'Oh God! Lords other than Thee have possessed us; the waters of treachery have almost ended us.

While Thou wast as one dumb, hiding Thy face - the Breaker came and smote mother upon children.

They were gathers together to the Fortress; together with those with them; but the Prince oppressed them, and the Enemy stood at his right hand.

We said ‘Plunder your property’. They replied, ‘No, we are come for a feastday’.

My bitter anger is against thee, King of the Isles, under whose robe is the Bloch on innocent souls.

May God visit my peoples slain on the bounds of Kittim: their lot be eternal life.’

These verses, written by a French Jew in the early years of the thirteenth century, are the most moving of all memorials to the single greatest tragedy in York history - the massacre and mass-suicide of the Jews of this city on the night of Shabbat ha-Gadol (16 March 1190). Ever since that night indeed, the slaughter on the site of what is now Clifford's Tower has been regarded by both Jews and Christians as the most shameful incident in the unhappy story of relations between their two races during the middle ages. The massacre of March 1190 has accordingly been described again and again by a long succession of Jewish and national historians with an ever-increasing degree of sophistication. Nor would one really wish it otherwise.

For anyone interested in medieval history, the role played by the Jews during the two centuries between their first arrival in England after the Norman Conquest and their expulsion from the country in 1290 must always be a fascinating topic. Living as we all do nowadays in a period of perennial and chronic ‘minority’ problems, we can hardly fail to be interests in how medieval Christendom dealt with the only important social, racial and religious minority to live within its midst. More than any other episode the York Massacre reminds us that although the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were not the darkest of all ages in the dark history of anti-Semitism, they were a good deal darker then we could wish.

But the history of the medieval York Jewry did not begin and end in March 1190; and it would be unfortunate if undue concentration on the great massacre, however understandable, should prevent us from seeing that history as a whole. For well over a hundred years the city of York sheltered one of the three or four largest and most influential Jewish communities in the whole of England, a community which has still not attracted the attention it deserves. Admittedly the extreme scarcity of documentary evidence for the period before 1190 makes it very difficult to generalise with confidence about the foundation and early history of the York Jewry: what evidence there is may even suggest that the presence of a large and active Jewish settlement in the city only dates from the 1170s and that the persecution of 1190 was directed not at a long-established but at a comparatively new body of immigrants into York. Paradoxically enough, the York Jewry was a good deal more prosperous during the century after 1190 than it was before the massacre. Within five years of that atrocity Jews had begun to return to the city; and they then rapidly proceeded to play a more prominent role in almost every sphere than had their martyred predecessors.

So abundant are the sources for is every chance that one day the history of the thirteenth-century York Jewry that it will be many years before its complete history can be written. Indeed one of the greatest and most unexpected pleasures of research into medieval Jewish history in England is that so many records survive of the activities of such a small minority of the population. It now seems doubtful whether there were ever more than 5000 or so Jews in medieval England at any time (a number which had certainly fallen to less than 3,000 by the eve of their expulsion in 1290); but no section of English society figures more prominently in the national governmental records for the reigns of Henry III and Edward I. To these generalisations York is certainly no exception; and its thirteenth-century Jewry is revealed to us as among the largest in the kingdom, one which enjoyed a period of remarkable wealth between the 1210s and 1250s (when on occasion it contributed even more in taxation than London) before entering a final age of slow and lingering decline which was itself cut abruptly short by Edward I’s expulsion of all the Jews from England in 1290. Throughout this period the Jewish community in York was dominated by a handful of all-powerful patriarchs; of these the most famous was the great Aaron of York, who died in 1268 after being first the most wealthy, and then the most ruthlessly taxes Jew in English history. But the task of reconstructing Jewish society in York during the lifetime of Aaron is still in its infancy; and there is every chance that one day detailed research into the family history of the thirteenth-century York Jews will transform our understanding of that society’s place in medieval city.  

How far is there any likelihood that archaeological discoveries will in time contribute something towards that deeper understanding? The honest answer must be that the solutions to most of the mysteries of the medieval York Jewry lie among the documents in the Public Record Office rather than in objects to be unearthed under the modern city. On the other hand, for the historian one of the greatest excitements of the recent efflorescence of medieval archaeology is the latter’s capacity to reveal the very unexpected at very short notice. The excavations of the York Archaeological Trust during the last four years have already done a good deal to confirm the view that the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries were ones of great territorial expansion and building in the city of York. The age of the medieval York Jewry coincided with the greatest of all boom periods in the city's history. Is there any hope that future archaeological investigation in York can produce more specific findings? Three main areas for speculation come inevitably to mind. What are the prospects for the discovery of Jewish objects or artifacts? of the remains of Jewish houses? and of the graves in the Jewish cemetery at York?

