On a visit to Lincoln Cathedral a few years back, we chanced upon a small memorial in the South Choir Aisle commemorating the long-dead ‘Little Saint Hugh’, the subject, I recalled, of a gothic folk-song resuscitated during the British folk revival and popularized by Steeleye Span back in the seventies. Little Sir Hugh, a tale of the death of a young lad at the hands of a mysterious lady, had been shorn of its true context – a fabricated ‘blood libel’ that led to the trial and execution of nineteen Lincoln Jews. It is believed that high churchmen exploited the incident to lure a profitable flow of pilgrims to the shrine of a martyr and saint. The mystery surrounding the boy’s demise was the first time that the English Crown gave credence to ritual child murder allegations with the direct intervention of Henry III. As a consequence, unlike other English blood libels – and there were many – the story entered the historical record, medieval literature and popular ballads that circulated until the twentieth century as the folk-rock song demonstrated. Read more here. See also below, in the last segment of this blog.

That northern summer, we’d spent a month in the historic northern city of York where we visited Clifford’s Tower, the remnant of a thirteenth century castle on the old city walls, and the site of a medieval pogrom. The English Heritage sign at the gate recalls how in 1190, 150 Jewish men, women and children fled thence to escape townspeople’s wrath, and when the latter had set the tower alight, chose to do a Masada rather than surrender to the bloodthirsty mob (the Masada  analogy is my own – the iconic Jewish narrative was unknown in the twelfth century). The tourist spiel, reluctant to disturb the squeamish, does not call it out as murder – but the stone walls do, as does the city’s historical narrative: English Heritage; History of York.   

In November 2019, the Times Of Israel reported on how after over eight hundred years, a Jewish community has re-established itself in York – it was as if there existed an unspoken herem or boycott on the city on account of what our indigenous people here in Australia would call “sorry business”. The article includes a good account of the deadly pogrom.

In the words of Taylor Swift, history often comes in flashbacks and echoes: an intriguing BBC programme called History Cold Case reveals how seventeen bodies of men, women and children had been discovered at the bottom of a well in Norwich. The findings of the forensic anthropologists were both tragic and terrifying.

The devil that never dies

England has long had an ambivalent, discriminatory, and often deadly relationship with its Jewish people, from medieval days to the present. As illustration, there is an arguably apocryphal story of how in 1290, when Edward 1 ordered the expulsion of all Jews from England, a sea captain taking a boatload of Jews to France, asked them to walk with him on the sand whilst the tide was out. He deliberately deserted them, swiped their stuff, and scarpered back to his ship before the tide came in, leaving them to a watery fate.

Today, we live in a largely post-Christian world, so why does such an ancient prejudice persist?

One clue is to be found in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. At its tragicomic core is a stock caricature of a Jewish moneylender. The Bard paints his Shylock portrait with empathy: “Hath not a Jew hands, organs, affections, passions? … If you prick us do we not bleed?” But any sympathy evoked for Shylock does not wash away the stigma that he is distastefully alien, and to the degree that humiliating him and treating him with unscrupulous dishonesty is seemingly excused, with his own daughter converting to Christianity and robbing him.

There were no practising Jews in Shakespeare’s England; they had been expelled from the country in 1290, 300 years earlier. The only Jews then living in England, from which Jews were officially barred until the mid-17th century, were a small group of semi-clandestine descendants of Marranos who did what they could to conceal their Jewish identity. In other words, the play is tapping into prejudice latent deep in the national psyche, appealing to an audience that had no experience of actual Jews living in the streets of London or even any ancestral memory of them. This astonishing fact should give us pause. It seems that anti-Semitic prejudice endures long underground, dormant like a sleeping troll. And it is swiftly aroused.

