Crusaders and Jews: The York Massacre of 1190 Revisited

Summary

Except for the general expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290, the York massacre of 1190 is arguably the most momentous and disruptive event in the history of the relationship between Christians and Jews in medieval England. Contemporaries, both Christian and Jewish, in England and elsewhere remarked on the enormity of the massacre in which around one hundred and fifty people are estimated to have died. As a subject of historiography, the York massacre can be framed in different contexts. First of all, there is the wider history of the relationship between Christians and Jews in twelfth-century England. Secondly, there is the more immediate context of the late twelfth century which witnessed an increasing hostility towards Jews in England. Thirdly, there is a crusading context. The York massacre took place during the preparatory phase of the Third Crusade, in which the English King Richard I played a leading role. This makes sense because, since its beginnings at the end of the eleventh century, the crusade movement carried with it a potential for anti-Jewish violence which intermittently led to pogroms against Jews perpetrated by crusaders. The York massacre of 1190 can, in fact, be understood as a typical example of the structural violence with which the crusading movement confronted European Jewry. It is this third frame, that is the connections between crusading and the York massacre, which will be the focus of this article.

The Dobson legacy

In his foundational study published in 1974, Barrie Dobson clearly acknowledged the influence of the crusades on the York massacre. In his explanation, the period of the Third Crusade was the first time that English Jews were directly affected by the anti-Jewish tendencies of the crusades, in contrast to Jewish communities in France and Germany which had already been targets of crusader violence during the First and Second Crusades. Dobson's view was that ‘the massacres of the Jewish communities at York and elsewhere during early 1190 were unquestionably the product of the peculiar political and emotional tensions released by Richard I's departure on the Third Crusade’. His explanation of the anti-Jewish violence was based on developments ‘set in a national and indeed international context’, which he considered to be the product of ‘an increasing papal obsession with the dangers to Christian souls of intercourse with the Jews’.