States, regimes, and decisions: why Jews were expelled from Medieval England and France

Abstract

This article explores the relation between the expulsion of Jews from medieval England and France and state building, geo-politics, regime styles, and taxation in these countries. Jews were evicted as a result of attempts by kings to manage royal insecurity, refashion relations between state and society, and build more durable systems of taxation within the territories they claimed as theirs. As they engaged in state building and extended their ties, often conflictual, to key societal and political actors, Jews became financially less important but more visible as outsiders, becoming a liability for the crown. Similar mechanisms were at work despite important differences distinguishing England's growing regime of rights and representation and France's emergent absolutist patrimonialism.

Jewish Persecutions and Weather Shocks: 1100–1800

“…174-202) examines a large number of antisemitic treatises published in France during the seventeenth century that suggest that antisemitism was widespread and conventional in both elite and popular circles. 51 Historians and sociologists have also argued that the birth of new nation states in the late medieval period was often accompanied by the expulsion of the Jews and other 'alien' populations (Baron, 1967a;Menache, 1987;Barkey and Katznelson, 2011). However, this was not in general true of medieval persecutions or expulsions.…”

“… Historians and sociologists have also argued that the birth of new nation states in the late medieval period was often accompanied by the expulsion of the Jews and other ‘alien’ populations (Baron, ; Menache, ; Barkey and Katznelson, ). However, this was not in general true of medieval persecutions or expulsions.…”

The Transnational Wandering Jew and the Medieval English Nation

“…Robert Stacey demonstrates a convincing correlation between “the precocious development of the medieval English state and the no less precocious development of medieval English anti‐Semitism” (“Anti‐Semitism” 163). Political scientists Karen Barkey and Ira Katznelson, comparing the political and social contexts of the post‐Bouvines medieval expulsions of Jews from both English and French territories, emphasize how important the Jews were as fiscal pawns in disputes between monarch and magnates as the English state took shape.…”

From the Persecuting to the Protective State? Jewish Expulsions and Weather Shocks from 1100 to 1800

“…One explanation for this pattern is that fiscally weak cities and states expelled Jews in order to satisfy revenue needs (Elman, 1937;Schwarzfuchs, 1967;Veitch, 1986;Barzel, 1992). Others argue that Jews were expelled in response to heightened religious fervor in the late medieval period (Grazel, 1966;Langmuir, 1990;Stow, 1992;Menache, 1997;Bell, 2001) or as part of a project of constructing a religiously or ethnically homogeneous state (Baron, 1967a;Katznelson, 2005;Barkey and Katznelson, 2011); or to a confluence of these factors as Moore (1987) argued in his Formation of a Persecuting Society. Alternatively, Poliakov (1955) attributed the decline in the fortunes of European Jewry in the fourteenth century to the series of calamities that befell Europe from the Great Famine of 1315-1322 to the Black Death and numerous individual accounts of specific persecutions or pogroms cite that the role played by economic hardship, natural disasters and bad weather in triggering particular persecutions or expulsions (Barber, 1981a;Cohn, 2007;Slavin, 2010;Voigtländer and Voth, 2012).…”

“…Historians and sociologists have documented how the birth of new nation states in the late medieval period was often accompanied by the expulsion of the Jews and other 'alien' populations (Baron, 1967a;Menache, 1987;Barkey and Katznelson, 2011). This factor was certainly an important one in explaining the expulsion of Jews from England in 1290 and Spain in 1492.…”