Indignity and expulsion
It wasn’t pogroms that ultimately drove the Jews from medieval England; it was their “protector,” the crown. By the 13th century, England’s kings had largely stopped borrowing from Jews and started just taking their capital instead, often by executing them for crimes they hadn’t committed. At the same time, their freedoms — to live where they pleased, dress how they liked, work as it suited them, associate with whomever they wished — were curtailed further and further. By the centennial of the York massacre, “an awful lot of people had already left — or been killed,” Dr. Dixon-Smith said.
On July 18, 1290, King Edward I, having squeezed everything out of them, issued a decree expelling all Jews from England. They were given just a few months to settle their affairs, pack up and get out — with one final insult. “Even people who lived in ports were instructed to come to the tower to be deported from here,” Dr. Dixon-Smith explained. They lined up on its wharf, recently built by Edward with money he had extracted from them and, before embarking, were “charged a couple of pence each,” she explained, “for deportation.” No plaque commemorated any of this either, she noted.
When finally allowed to return, several centuries later, they endured no more pogroms, but still experienced plenty of ugliness: At London’s fine Jewish Museum, you can view medieval artifacts, but also grotesque 18th-century caricatures that would have looked at home in Julius Streicher’s Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer 200 years later — and sadly, on certain websites today. At heart, they echo that sneer: Jews aren’t really English.
It’s an archaic sensibility, though not as old as the Domesday Book, in which Jews are listed; or Magna Carta, in which Jews are mentioned — twice; or some of the country’s oldest standing houses, built by Jews; or many of the national treasures that wouldn’t exist without them.
Back on that bright morning in York, after my encounter with the truck driver on Aldwark, I wandered over to Coney Street to see where the city’s medieval synagogue had once stood. I knew the precise address: A clothing store sat there now, a historical marker adorning its facade. It did, indeed, pay tribute to an earlier edifice on the site, though not the one I was thinking of. “The George Inn,” it proclaimed. “The sisters Charlotte and Anne Brontë stayed here in 1849.”
Later that day, I stopped by Mr. Oxley’s office and told him about it. He shook his head.
“That is just so typically English,” he said with a sigh.
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