The Story of the Jews

by Simon Schama

  Fantasies of the Jewish paschal anti-Easter in accounts like that of Thomas of Monmouth drew in elaborate detail a graphically precise picture of this new Passion acted out on the bodies of young boys: the scourges; the crowns of thorns; the piercing of the child’s body, the lance wound in the left side faithfully copying that which was inflicted on Jesus; and finally the mock crucifixion on a wooden cross customised for the junior stand-ins for the Saviour. ‘The Jews of Norwich brought a Christian child before Easter and tortured him with all the tortures wherewith our Lord was tortured and on Long Friday hanged him on a rood in hatred of our Lord and afterward buried him.’ Since the boys would not die of being merely attached to the cross it was often said that the wounds, especially the side-piercing, would produce copious effusions of blood that the Jews would gather in a ritual cup. The extra detail of what became thus known as the Blood Libel, that this blood was collected in order to bake Passover matzo, was a later addition, but the basic elements of the drama were already all there.

  Following the cult of William of Norwich, a rash of boy-saints victimised by the Jews broke out. In 1168, a circumcision party in one of the community’s houses in Gloucester turned into an abduction story featuring a boy named Harold, said to have been tortured and thrown in the Severn. No self-respecting abbey or cathedral could be without its boy martyr. The cult of Robert of Bury, which ended in the massacre of 1190 and the expulsion of the Jews, had been inaugurated in 1181 and owed something to the local abbot noticing how successful his counterpart in Norwich had been in attracting pilgrims.20 Two years later in Bristol, up pops Adam who, said to have been lured to the house of the Jew Samuel (who had also, it seems, murdered his own wife), was killed in the privy, but not before being visited with a vision of Jesus who embraced him. The result was that Samuel’s latrine became a site of sacred mystery and miracle, not least to its owner who was henceforth unable to use it without a visit from a fiery angel of recrimination or possibly more unsettling still a vision of the Virgin cradling the spotless child martyr in her arms. Winchester – which in 1190 unaccountably spared what the chronicler Richard of Devizes calls its ‘worms’ or ‘vermin’ – boasted no less than three child-murder accusations, in 1192, 1225 and 1232; and there was yet another in London in 1244 in which a child’s body, found in St Benet’s churchyard, was said to have had a mysterious Hebrew inscription cut into the flesh proving the boy had been abducted for sinister ritual purposes by the malevolent, murdering Jews. The corpse was carried by the canons of St Paul’s to their church and buried with all solemnities by the high altar where as usual it was said to have instantly begun delivering wonders and miracles.

  The most serious of all took place eleven years later in Lincoln where a nine-year-old, Hugh, was discovered in a cesspool. The child had been missing for three weeks, but because of the well-established assumption that conventions of Jews were held each year, the wedding party of Belaset, daughter to one of the wealthiest Jews of Lincoln, to which guests from all over England had been invited, suddenly assumed sinister significance. King Henry III just happened to be nearby, and demanded a guilty party. One was duly produced. After brutal torture one of Lincoln’s Jews, Copin or Jopin, made a ‘confession’, was dragged over the cobblestone streets, tied to the tail of a horse and what was left of his shredded body was hanged at the gallows. But this was deemed to be a collective crime. Virtually all of Lincoln’s Jews were rounded up and taken to London for trial. Eighteen of them insisted that they should be judged by a mixed jury of Jews and Christians, a demand that was taken as a confession of guilt and instead of being granted their due process they were summarily hanged. The remainder were imprisoned for a while and eventually released through the intervention of Richard, Duke of Cornwall, who like the king had many dealings with the Jews, but unlike him had some elementary sense of justice (not to mention a vital interest in preserving his own Jewish milch cows). At Lincoln, ‘Little Hugh’ was buried in a magnificent shrine in the cathedral that had been built mostly from Jewish money lent by the great magnate Aaron of Lincoln. Canonised as a martyr, Hugh was venerated over the centuries and immortalised in stained glass and in the Canterbury Tales, where Geoffrey Chaucer recycled all the most disgusting infamies and libels in ‘The Prioress’s Tale’.21 It took seven hundred years for the myth to be explicitly repudiated by the Church of England and a statement of regret posted at the site of the tomb, including the commendably fraternal interfaith greeting: Shalom!

  II. The Business

  On the other hand . . . those beautiful names were never just so many victims, martyrs folded into the tomb. Doulcea, the sweet and pleasant one, the wife of Rabbi Eleazar, the Perfumer, did not expire helplessly on the streets of Worms. If we are to believe the Perfumer’s eulogy (in both prose and acrostic verse), Doulcea went down fighting to save what was left of her family. The girls, Bellette and Hannah, were already gone, but her son and husband were alive though badly wounded. Doulcea forced her way past the surprised marauders, running into the street crying out for help, knowing the villains to be after her. That was the point. Once they were outside the house, she slammed the door (I like to think with a hefty back kick) and Eleazar locked it from the inside saving his own and his son’s life. Separated from their loot the assailants took out their rage on Doulcea. At some point Eleazar surfaces from his grief to write his eulogy to the slain eshet chayil, the woman of worth.

