Dawn Arrests Across the Kingdom of France

Sixteen years after Edward drove the Jews out of England. French Jewry was much older and much larger — the descendants of Rashi of Troyes, of the yeshivot of the Tosafists in Paris and Sens and Chinon, communities that had produced commentaries the whole Jewish world already read. One hundred thousand people, maybe more.

Philip IV — 'le Bel,' the Fair, called that because of his good looks — had drained the treasury on his wars in Flanders and on a nasty feud with Pope Boniface VIII, whose person his agents had actually grabbed and roughed up three years earlier. Money had to come from somewhere. The property of the Jews would do. (The same king would destroy the Knights Templar the following year for the exact same reasons and the exact same way.)

The operation was planned in secret for months. Sealed orders were sent to every royal officer in the kingdom, to be opened only at a certain hour. On the morning of Sunday, the twenty-second of July — the tenth of Av by the Jewish calendar — at dawn, all over the country at once, royal officers walked into every Jewish home in France and arrested the family. They were told that by the ninth of Av they had to be out of the kingdom. Everything they owned — houses, synagogues, Torah scrolls, business ledgers — belonged to the crown.

It was worse in the details. The great yeshivot were emptied out. Manuscripts were burned in the market squares or sold as scrap parchment to tailors for making patterns — copying the notorious burning of the Talmud in Paris in 1240, when twenty-four cartloads of manuscripts had been burned in the Place de Grève. Debts owed to Jews were now owed to the king, and the king collected them harder than the moneylenders ever had. Some hundred thousand people were pushed out with the clothes they were arrested in and a small amount of money for the road.

The refugees streamed toward Provence, which was still outside Philip's control, or up the Rhine, or over the Alps into Savoy, or south into Spain — where, within two centuries, the last and largest expulsion would find them. Nine years later, Philip's son let a small remnant back in on humiliating terms. They were expelled again in 1322, and for good in 1394. France would have basically no Jews until Napoleon.