The English Crown and the Jewish people
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor
Apr 9, 2007, 01:34
The entrance of Jewish people into England, following William the Conqueror in 1066, and their subsequent dealings with the British Crown do not make for a pretty picture. In fact, it portrays a relentless Royal greed and exploitation of Jews, culminating in their 350-year expulsion from England.
In the course of a generation, Jewish communities were established in London, York, Bristol and Canterbury. They thrived by trading, lending money to the baronage, and by advancing money to the Crown in order to feed the revenues of the Government. The Jewish Community became a vital asset to the Royal Treasury. The quid pro quo is that the Crown was to protect the Jewish financiers and their wealth.
Yet in 1144, the first charge of “ritual murder,” also known as a “blood libel,” was brought against Jews in Norwich. These allegations contained common elements. For instance, that Jews supposedly bought an innocent Christian child just before the Jewish celebration of Passover, which commemorates the flight of Jews under Moses from Egyptian persecution and slavery.
During Pesach, the Jews of Norwich supposedly tortured the innocent child, William, matching the barbarism shown to Christ during the crucifixion. William’s torture was supposedly part of a bizarre, satanic Pesach ritual. The blood of the Christian child, illustrated in this link, seems to be drawn from its member, and may be a mistaken comparison to the circumcision ritual (a hygienic ritual) for Jewish infants. In the Norwich instance, this event purportedly culminated in the death and burial of the child’s body by Jews.
As a result of these “blood libel” allegations, Jewish settlements were attacked; this despite Pope Innocent IV protesting the absurdity and falsity of the charges. The illustration presents an image of a murderous-looking Jew hell-bent on spoiling Christian innocence. As outrageous as it was, it took a firm hold in the public consciousness.
By the year 1189 and the Third Christian Crusade on Muslim-dominated Jerusalem, the Jews were assessed at a higher rate of taxation than the rest of England. Jews were taxed one-quarter of their moveable property while the rest of England was assessed one-fourteenth of theirs. And though Jews made up less than a quarter of the population, they contributed 8 percent of the total income to the Royal Treasury. Additionally, the pro-Christian ideology and zealotry that is part of any Crusade resulted in rioting in England, resulting in some Jewish businesses burned in London.
The destruction of assets was not only bad news for the Jews, but also for the Crown, which viewed the Jews’ lost property income as lost taxation revenue. In order to protect this valuable financial resource, the Crown established The Exchequer of the Jews in 1194. This was literally a catalogue of all Jewish holdings in England. And this registry gave the Crown a sterling opportunity to systematically exploit Jewish resources, arbitrarily collecting taxes on revenues from all resources.
The Jews responded to these excess taxes by raising their interest rates on loans extended to customers. The interest hike, which sounds curiously contemporary, only increased the hostility towards Jewish moneylenders. In short, the Jews became pawns of the Crown, whereby they were indirectly collecting taxes for the Crown via hiked interest income. By selectively taxing Jewish financial wealth at rising tax rates and forcing Jews to raise interest rates, borrowers were forced to pay more for borrowed money. In effect, the exploitation of the Jews propped up the war-sagging coffers of the Crown.
As a consequence of this financial conflict, in 1217 Jews were forced to wear yellow badges to identify themselves as Jews. This is more than 500 years before the Nazi occupation used the same practice in WW II. The Nazis had ironically also laid siege to Great Britain as well, in a seeming case of “what goes around comes round.” Yet this visible Jewish marker sets the stage for even more segregation and prosecution.
By 1255, Jews are once again accused of a case of “blood libel.” In a similar scenario to the 1144 “ritual murder,” a young Christian boy, Hugh of Lincoln, ran after a ball and fell into a Jewish cesspool and drowned. His body was found 26 days later, during the Jewish wedding of a leading Rabbi. The fact that the Rabbi’s large congregation came to Lincoln to attend the Rabbi’s marriage fueled Christian paranoia that the Jews had killed the boy as part of some bizarre ritual ceremony. Ignorance and hatred once again triumphed as 100 Jews were executed for the boy’s death.
