The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender by Julie L. Mell

Author:Julie L. Mell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US, New York

More generally, Jacobs, echoing Roscher, described the Jews as having an economic “function,” providing capital when the Church prohibited all Christians from practicing “usury” as England was passing out of a stage of barter. 25 Cecil Roth, in his magisterial History of the Jews in England, took up Jacobs’ metaphor of the Jews as the King’s sponge, dubbing the whole period of Henry III’s reign by the title “royal milch cow.” Roth also used the language of “economic function,” asserting that moneylending was the major economic occupation of the Jews, even as he laid out rich evidence for other economic occupations and asserted that not all Jews could have been moneylenders. 26 Peter Elman, echoing Dowell, argued in the Economic History Review of 1937 that the Jews were expelled from England because they no longer could perform their “economic function” as moneylenders to the populace and source of money to the Crown owing to the Crown’s overexploitation. 27 In the 1950s, Austin Lane Poole, in his volume for the Oxford History of England, depicted Jews as ostentatiously displaying their great wealth derived from high interest rates, “as usurers” gaining a “strangle-hold” on recently founded monastic houses and smaller aristocratic families and generating a universal dislike and hatred with their “unconcealed contempt” for Christianity. 28 Doris Stenton in the 1960s Pelican History of England similarly described Jews as single-handedly satisfying the “call for capital” in an age of expanding trade, since Christians were “forbidden by the Church to engage in usury:…High rates of interest meant that the Jews gathered great wealth but were hated by those who went to them for help.” 29 In the 1970s, P.R. Coss argued that support for the reformist earls in 1258–1265 could be explained by the large numbers of knightly families that “became indebted, primarily to the Jews, and were ultimately forced to sell out.” 30 Despite the thorough refutations of Coss, 31 his arguments are repeated in J.R. Maddicott’s recent study on Simon de Montfort, which had the poor taste to defend the expulsion of the Jews of Leicester by Simon de Montfort against the charge of “a piece of fanatical intolerance,” claiming: “Overbearing though it may seem, [the expulsion] was not impossible to justify, either in terms of the threat which the Jews offered to the faith or of traditional condemnations of usury.” 32 Michael Prestwich’s New Oxford History of England, a replacement for Poole’s volume of the 1950s, continues to portray the Jews of England as wealthy and successful moneylenders, profiting at the expense of knightly families, who held staggering riches even at the expulsion. 33 Recent publications in business history reiterate old seventeenth-century tropes from William Prynne: “The main occupation of the Jews—the reason for the toleration which they enjoyed and the sole official raison d’être of their existence in England—was the profession of moneylending.” 34

“I am confident that all the ambitious statements which I have quoted about the financial and economic position of the Jews in England in the Middle Ages are broadly speaking wrong.

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