Jews and Lepers as Outcasts

While Christian women found new roles for themselves, non-Christians were pushed further into the category of “outsiders.” To be sure, the First and Second Crusades gave outlet to anti-Jewish feeling. Nevertheless, they were abnormal episodes in the generally stable if tense relationship between Christians and Jews in Europe up to the middle of the twelfth century. Then things changed dramatically as kings became more powerful, popular piety deepened, and church law singled out Jews in particular for discrimination.

Even though Jews had been ousted from manors and banned from town guilds, they were essential to the surrounding Christian community. Although there were some Christian moneylenders (despite the Bible’s prohibition against charging interest for loans), lords, especially kings, preferred to borrow from Jews because, along with their newly asserted powers, they claimed the Jews as their serfs and Jewish property as their own. In England, where Jews had arrived with the Norman conquest in 1066, a special exchequer of the Jews was created in 1194 to collect for the king any unpaid debts due after the death of a Jewish creditor. Even before that, the king of England had imposed new and arbitrary taxes on the Jewish community.

Similarly in France, persecuting Jews and confiscating their property benefited both the treasury and the authoritative image of the king. In 1198, the French king declared that Jews must be moneylenders or money changers exclusively. Their activities were to be taxed and monitored by royal officials. Limiting Jews to moneylending in an increasingly commercial economy clearly served the interests of kings. But lesser lords who needed cash also benefited: they borrowed money from Jews and then, as happened in York, England, in 1190, they orchestrated an attack to rid themselves of their debts and of the Jews to whom they owed money. Churchmen, too, borrowed from Jews but resented having to repay.

Rulers of both church and state exploited and coerced the Jews while drawing on and encouraging a wellspring of elite and popular anti-Jewish feeling. But attacks against Jews were inspired by more than resentment against Jewish money and the desire for power and control: they also grew out of the codification of Christian religious doctrine and the anxieties of Christians about their own institutions. For example, the newly rigorous definition of the Eucharist meant to many pious Christians that the body of Christ literally lay on the altar. Even as some Christians found this thought unsettling, sensational stories (originating in clerical circles but soon widely circulated) told of Jews who secretly sacrificed Christian children in their Passover ritual—a charge that historians have termed blood libel. (In truth, of course, Jews had no rituals involving blood sacrifice at all.)

In 1144, in one of the earliest instances of this charge, the body of a young boy named William was found in the woods near Norwich, England. His uncle, a priest, accused local Jews of killing the child. A monk connected to the cathedral at Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth, took up the cause, writing The Life and Martyrdom of St. William of Norwich. According to his account, the Jews carefully prepared at Passover for the horrible ritual slaughter of the boy, whom they had chosen “to be mocked and sacrificed in scorn of the Lord’s passion.” Similar charges were brought against Jews elsewhere in England as well as in France, Spain, and Germany, leading to massacres of the Jewish population. Some communities expelled Jews, and in 1291 the kingdom of England cast them out entirely. Most dispersed to France and Germany, but to a sad welcome. In 1306, for example, King Philip the Fair had Jews driven from France, though they were allowed to reenter, tentatively, in 1315.

Meanwhile, lepers were suffering a similar fate. People afflicted with leprosy—a disease that causes skin lesions and attacks the peripheral nerves—were an unimportant minority in medieval society until the eleventh century. Then, beginning around 1075 and extending to the fourteenth century, lepers, though still a small minority, became the objects of both charity and disgust. Houses for lepers were set up both to provide for them and to segregate them from everyone else.

Leprosy delivered three blows: it was horribly disfiguring, it was associated with sin in the Bible, and it was contagious. In 1179, the Third Lateran Council took note of the fact that “lepers cannot dwell with the healthy or come to church with others” and asked that, where possible, special churches and cemeteries be set aside for them. No doubt this inspired a boom in the founding of leper houses, which peaked between 1175 and 1250.

Before the leper went to such a house, he or she was formally expelled from the community of Christians via a ceremony of terrible solemnity. In northern France, for example, the leper had to stand in a cemetery with his or her face veiled. The priest intoned Mass and threw dirt on the leper as if he or she were being buried. “Be dead to the world, be reborn in God,” the priest said, continuing, “I forbid you to ever enter the church or monastery, fair, mill, marketplace, or company of persons. . . . I forbid you to wash your hands or any thing about you in the stream or in the fountain.” The prohibition against drinking in the stream or fountain gained more sinister meaning in 1321, when false rumors spread that Muslims had recruited both Jews and lepers to poison all the wells of Christendom.