Abstract
This article explores the relation between the expulsion of Jews from medieval England and France and state building, geo-politics, regime styles, and taxation in these countries. Jews were evicted as a result of attempts by kings to manage royal insecurity, refashion relations between state and society, and build more durable systems of taxation within the territories they claimed as theirs. As they engaged in state building and extended their ties, often conflictual, to key societal and political actors, Jews became financially less important but more visible as outsiders, becoming a liability for the crown. Similar mechanisms were at work despite important differences distinguishing England’s growing regime of rights and representation and France’s emergent absolutist patrimonialism.
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Notes
Bouvines did not produce a complete or crisp break, as the English Crown maintained control over Poitou until 1226 and episodically over Gascony until 1453 (having been restored to England in the Treaty of Paris of 1303.
Tilly mentions the expulsions in Europe as a way to homogenize in one paragraph in Coercion and Capital, and European States AD 990–1990 (New York: Blackwell, 1990), p. 107.
A second major treatment of the contrast between parliamentary and absolutist regimes is Brian M. Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
A tallage “was an intermittent tax paid either in money or in kind by the direct feudal subjects of rulers and was spent at the discretion of the ruler.” See Judith Green, The Aristocracy of Norman England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 240.
From the evidence at hand, it is not possible to know precisely whether Edward responded to the knights or offered the arrangement in anticipation of their well-known wishes.
It is interesting that Louis IX never gave credence the notion of Jewish crimes against Christian children, much more interested to accumulate moral capital as he battled Jews on usury.
See also Jordan (1998), pp. 4–5.
Bisson argues that the term “Estates-General” is still useful as applied to Philip the Fair’s assemblies. He points out that “These consultations were indeed the first of a long series of national or central assemblies attended by men and communities of the three great orders of French society” (pp. 558–559).
See also Ertman (1997).
Jews were recalled by Louis X in 1315, the first son of Philip IV to take the throne. Louis X had accepted the Jews who had been expelled by his father into Navarre where he ruled. As the new King of France, Louis confronted similar economic demands and recalled the Jews in order to boost the finances of the monarchy. Jews paid for their reentry: 22,500 pounds and a yearly subvention of 10,000 pounds. Furthermore, they were allowed to collect on debts before 1306, but on the condition that 2/3 of their income go to the Crown. For the first time in Capetian history Louis X offered the Jewish community a specific charter of protection, regulation, and readmission, but only for 12 years. Between 1326 and 1327, as this contract expired, Jews again left. By 1359, it is said that Jews were recalled, but very few came back.
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Barkey, K., Katznelson, I. States, regimes, and decisions: why Jews were expelled from Medieval England and France. Theor Soc 40, 475–503 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-011-9150-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-011-9150-8