Pod Insights Gone Medieval The Jews of Norwich About this episode The chilling discovery of a medieval well in Norwich, filled with the remains of 17 Jewish adults and children, opened a window into the lived reality of historical antisemitism. What do these findings tell us about the forces that shaped Jewish life and loss in medieval England?
Dr. Eleanor Janega and Matt Lewis continue their exploration of Norwich, uncovering the rich, and often heartbreaking, story of the city’s once-thriving Jewish community. Dr. Oren Margolis joins Eleanor to trace the journey from the arrival of Jews after the Norman Conquest through centuries of resilience, discrimination, and ultimately expulsion in 1290.
More:
Antisemitism in Medieval Europe
Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/antisemitism-in-medieval-europe/id1564113746?i=1000664575746
Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/3a0cUBgcaEi0bVcOQMHeH2
Julian of Norwich
Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/julian-of-norwich-englands-first-woman-writer/id1564113746?i=1000614545675
Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/4D4iJhcQJzzANiIoyOI7Qr
Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega and Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.
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0:01 Matt Lewis? From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Yanega, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
0:42 Speaker 01 Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared, and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding, and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing, and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasiapro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.
1:20 Eleanor Janega? Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanega, and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were, and how we got here.
1:57 Eleanor Janega? Since our last episode when Matt and I visited Norwich Castle, we've stayed in Norwich to uncover more of its extraordinary medieval history. We're standing next to an avenue of old trees. Here, the air is really still, almost reverent.
2:16 Eleanor Janega? Around us, there's lots of gorgeous old headstones, some of them kind of getting swallowed into the shrubbery behind them. At the very far end of the cemetery, past the older Victorian monuments and the quiet ranks of war graves, there's a simple memorial. It's modest, but powerful. And it marks the resting place of the remains of seventeen Jewish men, women, and children, whose remains were found discarded in a medieval well here in Norwich.
2:50 Eleanor Janega? It's set at the end of the ranks of other memorials, and just behind it, there's a tangle of ivy, holly, and bay trees. It's dotted with small pebbles, tokens of remembrance left by visitors who know the story.
3:06 Eleanor Janega? There's a really palpable weight here. It's not a fear. It's more like solemn recognition. Recognition of the shadows of religious persecution at last honoured.
3:20 Eleanor Janega? It was only in 2013 that these seventeen souls were finally laid to rest, more than eight centuries after the massacre that destroyed them. Their bones were given the dignity of a burial that had been denied them in death, by violence, and in death again by erasure. They had lain, forgotten at the bottom of a well, just unceremoniously stacked like discarded refuse in an unmarked grave, sixty-one metres beneath the ground, in a pitch-black tomb that they did not choose.
3:54 Eleanor Janega? So Matt, what do we know about this massacre? And how did it come about?
3:59 Matt Lewis? Well, we know that this all really begins in February of 1190, when Christian crusaders are about to head off to Jerusalem for the Third Crusade. But they decided that before they went to fight the Saracens, they could identify an enemy closer to home to deal with first. On the 6th of February, they came here to Norwich. The medieval chronicler Ralph de de Keteau wrote these words with a kind of chilling brevity. He wrote, "All the Jews who were found in their own houses at Norwich were butchered. Butchered like animals, a family or families destroyed in an instant of religious fanaticism,
4:41 Matt Lewis? so absolute that their demise was never even dignified with the courtesy of a proper grave."
4:48 Matt Lewis? For more than 800 years, those 17 men, women, and children remained in darkness. But in 2004, when construction workers started excavation in the centre of Norwich to build a shopping centre, a human skull tumbled into their equipment. And suddenly, the well that had swallowed these people whole gave up its dark secret. DNA analysis revealed three of them as sisters. Another was a toddler with red hair alongside their mother and father. The most advanced forensic science was able to connect these medieval dead to modern Ashkenazi Jewish populations.
5:30 Eleanor Janega? So today on Gone Medieval, we're telling the story of medieval Norwich's once thriving Jewish community. Of how religious conspiracy theories, the blood libels, a specifically medieval lie, could turn a prosperous minority into hunted prey. Of a reconciliation that took over 800 years to attempt, but which finally honoured both the murdered and those who survived. So let's just take a moment to lay a pebble on the memorial.
6:30 Eleanor Janega? Now, to find out more about the pogrom that saw an end to Norwich's thriving Jewish community, I'm going up to the campus of the University of East Anglia and its Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts to meet Dr Orin Margulis, Associate Professor of Renaissance Studies. He's been leading a campaign to create a Centre for Jewish History and Heritage at UEA and is a trustee of Jurnet's House, which, in partnership with the city, aims to preserve and restore the oldest extant identified Jewish residents in England and promote Jewish cultural heritage in Norwich. So Matt, I'll catch up with you later.
7:34 Eleanor Janega? Coming up to the Sainsbury Centre here. Ah, there is Orin!
7:39 Speaker 03 Hi!
7:40 Eleanor Janega? Hello!
7:41 Speaker 03 Good to see you.
7:41 Eleanor Janega? Good to see you! Thank you so much for meeting me!
7:44 Speaker 03 Well, thank you for coming. Welcome to UEA, welcome to Sainsbury Centre.
7:47 Eleanor Janega? It's exciting!
7:48 Speaker 03 Okay, let's go in.
