Undoing Historical Revisionism

Expulsions of European Jewry, 1290-1492

by Austin Walsh

Part I: Seditious Sojourners in the Kingdom of England

If the Jewish Virtual Library (JVL) is to be believed, it seems as if one day, the Catholic Monarchs of England, France and Spain, during respective centuries, decreed spontaneously that Jews were no longer welcome in the Kingdom, necessitating imprisonment, asset stripping and deportation. In reality, such a decree is a very complicated legal and logistical step which no head of state would take lightly: how are debts to be settled? Where and when are the Jews to go, and how? What is to be done with abandoned property? Not even a mentally impaired monarch would undertake such a step without both grave underlying causes, and serious consideration. However, the only cause cited by the JVL is anti-semitism. Peculiarly, no Jewish behaviors are ever mentioned. Thus goes Jewish historiography on expulsions from Catholic Kingdoms, with the unjustifiable a priori presumption that only irrational Jew-hate explains the cause, like some pandemic virus coursing through the air from one Christian to the next, targeting and persecuting innocent and unsuspecting denizens of the synagogue. Such cartoonish and false history is fodder for simpletons, or those who read only comic books; but such is what most Catholics today believe about their own ancestors, and sadly also about themselves.

Historical lessons are often reducible to the same principles which govern interpersonal relations; that is, at times the events of centuries past are more easily understood by drawing analogies with the manners in which people do (or do not) get along. Let us consider first such an analogy. A man is sacked by his employer and then complains to his friends, “they didn’t appreciate me,” he groans. “All the credit that I deserved always went to others,” is followed by the inevitable “there’s something wrong with that place.” All of which seems reasonable except to the friends of the man in question, who are subject to the man’s repetitious complaints far too often, because in reality he loses every job he takes within a short period of time. Sooner or later, a true friend will challenge the man by telling him that when one has been fired from one hundred jobs, maybe the problem lies not with one’s employers, but with the person getting fired all the time.

To history now can be linked this lesson in which reality itself seems to beggar life’s participants to stop simply blaming everyone else and examine oneself.  Question: Is there any people on earth who have known banishment or expulsion in excess of one hundred times? Answer: the Jews have known expulsion in excess of one hundred instances.  Why were Jews banished so many times? To ask this question is to enter the minefield of historiography, but let’s begin with a sample of what the JVL says:

1. On July 18, 1290, shortly after money lending was made heretical and illegal in England, Edward I expelled the Jews from England, making England the first European country to do so.
2. {France} Phillip IV the Fair ascended to power in 1285. In 1305, he imprisoned all the Jews and seized everything they owned except the clothing on their backs. He expelled 100,000 Jews from France and allowed them to travel with only one day’s provisions
3. …the date 1492 has been almost as important in Jewish history as in American history. On July 30 of that year, the entire Jewish community, some 200,000 people, were expelled from Spain.

Bribery, Fraud & Usury

The first stop of Catholic history’s counter-narrative is England of the late thirteenth century, ruled by the House of Plantagenet, and is related to us by French author Hervé Ryssen via his concisely written History of Antisemitism (see PDF at Cognitive Gateway’s Gateway Reader Page.)

Plantagenet King Henry III (1227-1272) showed great kindness to Jews. Of Henry, Ryssen writes:

Henry, the son of King John and Isabelle of Angouleme, favoured the immigration of Jews and protected them against the common people. (21)

In fact, so favorable was King Henry’s treatment of England’s Jews that late in his reign (1263-64) a revolt of the Barons took place:

The Jews were accused of serving as the tools of royal oppression, and the communities of London, Cambridge, Canterbury and Lincoln were convulsed by riots. At Worcester, Simon de Montfort expelled all the Jews from their lands after declaring all outstanding debts to them null and void. At London, in 1264, more than 500 Jews were massacred; their houses pillaged and their synagogues destroyed. (2)

Now if Henry were an oppressive monarch, and the Jews his tools, then his death ought to have ended the problem. Edward succeeded him, and in 1275 issued The Statutum de judaismo, which included prohibitions against usury. (3) Now the Jews were wont to lend money to landed nobility at low interest rates of five percent or less, in exchange for the nobles’ pledge of physical protection. Once obtained, Jews would then lend to peasants at a compound interest rate of up to forty percent. Unsophisticated peasantry often found themselves ruined by such financial predation, but the Jews having the barons’ guardianship, would persist in their usurious practices until the peasants were forced to take matters into their own hands. Hence the wise prohibitions in Edward’s statute were intended to keep matters from spiraling out of control, and thus afforded a reasonable protection for both Jew and gentile.  But England’s Jews kept pushing the envelope in a manner devoid of any sense of proportion or reason. Ryssen relates:

but some Jews attempted to evade its prohibitions. Better luck next time: 293 of them were hanged at London for violating the royal interdict. It was soon discovered that counterfeit money was circulating in England and that the country’s silver pennies were often clipped. (4)

Coin clipping in this case involved shaving, then collecting silver from the circumference of the penny, and repeating ad infinitum. In so doing Jews literally robbed the kingdom of the purchasing power of its money.

