John Tolan’s 2023 monograph England’s Jews: Finance, Violence, and the Crown in the Thirteenth Century covers a period of English history in which Anglo-Jews—the “King’s Jews”—at once maintained great financial prowess while undergoing a century of increasing limitations that culminated in their eventual expulsion from England in 1290. In seeking to analyze the critical role of the Jew across all social strata of thirteenth century England, Tolan brings to life the incredibly intertwined relationship between Jews, Christians, and the Crown during this time. The book, by Tolan’s own admission, is “not a comprehensive survey or internal history of Jewish experiences,” rather a re-centering of the distinct importance which Jewish money and land had on the construction of what we consider “England.” Tolan’s work also embodies a significant shift in the perspectives and methods employed by scholars of Jewish studies across disciplines in recent years. As has been the current, the explicit humanization of the Anglo-Jewish subjects of Tolan’s book seems to have been top of mind in his composition, methodologically drawing upon the works of recent scholarly efforts to re-center the Jewish experience in works about Jews in medieval England. Though he relies primarily on English sources rather than Jewish ones, the idea that there ought to have been a larger surviving Jewish voice is never far from Tolan’s narrative. “The voices of Jews are all but absent from this rich array of sources,” he regretfully writes in the book’s introduction, setting the tone for the subsequent seven chapters of legal, financial, and personal sources. 

Chapter One, “Isaac of Norwich and the Rebuilding of the King’s Jewry (1217-1222),” covers the era immediately following the death of King John, a king famously antagonistic towards the Jews, and the ascension of Henry III. Tolan follows the life and career of Isaac of Norwich, a prominent and wealthy moneylender whose imprisonment and subsequent release from the Tower of London under the reigns of John and Henry III, respectively, represents the Crown’s shifting attitudes towards the utilization of Jewish money in royal pursuits. Importantly, these years also saw the continuation of the “archae” system in which financial dealings between Jews and Christians were recorded on chirographs and maintained in a designated “archa,” or chest, in the synagogue. This chapter focuses especially on the increasing intermingling of Jews and Christians in both professional environments, like in the financial dealings of Isaac of Norwich, and personal ones. By including imagery of Jewish-Christian “networks,” Tolan illustrates the ways in which these communities served one another during the early years of Henry III’s reign. 

In Chapter Two, “Of Badges and Wet-Nurses,” Tolan addresses the attempts by ecclesiastical authorities to limit Jewish-Christian interactions and the rhetorical efforts they employed to plant anti-Jewish sentiment firmly in the English people in the early thirteenth century. Pope Innocent III’s particularly bold utilization of anti-Jewish polemical devices passed down a sentiment to the kings of Christendom that Jews were not to be tolerated within the same circles as Christians. But, as Tolan points out in the first chapter, Jewish and Christian life, at least in England, were deeply intertwined, and with Henry III so heavily dependent on Jewish money, the idea of separating from Jews completely was unappealing at best. But Henry III’s devotion to the Jews and their money quickly led to domestic trouble, of which Tolan writes in Chapter Three, “Simon de Montfort and the King’s Jews.” Simon de Montfort, famous for his actions in the Second Baron’s War, had in 1231 become the new Lord of Leicester and immediately expelled the town’s Jews. This was, in effect, a power move on Simon de Montfort’s part to protest Henry III’s attachment to his Jews, displaying that the Jews of England belonged not to the king, but to the local authorities. Tolan contextualizes this mini expulsion within the increase of anti-Jewish policy by Henry III’s government, despite his dependence on Jewish finances. By examining increasing anti-Jewish sentiment in England alongside the anti-Jewish violence that was occurring on the continent, Tolan centers the thirteenth century Jewish experience as one full of fear and worry for the future.

Chapter Four, “Oxford Jews and Christian Hebraism,” continues Tolan’s quest to document the intricacies of Jewish-Christian relations in England by centering Christian Hebrew education and Jewish ties to what would become the University of Oxford. Tolan writes, “Oxford’s Jewry and the schools grew side by side  [ . . . ] many students and teachers rented their lodgings from Jews,” indicating that the town/gown relationship was also a relationship between the Jewish inhabitants of the town and the Christian students of the colleges. Not just practically, but ideologically the Jews and Christians of Oxford intermingled on a scale unlike other towns in England at the time. Tolan uses this closeness to illustrate how easily conflict erupted and how permanent the damage was. The subject of Chapter Five, “From the Statutes of the Jewry to Little Hugh of Lincoln,” demonstrates the wider damage of conflicts like those which erupted in Oxford on the perception of Anglo-Jews during the 1250s. Tolan focuses specifically on the profound impact of the ritual murder libel accusation of Hugh of Lincoln, a boy whose body was discovered in 1255 and whose death was blamed on the Jews of Lincoln. In the wake of the accusation, Henry III became the first monarch to acknowledge validity in a ritual murder libel accusation when, of course, the accusation was entirely false. Because of his acknowledgement, eighteen Jews were executed as a punishment for Hugh’s death. Tolan writes of the betrayal between the Jews and the Crown irrevocably changing their relationship for the worse. And while the Jews suffered, the Crown and Church continued to disagree with the treatment of their biblical neighbors. 

Chapter Six, “Baronial Revolts and Anti-Jewish Violence,” sees Tolan’s focus continue to rest on the slow decline of Jewish opportunity in the latter half of the thirteenth century. He invokes the Second Baron’s War of the 1260s and the accompanying surge of anti-Jewish violence that plagued England’s Jewry (and their archae) as one of the final massive acts, though not mandated by the Crown, that English Jews had to survive. With his forces, Simon de Montfort, once again back in our narrative to antagonize Jews, destroyed Jewish communities across the country. In the parabola of Jewish life in England, Tolan writes that, even though the conflict ended with Jews allowed to remain in England, they would have “an eye uneasily turned toward the horizon,” acknowledging their downward trajectory. Tolan’s final chapter, “A Curse Upon Edom,” covers the final act of Jewish life in England, from Edward I’s ascension to his relative financial independence from the Jews to their expulsion in 1290. It’s a somber chapter, particularly as Tolan reflects again upon the fact that we have no surviving Jewish texts that describe the horrors faced by their community—at least, that describe specific horrors. He ends the chapter with a poem by Meir of Norwich, a Jew of the expulsion period who composed a damning polemic against the English treatment of his coreligionists. Meir notably omits mention of any specific event in favor of a heartened plea to God to save his people from their enemy—the English—in what Tolan describes as a call “not for release from prison or a return to his former life, but the coming of a messianic age.” 

While John Tolan relies predominantly on English sources in his account of Jewish-Christian connections in thirteenth century England, his clear commitment to centering the lived experiences of England’s Jews is laudable. As scholars of medieval Anglo-Jewish studies, working with the limited source material available implores us to find other, and sometimes creative, ways of reanimating the Anglo-Jewish past. Tolan does this successfully in England’s Jews.