7:54 Eleanor Janega? All right, Orin, very basic one to start us out. Best possible way to discuss the Jewish community in Norwich from the beginning. How did this particular community come to be here? Where did they originate from?
8:08 Speaker 03 Well, that's a very interesting question. Because, of course, where Jews originate from, if we're going back in our previous thousand years, of course, Jews originate in Judea, originate in Jerusalem, from the people that were there in the time of the temple. And afterwards, when the temple in Jerusalem is destroyed, Jews remain in the region and so on. It becomes increasingly difficult for Jewish communities to live there through the early Middle Ages. And communities are moving through the Mediterranean world, through the developing Islamic world and so on. Also, then, by around the year 1000, we see Jews coming up from Italy into Central and then Northern and Western Europe.
8:51 Speaker 03 Most immediately, the Jews of Norwich are coming from Normandy. And that's notable because the Jewish population of medieval England comes after the Norman conquest and comes on the invitation of William the Conqueror.
9:08 Eleanor Janega? So why does William the Conqueror have such an interest in bringing the Jewish community over here? Is it just like more Normans is better? Or is it specifically we want Jewish Normans?
9:18 Speaker 03 Well, I mean, to the extent that they're Normans because the Jewish community in Normandy, of which there's been some really excellent scholarship that's been done, really interesting, with centers like Rouen that were really important centers. But it's part of this Northern French Jewish community, which produces some of the leading Jewish scholars and commentators of the medieval period. This is the world of Rashi, the great biblical commentator. And Normandy is part of that culture world. The Jews that come are, for the most part, they're invited as, they come as merchants and as financiers. That's the purpose for inviting them. But of course, communities don't live on commerce and finance alone. When Jewish communities come,
10:02 Speaker 03 they come also with the people that will provide for Jewish life in England, in places like Norwich, in places like London and Winchester and other English cities. This involves the butchers and the, that's an important one in a Jewish community.
10:18 Eleanor Janega? Of course, yeah.
10:18 Speaker 03 That's a special task. They come with all the stuff that you need for life. And we have records of the Jewish community of medieval Norwich that show the diversity of occupations that people had.
10:30 Eleanor Janega? So this is something that I find really interesting because what is really fun about these... Urban Jewish communities in England is we do have really great records for them.
10:40 Speaker 03 We do.
10:40 Eleanor Janega? Right? Because they are so particularly tied up with royal favor that it lets us kind of drill down a little bit more and find out way more about them than we know about, you know, I guess, generalized rural communities elsewhere.
10:54 Speaker 03 Yeah, and that's really interesting. And Eleanor, you've said that they have royal favor. That's in a context, however, where there's a lot of things Jews can't do. So Norwich is a city that it is settled in the Saxon period, but the building of Norwich Castle and the development of effectively a new town around the marketplace that I think you're going to be going to.
11:19 Eleanor Janega? Yeah.
11:19 Speaker 03 Is crucial too. And because that whole world, that civic world of guilds and the developing world of civic government that we associate with so much of the Middle Ages, is a world that is, however, close to Jews. Jews are not members of guilds. Jews aren't part of those city corporations. So what they do have is a relationship directly to the crown. But it's not so removed because the heart of the Jewish community of Norwich was right beside the marketplace in this, off the street now called Haymarket. So it was right at the heart of town, even if they could not take part in those civic institutions.
11:57 Eleanor Janega? So this is really interesting because we have this whole big community that comes over like other big communities of people from Normandy. Why are they settling in Norwich? Like, what is it about Norwich that you can have a huge community of people come over like this?
12:13 Speaker 03 Yeah. Well, let's, I mean, we should just be careful when we're talking about numbers. We're talking about about numbers that are in the hundreds that settle in Norwich. But that is sizable. I mean, when one thinks of the population, again, historical demographics are challenging, but it is a sizable percentage of the population. It has a number of things going for it that are attractive to it. First of all, it's effectively a new town. It's effectively a development town around the marketplace and the castle. It's, in that sense, it's also a royal town in that sense. And it's Also a town that has just become the Episcopal Sea. And for the eastern part of the country, the diocese moves to Norwich in the in the later 11th century.
12:55 Speaker 03 And Jews are involved in the financing of works on the cathedral. It's also geographically, it's at a point of close and easy access to some of the continental centers. Most of the medieval English Jewish communities of significance are at places with sea access to the continent. Those remain really important links. The Jewish community in medieval England is never really an isolated community. It is always relatively small, but in close relationship with those centers in Normandy and in northern France, and also with Spain, too. The great scholar Ibn Azra famously comes to London as well, too, in the 12th century.
13:38 Speaker 03 So it's a community that is for which it's always important to think about those links. There's a reason the Jews of medieval Norwich, from what we can tell, speak French as their vernacular language.
13:49 Eleanor Janega? Well, there's a lot of that about, though.
13:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, that's true. But but there's a reason that there's a reason that they they do because their lives are not removed from that world.
14:00 Eleanor Janega? So what's life like in the Jewish community here in Norwich? You're set up right by this very bustling market square. You're in a very up and coming city. But what does it sort of feel like to be one of the the Jewish people in this town? Well, what are kind of facilities are they constructing? Like, what are they using, I guess is my question.