But let us give the Bard his due. As Jewish-language columnist Philologos observes, Shylock “is by far the play’s most interesting and complex person. Admittedly, he has stereotypic features. His obsession with money, his legalistic mind, his obduracy: this is not only how most Englishmen, who had no actual experience with Jews, thought of them in Shakespeare’s time, it is also integral to the play’s symbolic structure, which pits the Old Testament against the New, the severity of Judaism against Christian compassion, vengefulness against forgiveness. Yet given this framework, Shakespeare did his best to modulate his characters and keep them from becoming caricatures. Shylock is unmerciful but never unfeeling, hard-hearted but not soft-headed, pitiless but also to be pitied, just as Antonio, Bassanio, Portia, and the Venetian high society they belong to are likable but frivolous, high-minded but hypocritical, loving toward each other but mean to the stranger—especially, of course, to Shylock himself”.

Philologos also argues that the name Shylock was not of Jewish origin, but rather that Shakespeare would have concocted it from a variety of contemporary non-Jewish sources: “It’s hardly a Jewish name, nor was it one in the late 1590s when he wrote the play. In fact, it wasn’t an actual name at all. What gave Shakespeare the idea for it? Nobody, it turns out, really knows.”

Shylock and Jessica, Maurycy Gottlieb (1876), Polish Ministry of Culture via Wikipedia

Oliver Cromwell allowed Jews to return to England in 1657; the Lord Protector saw no difference between Judaism and any other faith of ‘the Book’. But it took another two hundred years for male Jews in Britain to be granted equal civil rights, including the right to enter Oxford and Cambridge Universities, to join the public service, run for municipal office, and eventually, to stand for parliament. Just as catholics had to wait some three hundred years for emancipation, for Jews, it was indeed a slow train coming …

But even thereafter, the living wasn’t easy. In the Nineteen Thirties, there were running battles as Oswald Mosley’s Nazi-styled Blackshirts marched through the Jewish neighbourhoods of East London. During the hot, austerity-pinched summer of 1947, there anti-Jewish riots throughout England following the hanging of two British sergeants in Palestine by the Jewish terrorist Irgun in response to the hanging of three of its members by the British Mandate authorities. Manchester witnessed its own mini-Kristalnacht. Ironically, one of the sergeants was Jewish.

I recall walking through London’s cosmopolitan Notting Hill with an Israeli friend in the summer of 1976. There were big swastikas daubed on a wall. “That is why we have Israel”, Miri said. A few weeks later, these very streets became a war zone as racial tensions escalated into violence as the August Bank Holiday Notting Hill Carnival gave way to running street battles.

Today, the British Labour Party is tying itself in literal and figurative Gordian knots with accusations and counter-accusations of antisemitism (whilst the US Democratic Party is likewise tossing and turning over the badly thought-through, naive comments of an ingenue congresswomen). Meanwhile, the transparent xenophobes and antisemites of the alt- and ofttimes mainstream right hide in plain sight in the corridors of power and preen on streets and social media.

It has been said, with reason, that antisemitism is the devil that never dies. And yet, is antisemitism a unique and distinct form of racism, or a subset of a wider fear and loathing insofar as people who dislike Jews rarely dislike only Jews?

Fear of “the other” is a default position of our species wherein preconceptions, prejudice and politics intertwine – often side by side with ignorance and opportunism. it is no coincidence that what is regarded as a dangerous rise in antisemitism in Europe, among the extreme left as much as the extreme right, is being accompanied by an increase in Islamophobia, in racism against Roma people, and indeed, in prejudice in general, with an increase in hate-speech and incitement in the media and online, and hate-crimes.

We are seeing once again the rise of nationalism and populism, of isolationism and protectionism, of atavistic nativism and tribalism, of demagogic leaders, and of political movements wherein supporting your own kind supplants notions of equality and tolerance, and the acceptance of difference – the keystones of multicultural societies. It is as if people atomized, marginalized and disenfranchised by globalization, left behind by technological, social and cultural change, and marginalized by widening economic inequality, are, paradoxically, empowered, energized, and mobilized by social media echo-chambers, opportunistic politicians, and charismatic charlatans who assure them that payback time is at hand. These days, people want to build walls instead of bridges to hold back the perceived barbarians at the gates.

