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Israel and the Palestinians: a history of conflict in 8 key episodes
Writing in 2018, 70 years after the founding of the modern state of Israel, Matthew Hughes charted eight key moments in the history of the hostilities
Early Jewish settlement 19th century Palestine did not formally exist as a country before the First World War, when the British fixed Palestine’s borders after their conquest of what would become Iraq, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. For hundreds of years before the British took control, Palestine had been divided into provinces of the Ottoman empire, and had very few Jewish inhabitants. Indeed, at the start of the 19th century the Jewish population of the territory soon to be defined as Palestine was small – only about 3%. The majority of the region’s inhabitants were Arabs, mostly Sunni Muslim, who had occupied the region since the seventh-century Arab conquest; there was also a sizeable Christian minority. Together, these formed the population that would be considered – despite the lack of a formally recognised country – as Palestinians. The Jewish people of Palestine in 1800 were not farmers or settlers but instead lived in towns and worked as merchants or religious teachers. As the 19th century progressed, European Jews – influenced by the rise of nationalism in Europe – began to look to Palestine as the place for a possible Jewish homeland. A wave of Jewish people came to the country in an Aliyah (‘ascent’) starting in the 1880s, making their homes on land bought from Palestinians. This brought a new type of Jew to Palestine, there to settle the land; these adopted tough new names such as Oz (‘strength’). More settlers followed as Jewish people fled anti-Semitic pogroms in Europe, a situation exacerbated by the rise of rightwing sentiment that presaged Nazi rule of Germany from 1933. Settlement was core to Zionism – a Jewish nationalist movement – because it demanded land for a Jewish state. Zionists based their national claim to Palestine on ancient Jewish settlement of the area before the Romans expelled Jews from the region in the second century AD following two major Jewish revolts against their rule. Zionism and Jewish settlement were seen as a return to an ancient Jewish Palestine. “A land without a people for a people without a land” ran a pithy Zionist slogan – yet this was not accurate: the land was already occupied by predominantly Muslim communities. The seeds of conflict 1896–1917 In 1896, an Austro-Hungarian Jewish intellectual, Theodor Herzl, published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), a pamphlet outlining the intellectual basis for the idea of a Jewish country. There was initially much discussion among Zionists about whether such a place was to be in Palestine or elsewhere. Early schemes proposed such disparate locations as Canada, parts of South America, and Britishrun East Africa around what is now Uganda and Kenya. European Zionist Jews were looking for a place to make real the Jewish state, and the debate fell between two major camps. The first was willing to accept a Jewish state anywhere, while the other was determined to forge a state in historic Palestine. In 1905, at the Seventh Zionist Congress in Basel, the dispute was settled in favour of a Jewish state in Palestine rather than some part of the world with no religious or historical connection for Jewish people. Many Palestinians resisted this move to settle in the territory, and expressed their own national identity through channels such as Falastin, a newspaper founded in Jaffa in 1911 and named for their homeland. Other responses were more direct, with Palestinians aggressively targeting landowners who sold land to Jewish settlers. Jewish immigration and settlement set the two communities on the road to war. It would be a struggle in which the Zionists, armed with modern European nationalist ideas, organisation and technologies, had the edge. Riots and revolt 1917–20 In 1917, during the First World War, British-led troops conquered southern Palestine and took Jerusalem. In the same year, the British foreign secretary, AJ Balfour, issued the so-called Balfour Declaration. Sent as a letter to the Jewish (and Zionist) Lord Rothschild on 2 November, and published a week later in The Times, it was a deliberately ambiguous statement of British intent towards Palestine. It did not promise the Jewish people a state in the country; instead, it vaguely expressed the sentiment that “His Majesty’s Government view with favour” the establishment of a Jewish “national home” in Palestine, while also recognising that the region had an existing, non-Jewish, population. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/09/Israel-and-the-Palestinians-3-d4542d2-e1712056720635.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="General Edmund Allenby enters Jerusalem on foot on 11 December 1917 during the British campaign in Palestine against Ottoman forces in the First World War (Heritage Images/Getty Images)" title="General Allenby entering through the Jaffa Gate into Jerusalem, 1917" /> The declaration helped Britain’s war effort in various ways, boosting support in the United States (which had a significant Jewish population) and providing for British control of Palestine. The Jewish settlers depended on Britain for their survival and, until the Second World War, worked with the British authorities to maintain security in Palestine. Jewish settlement was met with local resistance: in 1920, for instance, rioting broke out as Palestinians opposed British-facilitated Jewish immigration. More violence was to erupt throughout the next two decades. Jewish-European settlers in this period recorded the mood of colonialism. “We must not forget that we are dealing here with a semi-savage people, which has extremely primitive concepts,” one wrote at the time. “And this is his nature: if he senses in you power, he will submit and will hide his hatred for you. And if he senses weakness, he will dominate you.” Amid such colonial views, the British veered between support for Jewish settlers and for the Palestinians. Their goals were diverging and becoming seemingly irreconcilable. Full-scale conflict 1929–47 As violence erupted between the two communities, Jews and Palestinians divided, and people had to take sides. Early Jewish inhabitants in Palestine, and Mizrahi (‘oriental’ or ‘eastern’) Jews who came to Palestine from Arab countries and who spoke Arabic, were now confronted by politically mobilised European Jews