14:21 Speaker 03 Well, this is a great question because our knowledge of the medieval Jewish community has changed. The physical space of the medieval Jewish community has changed significantly. Now, from these records that we've been talking about, it's been possible to understand a bit about who lived in which houses. I've talked about a Jewish community and a concentration in this area near the market. It's not a ghetto. Jews are not required to live there. That's not something of that we see characteristically of the Middle Ages. But it is it is a a density of the population. Because of those community institutions that we're talking about, things like the ritual slaughterer, the ritual bath, which is very important.
15:04 Speaker 03 That's the ritual immersion is extremely important for women especially. So things that will make the community concentrate as well as protection. But what's become interesting to, I mean, further is, so of course, there was also a synagogue that was there in this site. And that was a stone building, not that common here. Oh. Stone buildings mean that you had to import your building materials. So there was a synagogue. But it appears, and this has been one of these great kind of detective work cases. And it's slightly complicated, but based on finds in Rouen and reading sources in light of what those finds suggest to us. So rereading sources in light of what we can now know
15:48 Speaker 03 gives us an idea of what these sources actually mean. It appears that there wasn't just a synagogue in Norwich, but there was also a yeshiva in Norwich. Now, a yeshiva, yes, exactly. A yeshiva is an academy of scholars, of Jewish scholars studying Talmud, studying the oral law. You can't, that's actually changes our perspective of this place because you can't have a yeshiva. A synagogue you can have is run by a community, is run by a kahila. It's not like today where you hire a rabbi. The synagogue is run by a kahila. You have, but to have a yeshiva, you need a concentration of scholars. Yeah. So that's one other piece to the story. We have a concentration of scholars that's here. And it's quite likely that one of the bodies of commentary on the Talmud from the Middle Ages,
16:33 Speaker 03 this group of texts called the Tosafot, was penned in Norwich, a place that the texts referred to with a kind of inversion as by the name Gornish. So that's, you know, if we're thinking of what people are doing, that's also something that's going on here. Torah scholarship. Isaac Jurnet and his father, Jurnet of Norwich, also called Eliab, are identified in Hebrew sources with the name as well, Nadiv, which means benefactor. So these are people, wealthy people in the community that we do know were also financiers. But benefactor.
17:09 Speaker 03 refers to their role as benefactors of scholarship in the community.
17:13 Eleanor Janega? Well, I mean, this says a lot, right? Because by the time you have a holy yeshiva and you are, you've got the resources and a large enough community both to be holding classes and bring people in that really tells us that this is this is a really thriving group. But I guess I have a question just going back a little bit. You mentioned a few times now that there are some members of the community that are financiers. What is it that this particular group is offering in terms of services to the rest of the population in Norwich?
17:46 Speaker 03 In Norwich, insofar as we have records of this, we're talking about one of the most significant financiers in medieval England in the form of Isaac Jernit of Norwich and his son Isaac Jernit. They do have holdings not only here, but also in King's Lynn and other places. We're talking about financing. We're talking about, in this case, financing the construction of the cathedral.
18:07 Eleanor Janega? Wow, okay. Yeah, serious money.
18:11 Speaker 03 Yeah.
18:11 Eleanor Janega? Wow, okay. Yeah, so, and this is, this is one of these things where in terms of financing, I think that people don't really understand the difficulties that medieval Christians have created for themselves in terms of financing in the medieval world, right? Because there are particular rules within Christianity about money lending and the concept of what Christians call usury, right? Can you tell us a little bit about what that means? And how it is that Jewish people are able to get Christians out of this mess they've created?
18:49 Speaker 03 Well, in some ways, the, the answer is, is less dramatic than the whole story around it. This whole myth of the Jewish money lender as some kind of, some kind of figure so often of antisemitic discourse later on is exactly, as you say, it's something that we would consider entirely normal, which is means of providing credit for larger projects. And so you don't have to just spend what you can raise in that particular moment. That's entirely normal. Jewish law provides for loans, especially beyond the Jewish community. And this, this is one of the reasons, this is one of, as it were, one of the services that Jewish communities are called on to provide.
19:30 Speaker 03 It's also one of, it's one of the reasons that it seems that for the most part, Jews lived. Broadly speaking, quite decent lives when they were going about and living their lives. It's also one of the circumstances that made Jewish life always contingent and always at risk.
19:51 Eleanor Janega? Yeah, could we talk about that a little bit? You know, I think it's so difficult because I never want to make it seem when I'm talking about Jewish medieval life as though the only thing about them, oh, the only thing about Jewish people is that they're facing, you know, violence and oppression because there's so many interesting things they're doing as well. But, I mean, let's be real, there is still this kind of ongoing, I don't know, I guess you can kind of characterize it almost as resentment sometimes that some Christians have towards Jewish communities?
20:24 Speaker 03 Well, I mean, there's no way around it. I mean, I think it's so important that we understand Jewish history as not just a series of suffering, the old sufferings and scholars' history. It's important that we don't just do that and that we, we give in history a space for Jewish agency. At the same time, it's, it's important never to forget that Jews are a subordinate and subjugated population, that throughout our period, throughout the world in this period. And we can keep both those things in mind. You've mentioned Christian resentment. There is no doubt that resentment does play a role and resentment of others and fear of the other and so on.
21:05 Speaker 03 But there are also things particular to Christianity and indeed to Islam as well too, that mean that Judaism represents a problem. And so there's also a basis in an anti-Judaism as well too, that will characterize, so when we, all of those things are true, resentment, other, fear of others, these financial issues that we've been talking about, all those things are true, but there's a good seedbed to draw upon, which is theological.
