Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Netflix: The Last Saxon Kingdom's King Alfred when England Was Under Danish Control And Jews Lived There

Nadene Goldfoot                                             
I guess I'm into ancient kingdoms with all their fighting with swords that I've found on TVs Netflix.
Right now I'm following The Last Kingdom which is about the history of England's 9th century  where King Alfred of Wessex seems to be the main star. 

 My main field is Jewish history and what I know about Jews in England is that Jews were expelled from England for 400 years starting in 1290.  They weren't allowed to return until 1655.  Before that, Jews living in the Byzantine Empire were forcibly converted to Christianity in 640, 721 an again in 873.  King Alfred was then busy fighting the Viking Danes.  
                                                    

Some scholars have suggested that the early English thought that they were God’s new Chosen People and that an intellectual like Bede actually wrote so that his people would know how to fulfil their elect status as successors to the Jews of old.

Jews did not immigrate to England until the Norman conquest of 1066 when a handful of financiers followed William the Conqueror from the European continent.  It took till the next generation that Jewish communities were established 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 from anti-Semitism.  This was because Christians thought the profession too lowly for them; as their religion was against it.  They were not molested at the time of the 1st 2 Crusades, though in 1144, the 1st recorded  Ritual Murder accusation was brought against them in Norwich.  

Today's Ireland, I see that Jews didn't live in Ireland until the 12th or 13th centuries, but were expulsed in 1290, the same year as English Jews. The history of Ireland 800–1169 covers the period in the history of Ireland from the first Viking raids to the Norman invasion. The first two centuries of this period are characterised by Viking raids and the subsequent Norse settlements along the coast. Viking ports were established at DublinWexfordWaterfordCork and Limerick, which became the first large towns in Ireland.

 There were Jews in Wales, but they were more isolated and there were no Jewish communities  established there.  They didn't appear until the 13th century in Wales under English influence.  Their charters of new N. Welsh boroughs explicitly excluded Jews.  

 The Medici Family in Italy believed otherwise and became very famous bankers, asking advice from Jews on how to do it.  This became the only profession open to Jews to make a living besides trading. 

                                                     

King Alfred lived in the 9th century.   England was divided into seven separate kingdoms. The Anglo-Saxon lands are gradually attacked, plundered, and effectively ruled by Viking Danes in many areas.   No Jews lived in Denmark then, even in the Middle Ages.  

The Kingdom of Wessex remains the last major stronghold against the Danes..  The Danes, true Vikings, were planning on invading Wessex where for the first time they were defeated by King Alfred and his brother, Aethelred.  Then the Danes bead the Saxon force near Basingstoke.  These Vikings were reinvigorated by the arrival of a new army in 871 and prepared for a final showdown with the Saxons with Alfred at their head.  
                                                    
King Alfred born about 848 
Alfred was king of Wessex from 871 to 886 and Mercia was under King Burgred; the only Saxon kingdoms left in England that weren't under Danish Control.  The Danes gave the Saxon king a 5 year breather when they headed north.  Then they returned to attack the remnants of Saxon resistance in Wessex, and crushed Alfred at Chippenham in 878, forcing the king to retreat to his refuge in the marshes of Somerset.  This gave Alfred time to spend the winter arranging reinforcements.  

Then in the spring of 879 he headed towards Wiltshire and engaged the Danes near Warminster and he crushed the Great Danish Army completely and forced their commander, Guthrum, to come to terms.  The treaty separated England into 2 halves; with the dividing line running northwest from London to the coast near Liverpool.  East of the line was Danelaw.  To the west was Alfred's Saxon England.   He didn't save England from the Danes because the Danes had won control of half the country.  Of course, the peace didn't last.  Another army landed in 893 but left Alfred undisturbed.  
                                                             
Alfred the Great, died at age 50 or 51. 

Alfred wrote up a list of his own laws.  "About a fifth of the law code is taken up by Alfred's introduction which includes translations into English of the Ten Commandments, a few chapters from the Book of Exodus, and the Apostolic Letter from the Acts of the Apostles (15:23–29). The Introduction may best be understood as Alfred's meditation upon the meaning of Christian law.   It traces the continuity between God's gift of law to Moses to Alfred's own issuance of law to the West Saxon people. By doing so, it linked the holy past to the historical present and represented Alfred's law-giving as a type of divine legislation.
                                                       

Stories of Old Testament Israel were well known and lovingly re-imagined for an English audience. The epic poem Exodus, for instance, presented Moses and the Israelites as a brave band of warrior-companions, implicitly comparing them with the Anglo-Saxons themselves. Alfred the Great’s (d. 899) law code begins with the Ten Commandments, making, perhaps, the laws under which his own people lived an extension and continuation of Mosaic law.
                                                         

 The first and greatest historian of the English, the Venerable Bede (d. 735), devoted many of his copious writings to the finer details of ancient Jewish religion, particularly to the Temple in Jerusalem.   Bede the Venerable, Bede also spelled Baeda or Beda, (born 672/673, traditionally Monkton in Jarrow, Northumbria [England]—died May 25, 735,  an Anglo-Saxon theologian, historian, and chronologist. 

He said that though they were not descended biologically from Aaron, the first Jewish High Priest, they did descend from him “by believing in Him in Whom Aaron also, with the holy people of his time, believed”.

Today, you probably cannot tell from an Englishman whether his DNA is from the Saxons or Danes.   Their cultures were so similar, built around the Great Hall ideals of Beowulf.  It's a DNA blend of northern Germans and Scandinavians.  The Y (male line) haplogroup will start with R1b1a2, or R-M269 or R-L21, etc.   
                                                      
 Uhtred - born a Saxon but raised by Vikings - seeks to claim his ancestral birthright.
played by Alexander Dreymon 

The Last Kingdom is a British historical fiction television series based on Bernard Cornwell's The Saxon Stories series of novels. The first series of eight episodes premiered on 10 October 2015 on BBC America, and on BBC Two in the UK on 22 October 2015. A second series of eight episodes was aired on BBC Two in the UK in March 2017, co-produced by Netflix after the exit of BBC America. Netflix was the sole producer of the third series of ten episodes, and streaming began on 19 November 2018. On 26 December 2018, Netflix renewed the show for a fourth series.  

There is so much horse-back riding and fighting that I had to read some history to see how true all this is and found it is indeed based on their history.  

Resource: Saxons, Vikings, and Celts by Bryan Sykes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Kingdom_(TV_series)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_the_Great
https://blog.oup.com/2015/10/anglo-saxons-jews/

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