arriving to settle the land and build a Jewish state. Many of these long-time Jewish occupants of Palestine and the Middle East cut their ties to their Arab neighbours. An outbreak of extreme violence in 1929 dashed any faint hopes of Jews and Palestinians combining, and revisionist rightwing Zionist organisations grew. Palestinians and Jews prepared for a full-scale conflict. Militant Muslim preachers such as Shaykh ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam mobilised Palestinians, priming them for jihad. The Jewish population prepared much more thoroughly, building a proto-state alongside nascent political and economic structures, having already established a defence organisation, Haganah. The Jewish community pushed into new land with numerous settlements, and set up a Jewish presence across Palestine. By this point, the Palestinians were in conflict with both the Jews and the British authorities in Palestine, reaching a crescendo in a mass revolt in 1936. The British army crushed the revolt by 1939, but resistance and preparation for further attacks by both communities remained the pattern for the rest of the 1930s and throughout the Second World War. By the time of the Second World War, the British had shifted their policy from support for Zionism to blocking Jewish immigration to Palestine. They did this, again, to bolster support for their war effort, this time from Arab allies. In the face of Jewish people escaping the unfolding Holocaust in Europe, this caused growing resentment and conflict with Zionists who were trying to save European Jews by helping them get to Palestine. After the war ended in 1945, the Jewish population of Palestine had become sufficiently powerful and mobilised to fight Britain, and good Jewish preparation won the day. Jewish terror attacks against British targets helped to force Britain to reconsider its geopolitical priorities. In one of the most infamous attacks, in 1946 the wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem that housed a British headquarters was blown up, killing almost 100 people. In 1947, Britain decided to leave Palestine. Meanwhile, survivors of the Holocaust who emigrated to Palestine further boosted the territory’s Jewish population. In the November of the same year, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution that proposed the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Under the plan, Jerusalem would be an internationalised city. The suggestion was accepted, albeit reluctantly, by Jewish representatives in the region, because it offered some international acceptance of their aims of establishing a state. Palestinian and Arab groups rejected it, however, arguing that it ignored the rights of most of the population of Palestine to decide their own destiny. Read more: Matthew Hughes considers why British colonial forces couldn't cope with a Jewish revolt in the 1940s, prior to the foundation of the State of Israel The birth of modern Israel 1948–49 The First Arab-Israeli War of 1948–49 followed on from the violence between Jews and Palestinians as neighbouring Arab states – for their own political motives as well as to help their Palestinian Arab brethren – intervened in the hostilities. In May 1948, as British troops left Palestine, Zionist leader (soon to become the first Israeli prime minister) David Ben-Gurion declared the formation of the state of Israel, at which point Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, Lebanon and Syria attacked Israel in support of the Palestinians. Israel was born from war, both the legacy of the Holocaust and more immediate conflict when the Arab armies attacked in May 1948. Fighting against the new Israeli army continued until early 1949. Local Palestinian militia units supported the war effort, but were poorly organised and had little military power. In general, though the Arab forces looked impressive on paper, the military quality of their fighting power and the political unity of their command across different national forces were poor and, as a result, they lost. Israel’s success allowed it to expand its territory to include all of British-run Palestine, with the exception of the hilly West Bank next to Jordan, east Jerusalem (including the Old City), and the territory known as the Gaza Strip, running along the Mediterranean Sea just northeast of the Sinai Peninsula. The result of this expansion was that Israel controlled more than 75% of what had formerly been British-run Palestine – or, in other words, the Palestinians now held less than 25% of Palestine. What happened next has informed a great deal of how we now understand the Arab-Israeli conflict. For the Palestinians this was the nakba (catastrophe) that turned hundreds of thousands of them into refugees; for Israel, it was triumph in a war of independence in the face of a full-scale assault against its Jewish people. Both communities saw the events in very different ways. From an Israeli perspective, the Arabs were hell-bent on destroying Israel in 1948, and the war they provoked ended up making thousands of Palestinian people refugees. From a Palestinian viewpoint, the Israelis were acting on a plan to expel them and thus ethnically cleanse the country. Israel did expel Palestinians, but others simply left as their society collapsed under the pressure of war; even so, more than 100,000 Palestinians remained inside Israel after 1949. Massacre was followed by counter-massacre: Jewish forces killed around 100 Palestinian villagers at Deir Yassin, just west of Jerusalem, in April 1948; shortly afterwards, Arab fighters killed some 80 Jewish medical staff near Jerusalem. These massacres reveal how both sides emphasise different historical events, and in different ways. Indeed, histories of this period quickly reveal how divisive this time remains, with accounts often skewed significantly toward one side or another. The conclusion of the First Arab-Israeli War left two significant political problems, both of which remain largely unresolved today. First, more than 700,000 Palestinians now lived in refugee camps in the Egyptian-run Gaza Strip, throughout neighbouring Arab nations, and in the Jordanian-controlled West Bank. Stateless, without passports and dispossessed, theirs was a squalid existence, and no one addressed their lack of political rights. Meanwhile, Israel built a functioning Jewish state, drawing in more Mizrahi Jews who had lived for centuries in Arab countries but who were no longer welcome there. But though the Zionists had realised their ambition of a Jewish state, no Arab