I found myself unexpected moved—and surprised—by the story I
noted in some of the on-line news sources I frequent regarding the arrival of a
rabbi in the British city of York and her intention of leading the community of
Jewish people in that place in prayer this holiday season. And not only moved
and surprised, but also encouraged.
The pogroms that took countless Jewish lives in medieval
France, Germany, and England—both those connected directly to the Crusades and
those unrelated to them—have been forgotten by most. Even the names of the
sites of the worst massacres are unfamiliar even to historically-sensitive
Jewish souls: it’s the rare person these days who responds to the name of the
French town of Blois by remembering the murder of its Jewish families in 1170
or who thinks of Bonn as a place in which the Jewish population was massacred
by Crusaders in 1096 rather than as the town of Beethoven’s birth. Nonetheless,
the massacre at York occupies a special place, or should occupy a special
place, in our memory banks: it was there on the Shabbat before Pesach in 1190
that the entire Jewish community died, some at their own hands to avoid falling
into the hands of the anti-Semitic mob howling for their blood, others in the
fire that ensued after the mob set the castle in which the Jews had sought
refuge ablaze, and still others who surrendered with a promise to convert to
Christianity and who were then killed by the crowd anyway.
The backstory is complicated, but very interesting. The 1290
decree of King Edward I expelling all Jews from England is well known, as is
also the overturn of that edict 367 later by Oliver Cromwell in 1657. But less
well known is that there were flourishing, successful, and creative Jewish
communities throughout the British Isles before the edict of expulsion
successfully and apparently totally emptied England of its Jews in a way that
even the Nazis failed to manage in Germany. The names of its leaders have been
mostly forgotten and are remembered today only by medievalists and historians. But
the massacre at York was different and somehow retained its currency in the
consciousness of at least some students of Jewish history: the volume of dirges
that my congregation in Jerusalem uses on Tisha Be’av to this day contains an
elegy composed by one Menachem ben Jacob (d. 1203) commemorating the events
that took place in York. And we sing it too, or at least chant it, and attempt
in so doing to pay tribute to the martyrs of York.
Jews came to England in Norman times and mostly served as
bankers and money-lenders to the Gentile communities they found in that place. Jewish
people mostly chose to settle in towns where there were large royal palaces and
castles. (That detail rests at the intersection of cynicism and practicality:
the legal theory that permitted the residence of Jews in England in the first
place was undergirded by the principle that Jewish property ultimately belonged
to the crown and so, as a result, debts owed to Jews were to be collected by
the local royal authorities upon the death of the lender; this made it in the
crown’s best interests to keep the Jews alive and lending money freely, which
in turn led Jews to settle in the shadow of royal castles in which they could
take refuge if need be. And need frequently was.)
Richard I, later called Richard the Lionheart, was crowned
king of England in 1189 and soon announced his intention to join the Crusades.
Rumors of anti-Jewish edicts, none true, became to spread almost immediately,
as a result of which Jewish homes in London were destroyed and several
unfortunate Jewish souls forcibly converted to Christianity. Various
anti-Jewish assaults began to take place across England, including in York. And
then, just two years later, things became unbearable for the Jews of York.
Violence directed against Jews in that place was so
widespread that the leader of the community, a man known to history as Josce of
York, led the entire Jewish community to seek refuge in part of the local royal
castle called Clifford’s Tower. Days passed, then weeks. By March 16, the
situation was untenable. Surrender to the howling mob outside was unthinkable,
so the community’s French-born rabbi, Rabbi Yom-Tov of Joigny, suggested that
the Jews of York take their own lives rather than fall into the hands of their
would-be murderers. This actually happened—for the gruesome details, click here—on the very next day, March 17, 1190. Of those whose
courage failed, some perished when the castle was set on fire and the rest were
murdered by the mob. And so ended Jewish life in York, followed just exactly a
century later by the end of Jewish life in England until the days of Cromwell.
I’ve known this story my whole adult life. I was a teenager
when I read André Schwarz-Bart’s great novel, The Last of the Just, one of the truly great works
of twentieth-century Jewish literature and the first international bestseller with
a Shoah-based
theme. Basically stretching out its narrative arc between Jewish life in twelfth-century
England and in twentieth-century Poland, the book had a profound effect on my
adolescent self that lasted into adulthood and is still with me; the title of
my second novel, Light from Dead Stars, is taken from the first line of
Schwarz-Bart’s great book. And so, perhaps because my formative years as a
young Jewish man were so guided by that one book, York has always loomed large
for me as a milestone not only in Jewish history in the large sense of the
term, but also in my own internal Jewish history. I’ve recommended that book
many times in this space; I do so again now enthusiastically to all…and
especially to young Jewish people seeking to find their place in the ongoing saga
of the Jewish people.
So that is from whence derives my interest York. As a result,
I was primed to be interested when I read earlier this summer that, all these
centuries later that Jewish life has returned to York. A small congregation was
established there in 2014, the first in all these centuries. At first a tiny
conventicle, the community has grown to the point at which it became able to
bring in Rabbi Elisheva Salomo, most recently of California, to conduct
services on the High Holidays. It isn’t much. The community is still only
hoping to be able to raise the funds to support a full-time year-round rabbi.
And so it may sound—and will sound to most—like not much of a big deal at all:
a small Jewish community scraped together the funds to hire a rabbi for Rosh
Hashanah and Yom Kippur and is hoping to find more money in the future to turn
that appointment into a fulltime position.
But for me there is something inexpressibly hopeful about
this tiny news story. For me—and, I suspect for many—York was symbolic of anti-Jewish
terror so overwhelming as to make suicide the only possible refuge. The thought
that Jewish life could again take root in that soil—and not only take root but
begin to flourish, to grow, to assert itself in a place that the world knows as
a lovely medieval town but that Jews recall solely as a place of terrible
violence—there is, even for someone whose Jewish consciousness is as rooted as
is mine in the events of the Shoah, in that thought a glimmer of hope and, yes,
even confidence in the future. And it was for that specific reason that, when I
came across the story earlier this summer, I had the idea of saving it to share
with you in these weeks leading up to the holiday season.
It’s Elul, the month of introspection and reflection.
There’s a natural sense of somberness that attends the kind of self-analysis
traditionally undertaken in these weeks leading up to the holiday season. And
then a tiny story like this pops up. In a place of terribleness, hope. In a
place of misery and fear, worship. In a place in which Jewish life was totally
and absolutely eradicated for centuries upon centuries, a rabbi. So I offer
this story to you this week as a gift of hope in the future. And to encourage
you to face the holiday season with optimism and fortitude. And, yes, even with
courage.