Most unpredictable of all of course is the possibility that one day an archaeologist's trowel will uncover an object identifiable as something which once belonged to a medieval York Jewry. Such a discovery would not only be highly unlikely but literally sensational, for as Moses Margoliouth wrote as long ago as 1851, ‘Few and far between are the traces of the old Hebrews in this realm.’ Since Margoliouth’s day, innumerable urban excavations in England have failed to produce a major medieval Jewish artefact: not one, for example, is recorded in the late Dr. Cecil Roth’s standard History of the Jews in England. At first sight this almost complete absence of identifiably Jewish objects (to which the only mayor exception is a bowl with a Hebraic inscription dragged out of the bottom of a Suffolk stream in the seventeenth century) might seem very remarkable. But one must remember that the Jewish population of medieval England was highly mobile at all times and well accustomed to moving its precious objects about the country: we know that the Jews expelled from England in 1290 carried their most valuable material possessions with them across the channel for ever. As for the medieval York Jew's ordinary household effects, these were most certainly indistinguishable from those of a prosperous French-speaking burgess of this period; for it is now well established that the life-style of the medieval English Jew - always a town-dweller - was in many ways very like that of his richest Christian neighbours.

The extreme scarcity of comparative material in the way of medieval Jewish artifacts presents the modern urban archaeologist with an acute variation on a classic problem. Unless the object he discovers has a Hebraic conscription (and even then of course there is the possibility that it had been brought into England by a Christian) he has little chance of associating it with a Jewish community. More dangerous still is the temptation to identify as an object associated with the medieval York Jewry an article which dates from a much later period. Oddly enough one of the most remarkable archaeological finds ever more in York provides a locus classicus of this particular danger. When old Layerthorpe Bridge and Postern were being demolished in 1829-30, an allegedly medieval Jewish amulet was found in the cavity of a foundation stone there. This so-called ‘York Medal’ subsequently became the subject of much heated controversy within Victorian antiquarian circles, most Jewish scholars of the person being understandably anxious to argue that it was an authentic relic of the medieval York Jewry. Thanks to the temporary (but one hopes not permanent) loss of this medal among the collections of the Yorkshire Museum, the issue is bound to remain somewhat open. But certainly various nineteenth-century descriptions and illustrations of this amulet raise the uncomfortable suspicion that it is of sixteenth or seventeenth-century date. The medallion clearly takes the classic cabbalistic form of a talisman inscribed with the magic Hebraic numbers (adding up to the number 136 in all directions) and an invocation to Jupiter. Such amulets, presumably worn for their supposed healing properties, are by no means uncommon and seem to have been at the height of their popularity in England during the Tudor and Stuart periods.

It will be difficult for the archaeologist to recognise an object deriving from the medieval York Jewry, one would guess that it will be impossible for him to recognise at sight the house of a medieval York Jew. The remains of such houses certainly must being exist below and even above ground level in many parts of the modern city. Thanks to a wealth of contemporary references (including one to the ‘large houses like royal palaces’ inhabited by the Benedict and Josce, the two leaders of the York community on the eve of the 1190 massacre), it is well known that the medieval Jews were among the pioneers of stone domestic architecture in England. But recent research, not least in York itself, has revealed that stone houses were by no means uncommon in several early medieval English towns. The days have certainly gone when historians and archaeologists could fall into the trap of believing that any early medieval urban dwelling in stone must have been built by a Jew: we now know that there is not a scrap of evidence that the fabulously wealthy Aaron of Lincoln (d. 1186) ever lived in the stone house at Lincoln which still bears his name and which not long ago was acclaimed as the ‘oldest specimen of domestic architecture in this country still in occupation’. The identification of the remains of the houses of the medieval Jews of York will therefore always be a very difficult and hazardous undertaking. References to property owned or lived in by the Jews of medieval York are certainly abundant in surviving records; but sadly few of these references are at all geographically precise. However as so many of these properties were bought up by the richest Christian citizens of York at the end of the thirteenth century, there are real grounds for hoping that it will eventually prove possible to establish the continuous history of several ex-Jews' houses throughout the late medieval period. In this field, as in so many others, a detailed topographical survey of information relating to domestic buildings within medieval York (a survey yet to be seriously got under way) is likely to prove the most fruitful area for really meaningful cooperation between future local historian and archaeologists.

