whose anti-Jewish policies won support from bishops. In need of liquid
capital to subdue the feudal barons, in 1181 he arrested Jews in Paris in the
synagogue, and demanded a substantial ransom. A year later, he expelled the
Jews, and cancelled all debts owed to Jews if the debtor paid 20 percent to
the royal treasury. The Jews, though they lost much of their property, found
refuge on the estates of the neighboring feudal barons. In 1198, once again
short of cash, Philip allowed the Jews to return, and forced the barons to
release them. He gave the Jews a new charter that regulated Jewish life to
the benefit of the crown.
A century later, Louis IX, needing money and hoping to gather a large sum
in one fell swoop, banished the Jews in 1306 but forced them to leave their
property behind. He struggled to appropriate their property, and was unable to
collect the debts owed to Jews by Christians. In 1315, facing a dearth of credit,
Louis X recalled the Jews immediately upon his ascension to the throne. He
allowed them to regain all previous residential privileges, and to lend money at
high rates of interest. The readmission, however, was only for a period of twelve
years, at which point the arrangement would be renegotiated.
In the interim, a popular uprising known as the Shepherd’s Crusade led to
a series of massacres of Jews in 1320–1. A year later, Jews were blamed for an
outbreak of leprosy, leading to more massacres. These massacres left the Jews
of France seriously depleted. By 1359, a small number of Jews remained in
France. These Jews were given a new charter for twenty years. It was renewed
once, in 1379. By 1394, amid increasing anti-Jewish pressures, Charles VI
expelled the Jews in perpetuity.
In the Holy Roman Empire, the situation of Jews improved slowly after the
ravages of the Black Death subsided. During the 1350s, Jews were invited back
to communities from which they had been driven out by rioters, although on
less favorable terms. They were confined largely to small-scale money lending,
forced to pay a special imperial tax called the “golden penny,”subjected to
harsher residential restrictions, and forced to wear a badge.
However, because the empire was a confederation of autonomous states, no
full-scale imperial expulsion edict was ever issued, simply because neither the
emperor nor any other temporal or ecclesiastical authority had the power to
expel Jews from any domains other than his own personal holdings. Instead,
a series of local expulsions began during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth
centuries. Typically, when evicted from one state, the Jews would migrate to
the nearest state that would admit them. This series of local expulsions gave
credence to the image of the wandering Jew.
The Jews of Christian Spain
By the end of the fourteenth century, the only part of Western Europe with a
permanent Jewish community was Spain. This was not surprising. Spain was
on a different timetable than the rest of European Christendom, as were the
94 The Jews of medieval Christendom