Christians and Jews in Angevin England

Christians and Jews in Angevin England: The York Massacre of 1190, Narratives and Contexts, edited by Sarah Reese Jones and Sethina Watson. York, York Medieval Press and Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, The Boydell Press, 2013. xx, 351 pp. $90.00 US (cloth). On the night of 16 March 1190, in Passover week, a group of some 150 Jews sought refuge from an angry mob in Clifford's Tower, York. By morning, all were dead. Several of the unfortunate victims took their own lives rather than surrender to the fury of the attacking mob; others fell under the blows of the townsmen. In 1941, the Oxford-trained historian Cecil Roth explored briefly the events that led up to the brutal attack. His History of the Jews in England (Oxford, 1941) generated enthusiastic scholarly interest in this event and others like it. Before long, Barrie Dobson had authored several short studies of the York massacre in a series of pamphlets; these in turn helped to launch a generation of scholarship that sought to understand the experience of the Jews of England more generally over the course of the two hundred-odd years during which the medieval crown offered them protection. Roth and his early successors discovered that the attack on the Jews of York generated a great deal of discussion by medieval observers; indeed, a plentiful corpus of extant chronicle materials revealed that the slaughter of 1190 was but one event in a series of clashes that periodically disturbed relations between the Jews and their Christian neighbours throughout the realm. Roth's early explorations of the experience of the medieval English Jews soon formed the focus of vigorous historiographical debate. More important still, it encouraged scholars to undertake comprehensive studies of an enormous body of extant record material generated by the special status that was accorded the Jews at English law. In many respects, then, this collection of essays revisits well-trodden historical ground. Nevertheless, it offers an assessment of a single historical moment--and its aftermath--that is fresh, exciting and wholly original. The promise of the volume lies above all in its multidisciplinary approach to the terrible events of 1190. The book consists of some sixteen essays, plus a lengthy introduction and a conclusion. Several of the essays were originally delivered at a three-day conference held in York in 2010, the central theme of which was the massacre, its significance within the wider Anglo-Jewish world of the late twelfth century, and its legacy in later medieval England and Europe. As the editors' preface explains, the conference sought to reconstruct the mental, social, cultural, and confessional worlds in which the Jews of York lived, conducted business, made friends with, and fought, the Christians whose streets and public spaces they shared. It was also designed to highlight the potential inherent in the study of a single event by experts in fields as varied as history, archaeology, literary criticism, linguistics, exegetical studies, paleography, and museum studies. The volume of essays that the conference inspired more than accomplishes these goals. Ironically, perhaps, its most significant conclusion is that there are no simple explanations for the horrors that occurred on the night of 16 March 1190

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