Edward I Expels the Jews of England; Deadline Falls on the Ninth of Av

Two centuries after William brought the Jews to England. A century after Clifford's Tower. The community had been growing steadily poorer. In 1255, a boy named Hugh had been found dead in a well in Lincoln, and the monks and the king's men declared it a ritual murder — a blood libel. Nineteen Jews were executed. In 1275 the Statute of the Jewry banned lending at interest, removing the only trade the law had ever allowed. In 1287 King Edward simply imprisoned the entire Jewish community for a ransom of twelve thousand pounds. Jews were made to wear a yellow felt patch shaped like the Tablets of the Law sewn onto their clothes.

Edward was broke. His wars in Wales and Gascony had drained the treasury. His Jewish subjects had nothing left to squeeze. Expel them, however, and he could seize whatever they still had, collect the debts owed to them in his own name, and no longer be obliged to protect them. On the eighteenth of July — the ninth of Av — the deadline of the Edict of Expulsion, signed back on Shavuot, ran out. Every Jew in England had to be gone by nightfall or face the gallows.

There were about sixteen thousand of them, and they were on every road that led to a Channel port. Their houses, synagogues, and cemeteries were now the king's. The debts owed to them had been cancelled by decree — which is another way of saying transferred to the king.

A story came back from Queenborough on the Thames. A ship captain had taken money to ferry a group of exiles down to a ship waiting off the coast. At low tide, he dropped them on a sandbank in the middle of the river and told them to walk. As the tide came in around them, they cried out to him. He stood at the rail of his boat and mocked them. 'Call on Moshe your prophet,' he said. 'He split a sea for your fathers. See if he'll do it for you.' They drowned. The captain was later hanged — not for the murder, but for the theft of their goods.

England became the first kingdom in Christian Europe to expel all its Jews — the model that France, Spain, Portugal, and dozens of German cities would copy over the next two centuries. Jews would not be permitted back into England for three and a half centuries — until 1656, when Oliver Cromwell, moved by a petition from Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel of Amsterdam, quietly allowed a small Sephardi community to open a synagogue in London.