As it is, we already know that the York Jews held property widely dispersed throughout the medieval city, in streets like Micklegate, Fossgate, Hungate, Patrick Pool, Walmgate, Pavemen, Castlegate, St. Saviourgate and Feltergayle (the modern Fetter Lane). But much of the heaviest concentration of residential Jewish housing lay in the central section of Coney Street not far from the point where the significantly named Jubbergate (which occurs in the form 'Joubrettegat' as early as 1280, a decade before the Jews were finally expensed from the city) joins it near the western end of Spurriergate. It was in this area, between Coney Street and the Ouse that Aaron of York had his most important mansion in the city; and here too that was located the Jewish synagogue in the city. Archaeological investigation of the area between Coney Street and the river, now as then at the commercial heart of the city, is always likely to be conducted piecemeal; but Mr. Richard Hall's excavation at 39-41 Coney Street in 1974 (INTERIM Issue 2-2) has already raised some intriguing possibilities. Could the exceptionally large early medieval wall then exposed and subsequently interpreted as a revetment wall have been built to protect the Jewish houses on the south side of Coney Street from flooding by the river? Only when we learn a good deal more about the Christian owners of property in that area of York, both during and immediately after the period of Jewish settlement in the city, is this a question we may begin to answer.

Considerably more straightforward - and all in all much the most interesting archaeological prospect for any historian interests in the Jews of medieval York - is the site of Jewbury, immediately outside the northeastern walls of the city. Although the precise boundaries of Jewbury have tended to remain extremely vague since its first recorded appearance as ‘le Jeubyry' in 1290, there can be no doubt whatsoever that at still contains the cemetery of the medieval York Jews. Not mentioned as a Jewish burial place until about 1230, Jewbury was almost certainly first used as a cemetery by the York Jews soon after 1177: in that year the ‘lord king (Henry II) gave a licence to the Jews of his land to have a cemetery in any city of England beyond the walls of the cities, where they might buy a place for burying their dead reasonably and in a suitable spot; for previously all dead Jews used to be carried to London to be buried. Comprising a house (no doubt occupied by the ‘Jacob of the Cemetery’ who figures in thirteenth-century records) and an acre of land as well as the cemetery itself, ‘le Jeubyry' was probably the most important Jewish burial-ground outside London. Still being used by the Jews of Lincoln as well as those of York as late as 1290, it offers better opportunities for archaeological investigation than any of the other nine recorded Jewish cemeteries in medieval England. The precise location of many of the latter remains extremely obscure; and in the case of the other most interesting example, the Jewish cemetery on the site of what is now the Oxford Botanical Garden, it is hard to believe that the university authorities will ever surrender the claims of the gardener’s hoe to those of the archaeologist's trowel.

At York the situation is - in the long team - much more promising. Although the exact location of the Jewish cemetery in so extensive an area may be by no means easy, Jewbury itself (now cleared of Victorian terrace property) is certainly one of the most interesting and neglected areas or extra-mural York. Despite the detailed and excellent researches of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, the precise reason for the abrupt change in alignment of the city wall at Tower 32 (known in the later middle ages as ‘the new tower on the corner towards le Jubiry') deserves further elucidation. Could the area of Jewbury have had an interesting pre-conquest history? and is it possible that the ancient place-name of Layerthorpe derives not (as modern scholars have suggested) from the old Scandinavian leira (‘clayey place’) but from the Old English leger (‘grave, burial place’)? Above all of course there is the prospect of unearthing the graves of the medieval York Jews themselves. As always in these matters, it would be unwise to be too optimistic. When professor W. F. Grimes excavated the aite of the pre-expulsion cemetery of the London Jews outside Cripplegate in 1948-49, the results were hardly rewarding: ‘there could be no doubt that the graves had been deliberated and carefully emptied and backfilled with made or garden soil’. Unless, like Dr. Roth, one believes that the Jews of medieval England systematically dug up the graves of their ancestors big carried their bones with them into exile 1290, Jewbury should have a deal more to offer. Jewish tombstones, of which at various times at least six have come to light in London, are easy enough identify; and one can accordingly look forward hopefully to the day when the York Archaeological Trust is sufficiently free the more pressing needs of ‘rescue’ operations to turn its attention to this most intriguing area of the city. Would it be even more fanciful to hope that one day a pleasant garden and a few trees might replace the present peculiarly unsightly civil car park on the site as a more appropriate memorial to the ‘antiquum cimiterium Iudeorum’ of Jewbury?

R. B. Dobson

Dr R. B. Dobson is a Reader in medieval history at the University of York and is a member of the Trust’s Executed Committee. He is the author of The Jews of Medieval York and the Massacre of March 1190, Borthwick Paper no. 45, published by by St. Anthony Press, York.