York

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.