Anticapitalism and the Emergence of Antisemitism. Stephanie Chasin

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Anticapitalism and the Emergence of Antisemitism - Stephanie Chasin


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of most successful Jewish moneylending family in the thirteenth century was the le Blunds and when Aaron II le Blunds married, Christians attended the wedding, mingling with his relatives who were sumptuously “clothed in silk and gold.” Such was their wealth that in 1221 and 1223, Leo I and his son Aaron I together paid around 40 percent of the tallage—the tax levied in times of special needs—due to the king from London’s entire Jewish community. In 1220, Aaron I and his brother Elias I were granted a property in London stretching from Colechurch Lane to St. Thomas Hospital on the other side of the Thames to the Palace of Westminster. Their benefactor was Peter fitz Aluf, whose relative Constantine, a former sheriff of London, had attempted an insurrection against the king and was hanged without trial, his property confiscated. The land belonging to the le Blunds brothers was also ←32 | 33→appropriated by Henry III but returned to them on one condition: that no Jew should reside there due to its proximity to the hospital that commemorated the sainted Thomas Becket. Aaron duly sold the land to St. Thomas’s and purchased another property east of Colechurch Lane which was near to land owned by his brother Elias and his business colleague Aaron of York.17

      It was during Henry III’s reign that one of the wealthiest women in England, Licoricia of Winchester, lived and worked as a moneylender. From around 1230, she lent money in association with other Jews or alone, assisted by an attorney, becoming one of the most prominent moneylenders in Winchester. After the death of her first husband, Abraham, she married one of those richest Jewish moneylenders in England, David of Oxford. Their marriage was a complicated affair as David’s first wife refused to agree to a divorce until the intervention of Henry, the Archbishop of York, Walter de Grey, and the Jewish courts (bet din) in England and Paris. Upon David’s death in 1244, Licoricia was incarcerated in the Tower of London while the Jewish Exchequer scrutinized the official debts that were owed to her late husband. As the process dragged on, Licoricia languished in prison for months. Finally, the audit was completed and, as was usual with the ←33 | 34→king, there was a financial deal to be struck. In return for her freedom and the debts owed to her deceased husband, Licoricia was charged five thousand marks. A portion of that amount was earmarked for a project close to Henry’s heart. A fervent devotee of the cult of Edward the Confessor, the king intended to build a chapel to house a shrine dedicated to the former king.

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