The Expulsions from England and from France

The English community was young—it had come with the Normans—and from the start lived as royal property: the crown taxed it extraordinarily and promised protection in return. The protection failed: the blood libel of Norwich (4904), the massacre at York (4950), where Jews besieged in Clifford's Tower chose death over baptism, and the Statute of the Jewry of 5035, which banned lending without offering any other livelihood. By 5050 the community was too poor to be useful, and Edward I signed the edict of expulsion; it took effect on the Ninth of Av. By current estimates two to three thousand people left within three months (older sources said sixteen thousand); one shipmaster set a group down on a sandbank and sailed away, leaving them to drown. Jews would not live in England openly for nearly four hundred years.

France ended in 5066. Philip IV, always short of money, struck without warning: at dawn Jews across the kingdom were arrested simultaneously, given a month to leave, and stripped of everything—houses, goods, bonds, books. About a hundred thousand departed, among them descendants of Rashi and the last Tosafist academies, carrying manuscripts and rite into Provence, Germany, Spain and Italy.

In one generation two great centres of the Ashkenazi world vanished, and the weight of Jewish learning moved east—to Germany, and then to Poland.