Today, 736 years ago, on July 18, 1290, a date that symbolically fell on Tisha B’Av that year, King Edward I of England sent decrees to every town in the kingdom ordering that all Jews leave the country by the first day of November 1290. The decrees further stated that any Jew remaining in England after that date would be executed.
Following the king’s order, thousands of England’s Jews were expelled that year. Although the Jews, who emigrated primarily to the nearby Netherlands, France, and Spain, were permitted to take their movable property with them, their homes, together with all assets and possessions they were unable to carry, became property of the Crown by royal decree.
After 1290, there is no official evidence of the existence of Jews in the Kingdom of England. The only formal way to remain in England was to reside in the House of Converts, an institution located in London that, at the time of the expulsion, housed approximately 80 Jewish converts who lived there free of charge under communal conditions.
England’s status as an island with no land borders enabled relatively strict control over immigration and prevented Jews from returning for approximately 350 years.
Thus England became the first state in recorded history to completely expel its entire Jewish population, opening a historical floodgate of expulsions across the continent. France expelled its Jews twice, in 1306 and 1394. Hungary followed between 1349 and 1360.
Austria joined in 1421, while various regions of Germany implemented similar expulsion policies throughout the 14th and 16th centuries. The process later spread eastward and southward, with the expulsion of the Jews of Lithuania in 1445 and 1495, culminating in the famous expulsion from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497.
This pattern did not end in the Middle Ages or the modern era, nor was it confined to Christian Europe. For centuries, from the 15th century until 1772, Jews were completely barred from entering Russia. When they were finally permitted to enter, their movement was restricted to a closed and tightly controlled geographical area known as the Pale of Settlement.
In the modern era, between 1948 and 1967, this mechanism was recreated throughout the Islamic world. Nearly all the Jews of Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen were forced to dismantle their ancient and flourishing communities, flee, or be expelled from these countries out of genuine fear for their lives.
The most striking fact is that antisemitism has never required the physical presence of Jews in order to flourish. Hatred and fear of Jews became so deeply rooted in Western culture that they continued to exist as an independent ideology even in spaces “free of Jews.”
Approximately 100 years after the complete expulsion from England, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales. In “The Prioress’s Tale,” he portrays Jews through virulent antisemitism as ritual murderers of young Christian children.
Two hundred years later, after no Jew had set foot in the kingdom for three centuries, William Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice, introducing to the world the character of Shylock, the Jewish moneylender obsessed with claiming his debt through a pound of human flesh.
These canonical works demonstrate that antisemitism is not a response to Jewish behavior, but a cultural construct capable of sustaining itself even after the object of its hatred has disappeared.
Breaking the familiar patterns of persecution
When examining minorities persecuted throughout history, familiar patterns of hostility emerge: hatred arising from war, territorial conflict, ethnic origin, skin color, or clashes of religion and customs. Antisemitism, however, breaks every familiar pattern. Hatred toward the Jews has been the greatest and deepest hatred in human history.
It is a historical phenomenon unique to the Jewish people, with no parallel in the history of any other nation. While hatred toward other groups has always been limited by time, geography, or circumstance, no hatred in history has ever been as universal, as profound, or as consistent as antisemitism.
The past, the present, and eternity
Even today, we are witnessing a troubling resurgence of antisemitism on the streets of modern Britain, on its university campuses, and in its political corridors. The violent demonstrations, expressions of hatred, and diplomatic efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state and its representatives are not isolated incidents.
They serve as a painful reminder that the political, legal, and cultural tools used to condemn the Jewish people tend to reappear under modern disguises. Today’s international campaign of boycotts and isolation is, to a significant extent, the modern political incarnation of the historical expulsion decrees imposed upon the Jewish people among the family of nations.
There is, however, one fundamental and essential difference between the Jews of 1290 and the Jews of today: the existence of a sovereign territory with a Jewish army under an independent state.
Historical experience demonstrates that the empires and kingdoms that persecuted, expelled, and sought to isolate the Jews, from medieval England through Spain to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, declined, weakened, or collapsed altogether.
The Jewish people, by contrast, against every law of history and sociology, transformed from a persecuted object into an independent political subject that continues to exist, create, and flourish in its own homeland.
Antisemitism may have remained consistent, profound, and universal, but the Jewish people continue to sing their unique melody on the stage of history. Throughout thousands of years of exile and persecution, they did not merely survive; they continued to offer the world a moral and cultural voice wherever they lived.
In doing so, they left a permanent mark on world civilization. Today, the continuation of the Jewish melody no longer depends upon the goodwill of foreign rulers or royal decrees, but upon the strength and stability of the State of Israel.
The author is the deputy chairman of the Institute for Security Policy of the Israel Defense and Security Forum (IDSF). He previously served as a policy assistant to strategic affairs minister Ron Dermer and worked at Israel’s National Security Council.
Source:
www.jpost.com
