The Edict of Expulsion of 1290

The English Jewish community was created by royal invitation after 1066 and it existed at the king's pleasure throughout. Its members were not subjects in the ordinary sense but the property of the crown, taxable at will through the Exchequer of the Jews, and their principal permitted trade was lending at interest, an occupation the church forbade to Christians and the crown found useful because it could be taxed and, at need, seized.

By the middle of the thirteenth century the community had been taxed past the point of usefulness. The Statute of the Jewry of 1275 then forbade lending at interest altogether and directed Jews into commerce, agriculture and craft, in a kingdom whose guilds and landholding structures were closed to them. What followed was the coin clipping prosecutions of 1278 and 1279, in which hundreds were arrested and a large number hanged.

The expulsion order of 18 July 1290 gave until 1 November to leave. Estimates of the number who went cluster between two and three thousand. Some ships were plundered on the crossing and one master is recorded as having stranded his passengers on a sandbank in the Thames to drown. Debts owed to the departing lenders passed to the king, along with houses and synagogue buildings. In the same parliament the Commons granted Edward a fifteenth, the largest single subsidy of his reign.

What makes the instrument unusual in this collection is how it ended. It was not repealed, amended or superseded. It simply ceased to be applied, and the ceasing took a constitutional argument rather than an act.

There were Jews in England throughout the period in small numbers, mostly conversos from the Iberian peninsula living outwardly as Christians, some in the service of the crown. The question became live again in the 1650s, when Menasseh ben Israel, a rabbi of Amsterdam, petitioned the Commonwealth for readmission. Oliver Cromwell called a conference at Whitehall in December 1655 of judges, clergy and merchants. The judges gave the answer that mattered: there was no law that forbade Jews to return to England, the expulsion having been an act of royal prerogative directed at persons then living rather than a statute of general effect. The conference itself broke up without agreement on terms, so nothing was formally enacted.

Cromwell allowed the matter to rest there, and a community established itself quietly in London from 1656. The synagogue at Bevis Marks, opened in 1701, has been in continuous use ever since. The atlas records the repeal status as never having occurred in form: the instrument was overtaken by a finding that it had never had the force its authors assumed.