The reputed wealth of the Jews has subjected them to persecution and torture in many countries, and in different ages: and it is humiliating to reflect that our own history furnishes many illustrations of the damning fact. During the reign of Henry, III, these proscribed people were subjected to pillage, persecution, and to torture, to gratify the avarice of an extravagant prince, and the hatred of his bigoted and ignorant subjects. An immoderate zeal for the external rights of Christianity was a distinguishing characteristic of the age, and persecution, or extermination of those who differed from them in religious creed, was deemed virtuous and patriotic amongst our remote ancestors. Treating of the persecutions of the Jews in this reign, one of our popular historians says,

“The Jews, who had been for some time increasing in the kingdom, were the first who fell a sacrifice to the enthusiastic zeal of the people, and numbers of them were slaughtered by the citizens of London, upon the very day of the King’s coronation. Five hundred of that infatuated people had retired into York Castle, for safety, but finding themselves unable to defend the place, they resolved to perish by killing one another, rather than meet the fury of their persecutors. Having taken this gloomy resolution, they first murdered their wives and children, next threw the dead bodies over the wall against their enemies, who attempted to scale it, and then setting fire to their houses, perished in the flames.”

Henry, after extorting vast sums of money from the Jews, under various pretexts, at last carried his tyranny to such a length, that the whole body of the Jewish people solicited permission to leave the kingdom. Henry, however, found oppression too profitable to allow them to elude it: according to Hume, “he delivered over the Jews to the Earl of Cornwall, that those whom the one brother had flayed, the other might embowel, to make use of the words of the historian, Matthew Prior.” This Monarch was a worthy scion of his sire John, who, once having demanded 10,000 marks from a Jew in Bristol, on a refusal, ordered one of his teeth to be drawn each day until he should consent; nor was it until seven teeth had been thus extracted that the wretched man complied with the extortion. Such was the estimation in which the children of Israel were held at that time in England that by the laws of the land if a Christian man married a Jewess, or a Christian woman married a Jew, it was felony, and the penalty was burning alive.

Subsequently, in the reign of Edward I, many arbitrary laws and taxes were levied upon the Jews, two hundred and eighty of whom were hanged upon a charge of having adulterated the coin of the realm. The property of the remainder was confiscated, and the whole of them banished from the kingdom.

In conclusion we may observe, that in addition to the persecutions which the presumed wealth of the Jews entailed upon them, the most absurd and unfounded calumnies have been heaped upon them, of which we shall adduce one instance. The Abbe Guenne, author of Letters on the fertility of Palestine, addressed to Voltaire, states a circumstance which will stagger the faith of any modern converter of Jews. The tale is of one of the Kings of Persia, who, “allured by the fame that had spread abroad of the fertility and opulence of Palestine, marched to Jerusalem, beseiged that city, and carried off from thence an immense number of Christian captives;” and now comes the best part of the story, which is, that the Jews actually purchased ninety thousand of these Christian slaves, for the sole purpose of having the pleasure of cutting their throats. The author does not add whether the Jews afterwards eat these Christian captives; but whilst his “hand was in” he might as well have “gone the whole hog.”

The London Jewish Intelligencer says [p. 691]