amsterdam and Cambridge. She is expert among other things in medieval Christian-Jewish relations, especially Christian theological angles and is widely published in the area. She's a fellow of the British Academy. Professor Nicholas Vincent is professor of medieval history at the University of East Anglia. His journey has taken him via Oxford, Cambridge, Paris and Canterbury. He's expert in 12th and 13th century British and European history and has published extensively on the period in books and articles with a notable specialization in the legal, financial and documentary aspects of Plantagenet government. He is also a fellow of the British Academy. So a warm welcome to our two experts and an equally hospitable welcome to all of you who have joined this evening with a special hello to those attending from a far afield as the U.S. and Israel. So to business, Nick, can you please take us back to England at the time of William the Conqueror's longships when they arrived at Pevensey in 1066? Can you tell us who lived here? How did the blend of Anglo-Saxon Scandinavian and Normans work? How did the king and his military and the church and its priests shape life? Can you just parachute us back into that society and give us a flavor of it? So the key point about this society, Anglo-Saxon England, 1066 and all that, is that it's a post-Roman world, a North Sea world with connections to the Vikings in Scandinavia, with connections across to Normandy, with to some extent connections to Rome, but it's a very inward-looking world. It's a world with settler communities, merchant communities from Northern Europe, merchant communities from France. It's a community that's caught in tension between the Celtic world of the West, Wales and Ireland and Cumbria and Scotland and the Germanic North, from which the Anglo-Saxons themselves come. It's a very sophisticated world, established a dynasty, a royal dynasty in 1066 that's been established for 400 years or so, which has its own laws, its own language, its own very rich vernacular poetry, but it's a society right for conquest by William and the Normans. With the multiple cultures that are going on, with, as you mentioned, the Celtic and the Germanic and the Norman, to what extent is it a multicultural society or is it a fairly narrow-looking society? How does it feel? I think it depends very much on how you look at it, but essentially it's monocultural. So it's a monocultural society of Anglo-Saxons. Speaking though and originating from a variety of origins, and all of that, of course, changed fundamentally in 1066 with the coming of the Normans. So the Normans introduce a completely different element into this, a Northern French Viking world, closely connected to the world of the Rhineland, closely connected to the world of Paris with connections that take us down to Sicily, and it's really that conquest of 1066 that opens up Anglo-Saxon society in the process of apparently destroying it. So we have this extraordinary melting pot after 1066 of Normans in English. If anyone knows that society, they probably know it through Walter Scott still. I suspect that the chief access for many people is still Ivanhoe. And the world that Ivanhoe presents much later, but it's still supposed to be a description of England in the aftermath of the Norman conquest of total division between the English and the Normans. That's a very misleading view. The reality was that within really a few decades of 1066, there is a blending of English and Norman cultures. There's a great deal of intermarriage and there is the introduction of a whole series of rather exotic things from outside. For example, the Normans bring fallow deer from Sicily as a symbol of their authority, as a symbol of their wealth, of their cosmopolitan connections. They connect the English church far more closely to the church in Rome than had been the case before 1066. They bring a reform style of monasticism. So they deliberately reform what they claim is the unreformed corrupt church of the Anglo-Saxons. They bring rabbits from Northern Europe, from France. The rabbit, the fallow deer are both introductions by the Normans. So in a sense, the conquest of 1066 is seen as opening up what had previously been a rather closed world with Anglo-Saxon culture. And when we think and look back, elements that loom large always are royal power and ecclesiastical power. And is that real? Is that a sense one would have had at the time or is that just the way the documents make it look to us? How much of an impact did the king and the church have on daily life? Well, we are inclined to see power because power deliberately preserves itself. So a large part of the documentation we have comes in one way or another from the royal authority. I think the thing to say there is that England was an extremely well-organ, an extremely over-governed country compared to other realms in Northern Europe. And it was over-governed because it was extremely wealthy. The origin of that wealth is disputed, but it probably came from wool, from wool exports, from the woolen industry that remained the source of English wealth throughout the late and middle ages. And it meant that England from long before the Normans was always vulnerable to foreign conquest, was always wary, first and foremost, the Anglo-Saxons themselves after the fall of Rome, then the arrival of the Vikings and then the arrival of the Normans, this fear of foreign conquest. And that in turn led to a degree of centralization in government and militarization of society, the creation of military structures long before the Normans came, that meant this was a rather different place from other parts of Europe. It was centrally governed to an extent that simply wasn't true in France, that was certainly wasn't true in Italy or Spain or other parts of Europe at this time. Anna, it's likely that there were some Jews in Roman Britain among the merchants and the military, but the records are silent for the long Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian period that Nick talks about. During this time, however, there were Jewish communities in continental Europe. Could you first describe for us what life was like for Jews in Europe? How did the church view them? And how did that view affect their lives? And second, could you tell us about how the Jews came to England after 1066 and what made their experiences here unique? Right, well, those are very, very big questions to answer. I think the thing to start with, and it is very important for everything we're talking about tonight, is to explain that within Christian theology, there was is place for Jews in Christian society. And one might think that's obvious, but it wasn't obvious at all. And we really need to look very much to the work of Augustine, the church father who dies in 430. Now he was very much influenced, of course, by Roman law, the situation in the Roman Empire, where Judaism was, of course, a lizard religion. So there is room for Jews in Christian society, but it is conditional. The room for Jews, the place for Jews, was conditional on them being deemed to be useful to Christians. And a way that one might talk about this is that Jews had to do service. They had to deserve their place in Christian society for what they could offer to Christians. Obviously all of this is seen from the Christian point of view. And one of the things in Augustine was very important for this idea is the idea that somehow Jews help Christianity prove that it is the true religion. How is that possible? That is possible because Jews carry with them using Augustinian language, the books of the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, in which Christians find all of the prophecies of the coming of Christ, Christ ministry and the resurrection, et cetera, et cetera. So when Christians in that early period were faced by pagans, I don't like the word, let's use it for a moment. And pagans said to Christians, you falsified the Old Testament, you write the New Testament. Sure, of course the two texts cohere. Christians could say, no, no, no, look at the Jews. They carry the books of the Old Testament for us. It's all there. So willy nilly in this medieval Christian idea, Jews were very useful. They were also useful, again, purely from a Christian point of view, they had lost their land, the destruction of the temple in 70 CE, the revolts, Bar Kochba revolt 135 had been repressed, et cetera, et cetera. And the argument was, Christian theological argument was that this showed the fact that Jews no longer had a land of their own, showed that they were being punished, for not recognizing Christ as the Messiah and the Son of God. And finally, the Pauline prophecy that in the end, all the Gentiles and Jews would convert, you need Jews around in order for that prophecy to take place. So Jews had a place in Christian society. And one must take this very seriously, quite different for heretics. They didn't have that kind of room. So Jews were allowed to be Jews, but conditional on them being deemed to be useful. And the interesting thing is, is how that then translates into pragmatic politics, pragmatic social relationships between Christians and Jews. So in Latin Mediterranean, in Iberia, in Southern France, very large Jewish communities, very much from the late antiquity into the early middle ages, very prosperous with all kinds of different activities. Younger Jewish communities in Germany and in France, in England, they come effectively with the conqueror in 1066. And what is so special about the community of Jews in England, really three things. One is we have pretty much a beginning point, 1066. We have an endpoint, the expulsion of 1290. Secondly, and this follows from what Nick said, there was far stronger royal control over these Jews than anywhere else in Europe. And thirdly, they were because this is the pragmatic use the king, the crown made of them, they were involved, especially from around the 1180s, very much involved in money lending, before much more in the traffic as merchants of plate of silver. But through various reasons, what Henry did, they got into that money market with others, they were not the only ones. But because of that, the material we have of the Jews in England is by and large financial and that skews our view of the history of the Jews of England, because a lot of other things were going on than just finance. Thank you. So there's a uniqueness in many ways. A very unique situation. And it's incredibly important not to extrapolate from the English experience to everywhere else in Europe. We must remember different Jewries in Europe had different experiences, vastly different experiences. Yes, and we'll come onto some of those again later. Thank you for setting that up so well. Nick, medieval society was not static and each century had markedly different characteristics. So in this 220 years of Jewish presence here, there were many changes as power shifted from the Normans to the Angevins and the Plantagenets. And within this, the church thinking on society also changed. I'm wondering, can you tell us a little about how England's Jews fitted into this shifting society of those who prayed, fought and laboured? I mean, what was their legal status as non-Christians in a Christian society? And what tensions did that bring? They're essentially there because the king wants them there. Or William, as he came over as the Duke of Normandy wants them in Normandy. They are entirely dependent upon their symbiotic relationship with the crown. In everything that Anna said so far, absolutely spot on that they're also there as a witness to the truth of Christianity in the eyes of Christian bishops. So Christian bishops led by the Pope are very keen to protect the Jews, not for the Jews' own interest, but for the interests of the church. I think also key here, if we're thinking about the developing thinking of the church, the period of medieval