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Friday, June 12, 2020

How England's Jewish Expulsion From 1290 to 1655 Was a Lucky Break For Those Jews

Nadene Goldfoot
                                                                                     
King Harold Godwinson 6 January 1066- d: 14 october 1066, 282 days
Jews entered a Christianized England with the Norman Conquest in 1066.  A few financiers followed William the Conqueror there from the Continent.  They traded and lent money to the Baronage and advanced funds for current needs of the security of the revenue to the Crown which protected them.  Then in 1144, the first recorded Ritual Murder accusation was brought against them in Norwich. 
It has been in 595, when Pope Gregory I decided to send a mission to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, the Kingdom of Kent was ruled by Æthelberht. He had married a Christian princess named Bertha before 588, and perhaps earlier than 560. 
                                               

 By the time of the 3rd Crusades of 1189 -1190, there were riots all over the country with much bloodshed.  
                                                 

                              Roger Bacon b: 1214 d: 1292
Roger Bacon OFM, also known by the scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis, was a medieval English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empiricism.  

The situation only got worse for Jews as the 13th century progressed. 

Henry III of England : October 28, 1216-  to November 16, 1272
in 1218 proclaimed the Edict of the Badge requiring Jews to wear a marking badge. Taxation grew increasingly intense. Between 1219–1272, 49 levies were imposed on Jews for a total of 200,000 marks, a vast sum of money. Henry III imposed greater segregation and reinforced the wearing of badges in the 1253 Statute of Jewry. He endorsed the myth of Jewish child murders. Meanwhile, his court and major Barons bought Jewish debts with the intention of securing lands of lesser nobles through defaults. The Second Barons' War in the 1260s brought a series of pogroms aimed at destroying the evidence of these debts and Jewish communities in major towns, including London, where 500 Jews died, WorcesterCanterbury and many other towns.

                                                                      Edward I of England | Monarchy of Britain Wiki | Fandom
                King Edward I  b: November 20, 1272  d: July 7, 1307
I've always thought that England's expulsion for 400 years was a terrible experience for our some 3,000 Jewish 
ancestors, but after finding out the history that went on there with all the burning at the stakes and torturing people in the name of religion has changed my mind.  The Catholics and non-Catholics were constantly being attacked, brutally and bloody, the whole expanse from torture to being burned at the stake.  

The Edict of Expulsion was a royal decree issued by King Edward I of England on 18 July 1290 expelling all Jews from the Kingdom of England. Edward advised the sheriffs of all counties he wanted all Jews expelled by no later than All Saints' Day (1 November) that year. The expulsion edict remained in force for the rest of the Middle Ages. The edict was not an isolated incident, but the culmination of over 200 years of increased persecution. The edict was overturned during the Protectorate more than 350 years later, when Oliver Cromwell permitted Jews to return to England in 1657.

                                                     

It had been about 200 years earlier when the Jewish community that had valiantly continued to exist in Jerusalem had been massacred by the Crusades
starting in 1099.  They had to travel, by horseback, through Europe to get there and managed to kill Jews that they found for starters.   King Edward became a crusader on June 24, 1268 with his brother and cousins and joined the 9th crusade.  Ing Louis IX of France was the leader of this crusade.  He provided a loan of about 17,500 pounds which wasn't enough, so they raised money with a tax on the laity, something not levied since 1237.  They imposed restrictions on Jewish money lending.  Edward probably brought with him about 25 knights and the group totaled few than 1,000 men.  He ruled for (34 years, 230 days).

Since it was kings who laid down the law about what was to be accepted for the English religion, the people simply had no choice.  Those who deviated were killed.  There was a lot of slaughter going on through the ages.


It must be remembered that during the Middle Ages (476 CE to 1453),

it was commonly believed that the earth was the center of the universe.  It
was not a coincidence that this corresponded with the Catholic Church's notion about the central importance of man to just about everything, and with Henry VIII, who said he was doing God's work.  