states recognised it, meaning that Israel was flanked by hostile neighbours. The consequences of the failure to settle the political needs of both communities were to feed directly into the wars that were to come. Further Arab-Israeli wars 1956–73 Depending on your viewpoint, the causes of the Arab-Israeli wars that followed Israel’s formation lie either with an aggressive expansionist Israeli state that preferred war to diplomacy, or with an intransigent Arab front that refused to talk to Israel, wanting instead to eliminate the Jewish state. The Palestinian people were caught in the middle. Israel escalated border tensions in the early 1950s. This led in 1956 to what became known as the Suez Crisis – an invasion by Israeli, British and French forces of Egypt under its dynamic new pan-Arab leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Israelis considered that Nasser started the war by launching attacks into Israel and blockading the port of Eilat, but the war’s origins are contested. Israel won the conflict militarily but there was no political resolution, and another war followed little more than a decade later. The conflagration of June 1967 had major consequences. Across six days of fighting, Israeli forces destroyed the armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, and occupied vast new tracts of land in the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank and Golan Heights. Israeli paratroopers also took east Jerusalem, which included the Old City, home to holy sites such as the Jewish Western Wall and the area known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif and to Jews as the Temple Mount. Read more about the Six-Day war This was a stunning military success for Israel, but the 1967 war also led to political change. A messianic, less secular, settler-based Zionism grew in the recently conquered West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan. These settlers formed Gush Emunim (‘Bloc of the Faithful’) in 1974 as an orthodox activist organisation to reflect the new mood in Zionism, while Israel’s Jews divided into the more secular versus the more religious. Meanwhile, humiliated, the Arabs refused to accept their defeat. The result was yet another conflict: the Yom Kippur War in 1973, named for the Jewish holy day of atonement, on which Egyptian and Syrian forces attacked. Though this war proved more successful for the Arabs in its initial phases, the Israelis successfully counter-attacked. The conflict led Israel and Egypt to sign a peace treaty in 1979. Despite a historic visit to Israel by the Egyptian leader, Anwar Sadat, the issues underpinning the conflict had still not been fundamentally resolved. The Palestinians remained without a state, and their war went on. Indeed, after the peace with Egypt, Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 to attack Palestinian fighters based there. They remained in southern Lebanon, finally pulling out in 2000 when faced with a new foe in the shape of Lebanese Muslim Shia militia forces such as Hezbollah. Read more | What was Golda Meir's role in the Yom Kippur War Stalemate and resolution 1987–96 The lack of any wider political progress had provoked simmering anger among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza territory occupied by Israel in 1967. In 1987, this finally erupted into a full-scale uprising in Gaza – the intifada – which soon spread to the West Bank. Mass riots saw people, including children, throwing stones at Israeli troops and tanks. Soldiers responded with physical violence, some aimed at the children, and with lethal force. The resulting images, beamed around the world, were terrible PR for the Israelis. Israel’s military power was not so effective against unarmed demonstrators as it was against conventional armies. The asymmetric battle between hi-tech weapons and stone-throwers revealed that the side that seemingly holds more power does not always get what it wants. This helped to push the two sides to talk, and Yasser Arafat for the Palestinians and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin eventually forged a deal – of sorts. In 1993, the two sides signed a deal that was marked, historically, by Arafat shaking hands with Rabin on the lawn of the White House in Washington DC in front of the US president. It was a significant moment for Rabin who, for many years, had seen Arafat as an implacable terrorist foe. The window of peace opened briefly, and then closed. One view of why talks failed is that the Israelis were unwilling to trade land for peace; another is that the Palestinians, preferring war to peace, were unwilling to accept any realistic deal offered to them. Whichever perspective is correct, the inchoate negotiations shuddered to a halt in 1995 when a religious Israeli extremist, angry at Rabin’s peace moves, shot him dead in Tel Aviv. Chaos followed. Extremists on both sides, opposed to any peace deal that would involve some degree of compromise, took charge. Palestinian suicide bombers blew up Israelis on buses and in marketplaces. In 1996, a rightwing government led by Benjamin Netanyahu came to power in Israel, aiming to block the political changes made by Rabin. Critics argue that Netanyahu, who is in power again today, has worked assiduously to smash any political dialogue that would lead to Israel giving up land for a lasting political settlement, preferring instead stagnant talks and the offer of patchy autonomous areas of control to the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s supporters see his policies as the natural result of Palestinian unwillingness to forge a compromise deal and accept Israel’s right to exist. The continuing conundrum 1996–present The lack of political dialogue has led to further conflict. Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians after 1996, and the launch of a second intifada in 2000, led to Israel retaliating with the construction of a huge ‘separation’ wall to stop suicide bombers and blockade the West Bank, while simultaneously building new settlements on land taken in 1967. A withdrawal of Israeli settlements from Gaza in 2005 came shortly before a split within the Palestinians between the Islamist Hamas movement based in Gaza and, on the West Bank, Palestine Liberation Organization-led secular political groups centred around the nationalist party Fatah. The internal divisions within the Palestinian camp that caused this split made it hard to present a unified front in any negotiations with Israel. This made a peace deal problematic because there were now two Palestinian camps – one of which, Hamas, had Israel’s destruction explicitly written into its charter. Many Israelis were convinced that the Palestinians were not serious about peace. Israeli invasions of Lebanon provoked another conflict with Lebanon’s Hezbollah (backed by Iran), which attacked Israel in 2006. In 2014, Israel launched large-scale attacks into Gaza in response to rocket fire from Hamas militants. The conflict rumbles on. Despite ongoing efforts to find a resolution, it still takes a determined optimist to see much future for a two-state solution in which the Israeli and Palestinian states coexist alongside each other. Similarly, a binational solution resulting in a single Israeli-Palestinian state as a home for all communities also seems unlikely. Matthew Hughes is professor of military history at Brunel University London. His books include Britain’s Pacification of Palestine (CUP, 2019) This article was taken from issue 11 of BBC World Histories magazine, first published in August 2018
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Jewish people first began arriving in England following the Norman Conquest in 1066 and their histories can be traced in the country’s major cities today. Through the story of a bronze cauldron known as the Bodleian Bowl, historian Rebecca Abrams explores the experiences of Jews in medieval England, from prosperity to persecution…
Jewish communities spread rapidly throughout the Mediterranean world from the first century AD, but it was not until the 11th century that Jewish people in any significant number began to cross the Channel and settle in England. This magnificent bronze cauldron, from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (pictured below), is intimately bound up with the story of how the Jews first came to England in 1070, and what happened to them during the next 200 years before they were abruptly expelled from the country in 1290. Known as the Bodleian Bowl, it was discovered at the end of the 17th century in a disused moat in Norfolk, and remained shrouded in mystery for several hundred years. It was bought in 1742 by Dr Richard Rawlinson, who bequeathed it to the University of Oxford on his death in 1755. Standing almost 25cm high and weighing in at a hefty 5kg, the bowl has a long Hebrew inscription encircling the rim and is impressively decorated with hoof-shaped feet, birds, flowers, stags and fleurs-de-lys. The bowl’s value and importance were beyond doubt, but who owned it, what it was for and how it ended up in a Norfolk moat resisted answers for a long time. The Marquis of Northampton, writing in 1696, thought the bowl “a great mystery” and described it as a “rabbinical porridge pot”, intended by its users to symbolise the biblical pot of manna. Other theories were that it might have been used by rabbis to wash their hands during ritual observance, or to hold water during the preparation of the dead for burial. It is now generally agreed that it was in all likelihood used to collect charitable donations. The Hebrew inscription also puzzled scholars with its tantalising mixture of abbreviations, missing letters and words without clear meaning. A credible translation for the inscription reads: "This is the gift of Joseph, son of the Holy Rabbi Yechiel, may the memory of the righteous holy one be for a blessing, who answered and asked the congregation as he desired, in order to behold the face of Ariel as it is written in the Law of Jekuthiel, And righteousness delivers from death.” Read more: The Jews who fought back: the story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Podcast: Muslims and Jews in the 16th century Britain and Islam: a matter of faith (exclusive to The Library) <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/02/The-Jews-who-fought-back-335b30f.jpg" width="680" height="452" alt="The Warsaw Ghetto, Poland, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were forced to live before they were sent to concentration camps as part of Adolf Hitler’s ‘final solution’. (Bettmann/Getty Images)" title="The Warsaw Ghetto, Poland, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were forced to live before they were sent to concentration camps as part of Adolf Hitler’s ‘final solution’. (Bettmann/Getty Images)" /> Property deeds and other documents, which came to light in the 19th century, revealed that Joseph was a leading member of the Jewish community in Colchester in the 13th century, and the eldest son of Rabbi Yechiel of Paris, a leading Talmudic scholar in 13th-century France and head of the renowned Paris yeshiva. Joseph had spent time in prison (we don’t know for what, exactly) and on his release made a vow to emigrate to the Holy Land, an intention he began to realise in around 1257. Before his departure, Joseph put his affairs in order, transferred his property in Stockwell Street, Colchester to his brother Samuel and presented the bowl as a gift to the local Jewish community, possibly to thank them for raising money to help fund his journey. Joseph left England in 1260, either with his father, or possibly after his father’s death, travelling first to France and Greece, then on to Palestine, where he subsequently died. He was buried not far from Haifa in a graveyard at the foot of Mount Carmel, alongside many other eminent rabbis. The origins of the Jewish community in medieval England The bowl’s decorative features, its owners and their connections with France reflect the origins of the Jewish community in medieval England, which came originally from Rouen in Normandy. Actively encouraged by William the Conqueror, who was keen to foster trade between the two countries, Norman Jews began arriving in England soon after the Norman Conquest. They spoke a form of medieval French in their daily life and studied Torah with the help of French translations. They also frequently had French names, such as Bonami, Bonafoy, Deulecresse and Joiette. Rabbi Joseph of Colchester was also known by the splendid name of Messire Delicieux. For the next century, Jews flourished in England, forming settled communities in many towns and cities, including Norwich, Oxford, Hull, Lincoln and York. Highly literate and numerate, especially compared to the general population of medieval England, their opportunities for employment were nevertheless very restricted, but they played a vital part in the economic life of the country as financiers and moneylenders, the main occupations they were permitted to practise and which were forbidden to Christians. Read more: Should more be done to remember