Tenenbaum Lecture Focuses on Medieval Expulsions

Although the forced expulsion of the Jewish population from Spain in 1492 by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella reshaped Jewish life in Europe, the forced removal of residents from several European countries evolved long before the action by the Spanish rulers.

How that happened and how expulsion of populations was accepted in medieval Europe was the topic of this year’s Tenenbaum lecture at Emory University’s Tam Institute of Jewish Studies.

This year’s guest lecturer was Dr. Rowan Dorin, who teaches history at Stanford University and is on the faculty of the Jewish studies program there. His topic was, “The Road To 1492 – Jews, Christians and the Spread of Mass Expulsions in Medieval Europe.”

Although uprooting populations and banishing them from areas where they had long lived was not that unusual in the ancient world, it was rare, according to Dr. Dorin, that people would be forced to live outside the boundaries of a particular empire. It was all but unknown in the Roman world and in the Byzantine and Ottoman empire of the East. But all that changed beginning in the 11th century in Europe. Instead of looking at the phenomenon of mass expulsion as a Jewish tragedy, Dr. Doran took a different point of view.

“What if we start not from the targets of persecution, but from the tools?,” the Stanford professor asked. “In other words, what if we frame Jewish expulsions not from the perspective of ‘what else was being done to Jews’ but from the perspective of ‘who else was being expelled?’”

He took as one of his examples the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290, during the reign of King Edward I. The order brought an end to England’s thriving Jewish community that would not be reestablished for another 400 years. But the expulsion that ended Jewish life for so long in England actually began when the king’s great-grandfather, nearly 150 years before, expelled all the foreign mercenaries who were serving in his army. Over time, other foreign communities were exiled, until in 1240, Edward father, Henry III, expelled foreign merchant bankers. It would be 30 years before Edward began a 20-year campaign of ridding himself of his Jewish population.

“King Edward follows suit upon taking the throne in 1272, first expelling Flemish merchants from the realm as part of a commercial dispute,” Dr. Dorin explained, “and then a year later expelling Italian merchant-bankers on charges of usury. Right after expelling these Italian merchants, Edward goes on to prohibit the kingdom’s Jews from lending at interest — i.e. from engaging in usury.”

The effort in Europe to prohibit the lending of money with interest took off in earnest two years later when Pope Gregory X called a General Council of the Catholic Church that issued a decree that ordered all secular and church officials to expel any foreigners who were engaged in usury. It was a major step forward, according to the professor, toward the banishment of Jews.

“Only two months after the close of the Second Council of Lyon, the bishop of Angers, in western France, promulgated a new collection of statutes,” Dr. Dorin commented. “Since it was clear, continued the bishop, that ‘the Jews of the diocese openly engaged in the depravity of usury, all clergy and ecclesiastical institutions were henceforth forbidden from renting houses to Jews, or indeed allowing Jews to reside anywhere on church lands.’”

Fifteen years later, the Jews, along with foreigners from Italy, some of whom were also money lenders, were expelled from the region.

It was edicts like this that led to the order in the late 15th century by the rulers of Spain to expel its Jewish population, estimated to be as large as 200,000 people from that country. But not before King Ferdinand. In his decree that Dr. Dorin quoted, which denounced the Jews, “They (the Jews) wickedly and mercilessly consume the wealth and property of Christians through their enormous and unbearable usury,” the Spanish document charged. “Given that those Christians who have come to another land to be usurers must be expelled from cities and towns … how much more should infidel usurers, seducers of Catholics and abettors of heretics, be expelled and kept apart from Catholics for the preservation and protection of both their souls and the Christian religion?”

So, as history unfolded in medieval Europe, whatever punishments fell on the Christians for money lending, Jews would also be punished, as they were, when they were banished from Spain.

“So, a canonical sanction devised two centuries earlier to slow the spread of Christian moneylending,” Dr. Dorin emphasizes, “comes to play a supporting role in the great act of intolerance against Jews that signaled the end of one age and the beginning of another.”