Additionally, he listed rulings regarding their dress and therefore the importance of
differentiating between Jews and Christians. 35 He also decreed that Jews could no longer
hold public office. 36 John Edwards writes that this impacted the status of the Jewish
community. 37 From 1215 up to 1286, papal anti-Semitism persisted. Honorius IV wrote to
the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, that the “’accursed and perfidious Jew’” was a
“disease” to the Catholic faith, and must “be checked by proper remedies”. 38 According to
Albert Hyamson, Jews were therefore forbidden from appearing at Easter and from
practicing medicine. 39 Edward saw this whilst in Gascony, and put into place the 1289
expulsion of its Jews. Then he returned to England, was praised for his actions, and
instituted the Edict of Expulsion. It can be judged that papal anti-Semitism was instrumental
in their exile.
Edward was not the first European leader to exile his Jews. It has been deliberated as
to whether his Edict of Expulsion was purely a coincidence or whether he was influenced to
follow suit. Years earlier in 1182 Phillip II of France confiscated all of the lands and property
of the Jews there. 40 He did so because he needed money. 41 A French monk named Rigord,
as part of the Gesta Philippi Augusti wrote of Phillip II, that he “reserved for himself and his
successors” the Jews’ “houses, fields, vineyards, barns, winepresses, and such like”. 42
Rigord, according to Jacob Marcus and Marc Saperstein, was “naïve” and wrote “from the
35 The Papal Encyclicals Online, para. 76 of 79. 36 The Papal Encyclicals Online, para. 77 of 79. 37 John Edwards, ‘The Church and the Jews in Medieval England’, in Jews in Medieval Britain, ed. by Patricia Skinner, (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2003), pp. 85-96 (pp. 89-90). 38 Albert Hyamson, A History of the Jews in England, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1908), pp. 84-85. 39 Hyamson, p. 85. 40 Jacob Marcus and Marc Saperstein, ‘The Expulsion of the Jews from France 1182’, in The Jews in Christian Europe, (Hebrew Union College Press, 2015), pp. 315-1791 (p. 98).
41 Marcus and Saperstein, p. 98. 42 Marcus and Saperstein, p. 101.
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