THE JEWS IN ENGLAND.* THE history of the Jews in

England is an epitome of Jewish experience throughout the world; in England they have known the extremes of suffering and prosperity. It has been the mission of the Jews to be persecuted to the limits of endurance, yet never to be exterminated in any one place ; to

• A History of the Jews in England. By Albert M. Hyamson. With Por- t:mita and Maps, London; Chatto and Winclus. Eta, 6d. net.]

be deported bodily from a country, as in their classical period in Palestine, and taken to the country of their victors, or to be eipelled from the country in which they had 'made a new home, as they were expelled from Spain, and from England ln the reign of Edward L In Russia and elsewhere the sufferings of the Jews continue, but the vicissitudes of Jewish fortune in Britain are apparently at an end. .Here the free fields of commerce and Constitutional liberty are likely to be theirs as long as Britain lasts. Mr. Elyamson summarises the work of recent Jewish and non- Jewish writers, and this was well worth doing, for any one who has wanted even the most general history of the Jews in England has had to disentangle it from a mass of material. The book, therefore, is very useful, and we only wish 'that we could add that it is attractive. An extraordinarily picturesque history, however, is made almost unpicturesque in these pages. Moreover, the history stops short when we arrive at some of the modern problems of Judaism, which may not be the most dramatic, but are certainly the most critical, that the Jews have ever faced.

Mr. Hyamson begins with the legendary settlements of the Jews in England. For fifty years and more there have been philologists who have found evidence of early Jewish trade in Cornwall. The name " Marazion" means "Bitterness of Zion "—this is a popular name to quote—and there are resemblances between the Cornish and Hebrew languages. If Cornish were Hebrew in origin, Breton and Welsh would also be so. Mr. Hyamson wisely dismisses the whole body of legend as about equal in value to the theory which traces the descent of all Britons directly to the lost tribes. Readers of Max Muller are already in possession of the last word of the philological argument for an early Jewish colony in Cornwall, and if they are wise they are already warned against the fascinating snares of philology. We are on safer ground when we come to Norman England. The Jews were certainly here then, and they usefully supplied the want of a middle class. It has' been suggested that they paid William the Conqueror a large sum of money to he allowed to live in England ; but Mr. Hyamson gives a very good reason why William should have been glad to have them in the country:

"William was specially anxious that the feudal dues should be paid him in coin rather than in kind, but without the assistance of the Jews or a similar capitalist element such payment was impossible. The Jews brought -with them coin- that speedily got into circulation. The king was enabled to purchase luxuries and to satisfy his military require- ments; the barons were assisted to pay their dues; suitors who found it necessary to follow the king's court from one town to another, or to go to Rome to plead their causes before the Papal Curia, found their course rendered easier by Jewish money. Not only were the Jews instrumental in keeping the royal treasury filled, but they also managed to attract some of the odium that would otherwise have fallen upon the king and his more regularly appointed officials, and to a corresponding degree they were instrumental in relieving the latter."

In Angevin England the Jews, indeed, fairly established them- selves as financiers. They enabled the Barons to build houses and the clergy to build churches ; and they were probably ready, like Lloyd's to-day, to estimate and accept any kind of risk. It was the Jews who financed Strongbow's expedition

to Ireland, which was a private venture, carried out in defiance of Henry's wishes. Little need be said of the "Blood Accusa- tions," as this sinister pretext for slaying Jews is familiar to all

readers of history, and Mr. Hyamson adds nothing material to common knowledge. Of all the revenues which came into the Royal Exchequer from the Jews, the tallages were the most profitable:—

" These were arbitrary taxes, levied whenever the king was in need of money. The earliest occasions on which the English Jews suffered this form of oppression have been mentioned. They became gradually more frequent and more oppressive. It must not be thought, however, that the king always received the whole amount he demanded. The demands were sometimes so exorbitant that it was impossible to comply with them. On other occasions the amount of the tallage was accepted in instalments spread over a number of years. Dr. C. Gross estimates that the average annual income derived from this source during the century pro- ceeding the Expulsion was between £5,000 and £10,000. In the money of that day this was an enormous sum, and at the lowest , estimate equalled a thirteenth of the total revenue of the king- dom. The tallage was sometimes levied as a' poll-tax,'but more often collectively, the assessment of individuals being arranged by the Jewish community?'

From thd tithe Of the Conquest to Ed-wird L the Jews were mite& rudely persecuted and protected; and really one conies to the -

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conclusion that the only English King who had any coherent policy with regard to them was Edward L John seems to have meant well by the Jews when he invented a badge for them to wear, so that no one might have an excuse for saying that he had ill-used a Jew unwittingly; but the badge soon, and naturally, became an instrument of isolation. Optimism,

however, has always been a Jewish trait—but for that they could scarcely have come through some of their experiences—

and John's goodwill brought the Jews pouring in from the Continent. The policy of Edward I., though short-sighted, was not dictated by intolerance. The Jews had gradually been restricted to about seventeen towns, and it was compara- tively easy to expel them from the country. About sixteen thousand departed. They were allowed to take their property, and Edward made genuine attempts to guarantee their safety, with what result in some cases may be gathered from the famous and terrible story related by Holinshed

"A sort of the richest of them, being shipped with their treasure in a mightie tall ship which they had hired, when the same was under saile, and got downs the Thames towards the month of the river beyond Quinborowe (Queenborough), the maister mariner bethought him of a wile, and caused his men to cast anchor, and so rode at the same, till the ship by ebbing of the streame remained on the drie sands. The maister herewith enticed the jewes to walke out with him on land for recreation. And at length when he understood the tide to be comming in, he got him backe to the ship, whither he was drawne up by a cord. The Jewes made not so much hast as he did, bicause they were not ware of the danger. But when they perceived how the matter stood, they cried to him for helpe : howbeit he told them, that they ought to crie rather unto Moses, by whose conduct their fathers passed through the red sea, and therefore, if they would call to him for helpe, he was able inough to help them out of those raging fiends, which now came in upon them : they cried indeed, but no succour appeared, and so they were swallowed up in water."

In spite of this great expulsion, a few Jews lingered in England. Perhaps most of them were physicians. There

was, for instance, Roderigo Lopez, physician to Queen Elizabeth, who was hanged for alleged conspiracy, although it is clear that Elizabeth never felt quite convinced of his guilt. This period, when it was nominally illegal to be a Jew in England, is most interesting. It ended with the rule of Cromwell, in whose tolerant days the Jews were allowed openly to return.

Mr. Hyamson records the advance of the Jews to the full rights of British citizenship, and describes some of the most

famous Jewish characters. But what is to be the future of the Jew ? Will the race retain its marvellous cohesiveness P In England, as Mr. Bryce said a few years ago, the struggle between the two tendencies of Judaism—the conservative

tendency and the tendency to change—is more marked than in any other country. On this Mr. Hyamson says nothing. If the tendency to shed old ceremonial usages triumphs, and Judaism becomes a kind of philosophic Theism, the Jews will lose their true distinction. It would be rash to speculate; one can only say that, in the freedom of British life, the better-educated Jews are insensibly penetrated by neological tendencies, while immigrants continually arrive who have been bound by persecutions particularly close to the strict old Talmudic tradition. Mr. Bryce has rightly said that the essential feature of Judaism is not its blood—persistent though its physical treat§ are—but its religion. If that goes, intermarriages might eventually quite absorb the Jewish race in Britain, which would "dissolve like a lump of salt

in water."