The Jewish Diaspora

Expulsion

Expulsion from England

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1290England → Northern France (Champagne & Île-de-France)

Why it happened

By 1272 taxation had left the Jews too impoverished to profit the treasury.1 The 1275 Statute of the Jewry outlawed their lending at interest,2 and foreign bankers had supplanted them.1 Amid coin-clipping trials, Edward I expelled the whole community.31

The migration

On 18 July 1290 Edward issued writs ordering every Jew to leave England before All Saints' Day (1 November)—the first of the great general expulsions of the medieval West.1 The community was small, perhaps 2,000, though older accounts counted 16,000.45 In return Parliament voted Edward a subsidy of £116,000, probably the highest of the Middle Ages.6 Most refugees crossed to France, Flanders, and Germany; about a tenth reached Flanders at the king's expense, and English exiles soon appear in the Paris Jewry.15 The passage was perilous: some were robbed by the captains hired to carry them to Wissant, others drowned, and one ship ran ashore near Burnham-on-Crouch, its passengers robbed and murdered.57 No professing Jews lived openly in England for over three and a half centuries, until readmission under Cromwell in 1656.8

Genetic corroboration

  • ancient DNA (whole-genome; 6 individuals)Six individuals from the base of a medieval Norwich well, radiocarbon-dated consistently with the anti-Jewish violence of 6 February 1190—a century before the expulsion—had 'strong genetic affinities with modern Jews,' placing England's medieval, later-expelled Jewry within the northern-European Ashkenazi of France and Germany to which the exiles returned.99

Sources

  1. BRoth C, Lipman VD, Krausz E. 2007. England. Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed. (Gale, via Encyclopedia.com) link
  2. BPrestwich M. 1997. Edward I. Yale University Press (Yale English Monarchs series), New Haven
  3. ARokéah ZE. 1988. Money and the Hangman in Late-Thirteenth-Century England: Jews, Christians and Coinage Offences Alleged and Real (Part I). Jewish Historical Studies (Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England) 31 83–109.
  4. BMundill RR. 2002. England's Jewish Solution: Experiment and Expulsion, 1262–1290. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
  5. BJewish Encyclopedia contributors. 1904. England. The Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–1906) link
  6. BStacey RC. 1997. Parliamentary Negotiation and the Expulsion of the Jews from England. Thirteenth Century England VI: Proceedings of the Durham Conference 1995 (eds. M. Prestwich, R.H. Britnell & R. Frame), Boydell Press, Woodbridge 77–102.
  7. BHuscroft R. 2006. Expulsion: England's Jewish Solution. Tempus, Stroud
  8. BRoth C. 1964. A History of the Jews in England (3rd ed.). Clarendon Press, Oxford
  9. ABrace S, Diekmann Y, Booth T, et al.. 2022. Genomes from a medieval mass burial show Ashkenazi-associated hereditary diseases pre-date the 12th century. Current Biology 32 4350–4359.e6. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2022.08.036