Lately,  I have been working my way through British historian Peter Ackroyd’s six-volume History of England. I’ve enjoyed a re-acquaintance with half-remembered names and places, moments and movements from long-gone school and university history classes. Given his arduous brief – he’d resolved to recount the story of England from its birth in the Neolithic Age to the dawn of the Twentieth Century -it is relatively lightweight but informative, family friendly with the nasty and naughty bits toned down, and inspirational precedents and premises accentuated to illustrate evolution and progress, whether it be of language or lifestyle,  ideologies or institutions. He wears his liberal heart prominently on his sleeve, whether it is in describing the casual cruelty of the slave trade or the plight of children in the “dark satanic mills” of the industrial revolution. A recurring leitmotif is England’s unique and intractable Irish Question, and particularly its responsibility for and response to An Gorta Mór, ‘The Great Hunger’. An he confronts England’s medieval Jewish Question head on, describing a not so happy and glorious period in its history.

Antisemitism, he implies, has always been with us. I have reproduced in full below a short chapter from the very first volume of his history. It is a readable précis of many other sources. Read more in The Jews of Medieval England, and History of the Jews in England (1066-1920)Ost

Postscript

When this article was posted on Facebook, it elicited the following comment. The questions raised will most certainly be checked out and appropriate changes will be made.

“A slightly problematic piece (though I’d had no idea that Peter Ackroyd had read Robert Stacey’s work so carefully). It’s worth noting, however, that the story of how the captain forced the Jews to walk on the sand is anything but apocryphal – said captain spent two years in a Sandwich gaol on Edward I’s explicit order as a result (and probably died at the end of that period). There were to many holes in the Norwich documentary for it to be taken seriously. And, as with the other ritual murder ‘saints’, Little St. Hugh was never a popular attraction – that accolade goes to St. Hugh of Avalon in the case of Lincoln. The small one was, at best a distraction and it’s clear that the Chapter tried to avoid him as much as possible”.

The Hammer 

Peter Ackroyd,  Foundation – The History Of England Volume 1, Chapter 20

King Edward 1 was known as ‘the hammer of the Scots’ but he could more pertinently be known as the hammer of die Jews. He exploited them and harassed them; finally he expelled them. Their crime was to become superfluous to his requirements. The history of the ]ews in medieval England is an unhappy and even bloody one. They had arrived  from Rouen, in the last decades of the eleventh century; they were first only settled in London across a broad band of nine parishes but in the course of the next few decades they also removed to York, Winchester, Bristol and other market towns. The previous rulers of England, in the ninth and tenth centuries, had not welcomed them; Jewish merchants would have provided too much competition for Anglo-Saxon traders.

William the Conqueror brought them to England because he had found that in Normandy they had been good for business; in particular they provided access to the silver of the Rhineland. The Jews of Rouen may also have helped to finance his invasion of England, in return for the chance to work in a country from which they had previously been barred. Another reason can be given for the favour they found with the king. Since Christians were not allowed to lend money at interest, some other group of merchants had to be created. The Jews became moneylenders by default, as it were, and as a result they were abused and despised in equal measure. But they did not only lend money; they were also money-changers and goldsmiths. money; they also exchanged plate for coin. They provided ready money, a commodity often in short supply.

The Norman kings of England, therefore, found them to be very useful. They could borrow from them but, more profitably, they could tax them. They could levy what what were known as ‘tallages’, and succeeding kings were able to take between a third and a quarter of the Jews’ total wealth at any one time. As a result the Jews, in the twelfth century  were afforded royal protection. No Jew was allowed to become a citizen, or to hold land, but the neighbourhood of the Jewry was

like the royal forests exempt from common law; the Jews were simply the kings chattels, who owed life and property wholly to him. They were granted the protection of the royal courts, and thier binds were placed in a special chamber of the royal palace at . Westminster. A Jewish exchequer was established there, with its own clerks and justices.

In return for royal favour the Jews brought energy and prosperity to the business of the realm; their loans helped to make possible the great feats of Norman architecture, and the unique stone houses of Lincoln and Bury St Edmunds are credited to them. Jacob le Toruk had a grand stone house in Cannon Street, in the London parish of St Nicholas Acon. The Jews also introduced the more advanced forms of medical learning, and were able to serve as doctors even to the native community. Roger Bacon himself studied under rabbis at Oxford.