21:36 Eleanor Janega? Yeah, and I suppose that this is one of those things that we do see across the period. You know, you've mentioned we've got some big, well, household names if you're a medieval historian, I guess. Like, you know, we have like real Jewish thinkers and scholars. And you see particularly at a very high level of theologians, like a lot of very fruitful scholarship, going back and forth, you know, not just, I think that people tend to talk about Iberia and the Jewish populations there, and quite rightly too, but certainly here as well. You know, this is, this is a sort of hotbed of scholasticism here in England. And we, we've got big names coming and going back and forth. And I guess here in Norwich, we've got big names like Jurnet, who are making these things possible, right?
22:17 Eleanor Janega? And so it's interesting because you have a collection of people who, yeah, they, they do become wealthy, but they're providing a service that people want. You know, people want a cathedral here in Norwich, yeah. And one of my favorite cathedrals in England, too, love Norwich Cathedral. And, you know, who's gonna pay for it? That's, that's the question.
22:36 Speaker 03 Who's gonna finance it?
22:37 Eleanor Janega? Yeah.
22:37 Speaker 03 Let's, let's put it that way, too, right?
22:39 Eleanor Janega? Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
22:39 Speaker 03 Yeah. When we're talking about a cathedral, as you well know, is a project that is always ongoing. So the beginnings of Norwich Cathedral are before the time of the Jurnets. Jurnet is, the Jurnet father and son are either side of 1200. So let's think, this is, building cathedral never ends.
22:57 Eleanor Janega? Oh, yeah, it's, it's still being built right now, babe.
22:59 Speaker 03 Probably, yeah, yeah.
23:01 Eleanor Janega? So you have, but you've got the Jurnets. And by the time they are, they are kind of in the swing of things, this is a really influential family. So, you know, it's been, you know, a hundred some years since Jewish people have showed up. This is like embedded, this is bedrock into the community of Norwich writ large. You know, like this group of people that you can kind of rely on for financial services. Do you think that that would be a fair thing to say?
23:26 Speaker 03 Well, the, the time that, what's interesting is that by the time we're talking about the Jurnets, the community has also suffered a lot of severe blows. So in some ways, if we want to think of this, you know, this is already, in some ways, the period of the decline of medieval Jewish Norwich in terms of its population. Because there is the blood libel of 1144. And also, it seems that there may have been a massacre in 1190 as well.
23:49 Eleanor Janega? And this is really interesting, right? Because when you have, you have this kind of underlying antisemitism and, you know, ongoing accusations of blood libel. And then here you have people like the Jurnets who are... They can kind of be, I don't know, a magnet in certain ways for resentment. Because if you have like very prominent or very wealthy families in these areas, that can cause problems. So like, how do we see them depicted? We know that they are incredibly important to the Jewish community. What about for Christians outside of that?
24:25 Speaker 03 Well, they clearly are depicting themselves, are trying to present themselves, to represent themselves, not just to the Jewish community. Because their substantial townhouse is not in that area I was describing earlier. It's not in the heart of the Jewish community. It is on King Street. It's part of, not part of the new expansion of the city. It's the area down towards the river. It is a street that has a number of patrician residences at that point, and it has river access. So it is a grand house that's kind of, has another audience in mind too. But that's, you know, this is, in some ways, one of those eternal themes. They're representing themselves to a non-Jewish audience as well.
25:08 Speaker 03 But we also see how a non-Jewish audience depicts and sees them. Because we do have the record of a, on a famous tax record in the National Archives in London, probably what I'd call one of the first recognizable antisemitic caricatures, depicting, at the top of a record that's involving the Jurnets and their agents, an image of Isaac Jurnet, a three-headed fork-beared Isaac Jurnet, with his assistants, a man and a woman with hooked noses and grotesque features, in league with demons. And this is, we all know this imagery. As you know, Eleanor, this is not a entirely widespread medieval imagery.
25:49 Eleanor Janega? No.
25:49 Speaker 03 We know where it goes. But this is one of our earliest pieces of evidence of the development of this imagery.
25:56 Eleanor Janega? Oh, I hate that.
25:59 Eleanor Janega? Yeah, it's like, oh, it's gonna be bad vibes from here on out, isn't it? I guess unfortunately, I'm going to take us into like the bad vibes portion of this. Because I think it is important, you know, we can acknowledge that there is this really important thriving community. But, you know, you've already alluded to it, you know, in 1144... There is an incident that particularly inflames hatred against the Jewish population here in Norwich, and there is the death of a 12-year-old boy. This is William the Skinner. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
26:38 Speaker 03 Many of your listeners will have heard of the phrase "the blood libel", and the blood libel is the false malicious accusation of ritual murder of Christian children, the accusation against Jews. And the first blood libel in recorded history is William of Norwich. The fact is, is that, you know, this is something that when we're thinking about how we deal with Norwich Jewish history and heritage, and even how we think about life as a Jewish community here in Norwich today, it's something that always comes up. Everyone knows, in the Jewish world, everyone knows of Norwich because of William of Norwich, because of the blood libel.
27:35 Speaker 01 Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared, and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding, and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing, and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasiapro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.
28:10 Speaker 04 After civil war, regicide, and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.