English Jewry is almost exactly coterminous with the period of the Crusades. So the Crusades get going in the 1090s and Acre, the last Crusader fortress is lost in the 1290s. Almost exactly the same period as the Jewish community in England. And the Crusades fundamentally altered attitudes towards those who were not actually Christians within Christian society. So that at periods of tension, particularly at periods when Crusades were being organized, the Jews were extremely vulnerable. Those who couldn't go to the East to make war on the infidel in the East could do so by making warfare on the infidel as they saw it closer to home. So that from the 1090s, when the Crusades get going, from the period of the first Crusade onwards, periods of crusading rhetoric, periods of crusading recruitment are always marked by particular tensions with the Jewish community in England as elsewhere in Europe. So it's very strong in places like Germany when the first Crusade army mobilized, for example. How long does it take in England for similar anti-Jewish feeling to build as a result of the succession of Crusades? Well, the first key incident there is in the 1140s, which again is a period of crusading, the period of the second Crusade. You're right, there were appalling massacres in the 1090s in the Rhineland at the time of the first Crusade. We don't actually know, we don't have a date for the arrival of Jews in London. We assume that London is the first point of call. We don't have a date for that. All we know is that the Jews were in England by the reign of Henry I, so by the 1130s, they were certainly there. But in the 1144, in a notorious incident, accusations were made against the Jewish community in Norwich from where I'm speaking to you today, that the Jews were involved in the ritual crucifixion of a small Christian boy, a young boy named William, of roughly the same age of Christ in his infancy, who was a member of the English-speaking community in Norwich, and whose body was later found just up behind where this house is, from which I'm speaking to you, in Fort Wood, and immediately became the focus of suspicion that the Jews had deliberately murdered this boy. And that's repeated in the 1190s. Again, at the time of the third crusade, there are pogroms against the Jews of Norwich, and especially against the Jews of Lincoln. The same is true in the early 13th century. The same thing is repeated in the 1230s, 1250s, all the way through to the expulsion of the Jewish community in the 1290s. So these periods of crusade are particularly difficult for Jewish-Christian relations from the 1140s in England on them. So that's fascinating. So two things I'm taking from that are, one, the problems start really very soon, and two, they are persistent throughout the period, albeit that there are phases of it. It is nevertheless a factor of life for Jews in England, that these periods of hostility keep coming round predictably. Yes, and they're mimetic. So they build upon one another, they imitate one another, so that we, for example, the first incident outside Norwich of this accusation of ritual murder, outside Norwich after 1144 is in Gloucester, where a boy called Harold is likewise said to be a victim of Jewish persecution, and it's no coincidence that the church in the center of Norwich market, St. Peter Mancroft, belongs to the monks of St. Peter's Gloucester. So there's a direct line of communication, a direct line of imitation there across these various incidents of anti-Jewish violence. Right, taking that a little further. Anna, can we look a little deeper into the tensions arising from the fact that England's Jews were at the same time notably successful, but also very vulnerable in the way Nick describes in these pogroms, St. William of Norwich, Little St. Hugh of Lincoln, Winchester, all sorts of places, this is happening, but can you explain a little why and how, despite their success, the Jews were so consistently framed as outcasts, murderers, enemies of God, and compare this with what the Jews are experiencing elsewhere on the continent? Right, yes. Yes, now what I find so remarkable when I look at the experience of the Jews in England is how they go through bad periods, but the elasticity, their capacity of bouncing back and recovering from the most terrible, well, violence one sort or another or very heavy taxing, et cetera, et cetera, is really quite remarkable. It's almost as if kind of every 20 years something bad happens and then they again recover, but it isn't really important to understand this ambiguity. And I would put the accent of their vulnerability back to where Nick started, and that was their symbiotic relationship with the crown because their protection was incredibly important for them and they could do very well out of it, but it was up to the king how he dealt with the Jews. So let me start right in the 1180s. So I said before, really due to various things that Henry II did, the Jews were able to enter into the money-lending market. I'm simplifying here, but some of this had been vacated by English Anglo-Saxon moniers and that was something that Henry II had done. Now what in the literature is always what people concentrate on in this period is the fabulous wealth of somebody called Aaron of Lincoln. And somehow the images created Aaron of Lincoln is so wealthy. Every medieval Jew in England is wealthy, but we need to look at this much more carefully. Not all Jews in England were wealthy. There were some outliers. There were a lot of people who were not wealthy at all. And for me, the most crucial thing to focus on is when Aaron of Lincoln dies, who takes over that wealth? It is the king. It is the king. So this is what we need to remember. However well, however successful the Jewish community, and there are different Jewish communities again within England, they always depend on what will be demanded of them from the crown. Now, if you're looking at a community that is useful to the crown