Anti-semitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present

126 ANTISEMITISM
to make to the king exorbitant. * Indeed the king, who made himself the Jew’s
silent partner, was the chief maker of the Shylock image.
For a Jew to function as a banker, he had to have royal permission in the
form of a charter, which was costly to purchase and to renew annually. There
was little chance for him to collect debts without the king’s assistance, for
which the royal fee was about 10 percent, although often it was much more;
debts outstanding were subject to a hefty tax on the creditor, which was a chief
source of royal revenue in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England. If a Jew
died without heirs, all his property and the debts payable to him went to the
king; surviving heirs had to pay any sum the king demanded, usually about a
third, as an inheritance tax. Kings ordinarily did not borrow from the Jews but
periodically simply bilked these “serfs of the royal chamber” of any amount
according to the needs of the treasury or the whims of the monarch. The doctrine
of the “eternal serfdom of the Jews,” which had originated with the
Church Fathers, was very serviceable in providing a legal basis for such royal
expropriations. By the same warrant—when it suited their purposes, fiscal and
political in the case of John of England, moralistic in the case of St. Louis IX
of France—kings reduced or canceled the interest or principal of anyone’s
debts owed to Jews; sometimes they made such debts payable to the crown.
The pound of flesh extracted by the king from the Jewish moneylender, the
Jewish moneylender had, perforce, to extract from his clients. “The Jews,”
wrote Montesquieu, “enriched by their exactions, were pillaged by the tyranny
of the princes.” 23 It was a vicious cycle that ended when the Jewish community
was, as a result of royal exactions, bankrupted and then, of no further utility,
expelled, as in England in l290 and France in l306 and l394. Thus was the
golden goose killed.
Jewish wealth and royal toleration were directly proportionate to each
other, so much so that Jewish communities frequently concealed their poor
members and paid their taxes. Taxpaying was the Jews’ one shield: “Taxes are
our saviors,” said the talmudist Asher ben Yehiel (ca. l250-l327). 24 “All kinds of
taxes are in the category of defense, for they guard us among the nations.
What other benefit do the nations derive from defending us and allowing us to
live among them, unless it be to their advantage to collect from us taxes and
* The rates charged by Christian bankers were generally not lower than those charged
by Jews. In the twelfth century St. Bernard of Clairvaux admitted, “Where there are no
Jews, Christians judaize far worse” (quoted by Poliakov, 3:397); and the Emperor
Charles V lamented in 1520 that religious scruple did not restrain Christian bankers
who “sucked the blood” of his fellow Christians (quoted by Baron, 12:161); like sentiments
were expressed in every age.