28:55 Eleanor Janega? I mean, I suppose it's a little bit frustrating when one is a medieval historian because we like to be so exacting in the way that we relate to history is that, you know, what we want to do is see how communities respond, how people reflect on things. I think that when you kind of talk about William of Norwich showing up dead, there is this instant reaction where people say, oh, what really happened to him? I don't think anyone really believes Jewish people were out to kill a Christian child. But one way or another, William ends up dead and people will always say, oh, well, what really happened to him?
29:34 Speaker 03 Yeah. As a historian, I really find that question to be one of the least important. I'm not a solver of cold cases. I am interested in historical problems. And the thing is, and the fact is, the fact of the blood libel, this accusation is produced in the 1140s, associated with a death that purportedly happened in 1144. There is a life of William of Norwich written by Thomas of Monmouth, associated with Norwich Cathedral in 1150. That is our first recorded blood libel. But it's clear he's drawing it from other, material from other sources. It's clear there was a quite interested campaign within Norwich
30:18 Speaker 03 before that to develop a local saint. And those who were promoting William's sanctity, the cathedral, then with Thomas of Monmouth gets on board. But there's probably other antecedents, too. It's important to call this the first recorded blood libel. But that's where we can start to do our historical analysis of the development of the rhetoric of blood libel. It's significant that all of the features that are present in the William blood libel recur in all subsequent blood libels, in Blois, in Lincoln, in Trento, famously, in Bialystok, in Kishnev, in Damascus, and so on and so forth, that involve an innocent
30:58 Speaker 03 child ritually murdered, and so on. Are they all taking it from William of Norwich, from the life written by Thomas of Monmouth? Of course not. This text doesn't circulate widely. And the cult of William doesn't circulate widely. But it's drawing clearly on Probably some common stock, probably some common ideas, and probably on what some people want to hear.
31:20 Eleanor Janega? So certainly, I think that we can say that there is
31:27 Eleanor Janega? this legend that is born out a result of it. In terms of the Jewish people who live here in Norwich, what are the consequences of William's murder for them?
31:39 Speaker 03 Well, the contemporary sources show the Jewish community being sheltered in the castle when there is a riot provoked by this. That's what the contemporary sources show. But the contemporary sources give a bit of a different picture of what happens a few decades later. Even though the Jews appear to be sheltered in the castle then, this is an outpouring of violence. And it's not the last outpouring of violence that English Jews face. In the same year as the notorious York massacre, 1190, that massacre which kills, amongst others, the great Rabbi Yom Tov of Joani, Yom Tov of York, probably the greatest liturgical poet in medieval England,
32:20 Speaker 03 there's also, some contemporary sources, record a massacre in Norwich. A massacre that has been given some added credence by the discovery of 17 bodies in a well that was discovered about 20 years ago.
32:35 Eleanor Janega? And can we talk about that a little bit? Because I think this is an incredibly important point. When you have these flashpoints of violence or these new ideas that come into being. Yes, so in 1144, there's one specific outpouring of violence that the Jewish community manages to more or less avoid by being sheltered in the castle. Great, but then you have subsequent ideas about what it is Jewish people are like as a result of this that are fed and fed through these particular rhetorical exchanges. You know, and obviously, there is, as you say, there is kind of something in it for the cathedral, for example, like Thomas of Mammoth, he's writing about this. Yeah, they want a local saint. It's a new city.
33:20 Eleanor Janega? You can have a new saint like this.
33:22 Speaker 03 There isn't a local martyr.
33:24 Eleanor Janega? And so and now you've got one, right? And so it's not just like surviving that one day. It's like, what does this narrative do when it gets out into the world? It grows and it grows and it grows. And eventually, we do see that things begin to happen. It's not just 1144, it's the things afterwards. And we do have this discovery of the well.
33:48 Speaker 03 I like to phrase my words very carefully about this because DNA-based history presents some problems around precise dating. And this question about whether there was a massacre in Norwich is contested amongst some historians as well, too. But again, the particularities, I think we can zoom out a little bit of it. Because what the, well, precise dating is very hard to do. These 17 bodies that were found in the well, including women and children, some that are put in headfirst, so what appears to be execution-style killing, are, what the DNA evidence did find
34:29 Speaker 03 was some matches with things that we, genetic matches with what we tend to find in contemporary Ashkenazic Jewish populations. Now, that's not to say that the, as was reported in the media at the time, it's not to say necessarily that the Jews of medieval Norwich were Ashkenazic. That, as a meaningful term for dividing the Jewish world, that's a bit of a more recent development. But what it does show, whenever the bodies precisely ended up there, whenever there was this execution of a number of Jews that took place here, that does show something quite critical if we're looking forward, because it suggests to us that the Jews of medieval
35:12 Speaker 03 England, they were expelled in 1290. They didn't just all go and jump into the sea, of course. They went into continental Europe again, and they mixed with the populations of Jews in France, and when they were expelled, of those of the Rhineland, and subsequently into Polish Lithuania, Poland-Lithuania, and so on. That is to say that the story of medieval English Jewry is not this kind of peripheral story just equal to its weight in numbers at the time, but it's actually a point of departure, one of the points of departure for a big chapter of world Jewish history. So what we have here, what we have here in the form of Jurnet's House, the oldest identifiable place of Jewish residence
35:55 Speaker 03 in England, is a touchstone to something of world historical importance. There's no earlier survival from that. And this isn't just a little peripheral story. It's something that's part of the mainstream.