Ritual Murder “In contempt of the passion of our Lord”

With documented activity in Europe since at least 600 A.D., human trafficking has been a Jewish operation targeting primarily Christians. The events of Holy Week’s Spy Wednesday (22 March) of 1144 in England’s Norwich, would cause the mother of a boy named William to discover this fact the hard way.  Earlier that week William’s mother Elvira was offered a large sum of money to release her son into the custody of a man claiming to be the cook for the local archdeacon, so as to make William his apprentice. In actuality a Jew of Norwich by the name Eleazar, the man brought William to his home. An eyewitness recounts

This was Eleazar’s Christian servant, who, the following morning, had by chance, witnessed, with horror – through the crack of a door left inadvertently open – the cruel ceremony of the child’s crucifixion and atrocious martyrdom, with the participation, carried out with religious zeal, of local Jews, “in contempt of the passion of our Lord”. Thomas kept the date of the crucial event clearly in mind. It was the Wednesday following Palm Sunday, 22 March of the year 1144.

To throw off suspicion, the Jews decided to transport the body from the opposite side of the city to Thorpe’s Wood, which extended to within a short distance from the last house. During the trip on horseback with the cumbersome sack, however, despite their efforts at caution, they crossed the path of a respected and wealthy merchant of the locality on his way to church, accompanied by a servant; the merchant had no difficulty realizing the significance of what was taking place before his eyes…Young William’s body was finally hidden by the Jews among the bushes of Thorpe. (5)

Taken from the book Blood Passover, the Jews of Europe and Ritual Murder, this history was written by Ariel Toaff, son of Rome’s Chief Rabbi, and history professor at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University (not a likely suspect for antisemitism). Subject to a firestorm by American Jewry’s ADL for translating the original Hebrew into English, Toaff abandoned the copyright in 2014. (A full and free PDF download of the English translation of this book is available via the following link to Cognitive Gateway’s Gateway Reader Page.)

As grisly as are the facts of this case, Our Adorable Savior does not permit young William’s story to end here, but ordained that he become the venerable martyr and Saint William of Norwich

The scene now became the inevitable scene of miraculous happenings. Beams of celestial light illuminated the boy’s resting place late at night, causing townspeople to discover the body, which was then buried where it was found. A few days afterwards, the cleric, Godwin Sturt, who, informed of the murder, requested, and was granted, permission to have the body exhumed. He then recognized his nephew William as the tragic victim. A short time afterwards, during a diocesan synod, Godwin got up to accuse the Jews of the crime. Thomas of Monmouth agreed with him and accused them of the horrible ritual of crucifixion of a Christian boy as the principal event of a Passover ceremony intended to mock the passion of Jesus Christ, a sort of crude and bloody Passover counter-ritual. (6)

Authentic converts from Judaism prove themselves praiseworthy sons of Holy Mother Church. History gives us Nicholas Donin and Johannes Pfefferkorn as examples of exemplary converts who helped alert the Church to the threat posed to it by the synagogue. Add to these witnesses the name Theobald of Cambridge, an authentic convert who became a monk, and gave testimony in William’s case.

The convert revealed that the Jews believed that, to bring redemption closer, and with it, their return to the Promised Land, they sacrificed a Christian child every year “in contempt of Christ”. To carry out this providential plan, the representatives of the Jewish communities, headed by their local rabbis, were said to meet every year in council in Narbonne, in the south of France, to draw lots as to the name of the locality where the ritual crucifixion was to occur from time to time. In 1144, the choice fell by lot to the city of Norwich, and the entire Jewish community was said to have adhered to that choice. (7)

