Читать книгу The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich - Thomas of Monmouth - Страница 7

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The original story of the Jews at Inmestar who were punished by the magistrates on a charge of beating a boy to death in the 5th century is to be found in the ecclesiastical history of Socrates, who was alive at the time of the occurrence. It is quite incredible that the monk Thomas could have read it in the original Greek; but we shall see that there was a Latin translation of the story to which he might have had access. The circumstances of the time were favourable to its revival, and the intense and increasingly bitter feeling against the Jewish communities—who enjoyed a kind of privileged position in some of the more important English towns during the 12th century—was preparing people to believe that the objects of their fierce hatred were capable of perpetrating every kind of wanton cruelty.

The cause of this ill feeling is not far to seek, inasmuch as the Jews were the only financiers, money-lenders and pawnbrokers who were tolerated. To receive any interest for money advanced on security was denounced as a breach of the moral law which the Church sternly condemned: yet the capital required by those who embarked in commercial ventures—or were engaged in those architectural works which were the rage of the time—had to be found somewhere, and the Jews, who had no scruple in charging their price for providing the accommodation required, were the only capitalists to apply to for assistance. The interest charged was very high; it could hardly be otherwise when, for obvious reasons, the security was difficult to realise, and in the case of an utterly dishonest and unscrupulous debtor the chances of recovering the loan, or even the interest, might easily be reduced to the vanishing point.

As Miss Norgate has put it, "the Jew was not a member of "the State, he was the king's chattel not to be meddled with " for good or evil save at the king's own bidding. Exempt from " toll and tax and from the fines of justice, he had the means " of accumulating a hoard of wealth which might indeed be seized " at any moment by an arbitrary act of the king, but which the " king's protection guarded with jealous care against all other " interference. The capacity in which the Jew usually appears " is that of a money-lender—an occupation in which the scruples " of the Church forbade Christians to engage lest they should be " contaminated by the sin of usury. Fettered by no such scruples " the Hebrew money-lenders drove a thriving trade, and their loans "doubtless contributed to the material benefit of the country by " providing means for a greater extension of commercial enterprise "than would have been possible without such aid."

William of Malmesbury tells us that the Jews were first brought over by William the Conqueror from Rouen and established in London. They appear to have been settled as a privileged community of financiers on the edge of the Walbrook, which perhaps served at once as the boundary and one of the defences of the London Jewry at least as early as the reign of Henry I. All through the days of William Rufus they seem to have been treated with remarkable toleration; though efforts sometimes successful were made for their conversion, and we hear that some of them who had been persuaded to renounce their ancestral faith and embrace Christianity were actually paid to return to their Judaism by the king in one of those fierce freaks of his which almost make us doubt his sanity. The Jews appear very early at Cambridge and Oxford and probably their settlements may have been found in the larger towns at an earlier time than has been recorded.

If the Jews had confined their operations to the financing of large undertakings they might conceivably have had the great bulk of the people on their side for the building of the great churches and religious houses meant extensive employment of labour and this meant circulation of money among the employed but the habits and instincts of the Hebrews made them money-lenders to small and great, and when it came to the artizans and the needy small folk among the townsmen resorting to them for small loans and leaving their clothes in pledge, and when the interest could not be paid and the security was forfeited, then the feeling of the populace was easily stirred against the Jew even to frenzy. It was the old story over again,

periit postquam cerdonibus esse timendus cœperat.

The Jewish community meanwhile were under the special protection of the king and the king's representative, the sheriff. They did not live in houses of their own, they were tenants at will as it seems, who might be turned out at any moment. At Norwich, at any rate during the time we are concerned with, it seems that there was no Jew living in an important house of his own as Aaron, the son of Isaac, was doing at Oxford, and no house appears ever to have been built in Norwich at all comparable to the still existing stone houses known as Moyse Hall at Bury St Edmund's, or that of Aaron of Lincoln, which is probably the oldest domestic building existing in England. The Norwich Jews were living together in a settlement or block of buildings the boundaries of which may be distinctly traced at the present day, and the Jews were outside the jurisdiction of the old burg which was on the other side of the Castle. That mighty fortress had only recently been built, and was a standing menace to the older burghers, between whom and the inhabitants of the new burgh there were relations not always friendly. The attempt on the part of the clergy and the bishop to make the Jews answer to a capital charge before the synod was manifestly an attempt to exercise jurisdiction over the king's men, and the attitude of the sheriff was the only attitude which he could have assumed consistently with his responsibility for the rights of those—whether Jews or Gentiles—for whose protection he was answerable.