because of tellages and taxation on the profits made from money-lending, you can easily see that when the crown puts more pressure on the Jews, the Jews have to put more pressure on the people who are borrowing money from them. So in many ways, one could almost say that the crown is exercising some kind of indirect taxation of Christian subjects. But who carries the blame for this extra pressure? It is, of course, the Jews. So what we must remember, the position of the Jews in England, pragmatic, they serve the king, they're useful. But in serving the king, they might not be seen by the king's Christian subjects to be serving them. And I think that is where much of this ambiguity comes from. I would be a little bit more cautious in focusing on the ritual murder accusations. And the reason I say that is that, yes, it is absolutely true that it is in England that we have the first full literary account of a ritual murder accusation. As Nick says, that is the little volume of knowledge and it is a horrible text to read. What I am always thinking of is so important. On account of that accusation, there was actually no violence in knowledge. That is not why the Jews in knowledge died in 1190. It had to do with problems of taxation, problems of lack of authority within the North, absence of royal control, all sorts of other things played into that. And yes, Nick is absolutely right. It goes to Gloucester, it goes to Barry St. Edmonds. But in England, in the 12th century, we do not have violence on account of these horrible tales. And why are the tales told? Are they believed? And again, we need to think, what does it mean to believe a ritual murder accusation? It's one thing to listen to a myth, this horrible stuff and little boys tortured and all these awful, terrible Jews. But we have no evidence that mothers in knowledge were telling their children, don't go out because the Jews will take you. We have no evidence of that. In many ways, this is a literary trope, that puts out the message that, yeah, there's a lot of interaction between Christians and Jews, but watch out because Jews might be dangerous. Let's be careful to have separation lines between Jew and Christian. And also in all of these stories, the Jews come to a bad end. In so many of these stories, the Virgin Mary plays a role and the Virgin Mary will save a child, or it is a child singing to the Virgin that will be found not always on time, but all that sort of thing. What do we have here? Jewish service, a story, a horrible story, accusing Jews, but proving the veracity of Christianity. And what is so interesting in England, we have violence because of these kind of stories in LinkedIn in 1255, because the king says, I believe it. He didn't believe it for long, but it was long enough for Jews to lose their lives. It is in France where it becomes a judicial tool to murder Jews. It becomes in Germany a horrible catalyst to incredible violence against Jews, both by authority, but also popular violence. Because in Germany, we don't have concentrated authority protecting Jews at the right time in the right place. And that's what we always need to look at, ambiguous situation, full of paradox. You need to have authority at the right time at the right place, who will protect Jews? Thank you for bringing out that ambiguity. It is very interesting, isn't it? That the king's protection so important comes at a price. For some, it's a price of military service, for others, it's a price of taxing and financial. So Nick, can we just, can we look at the money in a little bit more detail just so that we can get some context around it? The Old Testament has prohibitions on lending with interest. And by the high middle ages, the English church is forbidding Christians from lending for a return, although regularly turns a blind eye to it when it does happen. However, Jews were exempt from this prohibition and kept the vital capital circulating. I mean, a major part of the economy, really, that the king established the exchequer of the Jews, mentioned earlier from Aaron of Lincoln, to regulate their affairs. But can we put this into some kind of a context for us and describe how the Jewish role in finance and the economy actually worked? Okay, so the key point here is that we're, again, in this upsurge after the post Roman economy, where the economic situation is improving massively for many, many people. It's an economy that's desperately short of credit, though. There has to be a supply of credit for any economy to take off. Think of today. And as in any economy, even the very rich are often very short of money. So there has to be a ready supply of money on loan. The Jewish restrictions on usury forbid lending within the Jewish community, but they do not restrict the Jews from lending beyond the Jewish community. Christian moneylenders are not supposed to charge interest on loans to one another, but inevitably do and conceal all of that often by describing it as charges. There are parallels there to be drawn with the way that banking works today. You don't necessarily pay a very steep rate of interest, but you pay very heavily to use the account. So often interest is concealed by saying that a sum of money will be repaid. And in reality, that sum is a great deal higher than the money that's been advanced to start with. Going back to what Anna was saying too, though, it's also very important to notice that this is only one part of a much wider story. It's the part that's obviously very well documented because all of these bonds, all of these IOUs were deliberately and very carefully preserved. And the King took an interest in them because often as with Aaron of Lincoln, the King became the owner of those bonds and began to demand repayment. If you think of those great piles of paper money that IOUs and bonds and so forth, in any Victorian novel, think of Thackeray, there's a constant market, secondary market in these bonds. They were very, very carefully looked after