JEWS’ PERSECUTION

Taranaki Daily News, 7 November 1935, Page 13

JEWS’ PERSECUTION

ENGLAND AFTER CONQUEST. WERE THEY BAD AS NAZIS? It will help us to understand the way the world has come if we remember that the ferocious persecution of the Jews in Germany is like an echo of events in Britain centuries ago, says the Children’s Newspaper. _ . We were just as bad as the Nazis in this. The Germans have sent a girl to a concentration camp for embracing the Jewish faith; we burnt an Oxford student alive for the same offence. But that was in 1222, not in 1935.

Jews appeared in England after the Conquest, and on very strange terms. They were the personal property of the king; his estate consisted of forests and Jews, who were to him mere chattels. Our Church laws forbade men to lend money on usury; the Jews were not bound by the law, so from the outset they were the great financiers. Feudal lords employed them to manage their estates; William Rufus, claiming the revenues of bishoprics to which he prevented bishops from being appointed, shocked the public conscience by putting Jews in charge of such estates. Brilliant scholars, doctors, scientists, mathematicians arose in their ranks, but, no matter how brilliant, Jews had no rights. Kings and feudal lords pillaged them, adding dreadful tortures as

an aid to the discovery and extraction of their wealth. Nevertheless they established themselves in various centres known as Jewries, and had their own synagogues and schools, and although Magna Carta drew attention to them by forbidding them to seize the estates of heirs, so showing that they were the only people dealing in money at the time, there was no mass persecution until the reign of Richard Lionheart. The preaching friars inflamed the peasants against the Jews, and many a monastic building had its origin in a Jewish synagogue from which the owners had been driven and murdered. So terrible did the conditions become tliat the Jews vainly begged to be allowed to leave England. They suffered a second bondage, forbidden to take interest on the money they lent, kept out of trade by the guilds, unable to labour on the land, simply because they were Jews. Toward the close of. the 13th century all known Jews were expelled, 17,000 going forth on a new exodus, many to be deliberately wrecked at sea so that their murderers might enjoy their property. Many remained, professing conversion to Christianity, and surrendering their all to the king. Still more pretended to be Spaniards, and when in 1655 a deputation arrived from Holland to plead with Cromwell for their readmittance, a body of supposed Spaniards, who were really Jews secretly worshipping in London, were among the petitioners who moved Cromwell’s heart to reopen England to their race. He, of course, did so, and Jews have been free in England since.