36:08 Eleanor Janega? And I think that is such an interesting point because I do think that there is a tendency on everyone's parts to kind of think of everywhere in Europe as cut off from one place or another, as every single community is particularly distinct. And of course, there are nuances to how different groups of people live, but also, especially a place like Norwich, if you get expelled from the country, pretty easy to get on a boat and head to somewhere else, I guess. But I think that this is such an interesting case because it does show us how, I suppose, the temperature of antisemitism is being turned up over
36:53 Eleanor Janega? the period. You go from a kind of relatively like, oh, yeah, well, here's a new group of Normans, not necessarily like any other, but this is an expression of Norman-ness, it becomes an expression of English-ness. And then suddenly you have this campaign to say, oh, this is actually in other, in our midst. And that has real world consequences for people who are killed. And these bodies we found in the well, you say some of them are head down. Does that mean that they are killed by being thrown into the well, or are they killed and then thrown into the well? Do we know? Does it matter?
37:30 Speaker 03 They are probably killed, thrown into the well, but quite quickly. There are a lot of controversies, historical controversies, questions still around the issue of the bodies in the well. When they were exhumed, first when they were discovered while building the shopping centre, they were eventually exhumed and given a proper Jewish burial. But there are questions around the bodies in the well. I prefer to think about that, separated from the issue of the proper treatment of the bodies. Can that evidence that we found, that DNA evidence, rather than trying to figure out who the Jews of Norwich were, rather to use that to think differently about the role of English Jewry in the making of world Jewish history?
38:10 Speaker 03 What we have here, as awful as it is, what we have here is actually evidence of the persistence of medieval English Jewry.
38:18 Eleanor Janega? And see, this I like because it is definitely, I know that the dating is very difficult with this, but it's after everything goes down with William of Norwich.
38:28 Speaker 03 Absolutely.
38:29 Eleanor Janega? Yeah, yeah. So they're able to persist, they're able to still be clinging on.
38:34 Speaker 03 But Eleanor, I mean also that they persist to this day because those genetic matches are to contemporary populations. So what we have here is evidence of the survival of the Jews of medieval England. Are they the Jews of England today? The story of Anglo-Jewry is one of the Jews that come to this country after Oliver Cromwell re-permits Jews to settle here again.
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39:51 Speaker 04 After civil war, regicide, and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same.
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40:34 Speaker 03 This is not the story of Anglo-Jewry. This is the story of world Jewry.
40:38 Eleanor Janega? I think we've been beating around the bush a little bit and we've mentioned it a few times, but eventually we do get to this point in time when the Jews are expelled from England. And this is, you know what, one of Edward the First's really bad projects. He's got a few. Can we talk a little bit about what happens with that and why we get to this point?
40:56 Speaker 03 The 13th century is an increasingly dark time for medieval English Jewry, it must be said. There's another notorious blood libel, one that gets royal endorsement this time, the blood libel of the 1250s of Little Hugh of Lincoln, which is endorsed by Henry III. So, things are darkening. The population of Jews in medieval England, certainly in medieval Norwich, is declining through that period. So, by the time we're getting into the 1270s and 80s, as there's increasing antisemitic, anti-Jewish preaching, also in the context of the mendicant orders, and which is endorsed by the monarch and the queen as well too, things are darkening.
41:39 Speaker 03 In 1286, that stone building that I've talked about, the synagogue of medieval Norwich, is burnt. There is a lair, it's now under the site of a pub and a primarch. Until we get to the earlier medieval lair, there's a burn lair as well too. So, that communal centre is destroyed in 1286. It's only four years later that the Jews are expelled. But we also have, and this is again an interest, something that brings us back to Norwich, our most eloquent voice of...
42:14 Speaker 03 All of medieval English Jewry, in fact, comes from that period and comes from Norwich. A poet who identifies himself in an acrostic as Na'ir Ben Eliyahu of Norwich. And he's writing in that period, maybe writing in exile too, based on the some hints that we get in his works. Turn largely liturgical poems, also one called, one in which he calls for a curse on his enemies. So it's a dark time, but we can see in that too, we have a contemporary Jewish voice. But in that too, we get a sign of the continued vitality through all of that of Jewish life in Norwich that was able to produce a poet of this rank.
42:58 Eleanor Janega? So you've mentioned here, like the preaching of the mendicants as being involved in this in terms of just kind of turning up the temperature on antisemitism here in England. Do you think this is a continent wide phenomenon? Or is that something that is an English specialty?
43:15 Speaker 03 No, this is a European phenomenon. It's not particular to England alone. We do see it elsewhere as well.
43:22 Eleanor Janega? I suppose what is particular to England, though, is if you're going to be a monarch who decides to get really antisemitic with it, you can kind of expel people from here, right? Because it's an island. It's possible to identify groups and say, okay, you're going to need to leave because there's more of a border.
43:38 Speaker 03 Well, this was the first country to ever do it. And what it showed was that it could be done because France isn't an island and it followed suit pretty quickly.