"The first major step towards expulsion took place in 1275, with the Statute of the Jewry. The statute outlawed all lending at interest and gave Jews fifteen years to readjust.
In the duchy of Gascony in 1287, King Edward ordered the local Jews expelled. All their property was seized by the crown and all outstanding debts payable to Jews were transferred to the King's name. By the time he returned to England in 1289, King Edward was deeply in debt. The next summer he summoned his knights to impose a steep tax. To make the tax more palatable, Edward, in exchange, essentially offered to expel all Jews. The heavy tax was passed, and three days later, on 18 July, the Edict of Expulsion was issued.

One official reason for the expulsion was that Jews had declined to follow the Statute of Jewry and continued to practice usury. This is quite likely, as it would have been extremely hard for many Jews to take up the "respectable" occupations demanded by the Statute. (Different occupations were divided into Guilds and they wouldn't have allowed Jews in them.  Then they couldn't get into that profession.) The edict of expulsion was widely popular and met with little resistance, and the expulsion was quickly carried out."
The 14th century had  produced upheaval in the Roman Catholic Church with the resolution of the Western Schism in the early part of the century, the controversies surrounding the papacies of the Renaissance era and new pressures brought by the invasions of Christendom by the burgeoning Ottoman Empire.

Kings following King Edward Ist: (started reign ,   to death)

1. Edward II    April 25, 1284            to September 21, 1327.
2. Edward III  November 13, 1312              to June 21, 1377
3. Richard II  January 6, 1367              to February 14, 1400

4. Henry IV  15 April 1307                       to March 20, 1413

Occasionally permits were given to individuals to visit England, as in the case of Dr Elias Sabot (an eminent physician from Bologna summoned to attend Henry IV) in 1410, but it was not until the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1497 that any considerable number of Sephardic Jews found refuge in England. In 1542 many were arrested on the suspicion of being Jews.   

5. Henry V  September 16, 1386             to August 31, 1422
6. Henry VI December 6, 1421                    to May 21, 1471  

7. Edward IV  April 28, 1412                        to April 9, 1483  
8. Henry VI  December 6, 1421                    to 21 May 1471     
9. Edward IV  April 11, 1471                        to April 9, 1483    
10. Edward V  April 9, 1493                   murdered at age 12,  78 days
11. Richard III  June 26, 1483                to August 22, 1495
                                        
                                          TUDOR LINE

When the first Tudor Kings came to the throne, England was a Roman Catholic country and the head of the church was the Pope in Rome, Clement VII. England was a Catholic nation under the rule of Henry VII (1485-1509) and during much of Henry VIII's (1509-1547) reign.

12. Henry VII  August 22, 1485                 to April 21, 1509
                                                     
                                                 


Copernicus (1473-1543)  was the first to challenge the traditional Catholic belief when he published his treatice De revelutionibus urbium coelestum (Nurenberg, 1543), arguing that the sun was near the center of the universe, near the center of motion for the earth and the other known planets.  His work was printed 20 years after he formulated it, and it was then greeted with respect but more as an alternative mathematical way of describing celestial motion rather than a truth.  Copernicus was born and died in Royal Prussia, a region that had been part of the Kingdom of Poland since 1466.   In 1417 the Hohenzollern was made a prince-elector of the Holy Roman Empire.
                             
13. Henry VIII  April 22, 1509            to January 28, 1547
          TUDORS  This Showtime drama focuses on the early years of King Henry VIII's nearly 40-year reign (1509-1547) of England. The series looks at Henry's famous female companions like Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn and delves into his relationships with important figures like Sir Thomas More, Cardinal Wolsey (head of the Catholic Church of England during its break with Rome) and Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, who was Henry's best friend and unofficial adviser..

14. Edward VI  January 28, 1547                to July 6, 1553  son of Henry VIII         and Jane Seymour,  never married  as died at age 15.   

15. Lady Jane Grey  July 10, 1553            to February 12, 1554 at age 16, overthrown after 9 days
16. Bloody Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, Spain, 
       July 19, 1553                                to November 17, 1558 (5 years, 122 days)
17. Philip,  husband of Mary I and son of Charles V of Holy Roman Empire and Isabella of Portugal  25 July 1554  to September 13, 1598  (4 years, 116 days)
18. Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry VIII and Ann Boylyn  (44 years, 128 days)

      November 12, 1558                             to March 24, 1603

Throughout the sixteenth century a number of persons named Lopez, possibly all of the same family, took refuge in England, the best known of them being Rodrigo López, physician to Queen Elizabeth I, and who is said by some commentators to have been the inspiration for Shylock.


