When things happen, we like to think they have never happened before. The business of history is to suggest otherwise.
With the Norman invasion in 1066 came William’s feudal system. The king ruled the lords, the lords ruled the rest, and the church ruled anyway. Jews were an exception. They were the king’s direct subjects.
This peculiar status makes for peculiar history. The 1215 Magna Carta, the treaty between King John, King John’s lords, and Archbishop Langton’s church which many of us wrongly recall as a charter of freedom, makes clear in clauses 10 and 11 that some creditors are freer than others, if they are not Jews.
In 1218, King John’s successor decreed that Jews wear badges. In 1253, article 9 of the Statute of Jewry confirmed that “every Jew wear his badge conspicuously on his breast”.
The personal relationship between the king and the Jews, and the distinct right of the king to act by whim, is well exampled in the opening words of King Edward I’s 1275 Statute of the Jewry:
Forasmuch as the King hath seen that divers Evils, and the disheriting of the good Men of his Land have happened by the Usuries which the Jews have made in Time past, and that divers Sins have followed thereupon; albeit he and his Ancestors have received much benefit from the Jewish People in all Time past; nevertheless for the Honour of God and the common benefit of the People, the King hath ordained and established, That from henceforth no Jew shall lend any Thing at Usury…
On 18 July 1290, a heavily indebted King Edward issued his Edict of Expulsion, expelling all Jews from England. This state of affairs continued until the 1650s under Oliver Cromwell.
In the Jewish calendar, 18 July 1290 was the ninth day of Av, 5050 years after creation. The ninth or Tisha B’Av has been a day of mourning from ancient times. It marks a number of trials, including the destruction of the first temple by King Nebuchadnezzar II and the destruction of the second temple by the Romans. Unsurprisingly, the day has come to embrace memory of later trials falling on or near the day, such as the Edict.