In fact, the story of Hugh of Lincoln is told in the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer. The “Prioress’s Tale” tells of some young Christian innocently singing a hymn while walking through the Jewish part of town. The Jews, purportedly incensed by the boy’s Christian piety, slit his throat and disposed of him. In a Stephen King turn of the screw, the boy keeps singing, even after death, which leads searchers to his body. The supernatural singing leads to eventual canonization of the boy as a saint. Alas and egads, this from the people who brought you Chaucer, Marlowe, and Shakespeare!
By 1265, the rising influence of Italian bankers begins to challenge the need for the financial services of the English Jews. In fact it makes them superfluous. And, as the English Crown turns away from their former bankers and Jews become of little use to it, the Crown has less interest and stake in preserving and protecting Jewish rights. In just three years, in 1269, again, eerily like the days of the Third Reich, Jewish rights are gradually restricted. The Crown declares that Jews cannot hold land; cannot leave money to heirs; children cannot receive parted parents monies; Jews in essence become Royal serfs whose cash at death is absorbed by the Crown.
In 1290, 300 years before the birth of Shakespeare, under Edward I, all Jews are expelled from England. Some manage to stay by hiding their identity and religion, as Jews in occupied Nazi countries did, as the young protagonist that writer Jerzy Kosinski created in The Painted Bird. In his novel a young orphaned boy wanders the Polish countryside, trying to avoid detection as a Jew. Eerily the past is prelude to the future. Many of the expelled Jews of 1290 make their way to France and settle there. But this expulsion from England lasts for 350 years.
In fact, Shakespeare, Marlow, and their contemporaries who live roughly from 1580 to 1620, never get to see a Jew in their lives. Yet in 1589, Marlow manages to write his biting political play, The Jew of Malta, a classic combination of Jew-and- Brit-bashing. The nasty Jewish villain as protagonist, Barabas, is outrageous in the grand style and refuses to pay a tribute (tax) to the Crown. Consequently, his wealth is seized and his house turned into a nunnery. This enrages him and he goes on a rampage of slaughter, including the poisoning of the entire nunnery.
Somehow Marlowe had absorbed the history of exploitation of Jews in England and put it into his tale. Yet, he had also absorbed the Crown’s capacity for brutality. When Barabas is caught, he is boiled to death in a cauldron of steaming water, screaming onstage in a scene of sensational violence equal to today’s horror films. Ironically, Marlowe was dead by 28, stabbed in the eye in a knife fight over a tavern bill. But he managed in his play, to explicitly parboil the hypocritical, Christian society in which he lived -- as well as grill the goated Jews to please the crowd.
In 1594, Rodrigo Lopez, a Portuguese Jew, and Queen Elizabeth’s physician, was executed in a plot to assassinate her. Lopez was tortured into confessing he was Marranos: a Jew of Spanish or Portuguese extraction, descending from baptized Jews who professed Christianity publicly in order to stay alive, but practiced Judaism in private. It’s fascinating that Marlow’s The Jew of Malta opened as soon as 10 days after Lopez’s execution. The Jewish demonization of Barabas played well with the English public’s bloodlust for the Jewish Lopez.
Only three years later, in 1597, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is said to have been performed. Shakespeare’s work, much more elegant, much less violent, centers around a successful shipping businessman in Venice, Antonio, who puts his personal bond up for a friend, Bassanio, so he can borrow 3,000 ducats from the Jewish moneylender Shylock. Bassanio will use this money to win the hand of the rich beauty Portia. The rub is that the Jewish Shylock, having had his fill with the ways of non-Jews, asks that if Antonio defaults on his payment for Bassanio, Shylock is to be repaid with a pound of flesh and not ducats.
Through various turns off events, it comes to pass that Antonio defaults. When he comes to face the judge/Duke in court, Portia disguises herself as a lawyer and challenges Shylock. In this bit of kangaroo court, she insists first that Antonio must pay exactly a pound of flesh and not a micro-ounce more, or Shylock forfeits. Secondly, removing flesh would lead to Antonio’s death, so Shylock would be guilty of pre-planned murder. Shylock backs off and worse, must become a Christian to boot. Still worse, his daughter Jessica steals jewels from him to run off with a Christian, Gratiano, to marry. Somewhere from the peeling of this stacked deck, Shylock utters the play’s most famous lines (Act III, Scene I), about being Jewish and equally human . . .
Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means,
warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer
as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us,
do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility?
Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his
sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge.
The villainy you teach me, I will execute,
and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
Could it be that in those 14 sublime lines Shakespeare captured the already millenniums-old anger of the Jewish people for their travails? It predicted the “never again” reaction that one day would turn the political life of the Middle East on its head. And could not the same lines be read today by a Palestinian? More is the pity that oppression breeds oppression and more oppression breeds more oppression, exponentially. In fact, it would not be until 1655 that Manasseh Ben Israel negotiated readmission of the Jews back into England. Ben Israel was a Sephardic writer and printer living in Amsterdam. He negotiated with Cromwell for the Jews’ return to London. In 1664, formal toleration was granted to the Jewish people.
It would be stranger still that about 150 years later in November 1917, after the British conquered the Ottoman Empire, that Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Foreign Secretary James Balfour and the Liberal Herbert Asquith government would recommend in a letter to Lord Rothschild, president of the British Zionist Federal, to invite Jews to Palestine. Yet the English in 1916 saw a Jewish entry into Palestine detrimental to British strategic aims in the Middle East. Lloyd George and his Tory supporters, however, saw British control over Palestine as much more attractive than the proposed British-French condominium. Palestine had taken on increased value given its proximity to the Suez Canal, where the British garrison increased to 300,000 men and due to a planned British attack on Ottoman Syria originating from Egypt.
What’s more, negotiations had been conducted by Chaim Weizmann, also the inventor of acetone, used with great impact and cost effectiveness in British explosives and munitions. Was there another quid pro quo in the making? That the Zionists would be potentially able to safeguard British Imperial interests in the region. And would not supporting a Jewish entity in Palestine mobilize America’s influential Jewish community to support US intervention in a coming war and sway even the large number of Jewish Bolsheviks who participated in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to keep Russia in the war? And if not Britain favoring this, could not the German community preempt them?
And so it was done, Balfour to Rothschild, “I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clear understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country [italics mine).
“I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.”
This declaration was accepted by the League of Nations on July 24, 1922, and contains the mandate that gave Great Britain temporary administrative control of Palestine. In 1939, Great Britain reneged on the Balfour Declaration by issuing the White Paper, which stated that creating a Jewish state was no longer a British policy. It was also Great Britain’s change in policy toward Palestine, especially the White Paper, that ironically prevented millions of European Jews to escape from Nazi-occupied Europe to Palestine.
As importantly, rising tension between Jews already there and Arabs erupted into bloody riots in 1920 and 1929, followed by the Arab revolt of 1936-1939. As of 1948 and the UN partitioning, the “War of Independence” for Israel, found Jerusalem divided, a border running through the city and cutting neighborhoods, streets, even houses. Yet, even as the fighting raged, the fledgling, or abandoned British protectorate, became the state of Israel, considering Jerusalem its capital.
Again, after Arab/Israeli hostilities in 1967, the city was reunited. But not for long. Had the Jewish people once more been set up by a ruthless England for its own purposes, and abandoned when they were no longer needed? Had history played another cruel joke on the Jewish people, believing the German Holocaust had ceded them the world’s sympathy to parse Palestine and more. Certainly, the Palestinians, and the Muslim world surrounding it did not. And has not since.
And thus, the “never again” bloodshed and death continues, waiting for its Shakespeare to immortalize the struggle; the age-old struggle for the territories of Palestine and its signature city, Jerusalem, this miraculous area that somehow has given succor and life to three of the world’s great religions, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. What is the mystique of this territory, this Maryland of earth that has absorbed so much blood and brilliance, creation and destruction, from time immemorial? And yet cannot deliver a lasting peace for even one acre of its being to any of its inhabitants. And who among us can unite these people in their common humanity?Jerry Mazza is a free-lance writer living in New York. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.