43:48 Eleanor Janega? That's a good point. See, you know, like the Norman-ness of England's showing through again. Okay, so in terms of, you know, the persecution gets worse. We're starting to see more pogroms. We're starting to see more just outright antisemitic rhetoric. But eventually this is stuff that is kind of coming from the crown as well. And I think that this is an important point because when Edward the first decides, okay, well, that's it, we're getting rid of Jewish people. Listen, it's not just, oh, I'm doing like a big religious thing, right? Like, this is a man who is in hok. This man owes a lot of money to this group of people. So it's actually really convenient, isn't it?
44:30 Eleanor Janega? Because it's not just, oh, yeah, I have these deep-seated religious opinions. It's also like, oh, yeah, now I don't owe you money anymore. And I think that's an important point, because there's this material thing. Like, there's always this kind of, I don't know, hypocrisy behind it. So you're where it's like, yeah, and you get something that you want, which is that you don't have to pay your bills, right?
44:50 Speaker 03 It's the whole thing together. The Jewish community, then, is also smaller and not as wealthy also by that period. The medieval economy is changing, too. You know, Jews are also less necessary for some of those purposes that we had earlier. So it's a number of forces coming to bear. And, you know, it's not just in England, too. There's this, also, the time of crusade fervor. Edward I is a committed crusader. It was the first crusade that expelled the Jewish population in Jerusalem as well, too, or was very harsh on the Jews that were living there. It's in the 13th century, 12th and then, well, then into the 13th century, we do see Jewish people from Western Europe, from Spain,
45:34 Speaker 03 but also from England and France, going to the land of Israel and setting up academies and wanting to be buried there, coming back to Jerusalem as well, too. But, you know, these are, these are all things that are happening on a pan-European level that English kings are not just operating in this island. They're operating on different stages, and crusade fervor is part of this, too.
45:57 Eleanor Janega? What do you think it is about England, though, that they were kind of the first to kick it off? Is there a reason why England are the first to do it? Or is it just a fluke?
46:06 Speaker 03 I don't know if I'd call it a fluke, nor would I put too much weight on it. Frankly, England shows it can be done, and other countries follow suit. It's true that, not all countries, of course, but as I said, France, famously Spain, of course, in 1492. There's other places that become centers of Jewish life afterwards. What England doesn't have, for example, because of this, is a whole wave. Of anti-Jewish violence occasioned by the Black Death. But that doesn't stop England after the Black Death from continuing to repeat these stories that it was the first recorded site of. For example, the story of the blood libel told in the Priors' Tale in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. So even the expulsion of the Jew
46:51 Speaker 03 does not expel the idea of the Jew that is present throughout European society, but that England also, it must be said, did a lot to shape.
47:04 Eleanor Janega? So I guess, you know, we've already talked a little bit about this. We see from the DNA evidence of the bodies that we find in the well that these are people who share genetic markers with Jewish people now. So where do the Jews of Norwich go when they're expelled? Do we know exactly? I mean, do they go back to, you know, France in the first instance? Are they?
47:27 Speaker 03 The Jewish community of Central Europe, this is, it's around this time that those start to grow, actually. For example, it's in the, for example, in the 15th century that we start to see significant Jewish populations starting to develop in Poland. Obviously, the famous Old New Synagogue of Prague is a late 14th century building. But that move of Jewish populations from Western Europe, Northern France, the Rhineland, into Central Europe is a product of these expulsions.
48:02 Eleanor Janega? So we can never just have nice things, can we? There's always got to be some terror behind it.
48:08 Speaker 03 But actually, one thing I often like to think about is, I mean, that's, periodizations are very interesting. This is a medieval podcast.
48:15 Eleanor Janega? Yeah.
48:16 Speaker 03 But if you're thinking about Jewish history, never, you know, these periods aren't invented for Jewish history. So what are ways of thinking about Jewish history? And one thing I like to think about is a notion of a double diaspora, which would really characterize my Jewish early modernity, really, which is, once these populations are moving into their next homes, as it were, Ashkenazic Jewry into Central, you know, where the main centers are Central and Central Eastern Europe, Sephardic Jewish populations, the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula, into places like the Levant, some joining the Italian populations in Italy, North Africa, of course, the Netherlands.
48:58 Eleanor Janega? I guess, so what happens, you've mentioned already that the synagogue gets burnt as a part of this process. What happens to the other properties in Norwich during this period? You know, once the Jewish people are expelled, what happens to their very nice houses?
49:12 Speaker 03 Well, I mean, the population by this time is much shrunken. Jews are required to give up their possessions that they have here. The Jurnets had already sold that substantial house. We have the records of the purchase and we have the records of the sale, both in King Street. The, they'd already sold that house. The history of the house is actually quite interesting, too, because that house subsequently is in the hands of the Paston family, subsequently of Edward Cook, the Chief Justice. And, and so it's a house with history. And these are these histories that can get effaced.
49:47 Eleanor Janega? So eventually Jewish people returned to England, very famously because Oliver Cromwell makes a concerted effort to have them come along. But is there a particular reason why people decide that Jewish people should be readmitted to England?
50:04 Speaker 03 Well, that's a contested question today. What are, what are the reasons? Is it Cromwell's apocalyptic beliefs? Is it out of some kind of religious motivation? Is it because of the lobbying of the Amsterdam Jewish community, Menasseh Ben Israel and his campaigns? Is it actually the circumstances, there's actually already a number of Murano's, a lot, a number of crypto Jews in London at that time? In fact, one, in one famous case, someone who's about to have his ship expropriated for being a Spaniard declares, actually, I'm Jewish. And really, that is, that is the de facto legalization of the Jewish presence in England before there's any legislation for this.
