Medieval English Rabbis: Image and Self-Image Pinchas Roth Early Middle English, Volume 1, Number 1, 2019, pp. 17-33 (Article) Published by Arc Humanities Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/731651 [ Access provided at 2 Oct 2021 13:24 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] MEDIEVAL ENGLISH RABBIS: IMAGE AND SELF-IMAGE PINCHAS ROTH “The neglect of the British situation is explicable largely on the grounds that, compared with other northern, Ashkenazic communities, the Anglo-Jewish community was not perceived to have produced the scholarly superstars so evident in France and Germany.”1 tantalizing about the Jews of medieval England. So much about them is unknown, perhaps unknowable, and even those facts that are well known There is someThing and ostensibly unquestionable have drawn attempts2 There to were bend, no crack, Jewish or communitiesotherwise move in Anglo-Saxonthem. The chronologically England.3 first fact known about this Jewish community is that itHistory came intoof the being Jews onlyin England after the Norman Conquest. 4 The end of the But, medieval as Cecil Anglo-Jewish Roth commented experience on the is first also pageclear—the of his Edict of Expulsion of 1290 did, not“Fantasy allow hasfor any… attempted continued to Jewish carry presencethe story inback England. to a remote5 That hasantiquity.” not stopped various people from believing that Jews continued to live in England for * Boyarin and Shamma Boyarin for their kind invitation and extraordinary hospitality at the University I am deeply of Victoria. grateful to Menachem Butler for his unflagging help, and to Adrienne Williams 1 Patricia Skinner, “Introduction: Jews in Medieval Britain and Europe,” in The Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary, and Archaeological Perspectives, ed. P. Skinner (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), 5. 2 Avrom Saltman, The Jewish Question in 1655: Studies in Prynne’s Demurrer (Ramat-Gan: Bar- Ilan University Press, 1995), 95–100; Joe Hillaby, “The London Jewry: William I to John,” Jewish Historical Studies 33 (1992–94): 1–44. The earliest evidence seems to be William of Malmesbury’s traduxerat) from Rouen. William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings, ed. and tangential mention of Jews in London whom William the Conqueror had brought ( 3 Andrew P. Scheil, The Footsteps of Israel: Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England (Ann Arbor: trans. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998–99), 1:562 (sec. iv:317). University of Michigan Press, 2004), 7; Heide Estes, “Reading Ælfric in the Twelfth Century: Anti- Judaic Doctrine Becomes Anti-Judaic Rhetoric,” in Imagining the Jews in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture, ed. Samantha Zacher (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 265–79. 4 Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 1. See further: Shimon Applebaum, “Were There Jews in Roman Britain?,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England Israel Numismatic Journal 4 (1963): 1; Robin R. Mundill, The King’s Jews: Money, Massacre, and Exodus in Medieval England (London: 17 (1951–52): Continuum, 189–205; 2010), Michael 1–4. Avi­Yonah, “The Melandara Castle Coin,” 5 Robin R. Mundill, England’s Jewish Solution: Experiment and Expulsion, 1262–1290 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 18 Pinchas roTh centuries, and indeed that all of the goldsmiths, importers, pepperers, moneylenders in fourteenth-century London were secretly Jews.6 This wishful thinking seems to compen- only was the period of time spent by Jews in medieval England brief and episodic, but sate for an underlying fear, expressed by Patricia Skinner in the opening quote—that not way, prevalent attitudes towards medieval English Jewish literature mirror the charac- terizationtheir cultural of Early achievements Middle English during literature that period as were“one insignificantof the dullest and and mediocre. least accessible In this intervals in standard literary history, an incoherent, intractable, impenetrable dark age scarcely redeemed by a handful of highlights.”7 royal archives teach a great deal about one aspect of the Jewish presence in England. The thousands of Latin documents preserved in the Exchequer of the Jews and other almost never afford even a glimpse of the day-to-day life of the Jews, or what the Jews themselvesAlthough they thought. provided To enormousunderstand detail how aboutEnglish financial Jews saw dealings themselves, involving we Jews,must turnthey to their own works. Rabbinic8 texts are inherently intertextual, explicating and echoing classic texts from the Bible and the Talmud. By reading medieval rabbinic English works closely, within and against their literary and historical context, we can salvage some traces of their authors’ self-image. From there we will turn to the ways in which that image was re-shaped by modern writers to suit their varying needs. Medieval Self-Image The Jewish scholars of medieval England included the authors of several grammatical works, and a single poet, Meir ben Elijah of Norwich, whose liturgical compositions have received a great deal of academic attention.9 Grammar is not usually very reveal- 6 Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman and Donald N. Yates, The Early Jews and Muslims of England and Wales: A Genetic and Genealogical History (Jefferson: McFarland, 2014), 206. 