The Shocking History of the Jews of England

 Nadene Goldfoot                                  

                                 William the Conqueror:  Though he spoke a dialect of French and grew up in Normandy, a fiefdom loyal to the French kingdom, William and other Normans descended from Scandinavian invaders. William’s great-great-great-grandfather, Rollo, pillaged northern France with fellow Viking raiders in the late ninth and early 10th centuries, eventually accepting his own territory (Normandy, named for the Norsemen who controlled it) in exchange for peace.  Every English monarch who followed William, including Queen Elizabeth II, is considered a descendant of the Norman-born king. According to some genealogists, more than 25 percent of the English population is also distantly related to him, as are countless Americans with British ancestry.

The impact of the conquest on the lower levels of English society is difficult to assess. The major change was the elimination of slavery in England, which had disappeared by the middle of the 12th century. There were about 28,000 slaves listed in Domesday Book in 1086, fewer than had been enumerated for 1066. In some places, such as Essex, the decline in slaves was 20 per cent for the 20 years. The main reasons for the decline in slaveholding appear to have been the disapproval of the Church and the cost of supporting slaves who, unlike serfs, had to be maintained entirely by their owners. The practice of slavery was not outlawed, and the Leges Henrici Primi from the reign of King Henry I continue to mention slaveholding as legal. (Henry I (c. 1068 – 1 December 1135), also known as Henry Beauclerc, was King of England from 1100 to his death in 1135. He was the fourth son of William the Conqueror and was educated in Latin and the liberal arts).

The Norman Conquest of 1066 brought the first Jews into England.  The Norman Conquest (or the Conquest) was the 11th-century invasion and occupation of England by an army made up of thousands of Norman, Breton, Flemish, and others including   Jews who were a handful of Jewish financiers who had followed William the Conqueror from the Continent.  Many Jews lived in Normandy, a French province, in the Middle Ages.  evidenced by the number of rabbinical scholars as well as streets in some localities named after the Jewish population. 

 They were expelled in 1394, after the English Jews were expelled, but by the early 17th century there was an important Marrano settlement at Rouen.  The number of Jews grew in the 19th century, and there were communities at Rouen, Le Havre and Elbeuf.  

During the course of the next generation, communities were established by Jews in London, York, Bristol, Canterbury, etc.   They traded, lent money to the baronage, and advanced funds for current needs on the security of the revenue to the Crown, which therefore protected them.                       

They were not molested at the time of the 1st two Crusades, though in 1144, the first recorded Ritual Murder accusation was brought against them in Norwich.  The natives knew nothing about Jews and showed it with such accusations of Jews needing human blood in the making of their matzos, etc.  Jews are not allowed by the Mosaic Laws that they follow to eat any kind of blood at all!!! To accuse them of such a thing shows their lack of knowledge about the people they had been taught from childhood on to fear and hate.  Jews have been the scapegoats of cultures since the beginning of religion-the people that were not Christians, so must be guilty.  

In 1063, William VIII of Aquitaine led a combined force of French, Aragonese and Catalan knights to take the city of Barbastro that had been in Muslim hands since the year 711.

The First Crusade (1096–1099) was the first of a series of religious wars, or Crusades, initiated, supported and at times directed by the Latin Church in the medieval period. The objective was the recovery of the Holy Land from Islamic rule. While Jerusalem had been under Muslim rule for hundreds of years, by the 11th century the Seljuk takeover of the region threatened local Christian populations, pilgrimages from the West, and the Byzantine Empire itself. The earliest initiative for the First Crusade began in 1095 when Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos requested military support from the Council of Piacenza in the empire's conflict with the Seljuk-led Turks. This was followed later in the year by the Council of Clermont, during which Pope Urban II supported the Byzantine request for military assistance and also urged faithful Christians to undertake an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

At a local level, the preaching of the First Crusade ignited the Rhineland massacres perpetrated against Jews. At the end of 1095 and beginning of 1096, months before the departure of the official crusade in August, there were attacks on Jewish communities in France and Germany. In May 1096, Emicho of Flonheim (sometimes incorrectly known as Emicho of Leiningen) attacked the Jews at Speyer and Worms.

At the time of the 3rd Crusade of 1189-1190, there were riots all over the country accompanied by much bloodshed, especially in London and York where their business bonds were burned.  (The Crusaders killed Jews as they rode through Europe on their way to Jerusalem.  When they got to the Middle East, they could not tell the Jews from the Arabs, so aimed at them all in their killing spree).  There were 5 Crusades altogether.  

To avoid the recurrence of this and the consequent loss to the Exchequer, a system of registration of Jewish debts was set  in 1194,  with Archae or chirograph chests in all the principal cities under the control of a central Exchequer of the Jews.  This made possible the systematic exploitation of Jewish resources by merciless taxation during the reigns of John in 1199-1216;  and Henry III of 1216-1277. 

 The enforced sternness of Jewish creditors in exacting their dues now resulted in growing unpopularity evidenced in the Ritual Murder case of Hugh of Lincoln in 1255 and the  attacks made on them during the Barons' Wars of 1263 to 1265.  The competition of the Italian bankers was by now making their services superfluous.  Their rights were progressively restricted from 1269 onward and in 1290, they were expelled from the country.

This expulsion was to last from 1290 to 1655, a total of 365 years;  the same number of days that make up a year. 

