This collection of works by a major contributor to our knowledge of medieval Jewry brings together six of Barrie Dobson's exquisitely researched and analyzed papers, all of which had been previously published. Had it only done that, it would have served a valuable function, as not all of the periodicals and collections represented here find space in smaller academic libraries (such as my own). Published on the eve of Dobson's eightieth birthday, the work celebrates his contributions to the field and displays the ways in which they have inspired a new generation of historians.
That inspiration, and the new paths that are being taken, are viewed from two perspectives: that of Dobson himself in an introduction to the volume, and in an appreciation written by a fellow scholar. But perhaps the greatest value can be had by simply reading through the essays in the order presented (in chronological order, with one unexplained exception), to watch the development of Dobson's interests, the connections he made, the expansion of sources available, and the ways in which events in his personal and academic life (such as his move to Cambridge in 1988) influenced his topics and perspectives. There is repetition here, and corrections of statements that later seemed unfortunate or excessive, but of greater interest is the growth of Dobson's judgment and discernment, marked by the combination of reason and empathy familiar to all who know him.
The appreciation by Joe Hillaby, President of the Jewish Historical Society of England 2006-2008, complements Dobson's own commentary on his career, the latter matter-of-factly entitled "The Jews of Medieval York in the Context of Some Other English Jewish Communities." While Dobson's roots in northern England certainly help explain his interest in Durham and York, topics of his earliest publications, it was attendance at Cecil Roth's lectures at Oxford that sowed the seeds of later interests. What began as the casual inclusion on his syllabus of a lecture on Anglo-Jewry became focused over time on York's Jewish population and the massacre at Clifford's Tower in 1190. This led to his first publication on that event in 1974 sponsored by the University of York's Borthwick Institute of Historical Research. The placement of a memorial tablet in 1978 at the site of the massacre expanded the reach and impact of Dobson's research, touching not only contemporary Jewish studies but also the transmission of historical knowledge to the public through the means of bodies such as English Heritage. His concern over the potentiality for oversimplification inherent in mass tourism is matched, and balanced, by his scholarly commitment to see that the lives of medieval Jews should be as celebrated as the anguish of their deaths.
The resources for the study of those lives in medieval England are both abundant and opaque. In nearly every essay, Dobson cites Roth's "ingenious manipulation of a famous phrase of Winston Churchill...: never in the field of medieval English history is it 'possible to assemble so much about so few' as it is about Jews of the thirteenth century" (151). Supervised by a royal government accomplished in its recording of matters of great interest to its officers and ignoring many of the issues that matter to historians today, the lives of England's medieval Jews may remain only dimly understood. Dobson has never been discouraged by such conclusions, however, and it is salutary to see at the end of his introduction his gentle but decisive dismissal of scholars who wish to treat sources only as texts with flexible meanings and to cease searching for the truth of those lives. However cautiously he had to tread, and limited the conclusions he could support with evidence, Dobson never abandoned the pursuit of the fullest illumination possible of lives distant from us but never unimportant.
The first reprinted essay in the collection is the revised (in 1996) edition of "The Jews of Medieval York and the Massacre of March 1190." [1] The revisions included updates to the scholarship cited in the notes, the author's assurance that "nearly all he wrote...in 1974 is what he would still write now," (33) and a description of the 1982-83 excavation of the medieval Jewish burial ground at York (although a more detailed analysis of its findings is included in the final essay in the collection). The first few pages provide background on the presence of Jews in England after 1066, and the major sources and historians by which we know of their lives before the expulsion of 1290. The gradual move from London to the provinces brought Jews to York by the 1180s, and their comparatively recent arrival and lack of time to be fully assimilated in civic society provides context for the ferocity of the attack on them on Shabbat ha-Gadol, the night of 16 March 1190. The need for their financial services, by rural lay and ecclesiastical landlords as well as individuals of more modest means, provided the Jews with reasons for settling in York. Such need also stoked resentments, exacerbated by the death of Henry II and the heightened emotionalism of Richard's early reign and crusade preparations, which York's royal officials had no experience in quelling. Employing both Hebrew and English sources, Dobson chronicles the events of February and March, as violence spread from Norfolk northwards until it arrived in the city and persuaded the Jews to seek protection in the royal castle. Miscommunication, understandable terror and distrust, the rabble-rousing actions of a Premonstratensian canon on the scene, and the arrival of siege machines combined to bring the community to its anguished decision of mass-suicide on the eve of the great Sabbath before Passover. The few who survived begged for mercy and promised to accept Christianity, but were killed as they left the castle the next day. The king's horror at news of the attacks and its violation of public peace resulted in lasting measures both to protect the servi camere nostre and to keep better track of all Jewish bonds and records of their financial transactions. Dobson concludes the work with a careful study of who was responsible for the violence, focusing on indebted country landlords whose greatest fear was the loss of their lands offered as collateral-a fear that came to pass in the thirteenth century when heavy and frequent royal tallages forced Jewish creditors to demand repayment under harsher circumstances. At this stage of Dobson's research, the return of Jews to York by 1196, the establishment of an archa there to register debts, and the growth of the community's prosperity in the early thirteenth century are topics handled briefly.