More dubious legal tactics were also enforced. William Rufus decreed, for example, that Jews could not be converted to Christianity; he did not want their number to fall. That may not have If) been a very Christian act but William Rufus was never a very good Christian. He supported the Jews partly because it offended the bishops; he enjoyed causing affront to his churchmen.

That royal protection did not necessarily extend very far. At the time of the coronation of Richard I in 1189, some Jews were beaten back from the front row of spectators; the crowd turned on them, and a riotous assault began upon the London quarters of fresh outrages as the of Jewry. The incident became the cause of fresh outrages as the news of the attack spread; it emboldened native hostility, and gave an excuse for further carnage. 500 Jews, with their families, took refuge in in the  castle at York where they were n besieged by the citizens; in desperation, the men killed their wives and children before killing themselves.

Richard 1 was even then malting preparations for his crusade to the Holy Land; violence and religious bigotry were in in the air. His successor, John, renewed his protection in exchange for large sums of money. In 1201 a formal charter was drawn up, giving the Jews their own court. They were allowed to live ‘freely and honorably’ in England, which meant that they were here to make money for the king. Nine years later John took overall the debts of the Jews, living or dead, and tried to extract the money from the debtors for his own benefit. It was another reason for the barons’ revolt that led to the sealing of the Magna Carta.

Antisemitism was part of the Christian condition throughout Europe. The Jewish people were abused for being the ‘killers of Christ’, with convenient forgetfulness of the fact that Jesus himself was Jew, but other more material reasons account d for the racial hatred. By the middle of the twelfth century, several prominent Jewish moneylenders had extended very large loans to some of the noblest men in the kingdom; men like th famous Aaron of Lincoln were the only ones with resources large enough to meet the obligations of the magnates. If they could be attacked or killed, and their bonds destroyed, then the great ones of the land would benefit. The myth that they were engaged in the ‘ritual murder of Christian infants became common at times of financial crisis when the populace could be incited to take sanguinary vengeance. It is a matter of historical record that England took the lead in the execration of the Jews.

The first rumour of a ritual crucifixion emerged In 1144, with the story of the death of William of Norwich, and thereafter the tales of ritual murder spread through Europe. England was also the first country to condemn all Jews as criminal ‘coin-clippers’, and the iconography of antisemitism is to be found n the west front of Lincoln Cathedral.

In 1239, during the reign of Henry III, a great census of the Jews and their debts was carried out. The representatives of all the Jews in England were then obliged to convene at Worcester and agree to pay over 20,000 marks to the king’s treasury. This measure effectively bankrupted some of them, which meant that their usefulness had come to an end. Fourteen years later, Henry III ordained a Statute of Jewry that enforced a number of disciplinary measures including the compulsory badge of identification, This was or tabula of yellow felt 3 by 6 inches (7.5 by 15 cm) to be worn on an outer garment. it was to be carried  by every Jew over the age of seven years. Two years later Henry investigated the death of a boy, Hugh, in Lincoln; he believed or professed to believe that this was a crime of ritual murder and as a result, 19 Jews from the city were executed and 100 dispatched to prison in the castle.

Edward I was even more ferocious. He ordered that certain Jews, who had been acquitted of the charge of ritual murder, be retried. In November 1278, 600 Jews were imprisoned in the Tower of London on charges of tampering with the currency. 269 of them were hanged six months later. In 1290 he expelled all of the remaining Jews from his kingdom; they were now approximately  2,000. He did not take this step out of misplaced religious zeal; it was the measure demanded by the parliament house before they would agree to fresh taxation. In fact the expulsion was seen

by many chroniclers as one of the most important and enlightened acts of his reign. The antisemitism of the medieval English people is clear enough. Some have argued that in subtly modified forms it has continued to this day.

