238 A History of Judaism
that Jews had to wear a special badge to distinguish them from Chris-
tians, and a wave of persecutions can be traced through the annals of
these communities down to the end of the Middle Ages.^11
The source of one frequent spark of violence against the Jews was the
blood libel, first known in France (in Blois) in 1171, in Spain (in
Saragossa) in 1182 and in Germany (in Fulda) in 1235. But before any
of these it appeared in England, where in 1144 it was claimed that the
Jews had bought the ‘ boy- martyr’ William before Easter ‘and tortured
him with all the tortures wherewith our Lord was tortured, and on a
Long Friday hanged him on a rood in hatred of our Lord’. Jews had
settled in England only in the wake of the Norman conquest in 1066.
Most had come from northern France and had close links to the mon-
archy, providing financial services to the Crown, and thus settled in
many of the bigger cities, with the most important settlement in Lon-
don. The role of financial intermediary between people and king may
explain some of the strength of anti- Jewish feeling, exacerbated by the
crusading zeal of Richard the Lionheart. Hostility to the Jews culmin-
ated in September 1189 with the looting of the Jewish quarter of
London and in 1190 the mass suicide of the Jews of York in Clifford’s
Tower in York Castle. The English Jews remained subdued for the next
century, until on 18 July 1290 Edward I issued an edict for their
banishment – the first general expulsion of Jews from any country in
the Middle Ages.^12
Whether from such expulsions, or for trade or other reasons, the
demography of Jewish settlement shifted constantly throughout the
Middle Ages. Some Jews from Germany moved east, settling in Poland,
Lithuania and Russia, taking with them a distinctive Jewish German
dialect which was to develop into Yiddish. Many Italian Jews emigrated
in the last centuries of the first millennium ce, with some choosing to go
north and others across the Mediterranean to North Africa. Charle-
magne settled Italian Jews in Mainz in the eighth century. And Italian
scholars took their learning to the rabbinic schools in Fustat (south of
Cairo) and in Kairouan in the same period. Italian Jews themselves were
in close contact with Palestine, acting as a conduit for the transfer of
Palestinian religious traditions into northern Europe.
It is clear that a simple ‘lachrymose’ account of Jewish history over
these centuries would be misleading. There were periods and places,
particularly under Islamic rule in Egypt, North Africa and Spain, which
witnessed Jewish communities flourishing in peace. An emphasis on