those bonds. So they do give us a slightly misleading impression of what was Jewish enterprise in the majority of cases. And if some of these bonds are land backed, actually we're also talking about a market in land which gives Barron's influence and increases their status. So presumably the King is very interested in that too. Yes, there are all sorts of complications, legal complications there about the ownership of land. So what tends to be Aaron is the mortgage on the land, not the land itself. And here we're not just dealing with Barron's, Barron's wanting to go on crusade, having to raise large amounts of money for this expedition, often borrowing from the Jews. We're also talking about the church. So the great monasteries have a very irregular income stream. Which they try to supplement, which they try to even out by heavy borrowing from the Jews. So this is an operation, a financial operation that involves many, many powerful people. Powerful people who take the opportunity when opportunity arises to actually tear up those bonds to destroy them in as large a number as possible, as is the case in York in 1190, as is the case in England under King John, the rebellion against King John. There's a major upsurge of violence against the Jews in London, burning of Jewish bonds. The same thing happens again in the 1260s. So, which is yet another reason why the things themselves are so carefully preserved because the King is very keen that these things do not be destroyed at times of tension between the community and those that the community regards as outsider. Which creates a very precarious situation. Anna, can you tell us a bit about how all this was perceived by individuals, by the people at the time? I'm thinking about how did the Christians of the Jews see each other? Because we have writings of churchmen, some positive, some negative, some of the lines that you've already mentioned. And questions around the massacre in York, William of Newburgh, actually standing up and being appalled that the Jews who were requesting baptism were slaughtered. And yet you have these other church texts in which quite plainly there's a very hostile line being spun. So, can you tell us a bit about the different ways in which all of these events were understood? I want to concentrate on William of Newbury who is, he dies in 1198. Hope I've got that right, yes. And he gives us a great deal of information about what happens in York. So a lot of people know about the massacre of the Jews when the third crusade were in 1190. And so this is a really good example of how this ambiguity, how this has such terrible effects. So Aaron of Lincoln's money, his estate is taken over by the crown. So the crown all of a sudden becomes the lender to all kinds of people in the North, including the Cistercians who have borrowed money. We have an absence of power of authority within the North, very complicated story. Through tremendous misunderstandings, the Jews of York are in the King's Tower, Clifford's Tower, and they are being attacked and they have to decide what to do. Now, William of Newbury, very interesting, has a problem because he is a good enough theologian that he knows that you're not allowed to attack Jews, you're not allowed to kill Jews, and you're not allowed to force Jews to convert. However, lots of Jews die and lots of Jews by their own hand come to that in a moment. And many are actually, as you just said, they are massacred as they leave the Tower to accept baptism. And of course, for William of Newbury, if that happens, then God must have a reason. And it's very interesting to look actually at what William himself says, and I'll just read little bits to give you the flavor of this incredible paradoxical ambiguity of views about Jews. William writes, the same zeal had set everyone on fire thinking that they were performing a great service to God if they would wipe out a people rebellious against Christ. While in their blinded minds, they were impervious to those words of David, indeed of the Lord, which has spoken in this person of Christ, do not slay them lest at any time my people forget. And he goes on to explain that Jews are in Christian society for the utility of Christians, but he has to explain why God lets this happen. But then he says, but the Jews living in England in the reign of Henry II had been successful and celebrated in an inverted state of affairs over and above Christians. And on account of their great good fortune, they had impudently puffed themselves up against Christ and inflicted very many burdens on Christians. For this reason in the days of the new king, so Richard who had just come to the throne, their lives which they had through the mercy of Christ were put in peril by his just decree, nevertheless those who inflicted slaughter on them in a riot are by no means excused by the exquisite order of his judgment. So people who did it do wrong, they've sinned, they're guilty, but somehow the Jews have deserved it. And the problem is, is what I've said before, this ambiguity, these Jews were serving the king, but the people in York who actually owed a lot of money now to the crown which is much more frightening than owing money to Jews, they felt that somehow through this money lending, there was an inversion. Jews were supposed to serve Christians, Christians were not supposed to serve Jews. And through money lending, the fear was that the Jews were kind of on top and that was not what was envisaged. But from the Jewish point of view, all of this happened in York on Shabbat HaGadal, we're on the eve of Palm Sunday, the 16th and 17th of March. And amongst their number is a rabbi from France and they do what the Jews in the Rhineland did and many of them decide better to die at their own hand in honor of God, in Hebrew kiddush Hashem, in the, to honor the name of God, the sanctification of God's name, rather than be attacked, killed or baptized. Others escape, Jews don't all act the same, some