The tale of Little Saint Hugh

from The National Anglo-Jewish Heritage Trail 

A unique form of religious persecution, the ‘Blood Libel’ or ‘ritual child murder allegation’, arose in England for the first time in Norwich in the 12th century when the body of a boy was found in the depths of Thorpe Woods outside of the city. Periodically, Medieval English Jews were falsely accused of ‘ritual child murder’ by local Christians. It was usually claimed they tortured and killed little Christian boys in a mockery of Christ’s crucifixion, and that they used their blood for magical purposes. The idea of Jews attacking children for blood may have been partly derived and adapted from East Anglian rural folklore, where evil fairies, called ‘Pharisees’, lived underground and sucked the blood of children. The children were probably the victims of accidents or lawless violence, while the accusers’ motives are now generally accepted to have been for financial, political, or religious gain. It set a pattern for future persecution.

In Lincoln, in 1255, ‘Little Hugh’ was found dead near the Lincoln Jewry. The Jews were accused of ritual child murder, not by popular hue and cry, but five weeks later at the instigation of John of Lexington, the brother of Bishop Robert Lexington (1254-58). He had traveled from the North, with the deeply impoverished King, who was desperately raising funds to pay to the Pope for his son Edmund to be crowned King of Sicily, partly by pardoning murderers for cash. Henry III was under threat of excommunication if he did not pay the money to the Pope. Lexington supported by the King secured a forced confession from Copin the Jew, who was then killed despite having been promised a pardon for his confession. In consequence 91 Jews were imprisoned in the Tower of London. Eighteen were summarily executed by the King, for the temerity of requesting a trial by Jury and not trusting the mercy of the King. The rest (including a convert to Judaism called John) were eventually released due to the intervention of the Friars. The boy was then venerated as a local saint (but never canonized) after a miracle was claimed, and he was enshrined in the Cathedral until the Reformation. There is little evidence that the shrine was popular and some doubt that there was ever a proper cult of Hugh. The King was clearly the prime mover in the Blood Libel, aided and abetted by John of Lexington and probably also by the Papal Nuncio. He took the lead in choreographing the rapid events over several days in Lincoln, leading to the confession and condemnation of the Jews. He was the main financial beneficiary. The Papal Nuncio, Rostand Masson, was apparently present with the King throughout the events as part of his retinue. Seven days afterwards he declared Henry’s son, King of Sicily. Therefore it seems that the Jews of Lincoln were sacrificed for the King’s Sicilian business. The motives of the Bishop and the Cathedral cannot be accurately determined, though they played their role in supporting and not resisting the drama. Joe Hillaby asserts that John of Lexington’s actions were extraordinarily timely and fortuitous in assisting his brother the Bishop in his task to magnify the existing cult of Hugh of Avalon and the task of building the Angel Choir, as well as establishing the new cult of the ‘Little Hugh’.

The boy martyr was later celebrated in numerous ballads and songs as well as in Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale’ (Canterbury Tales). The gruesome lyrics of the ‘Ballad of Little Sir Hugh’ (but usually without mention of any explicit Jewish identity of the alleged perpetrators) are still performed today in folk music circles, frequently without any explanation or apology. As such, ‘Blood Libels’ became one of the most pernicious and enduring of all anti-Semitic fabrications, spreading through Europe and beyond, even up to the present day.

During the 1290s, soon after the general expulsion of the Jews from England by Edward I, the remains of Little Hugh were translated to a new shrine intruded into the South Choir Aisle Screen, but there is little evidence that the cult was ever a success. The architectural evidence (as interpreted by Stocker and Hillaby) suggests that Edward I had a significant role in its construction. Two out of four original coats of arms on the shrine were Edward’s, and we know that he made a gift to the shrine in 1299 / 1300. The style of the shrine seems to be modelled on the architectural tabernacles for the statues on the original 12 Queen Eleanor crosses, erected by Edward I on the path and resting places of his wife’s body, on its way to London from Lincoln, rather than upon usual sepulchral design. It seems entirely likely that the shrine was intended to be linked to the visceral tomb of Queen Eleanor, at the end of the same aisle in the Cathedral. Hillaby asserts that the shrine may have also been intended as a symbol and a piece of royal propaganda, to deflect hostility from Edward and his wife who trafficked in Jewish debts, and to build on the gratitude of the nation in his subsequent action as ‘defender’ of Christianity in expelling the Jews in 1290.