  Eleazar can think of no higher praise than his wife never angered him. But the portrait he paints is not of a doormat for his pious grandeur – quite the opposite; Doulcea did all the things expected of a religious and dutiful helpmate – feed his many students, make the candles used for Shabbat – and much more. She may possibly have been the kind of multitasker admired by Rashi of Troyes, who described women simultaneously ‘teaching ideal wives a song for a fee, watching the vegetables cook, spinning flax and warming the eggs of silkworms at her bosom’.22 Even Doulcea might not have managed all that, at least not at the same time, but Eleazar recalls that she not only went to synagogue every day, morning and evening (well beyond what was required and expected of women), but also led the women of the congregation in prayers and song. Since not many Jewish girls had been taught Hebrew (Doulcea, from a famous learned family, was an exception), in all likelihood she took the service in Judeo-German, either in a separate adjacent building or in the screened-off area reserved for her sex. Eleazar’s verse eulogy expressly describes her as ‘singing hymns and prayers and reciting petitions’ and ‘teaching women in all other towns to chant songs’.23 Women taking an active part in religious services in the Ashkenazi world was not uncommon until a wave of objections beginning in the fourteenth century made it more difficult. The gravestone of another woman in Worms active in the thirteenth century, Urania, tells us that as the daughter of a precentor-cantor, she followed in her father Abraham’s vocation by being a prayer leader. For that matter Rabbi Eleazar and others saw no reason why they should not pray, read from the Torah and recite blessings as men did. The Sefer Hasidim, the book which collected the teachings and prescriptions by which Eleazar and his family lived, expressly instructed fathers to teach the commandments to their wives and daughters.24 Even though women were not expressly instructed to do so in the Torah, there is some evidence that women in this period even wore the fringed garment the tzitzit and prayed with the tefillin phylacteries on forehead and arm, enough for later authorities to take exception to the practice. Much to her father’s delight, the younger of the girls, Hannah, could recite Hebrew prayers like the daily shema and she sang with the kind of full-throated, pleasing voice with which Doulcea would have led her women. Until marginalised by more censorious figures like Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg and Samson ben Tzadok in the thirteenth century, women were often at the heart of ritual. Despite much rabbinical frowning and the incorrect modern assumption that women, especially mothers, were invariably excluded from the circumcision of their infant sons, plenty of evidence survives to show that th
is was not the case in Ashkenaz until, at the earliest, the late thirteenth century.25 They were at the centre of a little home ceremony on the morning of the circumcision, the eighth day after birth, in which the mother drank wine to signify her healing (and probably the cut about to be made for the covenant). It had, after all, been Moses’ wife Zipporah who had been the first circumciser, of their son. In the late-medieval period, a campaign to make the brit milah an all-male ceremony reduced women’s role to carrying the beautifully swathed child through the streets to the synagogue where the circumcision took place. At its door, the baby would be handed to the sandek who would hold him on his lap while the circumcision was carried out. But both Samson ben Tzadok and Rabbi Jacob Moellin make it clear they were fighting a widely accepted custom which granted the mother a central role in the ceremonies both outside and inside the synagogue. The mother, as one would expect, might carry her own son through the streets (despite Rabbi Yekutiel bar Moses’ advice that ‘it is better to walk behind a lion than a woman’) and then act herself as the sandek, holding him on her own lap, seated among the men, while the circumcision was performed. It was this natural mingling which upset rabbis like the Tashbetz (Rabbi Shimon ben Zamakh Duran), lest while both walking among men and sitting as the mohel leaned over her to cut the foreskin, some sort of licentious thoughts should cross the mind. Worse still, the mother-sandek would be ‘beautifully dressed’, stirring temptation even further. Warming to his anxiety the Tashbetz goes on to say that even were the mohel the father and husband, not everyone would necessarily know that. If the pious saw a woman with the baby on her lap, they should leave the synagogue at once.26

  Doulcea may not have been a sandek, but whatever she could do, she did: make bindings for religious books; sew and embroider no less than forty mantles for the scrolls of the law, as well as the binders that tied them; bathe the bodies of the female dead and put them in their shrouds. Though we think of Muslim Spain or other parts of the Islamic world as more easy-going for Jews, women were more visible in Ashkenazi Christian society. They were unveiled, travelled freely, were not confined yet to any sort of ghetto, and could plead their cause in courts of law – and given the number of family disputes, especially over whether they could reclaim their dowry after the death of a husband, this was just as well. They could own property and chattels, and although it was usually legally and technically forbidden, many of the better-off had Gentile maidservants and took their children to Christian wet nurses, sometimes all day long; their version of helpful day care. Some of them were midwives and healers, known as nashim khakhamim, wise women. Others might be marriage brokers for which there was a keen demand in a culture in which women often outlived the men and in which there was a surprisingly high rate of divorce. Since the parties were commonly betrothed while they were still children, the rabbis, especially the Pietist hasidim, were at pains to insist that although children ought to respect their parents’ decision in such matters, they could not be forced into an incompatible marriage nor kept in one if it proved distasteful to either side.