Jews do this, other Jews do that, like any other community, and these Jews are attacked and murdered and William is desperately unhappy about that and feels that they have actually been baptized in their own blood as they are being murdered. And we have Jewish sources about what happened and very evocative sources, of course, very much honoring the martyrdom of these Jews who have died to remain Jews. It is one of the most horrific stories of 12th century England. And from what you're saying, I'm beginning to see three ways of looking at these relationships. One is to look at the ecclesiastical and the theological context where we have, as you mentioned, William of Newberg with his perhaps slightly surprising views, considering the mainstream, there's the popular view, which may or may not be following what the theologians are saying, but then there's also a legal view. And Nick, I'd be interested if you could tell us something about how, I mean, clearly the law is evolving throughout this period. We think of Henry II, DeGlanville, the common law, but law specific to Jews are also evolving. Some coming from externally, like the Fourth Lateran Council, requiring the wearing of specific clothing by Jews and Muslims to identify them. But then in England, we also have specific laws, little bits in Magna Carta, the statutes of jury. And then finally, of course, the edict of expulsion itself. Could you just trace that development for us as an English legislation and the way it deals with England's Jews? So clearly there's an awareness on behalf of the King that this community is the object of a great deal of tension. And as today, periods of economic instability, this gets very dangerous. So to begin with, the King offers a degree of protection to the Jews. He says that certain things that the Jews do are illicit money lending, for instance, as long as the goods in which they are involved as taking as securities, don't include things like bloodstained clothing or church vessels. Then we begin to move towards a situation where the crown intervenes from the 1230s onwards to limit the rate of interest at which Jewish loans can be charged. Now, those limitations, they may sound quite severe. So we're told that a Jewish loan can only go up to two pence in the pound. That's two old pence. Two pennies out of 240 pennies in an old pound. But if you calculate that over a year and compound it, it's well over 50% interest rate as we would be paying today. It's still quite hefty interest. And then in the 1250s, again, we get limitations on, the Jews are not to blaspheme the name of God. Their religious ceremonies are to be conducted quietly and peacefully. Again, they are to wear this object on their outside clothing. The object in England is called the tabular. And in a sort of hideous inversion of Jewish ceremony, it's supposed to represent, I think, the tables on which the laws of Moses are displayed in the synagogue. So they take a deliberately Jewish symbol, but turn it into a symbol of persecution, of segregation towards the Jews. And then the culmination of all of this legislation, of course, is the edict of expulsion itself, when by all saints' day, 1290, Jews have to have left the kingdom. Can you tell us something for the reasons that provoked or prompted Edward to take that really very drastic measure? Well, essentially, I think it's the exhaustion of the usefulness of the Jews to the crown. In essence, through the 13th century, the crown bleeds the Jewish community entirely to drive financial resource. It does say through a series of false taxations, it pays the crown paid for its walls in France, very largely from Jewish money enterprise, through the sale of Jewish bonds, through false taxation against the Jews. So as early as the 1250s, the Jewish community was really no longer in a position and has already drawn attention to the fact that the number of very wealthy Jews was already limited in the 12th century. By the 1250s, really the Jewish community is struggling to survive at all. And by the 1290s, we've also got expulsions in France, we've got expulsions in Sicily, we've got attacks upon the Jewish communities in Aragon, in Spain, and all of those seem to be present in the mind of Edward I. Again, a crusading king at a period when the crusading kingdom seemed to be about to fall as they do indeed fall. And in 1290, the Jews are duly expelled from it. Fascinating and very depressing. But I mean, that comes back to, I suppose what you've both been saying for the period of the talk, that this concept of utility of dependence of being able to provide something to the crown as soon as that is no longer there, then the interest wanes entirely. And Dominic, there are parallels to be drawn there with the way that we treat immigrants even today. And not just we, but other parts of the world, very dependent upon immigrant labor. But the moment that immigrant labor has lost its utility, it becomes more a burden than a utility and all sorts of things happen that are deeply regrettable. And history doesn't repeat itself, but we absolutely can always learn from it. Finally, Anna, can you just help us with some of the, getting inside the minds and the experiences of some of England's Jews on the eve of the expulsion or actually just tracing it of their experience in England. We do have writings from people like Rabbi Jacob Ben-Judah of London and Mayor Ben Elijah of Norwich. Can you tell us something about what these, very personal records tell us about the Jewish experience in England in this period before expulsion? Yes. So Rabbi Jacob Ben-Judah of London, he wrote the Ex-Chayim, which is a compendium of Jewish law, which contains the kind of religious services that Jews held at this time. So we're just before the expulsion. And lots of snippets of laws concerning everyday life. And just to bring in something, a little bit of a lighter note, this has been quite a heavy conversation. So one of the things you find in this