7 Thomas Hahn, “Early Middle English,” The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 61. 8 “[C]ould something happen between Christian and Jew that might yield a story other than Christians?”—Jeffrey Cohen, “The Future of the Jews of York,” in Christians and Jews in Angevin England:the timeless The one York provided Massacre by of the 1190 temporally Narratives rigidified and Contexts Jew, whose, ed. Sarah narrative Rees is Jones by, for and and Sethina about 9 See the description of Moses ben Isaac of London’s Sepher ha-Shoham (a Hebrew grammar and Watson (York: York Medieval Press, 2013), 283. lexicon) as the “[m]ost important literary production of an English Jew before the Expulsion”— Joseph Jacobs and Lucien Wolf, Bibliotheca Anglo-Judaica: A Bibliographical Guide to Anglo-Jewish History The Sepher Hashoham (The Onyx Book) by Moses ben Isaac Hanessiah, ed. Benjamin Klar (London: Jewish Historical Society of(London: England, Jewish 1947). Chronicle, See also Ilan1888), Eldar, 17. “The The Grammaticalwork was published Literature as of Medieval Ashkenazi Jewry,” in Hebrew in Ashkenaz: A Language in Exile, ed. Lewis Glinert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 26–45, at 35–36 and 39–41; Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, “Sefer ha-Shoham (le Livre 1260),” in En mémoire de Sophie Kessler Mesguich: études Juives, linguistique et philologie sémitiques, d'Onyx), Dictionnaire de l'Hébreu biblique de Moí�se ben Isaac ben ha­Nessiya (Angleterre, vers see Abraham Berliner, Hebräische Poesien des Meir ben Elia aus Norwich ed. Jean Baumgarten et al. (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2012), 183–98. On Meir of Norwich (London: Nutt, 1887); M. D. 19 medieval english raBBis ing, nor are Meir of Norwich’s poems particularly rich in historical detail. There are two areas, however, in which we possess a large body of writings by roughly a dozen different English rabbis. These are discussions of Jewish law (Halakhah) and comments on the Bible that became, for the most part, embedded within the rabbinic heritage of medieval France and Germany. Often, comments by English rabbis were copied in the margins of classic works such as Isaac of Corbeil’s Sefer Mitzvot Katan (Small Book of Commandments) or Mordechai ben Hillel’s eponymous legal anthology from late thir- teenth-century Germany.10 the printed editions of those works, and thus into the mainstream of modern rabbinic knowledge. These passages Somethrow oflight those on theglosses ways subsequently in which medieval found English their way rabbinic into scholars perceived themselves and their place in the world—both in their immediate geographic context, in relation to the Christian majority society, and vis-à-vis the larger Jewish communities on the Continent. In 1201, King John famously declared the Jews to be “our property.”11 An exegetical passage, probably attributed to an important Cambridge Jew who lived at the beginning of the thirteenth century, may provide a glimpse of the Jewish response to this declara- tion.12 By 1194, Benjamin of Cambridge was the wealthiest Jew in Cambridge, and before that he probably studied in Champagne with Rabbi Jacob Tam, who died in 1171.13 In a collection of biblical exegesis from medieval France, a tense conversation is described between Rabbi Benjamin and a Christian:14 Davis, “Meir ben Elias of Norwich,” The Jewish Standard The Jews of Medieval Norwich (London: Jewish Historical Society of England, 1967), Hebrew section; Susan L. Einbinder, “Meir b. Elijah of Norwich: Persecution, June and 29, Poetry 1888, Among7; Vivian Medieval D. Lipman, English Jews,” Journal of Medieval History 26 (2000): 145–62; Miriamne Ara Krummel, Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England: Legally Absent, Virtually Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 49–67; Into the Light: The Medieval Hebrew Poetry of Meir of Norwich, trans. Ellman Crasnow and Bente Elsworth, intro. Keiron Pim (Norwich: East, 2013). 10 See, for example, the rulings of Isaac of Northampton, found in a manuscript copy of Sefer Mordechai. See Pinchas Roth, “New Responsa by Isaac ben Peretz of Northampton,” Jewish Historical Studies 46 (2014): 1–17. 11 Robert Chazan, Church State and Jew in the Middle Ages I. Schechter, “The Rightlessness of Mediaeval English Jewry,” Jewish Quarterly Review 4 (1913): 121–51; J. A. Watt, “The Jews, the Law, and the Church: The Concept (New York: of Jewish Berhman, Serfdom 1980), in Thirteenth- 79; Frank Century England,” in The Church and Sovereignty c. 590–1918: Essays in Honour of Michael Wilks, ed. of Jewish Service in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century England,” in Christians and Jews in Angevin England:Diana Wood The (London: York Massacre Ecclesiastical of 1190: History Narratives Society, and 1991), Contexts 153–72;, ed.