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Expulsion: England's Jewish Solution. By Richard Huscroft. Stroud, U.K.: Tempus, 2006. 192 pp. $24.95 paper.
Richard Huscroft's slim volume, unburdened by extensive notes, will be a useful classroom text. Huscroft proposes to overlay the results of recent historical research upon the portraits that Michael Adler, Cecil Roth, and Henry Richardson drew of medieval English Jewry. With social and economic data drawn from records of the Exchequer of the Jews, pipe rolls of the Royal Exchequer, and letter rolls from the Royal Chancery, and utilizing the recent scholarship of Robert Stacev, Robin Mundill, Paul Brand, and others, Huscroft has produced a very readable overview of the history of the Jews of England from the Norman Conquest to their mass expulsion in 1290.
The subject matter for this book is important in its own right. The history of medieval English Jewry provides a case study in medieval Jewish-Christian relations, both because it is so well documented and because England was the crucible in which new developments in Christian anti-Judaism were tested. Although English Jewry did not suffer the violent attacks that accompanied the First Crusade on the Continent, nonetheless, it was likely that the myth of ritual murder, a charge that spread across England and then to the Continent, first appeared in England after the death of William of Norwich in 1144. By the twentieth century, then, one would be hard pressed to find a single European Jewish community that had not suffered under this accusation....