The original plinth and raised back panel of the shrine of the c. 1290s still survive. There are also two broken stumps of the former canopy at the back that made what would have been part of a panel at the side of a small side arch forming the upper structure of the shrine. There are still visible traces of rich green and blue pigment used to decorate parts of the shrine. At the end of the 19th century it was said that there were remnants of gilding as well.

The pierced base of the shrine has gone, along with its ornate canopy, with tall side pinnacles, niches, and the decorative finial with a niche illustrated in Dugdale’s drawing. These were all removed in the Civil War. It seems that there was also a figure of Little Hugh in the shrine. Overall the shrine was a tall monument, reaching at least up to the top of the choir wall, if not higher.

In 1736 the painted, freestone figure of a little boy, about 20 inches high, still existed and was recorded by an antiquarian, Smart Lethieullier. It was by tradition part of the original shrine. The figure was supposed to bear the marks of crucifixion. The head had by that time been broken off and it had been removed from the shrine and was in ‘a by-place just behind the High Altar, where we found it covered with dust and obscurity’.

In 1791, the tomb was opened, when the Cathedral paving was renewed. The remains of Little Hugh were found in a stone coffin just below the paving and seen for the first time since the Middle Ages. The boy was apparently four feet and two inches tall and was thought to have a rather long thin face. No doubt modern forensic work, if available, would have been able to say something about the circumstances of his death. The skeleton provided a refutation of one allegation, as his teeth had not been smashed, as alleged in the blood libel stories.

A careful examination of the surroundings of the shrine shows other significant features. The former upper superstructure of the shrine was skillfully and well integrated into the screen wall of the choir and looks as if it had been carefully planned and positioned so as to be a focus of the aisle in which it stands, even though it was not part of the original design. An impression is gained that the canopy may have been rested, afterwards, above, and onto, an existing tomb, which was itself much more crudely inserted into the Choir wall. It rested on and above the base and back of the tomb (the surviving elements) and was structurally separate, and not built in one piece, which is why the dismantling of the canopy at the Reformation did not destroy the tomb beneath.

The evidence suggests that an original tomb of Little Hugh was significantly embellished to become a major feature of the south side of the Cathedral and in its day represented not only the cult of Little Hugh, but garnered a royal meaning and patronage as well and was quite imposing in its improved state after 1290.

The Cathedral for many years placed a notice by the shrine of Little Hugh to explain its meaning, but it is easy for the casual visitor to completely miss the remains. The notice has its own history and has evolved over the years. Before 1959, a notice largely repeated the traditional libel. But in 1959, it was replaced by the then Dean, the Rev D.C. Dunlop, who was reported by the Daily Telegraph as saying that the Chapter did not wish, ‘to see things that are not true up on the walls of the Cathedral’ and that a new notice would correct the record. This new notice, cancelling the libel, remained in place for a good many years, but recently has been further revised and then improved again, most recently through a collaboration project between the Cathedral and the Jewish community.

Between July 2008 and September 2009, the notice was entirely re-written in an interfaith collaboration, by Professor Brian Winston (for the Lincoln Jewish Community), Carol Bennett (for the Cathedral) and Marcus Roberts (JTrails) as part of the Trails Jewish heritage project in Lincoln, working in the first instance with the Lincoln Jewish Community. The American academic Elisa van Court had criticised the wording of the existing signage in 1997 and again in a publication in 2006. The new plaque refers to ‘Little Hugh’ without referring to him as ‘Saint’ since he was never officially recognised as such by Rome. Calling him a ‘saint’ confers false credibility for the blood libel in Lincoln. The new signage also draws notice to the terrible consequences for the medieval Jewish community (the most notable omission in the original signage as high-lighted by van Court) and the contemporary relevance of the shrine. The new notice is the result of excellent interfaith relations between the communities and a desire to show the real significance of the Lincoln Blood Libel today.