the Holocaust in Britain? The murderous history of Bible translations One of the oldest Jewish communities in England was in Oxford, where Jews had begun to settle as early as 1075. Over the next two centuries they grew steadily in number, wealth and influence, owning some impressive stone properties in and around Great Jewry St (now St Aldate’s.) At its peak, between 1170 and 1220, the medieval Jewish population of Oxford consisted of around 100 people in a city of about 2,000, and owned perhaps as many as 100 to 150 properties. The graceful vaulted stone ceilings of one of these medieval Jewish homes has survived to this day and can be viewed in the current Town Hall. Archaeological excavations in 2015 from the old Jewish quarter included vessels that had been used for smelting metals, supporting theories that the Oxford Jewish community was involved in both the procurement of bullion for the Royal Mint and the actual production of coins. Earlier excavations revealed that houses in the Jewish quarter were connected by underground passageways, possibly designed for the safe traffic of money to and from the castle mint. Jewish landlords and property owners also played a significant role in the establishment of the university. Merton College, one of the earliest colleges in Oxford, was established in the 1260s with the help of a wealthy local Jew named Jacob of Oxford, who was instrumental in the purchase and even the purpose-built designs of some of the buildings. Balliol College and Christ Church were also endowed with properties that were originally owned by the city’s medieval Jews. Cash-strapped students, meanwhile, would often pawn their books to local Jewish moneylenders in order to fund their drinking sprees and other expenses. In 1244, so many books were held in pawn that a riot broke out. The chancellor of Oxford, Robert Grosseteste, banned all further contact between Jewish pawnbrokers and the students, and set up a university-run loan chest, called St Frideswide Chest, to enable students to borrow money without jeopardising their studies. As private tutors, local Jews also assisted the university’s students and scholars in their study of Hebrew texts. The Franciscan philosopher Roger Bacon (c1220–92), who spent many years of his life in Oxford, not only wrote with genuine admiration about Jews, but was an excellent Hebraist and, in all likelihood, was personally acquainted with members of the Jewish community and may have worked with respected Jewish scholars, such as Jacob of Oxford. One unnamed Christian deacon, who was taking Hebrew lessons with an Oxford Jew in the early 13th century, fell so in love with his tutor’s daughter that he had himself circumcised and converted to Judaism in order to marry her, for which on 17 April 1222, he was found guilty of apostasy and burnt at the stake at Osney Abbey. The relationship between Christian Hebraists and Jewish scholars appears in several cases to have been a close one in the 12th and 13th centuries, with evidence of English Christians, such as Herbert of Bosham (c1120–94) and Ralph Niger (1140s–c1199), studying Hebrew texts and working with Jewish scholars for assistance with their study of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Bible) and the Vulgate (Latin Bible). A number of medieval manuscripts have survived in which the Hebrew text of the Bible has been painstakingly translated, with the Latin written word for word above the Hebrew in places to create a bilingual edition, enabling the two versions to be directly compared. Read more: How bloody was medieval life? Medieval civil war (podcast) Taxed by the monarchy Jews in medieval England were legally the personal property of the king and came under royal protection. As wards of the crown, they had the freedom of the king’s highways and, as royally protected financiers, they participated to some degree in court affairs. But they were also subject to heavy taxation. At the end of the 12th century, the Jewish community made up less than 0.25 per cent of the English population, but was providing 8 per cent of the total income of the royal treasury. During the 12th and 13th century, extra taxes levied on the Jewish community, as well as assets confiscated from wealthy individuals, helped to fund the Christian crusades and the construction and expansion of many of England’s finest churches and cathedrals, among them Norwich Cathedral and Westminster Abbey in London. As long as the Jews had money (and no competition from other moneylenders), they were a valuable source of income and could rely on royal protection. But the medieval Jewish community was exceptionally vulnerable to the caprices of individual monarchs. The battling royal cousins Matilda and Stephen repeatedly imposed exorbitant additional taxes called tallages on the Jews, in part to fund their internecine civil war. Richard I (reigned 1189–99) not only used the Jews to finance his 1189 crusade, but also forced them to pay the enormous sum needed for his ransom when he blundered into captivity on his way home. Read more: 8 facts about Richard the Lionheart Stephen and Matilda's fight for the throne Where history happened: Stephen and Matilda In Richard’s absence, his brother John taxed the Jews relentlessly, and took this practice to a new level when he in turn became king. Having bankrupted the country with his disastrous campaign against the French, in 1210 John imposed crushing taxes on his only remaining source of funds: his Jewish wards. Punishments for non-payment included confiscation of goods and property, severe fines, and collective imprisonment. Entire communities of men, women and children, young and old, were locked up on numerous occasions. Desperate to keep his rebellious barons on side, the king allowed them to plunder whatever Jewish assets they pleased. Under John’s son Henry III (r 1216–72) and grandson Edward I (reigned 1272–1307), the situation deteriorated still further. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/02/GettyImages-587494400-a27c343.jpg" width="3786" height="4950" alt="King John of England imposed crushing (Photo by Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)" title="King John of England imposed crushing taxes on his Jewish wards, says Abrams. Engraving from 'Histoire de France' by Lahure, 1866. (Photo by Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)" /> The rise of anti-Jewish hostility Fuelled by zeal for the crusades and resentment of the Jews’ special status and presumed wealth, physical assaults on Jews escalated from the middle of the 12th century. As moneylenders, Jews were despised and came to be hated by the very people who relied upon their services. In 1190, a violent riot erupted against the Jews of York, and the entire Jewish community was forced to take refuge in the castle, where they eventually committed suicide en masse rather than fall into the hands of the murderous townsmen. Other attacks took place in London, Norwich and King’s Lynn. Around this time a new papal decree obliged Jews across Europe to wear an identifying badge to distinguish them from other citizens. In England, it was ordained that “every Jew shall wear on the front of his dress tablets or patches of cloth four inches long by two inches wide, of some colour other than that of the rest of his garment”. This usually took the form of a white or yellow badge signifying the two tablets of Moses. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/02/GettyImages-639160994-6351a52.jpg" width="4406" height="3966" alt="In 1190, a violent riot erupted against the Jews of York, and the entire Jewish community was forced to take refuge in the castle. A 20th-century depiction of Clifford's Tower, York, during the 1190 riot. (Photo by English Heritage/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" title="In 1190, a violent riot erupted against the Jews of York, and the entire Jewish community was forced to take refuge in the castle. A 20th-century depiction of Clifford's Tower, York, during the 1190 riot. (Photo by English Heritage/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" /> The most pernicious form of anti-Jewish hostility in medieval England was the blood libel, the accusation that Jews were murdering Christian children as part of their Passover rituals. The allegation was made for the first time in 1144 in Norwich, then home to one of the oldest and richest Jewish communities in England, after the mutilated body of a young man called William was found in woodland near the city. No evidence was found to connect Jews to William’s death, nor were any Jews in Norwich found guilty of the crime. But six years later, in 1149, the allegation was resurrected during the trial of a Christian knight called Sir Simon de Novers. Newly returned from the Second Crusade and deeply in debt, de Novers was accused of murdering a local Jewish banker to whom he owed money. In itself, the murder of a Jew in medieval England was hardly ground-breaking news, but as Jews were chattels of the king, the crime had to be prosecuted. As there was the clear evidence that de Novers had arranged the murder, the outcome of the trial was generally assumed to be a done deal. What turned the case into a high-profile spectacle was the defence mounted at the trial by Bishop William Turbe on the knight’s behalf. The bishop’s audacious line of argument was that, “we Christians should not have to answer in this manner to the accusation of the Jews, unless they are first cleared of the death of our Christian boy, of which they are themselves known to have been previously accused and have not yet been purged”. In other words, Simon de Novers should not be punished for killing a Jew until the Jews had been collectively punished for killing William. Read more: Medieval money tricks Henry VI may have had a "sex coach" - plus 4 more curious facts about his life In the event, no ruling was reached, the case was adjourned, and the guilty knight walked free. However in 1150, Thomas of Monmouth, a young monk at Norwich Cathedral, decided to make a martyr of William. In his book, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich, Thomas presented the Jews not just as William’s killers (despite not a shred of evidence to support this assertion) but as insatiable for Christian blood in general. The myth of the blood libel rapidly took hold in Christian imagination from then on. Whenever a Christian child died accidentally or in some unexplained manner, the Jews were likely to find themselves accused. This resulted in massacres in Bury St Edmunds in 1181, Bristol in 1183, Winchester in 1192, London in 1244 and Lincoln in 1255. In the French town of Blois in 1170 it was the excuse for executing 30 entirely innocent Jews, 17 of them women, some pregnant, others holding young children in their arms, all burned to death in the building where they had been locked. Poverty and despair By the time Rabbi Joseph left Colchester in 1260, the Jewish community in England was sunk in poverty and despair. The ban on Christian usury had recently been lifted, Jews were facing stiff competition from non-Jewish moneylenders, and the beleaguered crown had less reason to stick its neck out to defend them. Stripped of their assets, the Jews were deprived of the means to earn a livelihood and increasingly afraid for their personal safety. Between 1263 and 1267, the combined forces of England’s barons and gentry (the two groups most indebted to moneylenders) attacked one English Jewish community after another, murdering many of their inhabitants under the guise of waging war on the crown. In addition, they put huge pressure on the king to introduce increasingly oppressive restrictions on the Jews. In 1269 new laws were passed forbidding Jews from owning land or property other than their own homes or those rented to other Jews, and confiscating all their assets when they died. Jewish children were no longer allowed to inherit from their parents and, from 1275 on, Jews were banned from lending money. Read more: Christianity’s rocky relationship with sex Christianity and the classical world What religion was practised by the people of Lithuania before their conversion to Christianity in the 14th century? The end was now in sight. With almost no way to earn a living, some resorted in desperation to illegal options. In 1278, 293 Jews were found guilty of coin-clipping and hanged at the Tower of London. A heart-rending poem, written by Rabbi Meir of Norwich, expresses the dreadful plight of the Jewish community at this time: Forced away from where we dwelt We go like cattle to the slaughter A slayer stands above us all. We burn and die. On 18 July 1290, just 30 years after Joseph had left for the Holy Land, Edward I issued an edict expelling the entire Jewish population from the country in return for a huge grant from his knights and barons of 150,000 marks to support his war against the Scots. Any Jew remaining in the country after All Saints’ Day (1 November) of that year did so on pain of death. Between 4,000 and 16,000 Jews fled to the continent. Many returned to northern France or moved to countries such as Poland, where Jews were still legally protected. A small number remained, either by converting to Christianity or concealing their identity and religion. England was the first European country to expel its Jewish population but in the following centuries France, Spain, Portugal and others would follow suit. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/02/GettyImages-464437711-e72bf1e.jpg" width="3880" height="2953" alt="The expulsion of Jews from France in 1182. Found in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" title="The expulsion of Jews from France in 1182. Found in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)" /> In the space of just two centuries, the Jewish community in medieval England arrived, thrived and was systematically demolished. Encouraged to come to the country, they were then despicably abused, exploited as cash cows by the crown, mercilessly stripped of everything they had worked so hard to create, and finally forced from the towns and cities they had come to regard as home. For the next 350 years, Jews were officially banned from England. A small number remained in the country, however, either as crypto-Jews or as converts to Christianity. Small communities of Spanish and Portuguese conversos in London and Bristol were tolerated by both Henry VIII and Edward VI. Many of the foreign musicians in the Tudor and Elizabethan court, notably the Lupos and Bassanos, were most probably also originally or covertly Jewish. In 1655, the position of Jews in England was transformed when Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel of Amsterdam delivered his famous petition to the Council of State, requesting their readmission. Oliver Cromwell supported the petition and established that no actual law forbade readmission, thus paving the way for Jews to return to the country. The frantic exodus that must have followed the king’s edict in July 1290 may explain how the Bodleian Bowl found its way to the bottom of a moat in Norfolk. Perhaps it was dropped by accident during the fear-fuelled dash for the coast. Or perhaps it was intentionally hidden in the moat, in the hope it might be retrieved at some point in the future. Whatever the answer, the Bodleian Bowl is a poignant relic of England’s medieval Jewish community, a reminder of its technical accomplishments, commercial savvy, religious piety and enormous financial contribution to the country. It stands as a symbol of the fluctuating fortunes of the Jews in the Middle Ages, not only in England, but in the medieval diaspora as a whole. This article is extracted from The Jewish Journey: 4000 years in 22 objects from the Ashmolean Museum by Rebecca Abrams, with a foreword by Simon Schama (published by the Ashmolean Museum) This article was first published by HistoryExtra in February 2018
Songs of the Holocaust: the music of Aleksander Kulisiewicz
Aleksander Kulisiewicz survived five years in a Nazi concentration camp, where he committed the music and lyrics of his fellow inmates to memory. As Mark Burman recounts, it was an act of defiance that allows us to glimpse a manmade hell
This article was first published in the February 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine Accompanies the BBC World Service documentary Songs from the Depths of Hell, produced by Mark Burman Aleksander Kulisiewicz lay in a Polish infirmary seemingly babbling. The doctor assumed he was raving. Kulisiewicz thought he was dying. He had survived five years of incarceration in Sachsenhausen concentration camp and the subsequent death march ordered by the SS as the Soviets closed in, in April 1945. But the nurse attending Kulisiewicz realised he was urging her to transcribe what he was feverishly reciting. She began copying down what would become hundreds of pages of lyrics. Songs of the damned and the dead. Songs of utter darkness or wicked portraits of camp life. Songs of longing for home or loved ones. Among them 54 of his own compositions. Recovered, Kulisiewicz would spend the rest of his life performing and collecting songs and stories of the survivors of the Nazi concentration camp system, which had imprisoned and murdered millions. It’s a body of work that represents the largest single source of music composed in the concentration camps. He died in 1982 before completing a 3,000-page musical survey that had increasingly absorbed his life to the detriment of his family and marriage. Read more from the February 2019 issue of BBC History Magazine here, including: The invasion that spelled doom for the Anglo-Saxons The women who wouldn’t be silenced in Reformation France There was precious little interest in all of this in his native Poland, which had been largely stripped of its Jewish population and was in thrall to manipulative communist narratives about the Holocaust. Kulisiewicz’s vast collection of tapes and papers began gathering dust – effectively in storage at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, until in 1993 it was brought to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Even now its contents are still being catalogued. A CD that emerged, Ballads and Broadsides, joins a collection of Kulisiewicz recordings that remain profoundly compelling musical documents. The songs he left us have titles such as ‘The Burnt Mother’, ‘The Corpse Carrier’s Tango’ and, detailing SS repressions against homosexuals imprisoned in Sachsenhausen, ‘Dicke Luft’ (‘Thick Air’). The lyrics are in German, Polish, Czech, Ukrainian and Yiddish. What you hear are trancelike performances featuring a strummed guitar, and a voice bitingly direct and unsettling. Conveying bitterness and sorrow, wreathed in darkness, Kulisiewicz was a living tape recorder of his days in Sachsenhausen. Playwright and translator Peter Wortsmann cut an album with Kulisiewicz in the late 1970s: Songs from the Depths of Hell. Even now, the recording experience marks him. “My mind went blank; I was horrified and heartened at the same time,” Wortsmann recalls. “A song like ‘Lullaby for Little Son in the Crematorium’ – do you have a right to listen to it, or shut your ears? He was Orpheus in hell, singing songs to try to raise the dead.” Without hope of release Aleksander Tytus Kulisiewicz was 22 when Sachsenhausen’s gates, bearing the mocking legend Arbeit Macht Frei (‘work sets you free’) closed behind him on 30 May 1940. In prewar Poland, he had been a wanderer, a misfit and a hellraiser, to the frustration of his father. He had performed ‘artistic whistling’ on stage in Czechoslovakia and Austria, sang in Krakow’s febrile