Ex-Chayim in this compendium is the question whether Jewish dietary law allows Jews to eat fruit tarts and the word in the text is transliterated in Hebrew, the French tart. And when it's been made by Christians in a non-Jewish oven, if that makes sense. And it is allowed as long as a grease hasn't dripped into the tart, which would make it, of course, not suitable for Jews to eat. Another thing, again, Jews and Christians, Jews could never have been as successful as they were in England if they were completely separate from non-Jews. There is, of course, a lot of intermingling as well. It isn't all bad news. And in this compendium, we learn that actually other Jewish communities are very shocked that in England, rabbis allow Jews to share a beer with non-Jews. You share alcohol and what will happen, et cetera. But that is allowed in England. So there is also clearly language that shows that Jews and Christians didn't act. There are other bits in the ets ha'im, which do show a lot of the tension within the communities. But perhaps I can close with Amiya Ben-Alaj of Norwich. We don't know anything about him, but Norwich was a place where a Jews were very economically active. And he writes a poem, which I think, and I'll just read out a few lines, which makes absolutely clear that the situation was really quite dire just before the expulsion. I quote from Susan Einbinder's wonderful translation, "'Put a curse on my enemy for every man's supplant's brother. When will you say to the house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light? You are mighty and full of light. You turn the darkness into light. Tear out their hearts. They who wrought harm to those who come to your name. When I hope for good evil arrived, yet I wait for the light. The words of the seer are garbled for the foe has mocked your children until they don't know which path is the one that gives off light. The land exhausts us by demanding payments and the people's disgust is heard. This is what we're talking about. While we are silent and wait for the light. They make our yoke heavier. They are finishing us off. They continually say of us, let us to spoil them until the morning light. You are mighty and full of light. You turn the darkness into light." So hope for redemption, but it's a pretty bleak picture that is being drawn by a poet just before the expulsion. Life was really tough. By this time, the communities were very much depleted. There was conversion. People were already leaving, seeing the writing on the wall. And of course the inner communities, these communities would help each other. There would be some very rich others not rich, but the rich would help those who weren't rich. There would be money for the widows, the orphans, et cetera. There's a lot of self-help. All of this was breaking down as we know from Bob Stacey's work. And yeah, towards the end, it's not a good story. Well, thank you for the moment of levity with the beer and the fruit tarts. It's nice to hear the original, I mean, it's wonderful exploring themes, but actually there's nothing so powerful as to hear the words of the actual, for people from the period. I've asked enough questions now. I'm gonna ask some questions from the audience so perhaps I'll write with you. So I've got the first one here from Richard Cohen, who says, I hope you can tell us something about where the Jews expelled from England in 1290 went. That's not an easy one. It's as far as we know, but Nick, please, please come in. They would go to France more or less, but of course they wouldn't have much luck there because we're looking at only within, what is it, 15 years we have the expulsion from France, but that would be pretty much their first call that they would go to. Some went further afield, but there is evidence of, in Paris, there's evidence of Jews who clearly came from England, but others would have gone through France presumably and it would be better to get obviously further south. I don't know if Nick, you know more than that than I do. I don't know at all, but I do know that exiles in general pose all sorts of problems. Criminals in England throughout the 12th, 13th centuries are expelled in very large numbers and they immediately cross to France. Obviously, France is the first port of call. What happens to them thereafter? We just don't know. That poem that you read out, Anna, Mayor Ben Elijah, that survives only because the manuscripts ended up in the Vatican for reasons that were completely... That's right. That is absolutely right. And the autograph of Eid Tchayeim is in Leipzig. It is actually an autograph. Yes, which is extraordinary. Yeah, yeah. What survives to us is the detritus of the royal side of the Jewish community in England, the bonds and the financial dealings of the estecho of the Jews. And there is appalling stories and there again all of their stories that we've told, like 1190, like William of Norwich, like little St. Hugh in Lincoln, they're all saturated with a literary element that makes it very difficult to know what the Jewish communities take on these stories would have been. So we go literally from the light into the darkness. After 1290, we just don't know what happened to this community. We do know that some actually perish. They were put out on boats and the boats were not seaworthy. Yeah, yeah. Can I invite members of the audience to keep submitting questions? There's a link at the bottom underneath the video where you can send questions through and they are coming through to me and I've got another one here. What still exists in modern day England that shows the presence of the Jews in medieval England? Well, there's quite a lot of physical remains apart from the documentation, which is often, if not written in Hebrew, it often has Hebrew endorsements on it or Hebrew inscriptions on it. There is quite a lot of the built environment even in Norwich today is what remains of the Jewish Quarter. The same is true in Lincoln, the same is true