From: The Medieval Review
Birkett, Helen, ed. The Jewish Communities of Medieval England:
The Collected Essays of R. B. Dobson. Borthwick Texts and Studies
39. Heslington: University of York, 2010. Pp. xxvii, 174. £25.
ISBN: 978-1-904497-48-6.
Reviewed by Lorraine Attreed
College of the Holy Cross
lattreed@holycross.edu.
This collection of works by a major contributor to our knowledge of
medieval Jewry brings together six of Barrie Dobson's exquisitely
researched and analyzed papers, all of which had been previously
published. Had it only done that, it would have served a valuable
function, as not all of the periodicals and collections represented
here find space in smaller academic libraries (such as my own).
Published on the eve of Dobson's eightieth birthday, the work
celebrates his contributions to the field and displays the ways in
which they have inspired a new generation of historians.
That inspiration, and the new paths that are being taken, are viewed
from two perspectives: that of Dobson himself in an introduction to
the volume, and in an appreciation written by a fellow scholar. But
perhaps the greatest value can be had by simply reading through the
essays in the order presented (in chronological order, with one
unexplained exception), to watch the development of Dobson's
interests, the connections he made, the expansion of sources
available, and the ways in which events in his personal and academic
life (such as his move to Cambridge in 1988) influenced his topics and
perspectives. There is repetition here, and corrections of statements
that later seemed unfortunate or excessive, but of greater interest is
the growth of Dobson's judgment and discernment, marked by the
combination of reason and empathy familiar to all who know him.
The appreciation by Joe Hillaby, President of the Jewish Historical
Society of England 2006-2008, complements Dobson's own commentary on
his career, the latter matter-of-factly entitled "The Jews of Medieval
York in the Context of Some Other English Jewish Communities." While
Dobson's roots in northern England certainly help explain his interest
in Durham and York, topics of his earliest publications, it was
attendance at Cecil Roth's lectures at Oxford that sowed the seeds of
later interests. What began as the casual inclusion on his syllabus
of a lecture on Anglo-Jewry became focused over time on York's Jewish
population and the massacre at Clifford's Tower in 1190. This led to
his first publication on that event in 1974 sponsored by the
University of York's Borthwick Institute of Historical Research. The
placement of a memorial tablet in 1978 at the site of the massacre
expanded the reach and impact of Dobson's research, touching not only
contemporary Jewish studies but also the transmission of historical
knowledge to the public through the means of bodies such as English
Heritage. His concern over the potentiality for oversimplification
inherent in mass tourism is matched, and balanced, by his scholarly
commitment to see that the lives of medieval Jews should be as
celebrated as the anguish of their deaths.
The resources for the study of those lives in medieval England are
both abundant and opaque. In nearly every essay, Dobson cites Roth's
"ingenious manipulation of a famous phrase of Winston Churchill...:
never in the field of medieval English history is it 'possible to
assemble so much about so few' as it is about Jews of the thirteenth
century" (151). Supervised by a royal government accomplished in its
recording of matters of great interest to its officers and ignoring
many of the issues that matter to historians today, the lives of
England's medieval Jews may remain only dimly understood. Dobson has
never been discouraged by such conclusions, however, and it is
salutary to see at the end of his introduction his gentle but decisive
dismissal of scholars who wish to treat sources only as texts with
flexible meanings and to cease searching for the truth of those lives.
However cautiously he had to tread, and limited the conclusions he
could support with evidence, Dobson never abandoned the pursuit of the
fullest illumination possible of lives distant from us but never
unimportant.
The first reprinted essay in the collection is the revised (in 1996)
edition of "The Jews of Medieval York and the Massacre of March 1190."
