Decrees

1275

The statute. In about 1275 Edward I forbade Jews in England to lend at interest. His reason was harm to “the good men of his land,” yet in the same sentence he admits that he and his ancestors had “received much benefit” from them. Lending had been pressed on them: the Church condemned interest as a sin, Jews were barred from guilds and from owning farmland, and the crown taxed what they earned. The statute also ordered a yellow badge for everyone over seven and made Jews “taxable to the king and to no other.”

17 Nov 1278

The charge. On 17 November 1278 all the Jews of England were arrested at once on a charge of clipping coins, and their houses were searched. Christians were accused of the same crime, but the National Archives say the Jews were “targeted as the key suspects.” The crime was punishable by death, and a record shows 269 Jews executed in London by 7 May 1279. The Archives give the toll, not the proof; many families were left poor, and the crown lost the taxes they had paid.

18 Jul 1290

The price. Edward I came home in 1289 deeply in debt, the National Archives says, and offered to expel all Jews in exchange for a tax. Parliament granted £116,000, and on 18 July 1290 he told his sheriffs that every Jew had until 1 November to leave; the crown took their houses. His letter of 5 November gives his charge, that Jews had turned lending into a worse kind, and calls them “perfidious,” meaning faithless. Historians still argue over why; about 3,000 left by the Archives’ estimate, 16,000 by the Encyclopaedia Judaica’s.

22 Jul 1306

France, 1306. On 21 June 1306 Philip IV secretly ordered every Jew in his kingdom arrested on 22 July, their belongings seized, and then expelled. Before they had left he issued rules for auctioning their houses, and the crown collected the debts owed to them until 1325. The Encyclopaedia Judaica judges that his policy toward the Jews was driven throughout by the crown’s interest. Nine years later Jews were back; in 1323 they were expelled again.

17 Sep 1394

France, 1394. The last order was given in the name of Charles VI, for whom his uncles had acted as regents since 1392. It told officers to press debtors to repay so the Jews’ pledges could be redeemed, to guard them, and to escort them to the frontier. With 1306, the Encyclopaedia Judaica counts it among the “general expulsions” that kept Jews out of most of France until 1789.

1182

The “109 countries” count. A number circulates: Jews “expelled from 109 different countries.” The Anti-Defamation League says it probably comes from a list of “109 locations” on an Australian antisemitic website, and that antisemites use it to claim Jews must be “a malicious and harmful people.” That argument treats what rulers, councils and mobs did as proof against the people it was done to. The Encyclopaedia Judaica gives the root of the expulsions as “hatred of the Jew,” which rulers at times exploited for money. In France, Philip Augustus, who needed money, annulled loans to Christians in 1181 and kept a fifth, drove Jews from his own lands in 1182, and readmitted them in 1198. His chronicler repeated a charge of ritual murder; it was false.

1348

The wells. In 1348 a rumor said Jews had poisoned wells to spread the plague. It was false. Prisoners seized by order of Count Amadeus VI of Savoy were tortured and “confessed,” the records went from town to town, and Jews were burned in at least two hundred places. Pope Clement VI wrote that the charge could not be true, but his commands were little obeyed, especially in Germany.

14 Feb 1349

Strasbourg, 1349. The council wanted to save the Jews, and a mob led by the butchers’ and tanners’ guilds and by nobles who owed them money overthrew it. By the chronicler’s count about two thousand were burned on 14 February; debts owed to them were cancelled and the new council shared their cash among the working men. Königshofen, writing decades later, blamed the money; the sourcebook’s editor adds that fear and bigotry drove it too. Basel’s council was forced to swear to bar Jews for two hundred years; Strasbourg let them back in 1368.

1483

The Inquisition. In 1478 a papal bull let Ferdinand and Isabella name inquisitors, to try converts accused of secretly keeping their old faith. Complaints that the two inquisitors at Seville were cruel reached Pope Sixtus IV, and in 1482 he wrote to the monarchs of his dissatisfaction. In October 1483 Torquemada was named inquisitor-general.

31 Mar 1492

The Alhambra Decree. The monarchs charged that contact with Jews drew converts back to their old faith; their proof was “many statements and confessions” gathered by the crown’s own inquisition. A reference article says most scholars read it instead as anxiety about converts, or as pressure to convert. Every Jew had until the end of July to leave, on pain of death and confiscation, and could not take out gold, silver or coin. Faith or home: Henry Kamen reckons at most 70,000 Jews in Castile and 10,000 in Aragon, and most, the best evidence suggests, converted; estimates of those who left run from 40,000 to hundreds of thousands.

