Gerard McSweeney wrote:
> I believe the answer is that, as Christians were not allowed to be
> money-lenders, one could say that it referred to the Jews by implication but
> not as what we should term anti-Semitism, specifically.
> G Mc Sweeney
As well as 1215 being the year of Magna Carta, it was also across Europe the
year of the Fourth Lateran Council, four of whose decrees referred to Jews. As
a result, for the first time, Jews in all Christian countries had to wear a
distinctive badge to single them out: boys over the age of twelve had to wear it
in their hats; women in their bonnets. The great Jewish historian Heinrich
Graetz (writing over sixty years before the Nazi cattle trucks rolled into
Auschwitz) pointed to 30 November 1215 as the day the Jews in Europe were forced
to take the first step toward becoming things.
The Magna Carta was sealed just twenty-five years after the events at Clifford's
Tower, York, when the many of the city's Jews committed suicide when they saw
there was no escape from the Christian mob that forced them to seek safety
there; the remainder, including the women and children, were brutally massacred.
The Magna Carta was also sealed just forty years before the execution without
trial of 18 of the 92 Jews arrested for the so-called "ritual murder" of Hugh
of Lincoln whose body had been found in a well in the house of a Jew named
Jopin.
The Magna Carta was sealed, therefore, in the midst of a period when, all over
Europe, Jews were suffering at the hands of their Christian compatriots, but
whether any of this was "what we should term anti-Semitism, specifically" is not
for me to say.
Malcolm Shifrin
Leatherhead
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