                                                                         
Francis Bacon b: 1561 d: 1626Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban, PC QC, also known as Lord Verulam, was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and as Lord Chancellor of England. His works are credited with developing the scientific method and remained influential through the scientific revolution.  However, who was the Jew he wrote about
in "The New Atlantis?"  New Atlantis is an incomplete utopian novel by Sir Francis Bacon, published posthumously in 1626. It appeared unheralded and tucked into the back of a longer work of natural history, Sylva sylvarum.
                                                                              

  William Shakespeare b: 1564  d: 1616  England
        He wrote about Shylock, a Jewish man who was evil in his play. 
William Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice (c. 1600). A Venetian Jewish moneylender, Shylock is the play's principal antagonist. His defeat and conversion to Christianity form the climax of the story.  It reflects the times of forcibly converting Jews which happened in 640, 721, 873 to Jews in the Byzantine Empire;  Spain in 1146 and 1391; 1492 in Spain; 1502 to Jews on Island of Rhodes; 
Shakespeare never knew a Jewish person as they were all exiled.  
                                                                     
           
 Galileo  b: 1564-1642 Pisa, Italy
      Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaulti de Galilei was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath, from Pisa. Galileo has been called the "father of observational astronomy", the "father of modern physics", the "father of the scientific method", and the "father of modern science.

                                           HOUSE OF STUART LINE

19. James I  March 24 1603                   to March 27, 1625 
20. Charles I  March 27, 1625               to January 30, 1649, son of James, executed at 48.  

21. Oliver Cromwell    December 16, 1653   to September 3, 1658
22. Richard Cromwell  September 3, 1658            to July 12, 1712  85 yrs old 

I've been watching TUDORS on Netflicks.  Can you tell?  No, I'm glad I wasn't living in England at this time.  No thank you;  it was a scary life, peasant or royalty.  

"Many Jews emigrated, to Scotland, France and the Netherlands, and as far as Poland, which, at that time, protected them (see Statute of Kalisz).  Why not Ireland, I wonder.  Probably because it joined England in being a Catholic state.  


Surely our some 3,000 ancestors did better going to Eastern Europe then from England. From the founding of the Kingdom of Poland in 1025 through to the early years of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth created in 1569Poland was the most tolerant country in Europe. . Jews probably entered Poland first.  The first actual mention of Jews in Polish chronicles occurs in the 11th century. It appears that Jews were then living in Gniezno, at that time the capital of the Polish kingdom of the Piast dynasty. Among the first Jews to arrive in Poland (in 1097 or 1098) were those banished from Prague. The first permanent Jewish community is mentioned in 1085 by a Jewish scholar Jehuda ha-Kohen in the city of Przemyśl.   Jews entered Lithuania from the 14th century on.

The question remains as to why the English Jews didn't try to return to their ancestral homeland now called Palestine?  They were forced to leave there by the Romans when Jerusalem was attacked and burned in 70 CE.  Who was living there in 1290?  

                                                

The answer to that is this.  "The Kingdom of Jerusalem  also known as the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, was a crusader state established in the Southern Levant by Godfrey of Bouillon in 1099 after the First Crusade. The kingdom lasted nearly two hundred years, from 1099 until 1291 when the last remaining possession, Acre, was destroyed by the Mamluks. Its history is divided into two distinct periods. The First Kingdom of Jerusalem lasted from 1099 to 1187, when it was almost entirely overrun by Saladin. After the subsequent Third Crusade, the kingdom was re-established in Acre in 1192, and lasted until that city's destruction in 1291, except for the two decades after Frederick II of Hohenstaufen reclaimed Jerusalem, placing it back in Christian hands after the Sixth Crusade. This second kingdom is sometimes called the Second Kingdom of Jerusalem or the Kingdom of Acre, after its new capital. Most of the crusaders who settled there were of French or Norman origin."


Resource: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Expulsion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_monarchs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Prussia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianisation_of_Anglo-Saxon_England
https://www.eiu.edu/historia/delgadillo.pdf  https://
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Expulsion

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