Expulsion

Medieval W. Christendom
The Roman Catholic Church took the position that Jewish presence was
legitimate in Christian society. When individual Jews broke the laws—religious or
secular—that constrained them, they were of course subject to the courts and to
appropriate punishment. When the Jewish community as a whole seemed to be guilty of
major offenses, then expulsion of such Jewish communities was deemed permissible.
The Church, however, was in no position to decree expulsion. That step was reserved for
the secular authorities of medieval western Christendom, and eventually expulsions
became a feature of Jewish life in medieval western Christendom.

Local expulsions began in northern France in the late twelfth century. Toward the
end of the thirteenth century, the new tendency accelerated. In 1290, Jews were expelled
from England, and in 1306 the same fate befell the Jews of royal France, which now
stretched from the Mediterranean Sea all the way northward. Expulsions recurred
throughout Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with Jews banished
recurrently from diverse domains. In some instances, these Jews were recalled; in other
instances the banishment became permanent. The culminating expulsions of our period
took place on the Iberian peninsula in 1492 and 1497. The Jewish communities expelled
at this point were among the very oldest in western Christendom and were deemed by
many immune from expulsion That even these oldest of European Jewish communities
might be banished reflected the extent to which this new and negative governmental
stance became the norm, at least in the most westerly and advanced areas of western
Christendom.

In this spate of significant expulsions, rulers who chose to banish their Jews
always grounded their edicts of banishment in some alleged misdeeds of the Jews that
could not be corrected except through removal of the offending Jews. During the late
twelfth, thirteenth, and early fourteenth centuries, the purportedly incorrigible Jewish
behavior revolved around money-lending. The unwillingness of the Jews to abandon
their nefarious money-lending was the supposed reason for the decision to remove them.
While there were often other more mundane factors at work as well, such as the desire for
revenue or the need to placate one or another element in society, every expulsion had to
be grounded in Jewish misdeed. The final expulsions of our period, from the Spanish
kingdoms in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497, were portrayed as the result of the
deleterious Jewish impact on the large number of New Christians on the Iberian
peninsula. So long as Jews remained—it was claimed—the grievous problem of
backsliding into Judaism on the part of these New Christians could not be solved.