The phrase to bring redemption closer warrants additional explanation. According to the Babylonian Talmud, redemption for the Jews means the arrival of Moshiach, or Jews’ version of messiah. The Talmudic messiah is an earthly ruler who will undertake the universal conquest and slaughter of the vast majority of gentiles, sparing only a fractional remainder for enslavement.  Redemption for Jews has nearly the opposite meaning of that for Catholics, whose understanding of the Redemption is rooted in the salvific act by Our Lord on Calvary. To Jews, the total destruction of all Christian society will bring about the arrival of Moshiach. To Catholics, this Moshiach is anti-Christ. Thus, the motive behind these heinous, outrageous and totally unprovoked murders was to bring the so-called messiah, or anti-Christ into the world. Unfortunately, additional ritual murder cases fit the same evidence pattern and motive as those above:

the accusation of ritual murder or the crucifixion of Christian boys spread from Norwich throughout England: from Gloucester in 1169, to Bury St. Edmunds in 1183, to Winchester in 1192, from Norwich – again – in 1235, to London in 1244, and, finally, to Lincoln in 1255, where the martyr was sainted.As we shall see, there are reports of an anomalous case of plural ritual murder again at Bristol at the end of the 13th century. (8)

In 1255 another notorious case erupted:

The body of an eight-year old child, Hugh, in the bottom of a well owned by Copino, a local Jew, at Lincoln in the summer of 1255. …The victim had been abducted by Jews, tortured and crucified, exactly as in little William’s case. (9)

And by the close of the thirteenth century, a serial case emerged, indicating a situation gone completely out of control.

The case of Adam, considered the victim of a ritual homicide occurring at Bristol at the end of the 13th century, provides us with a true and proper serial killer, the Jew Samuel, who, “in the days of King Henry, father of the other King Henry”, is said to have killed three Christian children in one year. Thereafter, with the collaboration of his wife and son, he is said to have gone on to kidnap another child, named Adam, who, tortured, mutilated (perhaps subjected to circumcision) and crucified, is said finally to have been skewered on a spit like a lamb and roasted over a flame. Samuel’s wife and son are said to have repented, expressing the intention to bathe in the baptismal waters, but at this point the perfidious and criminal Jew is said to have killed them both as well. (10)

The most important evidentiary item in a murder case is the body of the victim. Each of the well-documented cases above was made manifest by the discovery of a previously abducted, murdered and mutilated child. In many cases the wounds inflicted were puncture marks at physiological locations likely to bleed profusely. In many cases the body was pale, indicating heavy blood-letting before death. Many bore marks of crucifixion, and slashed throats were not unheard of. In the cases of Saints William and Hugh, the miracles documented owing to these Saints’ intercession provide us with the certainty of ratification by the Holy Ghost: ritual murder of Christian children by Jews is a historical fact.

The Expulsion of the Jews from England

Thus with usury, counterfeiting and coin-clipping already rampant, and instances of ritual murder also on the rise, King Edward I of England expelled Jews from his kingdom on July 18, in the year of Our Lord 1290. Ryssen relates the events:

They were granted the right to convert their property into liquid cash by the month of November; after this time, those found on the territory would be hanged. But first, they were to return to their owners all pledges and collateral in hock to them from Christians. King Edward nevertheless prohibited his officers from mistreating them upon their departure and from extorting money from them in the ports of embarkation. Finally, on 9 October; 16,511 Jews left England. Any goods which they had been unable to sell were confiscated by the King. (11)

From the welcoming stance of Henry III, to the protective prohibitions taken by Edward I, the historical record reveals monarchs taking great pains to obey the Church’s teaching that no one in the kingdom possesses the right to harm the Jew. By contrast, decades of Jewish behavior proved both disruptive, subversive, and a growing threat to the Kingdom itself. Worth noting are the explicit orders of the King who did the banishing: the expelled Jews were to suffer no harm to their persons or their property. If antisemitism were the motive all along, why would such royal policies have been decreed? Edward’s expulsion of Jews in 1290 was not only measured and reasonable, but an act of defense of the realm.

This concludes Part I of the Series.

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FOOTNOTES:

1 Ryssen, Hervé. History of Antisemitism (C. W. Port, Trans.). (Washington, DC: The Barnes Review, 2016), p. 157.

2 Loc. cit.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Toaff, Ariel. Blood Passover, The Jews of Europe and Ritual Murder (G. M. Lucchese & P. Gianetti, Trans.). (Italy: Gian Marco Lucchese and Pietro Gianetti, 2016), p. 167.

6 Op. cit., p. 168.

7 Ibid.

8 Toaff., op. cit., p. 170.

9 Op. cit., p. 171.

10 Op. cit. p. 171-172.

11 Ryssen, op. cit. p. 160.

CREDITS: The Featured Image is Valentin de Boulogne’s, Our Lord driving the Jewish Money Changers out of the Temple, which is in the public domain. — The first image in the text, is from the Codex Maneses, c. 800 A.D., and depicts a Jewish moneylender at the court of a Catholic prince. It is in the public domain. — The second image is of an engraving c. 1478, showing the Martyrdom of St. William of Norwich.

FromRome.Info wishes to thank Mr. Walsh for his research and contribution of this series.