Sixteen Thousand on the Roads to the Channel

Two centuries after William invited the Jews to England. A century after Clifford's Tower. The community had been getting 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 was ritual murder — a blood libel. Nineteen Jews were executed. Then, in 1275, the Statute of the Jewry banned lending at interest, taking away the only trade the law had ever allowed them. In 1287, King Edward simply threw the whole Jewish community in prison 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. But if he expelled them, he could seize whatever they still had, and he could collect the debts owed to them in his own name, without any longer having 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 out by nightfall or be hanged.

There were about sixteen thousand of them, and they were on every road that led to a Channel port. Their houses, their synagogues, their 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 allowed 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 let a Sephardi community open a synagogue in London.