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EXPULSION OF THE JEWS.

JEWISH traders had followed William the Conqueror from Normandy, and had been enabled by his protection to establish themselves in separate quarters, or " jewries," in all the larger English towns. But the Jew had no right or citizenship in the land.1 The jewry in which he lived was exempt from the common law. He was simply the king's chattel,2 and his life and goods were at the king's mercy.

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Still he was too valuable a possession to be lightly thrown away. If the Jewish merchant had no standing-ground in the local tribunals, the king enabled him to sue before a special court, and his bonds were deposited for safety in a chamber of the royal palace at Westminster. He was protected, too, against the popular hatred in the free exercise of his religion, and allowed to build synagogues and to manage his own ecclesiastical affairs by means of a chief rabbi.4

The royal protection, however, was dictated by no spirit of tolerance or mercy. To the king the Jew was a mere engine of finance.5 The wealth which he acquired was wrung from him whenever the Crown had need, and torture and imprisonment were resorted to when milder means failed. It was the gold of the Jew that filled the royal treasury at the outbreak of war or of revolt. Hebrew coffers that the Norman

It was in the

kings found

strength to hold their powerful barons at bay.

That the presence of the Jew was, at least in the earlier years of his settlement, beneficial to the

nation at large, there can be little doubt. He was a capitalist; and heavy as was the usury he necessarily exacted in the general insecurity of the time, his loans gave an impulse to industry. The century

which followed the Conquest witnessed an outburst of architectural energy which covered the land with castles

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SACKING THE JEWS' QUARTER.

and cathedrals; but castle and cathedral alike owed. their erection to the loans of the Jew. His own example gave a new vigour to domestic architecture. The buildings which, as at Lincoln and Bury St. Edmunds, still retain their name of "Jews' Houses," were almost the first stone dwellings which superseded the mere hovels of the English burghers.6 Nor was their influence simply industrial. Through their connection with the Jewish Schools in Spain and the East, they opened a way for the revival of science. A Jewish medical school seems to have existed at Oxford; Roger Bacon himself studied under English rabbis.

But the general progress of civilization now drew little help from the Jew, while the coming of the Lombard bankers drove him from the field of finance. He then fell back on the petty usury of loans to the poor, a trade necessarily accompanied with much extortion; and which roused into fiercer life the religious hatred against their race.

But all this growing hate was met with a bold defiance. The picture which is commonly drawn of the Jew, as timid, silent, and crouching under oppression, however it may truly represent the general position of his race, is far from being borne out by historical fact on this side the Channel. In England the attitude of the Jew, almost to the very end, was one of proud and even insolent defiance. He knew that the royal policy exempted him from the common taxation, the common justice, and the common obligations of Englishmen. Usurer, extortioner as the realm held him to be, he knew

that royal justice would secure to him the repayment of his bonds; and a royal commission would. visit with heavy penalties any outbreak of violence against the king's "chattels."

Up to Edward's day, indeed, the royal protection never wavered. Henry the Second granted the Jews a right of burial outside every city in which they dwelt. Richard punished heavily a massacre of the Jews at York, and organized a mixed court of Jews and Christians for the registration of their contracts. John suffered none to plunder them save himself, though he once wrested from them a sum equal to a year's revenue of his realm. The troubles of the next reign brought in a harvest greater than even the royal greed could reap; and the Jews grew wealthy enough to acquire estates; while only a burst of popular feeling prevented a legal decision which would have enabled them to own freeholds.

But the sack of jewry after jewry showed the popular hatred, and the growing weight of the Parliament told against them. Statute after statute hemmed them in. They were forbidden to hold real property, to employ Christian servants, or to move through the streets without the two white tablets of wool on their breasts which marked their race. They were prohibited from building new synagogues, or eating with Christians, or acting as physicians to them. Their trade, already crippled by the rivalry of the bankers, was annihilated by a royal order which bade them renounce usury under pain of death. At last persecution could do no

more, and Edward, eager at the moment to find supplies for his treasury, and swayed by the fanaticism of his subjects, bought the grant of a fifteenth from clergy and laity by consenting to drive the Jews from his realm.

Their expulsion was effected with great cruelty, so that, of the fifteen thousand who preferred exile to apostasy, few reached the shores of France. Many were wrecked, others robbed, and thrown overboard; while, in cruel mockery of their early history, one ship-master landed a crew of wealthy merchants on a sandbank, and bade them call a new Moses to save them from the sea.

1 No Jew was allowed to buy land at this time.

2 Chat'-tel, personal property. 3 His bonds, for loans.

Rab'-bi, a doctor or teacher among the Jews who was also judge both in temporal and spiritual matters.

5 An en'-gine of fi-nance', a means of raising money.

6 Burgh'-ers, burgesses, holders of a tenement in a borough.

7 Rog'-er Ba'-con (1214-1292), a famous English friar, scholar, and philosopher. He was skilled in

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chemistry, mathematics, etc., and is said to have invented the air-pump, telescope, gunpowder, etc. The monks, jealous of his great acquirements, accused him of having dealings with the evil one.

8 Lom'-bard bank'-ers. They came from Lombardy in Italy, and settled in London in a street still known as Lombard Street.

9 A-pos'-ta-sy, forsaking one's religion.

10 An allusion to the passage of the Jews through the Red Sea under the guidance of Moses.

SCOTTISH WARS OF INDEPENDENCE. IN the year 1286, Alexander III. of Scotland, who had married a sister of Edward I., died, leaving a little grandchild the heiress to his throne. But the infant queen never saw her kingdom, for she died on the voyage thither from her Norwegian home. With the Maid of Norway perished all hope of peace

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