The Jews appear to have returned to their Jewry and we hear of no serious molestation of them for a long time to come; the attempt to carry out a general massacre completely failed. As to the infamous murder of the Jew, Eleazar, by the ruffians in the pay of Sir Simon de Novers, it was an incident which stands quite alone, though an incident which, as related in these pages, reflects some discredit on the memory of Bishop William Turbe. Thomas of Monmouth's insinuation that the Norwich Jews suffered severely in their persons and their property as a consequence of their complicity in the guilt of little William's murder, must be taken for what it is worth; we may be pretty sure that if instances could have been adduced of any large number of the Hebrews vel festine mortis interitu deleti vel christianorum manibus perempti, we should have had them in the author's diffuse narrative.

Assuming that this narrative covers a period of some 30 years, namely from A.D. 1144 till A.D. 1174, there is no evidence to show that the Norwich Jews suffered worse than their brethren elsewhere did during the reign of Stephen, or indeed during that of Henry II. What does seem clear is that it was at Norwich first that the Christian population threatened and meditated a whole-sale massacre of the Jews, and that the plan would have been carried out but for the intervention of the Sheriff. The edict of Stephen alluded to at p. 95 shows that the king protected his Jews so far as he was able against the violence of the mob: and, whatever we may think of the very suspicious story of AElward Ded, it was not generally believed at the time it was promulgated, and indeed during the five years that had passed since the Synod of 1144 the doubters were at least as numerous as the believers.

* * * * *

It is hardly within my province to dwell upon the subsequent history of the Norwich Jews till the time of their expulsion from England in 1290. All that is ever likely to be known of the hard measure dealt out to this much oppressed people in England has been collected in Mr Jacobs' volume already referred to. Unfortunately that carries us no further than to the death of king John. The hideous massacre of Jews at the coronation of Richard I.—such is the contagion of these mysterious instincts, cruelty and the lust of blood—was repeated next year at Norwich as at other places up and down the land. Yet the Jews continued to increase in wealth and a certain measure of power, notwithstanding all the horrible treatment they received. They managed to extort for themselves increasing recognition at the hands of the king—who could not do without them—and concessions little by little were made in their favour, all in the direction of justice and toleration. Perhaps the most surprising fact that has but recently come to light is that among the English Jews there were men of profound learning; the inextinguishable enthusiasm for literary pursuits affording them something like an alleviation in the midst of the prolonged agonies through which the poor people were compelled to pass.

Mr Walter Rye has taken up the tale where Mr Jacobs leaves it. To the East Anglian Mr Rye's memorable paper in his own privately printed Norfolk Antiquarian Miscellany, 1877, Vol. i. pp. 312-344, must always be eminently interesting, for Mr Rye deals only with the Norfolk Jews; his work is a priceless contribution to the history of a painful subject by a man of indefatigable research and of great intelligence and sagacity. Mr Rye shows us that in the first half of the 13th century the Jews were continually increasing in numbers at Norwich—that in 1230 some fanatics among them seized the child of a Jewish physician (who, it appears, had become converted to Christianity) and circumcised him that the Jewry was set on fire that the king was appealed to that the anti-Semitic frenzy among the Norwich citizens was as violent as it is now in Central Europe; and the inference that is forced upon us is that the legislation of Edward I. against the English Jews was sure to come sooner or later. Moreover just as the enormous lying which prepared people to accept as true the unspeakable calumnies spread abroad against the Knights Templars in the 14th century, and the hideous slanders which were invented against the inmates of the Religious houses in the 16th, were powerful factors in facilitating the pillage of the Templars in the one case and the suppression of the Monasteries in the other, so the continued repetition of the stories of Christian children being ' martyred ' by infatuated Jews contributed not a little, and must have contributed, to prepare men's minds to accept with equanimity the final catastrophe; though few can have known or had any suspicion that the original story came from Norwich and that Thomas of Monmouth, writing his bombastic book in the Norwich priory, first stirred up that mighty wave of superstitious credulity, unreasoning hate, and insatiable ferocity, whichhftc not yet spent itself, though more than seven centuries have passed since Thomas took his pen in hand.