4 Dec 1496

Portugal, 1496. Most of Spain’s exiles had crossed into Portugal. When King Manuel sought the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, they demanded that he expel Portugal’s Jews. His edict of 4 December 1496 (5 December in some accounts) gave them eleven months to leave, on pain of death.

1497

Lisbon, 1497. The Encyclopaedia Judaica says Manuel saw that losing so many subjects would cost Portugal dearly; another account says conversion came first. He ordered them to gather at Lisbon, supposedly to embark, and had some 20,000 baptized by force. In 1506 a Lisbon mob killed some 4,000 converts, and Manuel had the friars who incited it executed.

c. 1492

The Ottoman Empire. Many exiles settled in Ottoman towns in the Balkans and Anatolia, and the chronicler Elijah Capsali says Sultan Bayezid II ordered his governors to receive them kindly. A reference article adds that the economic cost to Spain, once thought great, now seems relatively minor. The Encyclopaedia Judaica also records forced conversions in his reign and that he enforced the ban on new synagogues.

1264

Poland. After the Mongol invasions of 1241 Polish princes wanted settlers from the west. In 1264 Duke Boleslaus the Pious of Kalisz issued a charter, modelled on one from Austria, that saw Jews as protected lenders; Casimir III confirmed and widened it. The Encyclopaedia Judaica says Polish Jews spread into almost every branch of trade, which it holds contradicts the antisemitic myth of a “Jewish spirit of usury.” It was no refuge without limits: town and church pressed the badge, and Lithuania expelled its Jews for a short time in 1495.

1543

A reformer asks the rulers. Ninety-Five Theses told how Luther’s church began. In 1543 he wrote On the Jews and Their Lies, advising the authorities to take seven steps, among them burning synagogues and razing houses. The Lutheran scholar Gerhard Forde reports that Luther added: if they would not, Jews should be exiled. In 1994 the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America rejected that “violent invective.”

1598

Amsterdam. Amsterdam, in this story, is a refuge with limits, not the Netherlands as a whole: in 1444 Utrecht’s council ordered Jews tortured, imprisoned and expelled. Exiles from Portugal began to arrive in Amsterdam from about 1593; the city’s oldest record of them, probably, is dated 28 November 1598. The Union of Utrecht of 1579 had forbidden persecution on religious grounds, but its supporters were rarely clear whether that covered non-Christians. From 1619 each town set its own rules, and in 1632 Amsterdam denied Jews the full rights of burghers.

Dec 1655

England again. In December 1655 Cromwell called a conference at Whitehall on whether Jews could return. It ended without a definite conclusion: merchants and clergy opposed readmission, though some delegates argued that Jewish trading networks would lower the price of imports. Hessayon writes that Cromwell, like some delegates, may have hoped for conversions. The National Archives dates his permission to 1656.

1791–1917

The Pale. Russia had barred Jews since the end of the 15th century. After Poland’s partitions it ruled masses of them, so in 1791 the law fixed where they might live and barred them from trading in inner Russia. The May Laws of May 1882 forbade Jews to settle outside towns; the Encyclopaedia Judaica says they met the demands of rural merchants who wanted rid of Jewish rivals. In 1891–92 thousands of craftsmen were expelled from Moscow. About 4.9 million Jews lived in the Pale in 1897, some 11.6% of its people; the provisional government ended it in 1917.

13 Jan 1953

The Doctors’ Plot. The Encyclopaedia Judaica calls it the most dramatic anti-Jewish episode in the Soviet Union under Stalin. On 13 January 1953 the Soviet press announced the arrest of doctors said to have confessed to murdering two Soviet leaders, and falsely tied them to a Jewish aid organization in the U.S.; one of the doctors, Yakov Etinger, died under torture. Stalin died on 5 March, and on 3 April Pravda said the doctors were not guilty and that “impermissible means of investigation” had been used. The encyclopedia reads the Plot as apparently part of a plan for a new purge of Stalin’s own leadership.

1953

An alleged plan. Did Stalin mean to follow the Plot by deporting about two million Soviet Jews to Siberia and Central Asia? Most Soviet-era Western scholars took it as fact, Oleg Ivanov writes, citing memoirs and insiders such as the doctor’s adopted son, also named Yakov Etinger, who said Nikolai Bulganin told him of orders to gather cattle cars in February 1953. Gennady Kostyrchenko finds no credible evidence and calls it a “Cold War legend”; David Brandenberger, Jonathan Brent and others say the question must stay unresolved. No archival document has been found.