in Oxford. There's quite a lot of physical evidence on the ground and then we've got things like Clifford's Tower in York where the massacre of 1190 may have taken place. These things are still there. And also we have, we do have quite a few manuscripts actually in Oxford. Bilingual manuscripts, Judith Schlanger has worked on a huge amount of work on that and Oxford has a particularly good collection of bilingual manuscripts and Hebrew manuscripts. Some of these were created for Christian scholars to learn Hebrew. Others are manuscripts, Hebrew manuscripts that were later used by Christians and you can see that through what happens in the margins. So there's quite a bit like that. And of course, place names. We, I mean, in Oxford, we have Dead Man's Walk and that was the walk from the Jewish Quarter from what now is St. Olga's to get to the Jewish Cemetery, which is now the Rose Garden and the Botanic Gardens. So, and again, we know quite a bit about where Jews lived in Oxford. Thank you. And we have a question from Leslie Michaels, a good financial question here. In order to lend large quantities of money, one needs a source of funds, i.e. banks accept deposits. Where did the Jewish money lenders obtain the large amounts of money to lend? That is a very interesting question to which I do not immediately have an answer. Clearly, this was a profitable trade, even though it was taxed very heavily. And clearly, there must have been large amounts of capital to kick it off. But we do know, and this is a point we didn't really touch on, that these communities in England were closely in touch with communities in Brault, with communities in Paris, with communities broadly. And you could pose that same question, where does that capital originate of any great money lending enterprise? Something, again, we didn't touch on. Kings always needed money throughout the Middle Ages after the expulsion of the Jews. They just turned to another group, the Italian merchants, and in effect bankrupted them one after another, Luca, Florence, each of these Italian communities. But it is a very interesting question. Anna, do you have a... It is a very interesting question. I don't know the answer either. I mean, it's a sort of question I ask for the whole development of the economy, which is happening from the 11th century. And I always think to myself, where does it all come from? Because, I mean, it's a major, major question to ask. There was, of course, within the Jewish communities, there were ways and means for intra-communal lending, but that doesn't sufficiently answer the question because the Jews were not involved in the world trade. It's one of the things that puzzles us. They were not invited to England to partake of that. There was very much in English hands to start with, Anglo-Saxon hands. They were very much involved in the silver trade, the plate trade. And of course, the English coins had a very high silver content. And so that was very lucrative. So maybe this is part of the answer, but so when merchants came to do business in England, they had to change any money they had to get themselves the king's silver, the king's coin. So they could also bring silver and Jews were very much involved in getting that silver to the minters and the minters would then turn it into coins. And obviously money was made. So that must have given them a good head start, but I'm not an economic historian and these are questions that I have as well. It's a very, very good question. It also fits in that darker story too, in the clipping of coin, the deliberate manipulation of that exchange by clipping the edges of the coin is one of the last accusations made against the Jewish community in the 1270s. So again, there is a great deal of anti-Jewish violence around these accusations of coin clipping that suggest a connection with exchange. It does indeed, that's judicial violence because again, the Jews, there were a lot of people clip coins, but the Jews got it much more in the net, quite literally, than non-Jews. Yeah, but again, it shows us we have these very high value coins. And I'm sure it does somehow come back to the wealth that Nick was talking about at the very beginning of our discussion, this wealth in England. I think it's a particularly good question because usually finance businesses have the asset side and the liability side. And normally a money lender is also a deposit taker. So I'd be fascinated to know if the records show that if the king had excess liquidity lying around or any baron said whether they deposited it with any of the Jewish money lenders who were then able to recirculate it because that's how a more sophisticated economy would work. Yeah, we must remember that a lot of this money lending was in trifling sums. We always have these visions of these enormous sums passing hands, but the bulk of it was very, very little. And that had just to do with kind of cash flow problems. It wasn't all this high level, with collateral's of land. A lot of it is really mind-bogglingly small. But yes, I mean, yes, Dominic, I mean, that is very interesting. I don't know the, I'm sorry, I just don't know the answer to that. Well, it's lovely to end on something that we can all go away and try and find out about and maybe come back and talk about another time, but I'm afraid out of time. This has been truly fascinating and a real joy to explore, reflect on and learn from. So Anna, Nick, on behalf of the British Library, Jewish Book Week, the audience and me, thank you so much for sharing your expertise and insights with us so very engagingly. Ladies and gentlemen, we hope you have enjoyed today's event. A big thank you to the panel and a very special thank you to our partners, Jewish Book Week for working with us on this event. We have an exciting range of events linked to the Hebrew manuscripts exhibition. Do please keep an eye on the what's on pages of our website for more information. Thank you very much indeed for joining us.