Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

288 DEBT
this regard. They insisted that Jews be excluded from merchant and
craft guilds, but granted them the right to charge extravagant rates of
interest, backing up the loans by the full force of Ia w .113 Debtors in
Medieval England were regularly thrown in prisons until their families
settled with the creditor.114 Yet the same regularly happened to the
Jews themselves. In 1210 AD, for example, King John ordered a tallage,
or emergency levy, to pay for his wars in France and Ireland. According
to one contemporary chronicler "all the Jews throughout England,
of both sexes, were seized, imprisoned, and tortured severely, in order
to do the king's will with their money." Most who where put to torture
offered all they had and more-but on that occasion, one particularly
wealthy merchant, a certain Abraham of Bristol, who the king decided
owed him ten thousand marks of silver (a sum equivalent to about a
sixth of John's total annual revenue), became famous for holding out.
The king therefore ordered that one of his molars be pulled out daily,
until he paid. After seven had been extracted, Abraham finally gave
in.115
John's successor, Henry III (1216-1272 AD), was in the habit of turning
over Jewish victims to his brother the Earl of Cornwall, so that,
as another chronicler put it, "those whom one brother had flayed, the
other might embowel."116 Such stories about the extraction of Jewish
teeth, skin, and intestines are, I think, important to bear in mind when
thinking about Shakespeare's imaginary Merchant of Venice demanding
his "pound of flesh."117 It all seems to have been a bit of a guilty
projection of terrors that Jews had never really visited on Christians,
but that had been directed the other way around.
The terror inflicted by kings carried in it a peculiar element of
identification: the persecutions and appropriations were an extension
of the logic whereby kings effectively treated debts owed to Jews as ultimately
owed to themselves, even setting up a branch of the Treasury
("the Exchequer of the Jews") to manage them.118 This was of course
much in keeping with the popular English impression of their kings
as themselves a· group of rapacious Norman foreigners. But it also
gave the kings the opportunity to periodically play the populist card,
dramatically snubbing or humiliating their Jewish financiers, turning
a blind eye or even encouraging pogroms by townsfolk who chose to
take the Exception of Saint Ambrose literally, and treat moneylenders
as enemies of Christ who could be murdered in cold blood. Particularly
gruesome massacres occurred in Norwich in 1144 AD, and in France,
in Blois in 1171. Before long, as Norman Cohn put it, "what had once
been a flourishing Jewish culture had turned into a terrorized society
locked in perpetual warfare with the greater society around it."119