John Tolan’s monograph England’s Jews: Finance, Violence, and the Crown in the Thirteenth Century offers a fresh historical account of the Jews of medieval England that focuses on the changing attitudes of crown, church, and nobility towards England’s Jews. It will deservedly become the “go-to” book for all interested in the topic. Tolan writes engagingly. He draws heavily from the Latin chronicles and balances them with administrative records while interweaving a synthesis of recent historical literature, albeit without reference to more recent scholarly thinking about Jews and finance during the period. But do not expect a comprehensive history of the Jews of England that considers their social, demographic, cultural, legal, intellectual, and gender history, or their diverse economic occupations, as did Cecil Roth’s history.
England’s Jews focuses exclusively on the Angevin elites’ policies and attitudes to English Jews. Chapters are arranged chronologically, and each centres on the Crown’s, the Church’s, or the barons’ utilization, manipulation, or marginalization of this minority population. The book opens with the Crown’s taxation of Jews and control of Jewish finance through the loan chest system. Tolan represents this system through the figure of an early thirteenth-century Jewish financer, Isaac of Norwich – the wealthiest of his generation. Tolan then turns to the anti-Jewish legislation of the church councils in England, Christian Hebraism at Oxford, and the attitudes of intellectual elites like Robert Grosseteste. Henry III’s Jewish Statutes and founding of the Domus Conversorum (house for Jewish converts to Christianity) are discussed next, as are Simon de Montfort’s expulsion of Leicester Jews and the impact of the baronial revolt (1258–64 CE) he led on the Jews. Tolan rounds out the century with the Edwardian expulsion of Jews in 1290. Shot through all these chapters are episodes of sporadic violence against Jews, sometimes at the hands of the Crown, at other times by crusaders ignoring the Crown or rebel knights opposing the Crown.
Tolan defines his aim as “highlight[ing] the important roles Jews played in thirteenth-century English society and … explain[ing] how and why they faced increasing persecution and ultimately expulsion” (p. 9). He follows the trend of current historians in attributing persecution and expulsion to the growing religious hatred of clergy and the clerically influenced Crown, downplaying older theories of economic gain. But regarding “the important roles Jews played”, Tolan remains grounded in outdated historiography. He defines the Jews’ roles only economically. Jews, he claims, “were key-actors in financing the crown and certain monasteries; their monies were crucial to the emergence of the University of Oxford: they participated in the transfer of land from lower gentry to the greater barons and to monasteries”, and thereby unwittingly provoked the baronial rebellion (p. 2). In short, he describes Jews as a “royal [milch] cow” – a term he adopts from the venerable Cecil Roth – whose taxation filled the Crown’s coffers with gold and whose loans facilitated the land-grabbing by powerful nobles and monasteries.
Here Tolan echoes ideas that first entered mainstream history through the work of the political economist Wilhelm Roscher, who wished to combat economic antisemitism in Germany in the 1870s. Three decades later, Max Weber and Werner Sombart reconfigured it, with at best ambivalent attitudes to the Jews. Finally, during the Holocaust, the Jewish émigré historian Guido Kisch reframed it once again: Jews helped Europe’s economic development by providing credit, then suffered an antisemitic backlash for it. This version has shaped our textbooks and framed our research questions until recently. Yet, this philosemitic narrative lacks an empirical basis and dangerously maintains an essentialized connection between Jews and money, which easily flips back into an antisemitic stereotype. Ironically, this stereotype emerged originally in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Western Europe, the very period of Tolan’s account.
Tolan firmly aligns himself with the philosemitic side of the coin by framing medieval English Jews and Jewish finance as a medieval counterpart to modern enslaved people and colonial subjects whose labour and wealth built European institutions, but whose contribution is forgotten in national histories. But were Jews enslaved? No. They were free in medieval England. Were they colonial subjects? Not really. They were French speakers who immigrated to England along with the Norman conquerors (that is, the colonial powers). Much of Tolan’s account relies on the phrase “the king’s Jews” and a focus on Jewish tallage, which neglects the broader history of taxation. Tallage was a type of tax taken on freemen, such as those in royal boroughs. Tallages on the Jewish community were taken at similar intervals – if not always at the same rate. The Jews were “the king’s” in the same way that royal boroughs were “the king’s”. They were his to tax. The king laid claim to jurisdiction over freemen – among them the Jews. The extension of common law and the royal right to tax was the central mechanism by which the English crown extended and centralized its power. Taxation on Jews was not simply violent extortion, but conducted through a system of self-representation, common to free men in royal boroughs – the same system that was later celebrated by constitutional historians in the nineteenth century as the basis of modern democratic freedom. Which is it for the Jews – extortion or freedom? Both. They participated as royal agents in the collection of taxes by their own representatives; but because they were weak politically, they were more open to exploitative tallages than the town of London.
More to the point, the number of Jewish financiers in England was very, very small: fifteen men from nine families at the peak of Jewish finance around 1240. Jews were never the only moneylenders; they were simply the only lenders required to deposit contracts in royal chests, because of the antisemitic stereotypes that viewed Jews as the enemies of Christ and Christians. The distribution of wealth in Jewish communities was roughly comparable to that of urban Christians. On one end of the scale, many Jews were too poor to have made a living out of lending. On the other, the wealth of wealthy Jews closely parallelled that of urban Christian merchants. And Crown records show that Jewish tallages were only ever a small percentage of royal revenue. Jews were not a “royal milch cow”.
Where then does that leave us with England’s Jews? For all the reservations mentioned, the book is nonetheless immensely learned and a model for contextualizing the plight of Jews in the political history of the ruling elite. Readers, however, would do well to remember that most of England’s Jews were not wealthy financiers, and their importance for the Crown and England’s institutions was limited. They were a powerless minority, but their legal status was that of “freemen”. Rather than celebrate medieval Jews together with colonial subjects and enslaved people, let us seek to understand how a medieval antisemitic fear of the Jewish usurer warped our historical sources and still influences our historical vision.