50:49 Eleanor Janega? Oh, I absolutely love that. So we do, but like, this is the thing, is that eventually we do have Jewish people come back to England. Well, what's it like when Jewish people get back to Norwich? What like, what does their life look like then?
51:01 Speaker 03 Well, the Jewish population of Norwich, we start to see a community in the seventeen, probably around the seventeen fifties. We, it's really quite interesting, the development of it, really in the nineteenth century. Just across from the cathedral is where their first kind of permanent synagogue space was. There's some notable people in the community at that time, not least the scholar Simon Caro, who is an ancestor of the artist Anthony Caro, whose works you can see just outside here at the Sainsbury Centre. And the Norwich community builds a synagogue in eighteen forty-eight, large Victorian synagogue, and was the only synagogue street in all of England. Yeah.
51:39 Eleanor Janega? That's so cool.
51:40 Speaker 03 It no longer has that name. The building was destroyed in nineteen forty-two by enemy bombing. There is a synagogue today, not on the same site. But that first site, Synagogue Street, is right around the corner from Jurnet's House.
51:51 Eleanor Janega? I absolutely love that. I think that it's such an exciting project to try to re-establish our memory of Jurnet's House and the Jewish community here, because it's such an important part of English history.
52:04 Speaker 03 This is something I so often try to get across, because the Jews of medieval England come to this country in the same way that the Normans, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Celts came here. That is, they came here from somewhere else. But the Jews are the only one of those populations to be expelled. This is the beginning of England as an intolerant country. And that's a history that has a lot of road to run. We think of what happens in the Reformation and the fact that this is a country with an established religion. So I like to also think about what we have here at Jurnet's House as a touchstone to history, a touchstone to the history of medieval English Jewry, but also as a touchstone to a different way of thinking about the history of this country.
52:48 Speaker 03 What if we were to think of England as a place where diversity was the natural state, that only lost that through intolerance, the decision to become an intolerant country? That's one of the messages that we want to come out of Jurnet's House. I'm quite clear that we're telling a Jewish story, but that Jewish story, by focusing on its particular aspects, actually has something that is universal.
53:14 Eleanor Janega? Orin, it has been an absolute delight talking to you. Thank you so much for making time for me. And yeah, I'm gonna head back to the city centre to find Matt, probably by way of these sculptures outside the St. Sprey Centre.
53:27 Speaker 03 Very good. Thanks for coming.
53:28 Eleanor Janega? Thank you so much.
53:36 Eleanor Janega? Hey, Matt.
53:38 Matt Lewis? Hello.
53:38 Eleanor Janega? What have you been up to?
53:40 Matt Lewis? Hanging out in Norwich. I mean, is there any cooler place to hang out?
53:43 Eleanor Janega? Very cute.
53:44 Matt Lewis? And I thought we could end our visit to Norwich here. We're at the junction of White Lion Street and Haymarket, right in the heart of the city. And we're standing in the very centre of what was once one of medieval England's most prosperous Jewish quarters. In the 11th and the 12th centuries, this area would have been thrumming with life of a different kind. The streets would have echoed with Hebrew prayers, drifting from the synagogue that stood roughly where Primark is now. With the clatter, though, you can imagine, can't you? The clatter of coins being counted in the counting houses, the arguments of merchants haggling over grain and cloth in nearby markets. And this location was chosen deliberately.
54:26 Matt Lewis? It's close enough to the castle to provide the community with some royal protection, but it's also near enough to the city's bustling fish markets, corn markets and parchment shops to conduct the business that needed doing. Jurnet of Norwich's magnificent three-storey stone house with its vaulted undercroft still stands on King Street today, the oldest surviving Jewish residence in England. And it's a testament to the wealth and the permanence that this community believed that they'd earned.
54:55 Eleanor Janega? You know, one of the things I love about Norwich is you can really imagine the medieval street as it once was. Because you've got a community living under constant tension. You've got them resented by Christian neighbours for their favoured status under the king's protection. They're blamed for the debts that the English nobles owed them. They're subjected to the very first ever blood libel, recorded in 1144. And you know, the same streets where Jewish children played and studied the Torah, where families celebrated Shabbat and Passover, those would have become killing grounds on that February day in 1190, when crusaders decided it's time to rise against the Jews before marching to Jerusalem.
55:39 Eleanor Janega? I mean, what about that well, which became the unmarked grave for those 17 victims? You have men, women, three sisters. The redheaded toddler really gets to me. You know, all members of probably one extended Ashkenazi family.
55:55 Matt Lewis? And it becomes kind of heartbreaking when it becomes so personal, doesn't it? You can imagine those people. And that's all now being covered up by a shopping center where people browse for bargains. It's quite a haunting reminder, I guess, that the bustling consumer landscape of modern Norwich that we're enjoying today was built, quite literally, on the bones of those destroyed by a medieval hatred.
56:23 Eleanor Janega? It's a sobering thought. Well, thanks, Matt.
56:28 Matt Lewis? So welcome.
56:29 Eleanor Janega? Yeah, I know. Thank you all for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. And remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries, including my series, Meet the Normans, some of whom are Jewish, and ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com/subscription. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions, or wherever you get your podcasts. And tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Until next time.
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