There is much information  on the activities of the medieval English Jewry whose members probably never exceeded 5,000.  In the "Middle Period" of English Jewish history from 1290 to 1655, no Jews lived officially in the country, though by the 16th century, there was a Marrano colony which was broken up in 1609.  Marranos were Spanish and Portuguese Jews that had to go through baptism and pretend to be Catholics; not Jews.  They then were forced to leave anyway, to maintain their sanity. 

 Manasseh Ben Israel went to negotiate with the British Cromwell for the readmission of the Jews. He had only a partial success, but the presence of the new Marrano group was connived at and received official recognition in 1664. 

The original Sephardi community (Marranos) was reinforced by Ashkenazi  immigrants from Germany and Central Europe who established their 1st synagogue in London in 1690 and then spread to the rest of the country.  There were no important restrictions on the Jews, and no ghetto system was enforced that Jews had found in Venice, Italy.  By now, violence against Jews was virtually unknown, even the Jew Bill controversy of 1753 that led to serious molestation. 

Finally, by the 19th century, with the activity of Sir Moses Montefiore,  English Jews took a leading part in Jewish philanthropy.                         

Disabilities, not very irksome, were removed slowly from 1829 onward, culminating in the admission of Lionel de Rothschild to parliament in 1858.  From 1881, the older community was strongly reinforced by an immigration of Jewish refugees from Russian persecutions.  They soon adapted themselves to the English Jewish way of life under the Chief Rabbi, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and in London, the United synagogue.  

New Jewish communities of importance existed in Leeds, Glasgow, Manchester, etc.  A further influx, arriving from Germany in 1933 to 1939 helped to stimulate a weak and short-lived organized anti-Semitic movement.  England was the only important European country to escape the Nazi persecutions, but the air bombardment of the principal cities and consequent scattering  of the Jewish population changed and to some extent, weakened the traditional Jewish life.  

The Jewish population of Great Britain (with Northern Ireland) is estimated in 1990 at 330,000.   This year of 2022 shows 292,000 in all of the UK.  Some emigrated for the USA and others for Israel.

 I myself had found my own grandfather, Nathan Abraham Goldfoot, to have changed his name of Goldfus in England and anglicized it  to Goldfoot, and had gone from Telsiai, Lithuania to England and then to Dublin,  where he married his 1st wife;  a very short-lived married to a Lena Goldberg. then left Ireland at Londonderry.     Somehow he finally got to the West Coast of the USA.  Many Lithuanian and other Jews had been living in Ireland.  His relative had gone in another direction;  to South Africa where I found more relatives with the help of DNA testing.  

   Hitler starting WWII is meeting with the Arab Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti who has been leading his followers against Emir Feisal, who will later become King of Syria and Iraq.  The Grand Mufti wanted Hitler's help in getting rid of the Jews. 

The irony of this story is that Great Britain's Jewish representative, Sir Herbert Louis Samuels, Britain's first High Commissioner for Palestine,  had selected Husseini for this position.  Husseini became one of the founding fathers of Arab nationalism.  He was a distant cousin of Yasser Arafat, head terrorist.  

Amin’s father, mufti   Mohammed Tahir al-Husseini, was one of the early vocal opponents of Zionism. His efforts in 1897 convinced the local representative of Constantinople to put a stop to land sales to Jews for several years. That same year, he proposed that new Jewish immigrants should be “terrorized prior to the expulsion of all foreign Jews established in Palestine since 1891.”

Following in his father’s footsteps, around the age of 20, Amin al-Husseini became involved in Arab resistance to Zionism. After the British took control of Palestine following the end of World War I, he organized rallies against the Balfour Declaration. One of his speeches, on April 4, 1920, fanned the flames of anti-Jewish sentiment, resulting in violent riots. When the dust settled after four days, five Jews and four Arabs were dead. Another 211 Jews and 33 Arabs were left wounded.

Samuels was even a Viscount, a British statesman and philosopher.  He was a member of a British cabinet from 1909, and held office in  the Liberal government of 1905-1916, and in the national government of 1931 to 1932.  His memorandum to the Cabinet in 1914  concerning a British trust for the Jewish Home influenced the Balfour Declaration.  In 1920 to 1925, he was the 1st High Commissioner for Palestine.  He also held leadership for the Coal Industry in 1925, leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Commons from 1931 to 1935, and in the House of Lords from 1944 to 1955.  From 1936 he served as president of the Council for German Jewry and in 1939, founded the Children's Movement to bring unaccompanied refugee children from Germany to Britain. 

All this doesn't negate the error in choosing Husseini as a leader as he probably added the icing to the cake of Hitler's resolve to kill all Jews in the world.  Didn't he see how he was leading riots of Arabs against Jews?  It seems that people in those days lived in their own little bubble of the world and dared not step outside of it for fear of losing face or their own finances or safety. 

Resource:

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Conquest

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Crusade#:~:text=In%201063%2C%20William%20VIII%20of,hands%20since%20the%20year%20711.https://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-william-the-conqueror

https://honestreporting.com/hitlers-palestinian-ally-grand-mufti-amin-al-husseini/?gclid=CjwKCAjwp9qZBhBkEiwAsYFsb-tpcoYyjrqDkMPmq6Hx-AZHo79mVkhmImqQpchff16t19_ScUcbIBoCvCYQAvD_BwE

https://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2022/09/proving-israels-legitimacy-to-world.html