How the British Treated the Jews

89CHAPTER TENCults and the Rise of Anti-SemitismTHE OUTBURSTof ‘vengeance’ against Jews in 1009 was a stark reminderthat they had long been vulnerable to Christian prejudice and hostility. As far back as the second century AD, the Jews had, collectively, been accused ofthe murder of Jesus, the Son of God, in effect deicide. By the fifth centurythey had been excluded from public life. Their close-knit communities madethem easy to scapegoat and attack. In the 1090s there had been massacres ofthe Jewish populations of several European cities by passing crusaders.Guibert of Nogent records how, in Rouen, northern France, the crusaders‘herded the Jews into a certain place of worship, rounding them up by forceand guile and without distinction of age or sex put them to the sword’. In thischapter we will tell the story of one cult that was born within this climate ofsuspicion.A community of Jews had been brought to England by William theConqueror after his successful invasion of England in 1066. The communityoriginated in Rouen where Jews had long acted as moneylenders andchangers. These European Jews were a well-educated group and have beenseen by medievalists as ‘culturally far superior to their Christian counter-parts’,1largely due to their deep-rooted traditions of education and skills inliteracy and numeracy. They settled first in London but by 1159 nine otherJewish communities are known in England. One of these, numbering abouttwo hundred, was in Norwich, in eastern England, home of a flourishingtrade with north-western Europe and Rouen itself.The Jews were attractive to the Norman elite. Unlike the native Englishmany could speak French. They could loan money without breaking the rulesagainst usury to which Christians were subject, and change into English