Jews of York Die at Clifford's Tower; Mob Rides to Cathedral to Burn Debt Records

English Jewry was small — a few thousand people, invited over by William the Conqueror after 1066 and settled mostly in London, York, Norwich, Lincoln, and Oxford. By law they belonged to the king and could not own land. Most of them made a living lending money at interest, because Christians were forbidden to do so by canon law. And they were hated in exact proportion to how much money the Christians around them owed.

Richard the Lionheart had been crowned six months earlier. During the coronation feast, some Jewish leaders came to the palace with the traditional gifts. They were beaten in the street on their way in. Riots followed in London. Over the winter and spring, preachers stirring up the Third Crusade further inflamed the countryside. Attacks came in a wave — King's Lynn, Norwich, Stamford, Lincoln. Then York.

The mob at York was led by a local baron named Richard Malebisse, who owed the Jewish moneylenders a great deal of money. On the eve of Shabbat ha-Gadol, about a hundred and fifty Jews fled to the wooden royal keep called Clifford's Tower and locked themselves in. The mob surrounded it. Someone set the bottom of the tower on fire.

Inside was a rabbi named Yom Tov of Joigny, a student of the great tosafist Rabbeinu Tam. He was in York on a visit. He gave the ruling. Baptism was not an option. Dying at the hands of the mob was not an option — the crowd might lose its nerve and settle for baptism at the end. The halakhah for this hour was the same one that had been given at Mainz a century earlier. The fathers took whatever knives they had. They killed their wives, their children, themselves. A small group tried to surrender on the mob's promise of baptism. The mob killed them at the door as they came out.

Malebisse and his men rode straight from the smoking tower to York Minster, the great cathedral. The cathedral chest held the records of the debts owed to the Jews. They pulled the parchments out and burned them on the floor of the nave. That, contemporary coroners noted, appeared to have been the point of the whole business.

It was a century too early to be an expulsion, but it is the direct ancestor of the one that would come. English Jewry never recovered its numbers or its confidence. By 1290 there was almost nothing left for a king to expel.