The Massacre at York (Clifford's Tower)
On the eve of the Great Sabbath before Passover, 16 March 1190 (Shabbat ha-Gadol, 17 Adar 4950), the Jewish community of York — perhaps 150 men, women, and children — barricaded themselves inside the wooden tower of…
Biblical Narrative
On the eve of the Great Sabbath before Passover, 16 March 1190 (Shabbat ha-Gadol, 17 Adar 4950), the Jewish community of York — perhaps 150 men, women, and children — barricaded themselves inside the wooden tower of York Castle, which then stood on the great motte still known as Clifford's Tower. They had been driven there by a mob led by local gentry, debtors of the Jewish moneylenders, and crusader recruits whipped to fervor by the preaching for the Third Crusade. The royal sheriff had at first taken the community in for protection. By the second day of the siege, his loyalty wavered and the besiegers had brought up siege engines.
Inside the tower the rabbi of the community, Yom Tov ben Isaac of Joigny — a noted Tosafist and liturgical poet who had composed the Yom Kippur piyyut Omnam Ken — addressed the besieged. According to William of Newburgh, the most reliable Christian chronicler of the event, Yom Tov instructed the heads of households to take the lives of their wives and children, and then their own, rather than fall into the hands of the mob and either be murdered or be forced into baptism. Fathers killed their families with the ritual slaughterer's knife; the men cut their own throats; the wooden tower was set on fire so that nothing should be left for the besiegers.
A small remnant remained alive in the morning. They called down from the burning tower that they would accept baptism if their lives were spared. The mob's leaders — the lord Richard Malebysse and his confederates — swore the oath; the survivors descended; they were killed where they stood. The mob then went directly to York Minster, where the bonds and contracts recording debts to the Jewish moneylenders were stored for safekeeping under royal protection, and burnt them in the cathedral nave.
The York massacre is the worst episode in the history of medieval English Jewry. It was not isolated. The same coronation-and-Crusade fervor of 1189–1190 had already produced massacres at the coronation of Richard I in London (3 September 1189), at Lincoln, Norwich, Stamford, Bury St. Edmunds, and Lynn. York is remembered above the others because of the scale, the fortified setting, and the kiddush ha-Shem — the act of communal self-sacrifice rather than apostasy. A century later, in 1290, the surviving English Jewish community would be expelled by Edward I; they would not return officially until 1656.
Better that we should die for our Law than fall into the hands of our enemies.Words attributed to R. Yom Tov of Joigny, after William of Newburgh, Historia rerum Anglicarum, IV.10
Archaeology · History · Genetics
The York massacre is unusually well-documented for a 12th-century pogrom. Three Christian chronicles — William of Newburgh's Historia rerum Anglicarum (book IV, chapters 7–10), Roger of Howden's Chronica, and the Annals of Roger of Wendover — describe the event with substantial agreement and substantial moral disagreement. William of Newburgh, an Augustinian canon writing about 1196 less than thirty miles from York, condemns the killers in unambiguous terms and gives the most detailed account. His chronicle is the principal source.
Modern reconstruction of the event was achieved in R. B. Dobson's classic monograph The Jews of Medieval York and the Massacre of March 1190 (Borthwick Papers 45, 1974), expanded in his later study The Jewish Communities of Medieval England (1996, with B. R. Kelly). Dobson identified the principal instigators by name from the subsequent royal inquiry: Richard Malebysse, William Percy, Marmeduke Darell, and Philip de Fauconberg — all minor barons of Yorkshire, all heavily indebted to the Jewish moneylenders of York, all of whom secured the burning of the chirograph bonds at York Minster the same night.
The chirograph evidence is decisive. From 1194, in direct response to the York event, the Crown established the Exchequer of the Jews and the system of archae — chests of duplicate bond records held in royal custody in two dozen English towns. The institutional reform tells us what 1190 had revealed: the Crown could no longer trust local communities or local nobles to safeguard the financial records on which Jewish moneylending — and therefore Jewish royal taxation — depended. The English Crown's Jewish policy from 1194 to 1290 is a long aftermath of York.
Archaeological work at Clifford's Tower (the present 13th-century stone keep replaced the wooden tower that burned in 1190) and at the medieval Jewish cemetery at Jewbury, excavated in 1982–1983, has put the human remains of medieval English Jewry into direct dialogue with the textual record. The Jewbury cemetery contained the remains of approximately 500 men, women, and children of the York Jewish community, many of whom would have known the survivors' descendants of 1190. Modern memorial plaques at Clifford's Tower, erected in 1978 and revised in 2017, now name the event in English and Hebrew.
The massacre at York was not a riot; it was a calculated political act, conceived and led by indebted gentry who profited from the destruction of the bond records they could not have legally renounced.R. B. Dobson, The Jews of Medieval York (1974, paraphrased)