[1] The revisions included updates to the scholarship cited in the
notes, the author's assurance that "nearly all he wrote...in 1974 is
what he would still write now," (33) and a description of the 1982-83
excavation of the medieval Jewish burial ground at York (although a
more detailed analysis of its findings is included in the final essay
in the collection). The first few pages provide background on the
presence of Jews in England after 1066, and the major sources and
historians by which we know of their lives before the expulsion of
1290. The gradual move from London to the provinces brought Jews to
York by the 1180s, and their comparatively recent arrival and lack of
time to be fully assimilated in civic society provides context for the
ferocity of the attack on them on Shabbat ha-Gadol, the night
of 16 March 1190. The need for their financial services, by rural lay
and ecclesiastical landlords as well as individuals of more modest
means, provided the Jews with reasons for settling in York. Such need
also stoked resentments, exacerbated by the death of Henry II and the
heightened emotionalism of Richard's early reign and crusade
preparations, which York's royal officials had no experience in
quelling. Employing both Hebrew and English sources, Dobson
chronicles the events of February and March, as violence spread from
Norfolk northwards until it arrived in the city and persuaded the Jews
to seek protection in the royal castle. Miscommunication,
understandable terror and distrust, the rabble-rousing actions of a
Premonstratensian canon on the scene, and the arrival of siege
machines combined to bring the community to its anguished decision of
mass-suicide on the eve of the great Sabbath before Passover. The few
who survived begged for mercy and promised to accept Christianity, but
were killed as they left the castle the next day. The king's horror
at news of the attacks and its violation of public peace resulted in
lasting measures both to protect the servi camere nostre and to
keep better track of all Jewish bonds and records of their financial
transactions. Dobson concludes the work with a careful study of who
was responsible for the violence, focusing on indebted country
landlords whose greatest fear was the loss of their lands offered as
collateral-–a
fear that came to pass in the thirteenth century when
heavy and frequent royal tallages forced Jewish creditors to demand
repayment under harsher circumstances. At this stage of Dobson's
research, the return of Jews to York by 1196, the establishment of an
archa there to register debts, and the growth of the
community's prosperity in the early thirteenth century are topics
handled briefly.
A fuller treatment of those final decades is found in the second
reprinted essay, "The Decline and Expulsion of the Medieval Jews of
York," first published in 1979. [2] In contrast to the twelfth
century, this period offers an abundance of sources generated by the
royal and Christian government that protected, tallaged, and
eventually expelled the Jews. As noted earlier, that abundance does
not necessarily ease the historian's task in discerning the nature of
the York community's financial recovery and increasing penury by the
1250s and 1260s. York's Jews became more isolated in the region when
Newcastle expelled its Jews in 1234, although Dobson identifies 1255
as a great divide. That year witnessed the great financier Aaron of
York's bankruptcy, the ritual murder case of Little St. Hugh of
Lincoln, and the king's mortgaging of all the Jews of England to his
brother. Although northern gentry families continued to borrow from
the Jews, the loans were modest (£50-60), and by the 1270s Christians
obtained an increasing portion of the profits of lending by both
direct and indirect means. As a result, only a handful of York Jews
could contribute much to tallages and their hold on urban property
declined precipitously. Property seizures in the coin-clipping
prosecutions of the 1270s, as well as in the final confiscation after
1290, resulted in little joy for the urban and royal officials who
benefited. Such arguments might lead other historians to determine
that the Expulsion occurred because the Jews no longer provided
financial satisfaction to the king, but Dobson avoids such narrow
conclusions. The English society that allowed a small core of Jews to
recover and thrive in the decades after the 1190 massacre no longer
existed a century later, lashed as it was by increasing hostility of
the Church in general, the mendicant orders in particular, and a
populace all too willing to believe the blood libels.
Dobson's move to the University of Cambridge in 1988 provided him with
an opportunity to explore the populations of another English
provincial town. Elected President of the Jewish Historical Society
of England in 1990, "The Jews of Medieval Cambridge" formed his
Presidential Address. [3] He begins with a generous appreciation of
Canon Henry Paine Stokes, first President of the Society (1914-16) not
to be a Jew, whose Studies in Anglo-Jewish History attempted to
preserve all surviving references to the Cambridge Jewry. The
collection, however, proved smaller and shallower than that for
Oxford, and chroniclers of Cambridge's Jews have not approached the
fullness of Roth's account. Fragmentary records suggest that the
community prospered during the twelfth century, although here as
elsewhere their success stemmed from "the almost insatiable appetite
for small-scale and initially short-term loans on the part of the
county's local, often very local, landowners," scattered in
neighboring villages. (113) The community dissolved in 1275 when the
Queen Mother demanded the expulsion of Jews from her dower towns, and
much of their property fell into the hands of civic officials,
eventually to find its way into the holdings of the first colleges.