A fuller treatment of those final decades is found in the second reprinted essay, "The Decline and Expulsion of the Medieval Jews of York," first published in 1979. [2] In contrast to the twelfth century, this period offers an abundance of sources generated by the royal and Christian government that protected, tallaged, and eventually expelled the Jews. As noted earlier, that abundance does not necessarily ease the historian's task in discerning the nature of the York community's financial recovery and increasing penury by the 1250s and 1260s. York's Jews became more isolated in the region when Newcastle expelled its Jews in 1234, although Dobson identifies 1255 as a great divide. That year witnessed the great financier Aaron of York's bankruptcy, the ritual murder case of Little St. Hugh of Lincoln, and the king's mortgaging of all the Jews of England to his brother. Although northern gentry families continued to borrow from the Jews, the loans were modest (50-60), and by the 1270s Christians obtained an increasing portion of the profits of lending by both direct and indirect means. As a result, only a handful of York Jews could contribute much to tallages and their hold on urban property declined precipitously. Property seizures in the coin-clipping prosecutions of the 1270s, as well as in the final confiscation after 1290, resulted in little joy for the urban and royal officials who benefited. Such arguments might lead other historians to determine that the Expulsion occurred because the Jews no longer provided financial satisfaction to the king, but Dobson avoids such narrow conclusions. The English society that allowed a small core of Jews to recover and thrive in the decades after the 1190 massacre no longer existed a century later, lashed as it was by increasing hostility of the Church in general, the mendicant orders in particular, and a populace all too willing to believe the blood libels.
Dobson's move to the University of Cambridge in 1988 provided him with an opportunity to explore the populations of another English provincial town. Elected President of the Jewish Historical Society of England in 1990, "The Jews of Medieval Cambridge" formed his Presidential Address. [3] He begins with a generous appreciation of Canon Henry Paine Stokes, first President of the Society (1914-16) not to be a Jew, whose Studies in Anglo-Jewish History attempted to preserve all surviving references to the Cambridge Jewry. The collection, however, proved smaller and shallower than that for Oxford, and chroniclers of Cambridge's Jews have not approached the fullness of Roth's account. Fragmentary records suggest that the community prospered during the twelfth century, although here as elsewhere their success stemmed from "the almost insatiable appetite for small-scale and initially short-term loans on the part of the county's local, often very local, landowners," scattered in neighboring villages. (113) The community dissolved in 1275 when the Queen Mother demanded the expulsion of Jews from her dower towns, and much of their property fell into the hands of civic officials, eventually to find its way into the holdings of the first colleges. Dobson communicates with sensitivity the likely feelings of a group witnessing the beginnings of university formation but unable to participate in its intellectual life.
A term as President of the Ecclesiastical History Society in the early 1990s gave him the opportunity to set the theme for the Society's scholarly conference, "Christianity and Judaism." His address, "The Role of Jewish Women in Medieval England," heralded a new approach for his own scholarship while paying tribute to fundamental work on the same topic presented (to no great appreciation) almost sixty years earlier. [4] Dobson cites some specific cases that allow him to illuminate the social and economic freedom of Jewish women, while acknowledging that the written records that remain most likely took notice of them only when they conducted business by written contract, had large inheritances, or became involved in criminal behavior. Dobson's interest in the topic continued with publication of "A Minority within a minority: the Jewess of Thirteenth-Century England" in 1996. [5] As in all of his works, Dobson calls readers' attention to valuable data found in unlikely places: a list of names of converted Jewesses suggests ways to analyze residence or patronage; the compiler of materials in a ritual murder case turns out to be a converted Jew who provides insight into Cambridge's early community; analysis of the skeletal and dental remains from York's Jewbury excavation finds Jewish women to be healthier and longer-lived than their Christian counterparts. However strong the patriarchal nature of Jewish communities, it nonetheless allowed their females to find protection, respect, influence and personal freedom.
The most recent work in the collection, "The Medieval York Jewry Reconsidered," touched on a number of issues important to Dobson while refining his approach to the sources. [6] Although he celebrates the contribution made by the Jewbury archaeological excavation, and cautiously praises the inclusion of medieval Jewry into modern mass tourism, he asserts his commitment to history based on written sources. He reminds readers that the massacre at York was recorded by both Jewish and Christian sources, and provides a detailed study of chronicler William, canon of the Augustinian priory of Newburgh twelve miles north of the city. Only a writer of Dobson's elegance could manage to construct an analysis of Newburgh that included the work of both Bishop Stubbs and that of historian Peter Biller, his former colleague in York's history department. Here as elsewhere, Dobson recognizes and praises recent scholarship of historians such as Robert Stacey, Robin Mundill, Paul Brand, and the late Suzanne Bartlet. This collection is a valuable addition to the historiography of England's medieval Jews, its prose marked by elegance, empathy, and profound scholarship.
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Notes:
1. The Jews of Medieval York and the Massacre of March 1190, Borthwick Paper No. 45 (York: Borthwick Institute, University of York, 1974, revised edition 1996).
2. "The Decline and Expulsion of the Medieval Jews of York," Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society 26 (1979): 34-52.
3. "The Jews of Medieval Cambridge," Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 32 (1990-92): 1-24.
4. "The Role of Jewish Women in Medieval England," in Christianity and Judaism, ed. Diana Wood, Studies in Church History 29 (Oxford, 1993), 145-68. The Reverend Michael Adler's paper "The Jewish Woman in Medieval England," was delivered as a Presidential Address to the Jewish Historical Society of England in 1934 and published in The Jews of Medieval England (London: The Jewish Historical Society of England, 1939).
5. "A Minority within a minority: the Jewess of Thirteenth-Century England," in Minorities and barbarians in medieval life and thought, ed. Susan Ridyard and Robert G. Benson, Sewanee Medieval Studies 7 (Sewanee, TN: University of the South Press, 1996), 27-48. The title of this collection is given incorrectly in the Birkett edition.
6. "The Medieval York Jewry Reconsidered," Jewish Culture and History 3 (2000), reprinted in The Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary and Archaeological Perspectives, ed. Patricia Skinner (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003), 145-56.