  Doulcea’s generation and those that followed were the first to benefit from new rulings laid down by Rabbi Gershom ben Judah of Mainz in his book The Light of Exile (views shared by many of his contemporaries), the most radical of which was to ban polygamy, still in effect in the Sephardi–Muslim world. By the same token, the strictures laid down in the Mishnah and the Talmud about the physical as well as spiritual union of husband and wife were taken very seriously. Husbands were forbidden from beating or harming their wives or forcing any sexual submission on them that displeased them. To do otherwise, the rabbis said, would be to treat her like a whore. Just as women were commanded to please their husbands sexually, vice versa was also a sacred obligation. No sexual practices or positions inside the marriage were banned except the spilling of semen outside her body, and husbands were required to do everything to please and satisfy their wives, especially since their only route to the shekhina, the divine radiance, was through her delight. It was incumbent, then, on a husband to share whatever bed she might have prepared for them both, even if, as one treatise said, this meant leaving a bed of gold graced with embroidered linens for one laid on rocks and covered with nothing but straw. It was his duty and his happiness to lie beside her. Frequency and timings of sexual union were similarly spelled out, twice a week being optimal, especially on Friday nights. (For Jews living in the Muslim world, special dispensation was made for those whose work took them by camel since that would lead them farther away from the conjugal bed, though mule-train men were expected to report home more frequently.) And should, somehow, husband and wife displease each other physically, that would be good enough grounds for divorce, always assuming the wife agreed. Unlike conventions operating in the Muslim world no wife could be divorced against her will. But should a husband be so repellent (for whatever reason) that she fled his company, he could be obliged to grant her a divorce.27 So although there were endless and strict rulings about purification in the ritual bath, the mikvah, both during menstruation and after childbirth, Jewish wives had every reason to expect attentiveness from their mates.

  There was something else that made Doulcea the pillar of her community: managing its money. She was the one to whom her neighbours and co-religionists trusted their fortunes and she managed it as best as she could, lending some of the funds out, almost certainly just within the local Jewish community, but in her way, the wife of the Perfumer was also the friendly banker of the Pietists, the hasidim whom Eleazar led. It was undoubtedly that fact that brought on her disaster, for although the robbers may have worn crosses (at the time of the Third Crusade), it was the money they were after when they broke into the Perfumer’s house in November 1196.

  Doulcea wasn’t the only one. There was a surprising number of Jewish women who became bankers and creditors to the high and mighty in Christian society: bishops, abbots, counts, queens and kings. (Poulceline of Blois was one who paid the price for it.) In England we know of a whole cohort of matriarchs, wives and widows who ran substantial loan businesses: Chera of Winchester and her daughter-in-law Belia, Chera’s great rival Licoricia, Belaset of Oxford, and many more. Their names, and their dealings, have been preserved because among the casualties of the coronation riots of 1189–90 were the records of those who owed money to the Jews. Since the Crown considered ‘its’ Jews a personal asset, and was accustomed to lean on them when needs must, it was Richard’s interests that had been damaged as well as those of the Jews. Henceforth an Exchequer of the Jews would be responsible for recording all their transactions, along with monies owed, the loans themselves, the ‘tallage’ taxes and fines due. Since those fines extended to mundane matters such as permission to change marital status, the Crown Pipe Rolls supply the social history of the five thousand or so who comprised the Anglo-Jewish community up to the expulsion of 1290.

  Not all Jews were moneylenders and not all moneylenders were Jews. Although canon law forbade loans at interest there were Christians, the Lombards in particular, who offered similar services and who evidently were indifferent to the threat to their mortal souls, for they not only charged exorbitant interest rates, they insisted on charging interest for the whole life of the originally contracted loan even when early repayment had been made. As a subject population, the Jews, on the other hand, were strictly regulated in the interest they could charge and the terms of the loan. Their international links across Europe gave them access to hard capital and the security they took on their loans – land, manors, abbatial estates, urban property – became themselves negotiable items. When a Jewish lender died, a third (at least) of their property reverted to the Crown, so that the hard bargains the Jews might have driven became a source of instant profit for the ever-voracious treasury. The Jews were obliged to do the dirty work and get the odium while the Crown got the profit. Above and beyond those arrangements, sudden, crushing demands could be made on a helpless population, and in default anything could be seized at royal
will. When the Jews were faced with an unanticipated levy, or a forced loan, they had to call in their own loans to avoid immediate imprisonment; a choice between provoking hatred and inviting suffering. In most years, money in effect stolen from the Jews through such stratagems counted for a seventh of the Crown’s entire revenue.