Dobson communicates with sensitivity the likely feelings of a group
witnessing the beginnings of university formation but unable to
participate in its intellectual life.
A term as President of the Ecclesiastical History Society in the early
1990s gave him the opportunity to set the theme for the Society's
scholarly conference, "Christianity and Judaism." His address, "The
Role of Jewish Women in Medieval England," heralded a new approach for
his own scholarship while paying tribute to fundamental work on the
same topic presented (to no great appreciation) almost sixty years
earlier. [4] Dobson cites some specific cases that allow him to
illuminate the social and economic freedom of Jewish women, while
acknowledging that the written records that remain most likely took
notice of them only when they conducted business by written contract,
had large inheritances, or became involved in criminal behavior.
Dobson's interest in the topic continued with publication of "A
Minority within a minority: the Jewess of Thirteenth-Century England"
in 1996. [5] As in all of his works, Dobson calls readers' attention
to valuable data found in unlikely places: a list of names of
converted Jewesses suggests ways to analyze residence or patronage;
the compiler of materials in a ritual murder case turns out to be a
converted Jew who provides insight into Cambridge's early community;
analysis of the skeletal and dental remains from York's Jewbury
excavation finds Jewish women to be healthier and longer-lived than
their Christian counterparts. However strong the patriarchal nature
of Jewish communities, it nonetheless allowed their females to find
protection, respect, influence and personal freedom.
The most recent work in the collection, "The Medieval York Jewry
Reconsidered," touched on a number of issues important to Dobson while
refining his approach to the sources. [6] Although he celebrates the
contribution made by the Jewbury archaeological excavation, and
cautiously praises the inclusion of medieval Jewry into modern mass
tourism, he asserts his commitment to history based on written
sources. He reminds readers that the massacre at York was recorded by
both Jewish and Christian sources, and provides a detailed study of
chronicler William, canon of the Augustinian priory of Newburgh twelve
miles north of the city. Only a writer of Dobson's elegance could
manage to construct an analysis of Newburgh that included the work of
both Bishop Stubbs and that of historian Peter Biller, his former
colleague in York's history department. Here as elsewhere, Dobson
recognizes and praises recent scholarship of historians such as Robert
Stacey, Robin Mundill, Paul Brand, and the late Suzanne Bartlet. This
collection is a valuable addition to the historiography of England's
medieval Jews, its prose marked by elegance, empathy, and profound
scholarship.
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Notes:
1. The Jews of Medieval York and the Massacre of March 1190,
Borthwick Paper No. 45 (York: Borthwick Institute, University of York,
1974, revised edition 1996).
2. "The Decline and Expulsion of the Medieval Jews of York,"
Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society 26 (1979): 34-52.
3. "The Jews of Medieval Cambridge," Transactions of the Jewish 32 (1990-92): 1-24.
Historical Society of England
4. "The Role of Jewish Women in Medieval England," in Christianity, ed. Diana Wood, Studies in Church History 29 (Oxford,
and Judaism
1993), 145-68. The Reverend Michael Adler's paper "The Jewish Woman
in Medieval England," was delivered as a Presidential Address to the
Jewish Historical Society of England in 1934 and published in The (London: The Jewish Historical Society of
Jews of Medieval England
England, 1939).
5. "A Minority within a minority: the Jewess of Thirteenth-Century
England," in Minorities and barbarians in medieval life and, ed. Susan Ridyard and Robert G. Benson, Sewanee Medieval
thought
Studies 7 (Sewanee, TN: University of the South Press, 1996), 27-48.
The title of this collection is given incorrectly in the Birkett
edition.
6. "The Medieval York Jewry Reconsidered," Jewish Culture and 3 (2000), reprinted in The Jews in Medieval Britain:, ed. Patricia
History
Historical, Literary and Archaeological Perspectives
Skinner (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003), 145-56.