cabaret scene, pursued a lover (a 17-year-old circus horseback rider) and worked under canvas as a clown’s assistant. “I would lie down on the sawdust, like a corpse, while the boss would beat me on the head with an inflated rubber club. I’d then get up whistling, out of the blue,” he recalled. He was arrested over an anti-fascist essay, ‘Homegrown Hitlerisms’, which proclaimed: “Enough Hitler, Heil Butter.” Beaten and jailed, first in his hometown of Cieszyn, Polish Silesia, he was then sent up the system to Berlin before joining thousands of Polish prisoners entering the ever-expanding world of the conquered at Sachsenhausen, just 20 miles from Hitler’s capital. Alongside him were the professors and lecturers of Krakow’s Jagiellonian University – their arrests part of Nazi plans to destroy Poland’s intelligentsia. Behind the wire, Kulisiewicz’s experience was a grotesque parody of his time in the circus. “The camp was some sort of dark, perverted circus of sadists and miscreants,” he later said. “But here they didn’t hit you with inflated rubber clubs. Fellow prisoners looked like striped clowns, on whom an entire menagerie was unleashed. There was no sawdust, only cold dirt. No one had to pretend to be dead.” Kulisiewicz was imprisoned, like so many, under Schutzhaft (‘protective custody’). This meant arrest without judicial review. Entering Sachsenhausen early in the war, though, was fortunate in a way. Kulisiewicz formed bonds with prisoners at the top of the camp hierarchy, such as the German ‘politicals’, entrusted by the SS with making lists of inmates for transportation. Valued for his memory skills, Kulisiewicz was likely shielded by them and was never transferred. He was able to speak several languages, including fluent German – essential for responding to commands. But Sachsenhausen was still a brutal, murderous place: up to 50,000 would die there before the war’s end. His survival was remarkable. Outside the wire and guard towers of this ‘model camp’ stood the administrative headquarters of Himmler’s SS. This was a place to breed a new cadre of camp administrators, such as Rudolf Höss, who would soon preside over Auschwitz. Inside was an increasing babble of languages. Silence reigned only during the humiliating roll call. Music had a dual life there. The SS would command the more musical prisoners to perform Volkslieder (folk songs) for them, or compel performances to accompany floggings and other punishments. Occasionally, concerts of operettas and light works took place for favoured prisoner communities. But when the SS retired from the camp grounds at nightfall, different melodies emerged. German political prisoners sang their communal songs of solidarity. Czech students conducted rehearsals among the stacked corpses and echoing tiles of the mortuary. The Poles, part of a nation marked for starvation and annihilation by the Nazis, sang songs frequently full of bitterness and torment. Kulisiewicz, with his facility for languages, could move among these different groups, who welcomed not only his musical talents but also his extraordinary memory. A freak electrocution during childhood had given him speech problems until he was taught mnemonic techniques to recover language. Nothing was forgotten. But it was Kulisiewicz’s encounter with the socialist choir leader Rosebery d'Arguto and his clandestine chorus of Jewish prisoners that forever defined his calling. By late 1942, d'Arguto and his choir knew they were bound for destruction and, in utmost secrecy, were intensely rehearsing the bitter, tragic comic Jüdischer Todessang (‘Jewish Death Song’), based on the Yiddish folk melody Tsen Brider (‘Ten Brothers’), but with lyrics changed to reflect the fate of the Jews heading for the gas chambers. In a narrative that he endlessly repeated, d'Arguto implored Kulisiewicz to remember the song. Conveying bitterness and sorrow, wreathed in darkness, Kulisiewicz was a living tape recorder of his days in Sachsenhausen “Aleks, you are young. You speak German, you seem to have good relations with people here,” d’Arguto said. “We are sure you will survive and will leave this camp. We will be killed, Jews will not survive. Go into the world and sing our songs. Tell people about this horror and murder and this will be your mission. If you do it, God will protect you here and after the war.” Chosen and damned D’Arguto and his choir were executed, but Kulisiewicz had his mission, which he never relinquished: “Other prisoners came to me – Czechs, Poles, Germans. ‘Aleks, have you got some room in your archive?’ I would close my eyes and say, ‘Recite…’” Kulisiewicz became what he called a “poetic octopus” of hate, justice and longing. He could poke fun at the Nazis, depict the bleakest of conditions and be a repository for the crammed humanity of Sachsenhausen. For 20 years after liberation, Kulisiewicz had no audience beyond other camp-survivor organisations across Poland, which he would encounter in his work as a travelling salesman. But in 1965 he stepped onto the stage at Bologna’s Music of the Resistance festival and found a new outlet for his musical testimony. A young generation was beginning to tear away at the stifling silence of postwar Europe and its fascist past. West German youth, in particular, were questioning the convenient narratives of their parents and here was Kulisiewicz, a living witness to the world of camps such as Sachsenhausen that had immediately abutted ordinary, ‘good’ German homes. He would perform continuously for the next 16 years while obsessively working on his archive. There were albums, television and radio appearances and concerts. He clothed his diminutive form in the stripes of his KZ (concentration camp) uniform. He would strum the guitar he took from Sachsenhausen and always he would perform the ‘Jewish Death Song’ of d’Arguto’s choir, keeping his promise to honour their memory and play the music of death and life. He knew he was chosen and damned. Mark Burman is a BBC radio documentaries producer Songs from the Depths of Hell, a documentary about Aleksander Kulisiewicz’s music presented by Alan Dein and produced by Mark Burman, will air on BBC World Service in late January To listen to excerpts of Kulisiewicz’s music, search on ushmm.org
Sewing for the Nazis: who were the dressmakers of Auschwitz?
You may have heard of the musicians of Auschwitz – prisoners forced to provide orchestra music as other inmates marched to work – but chances are you've never heard about the dressmakers. Here, costume historian Lucy Adlington reveals some startling facts about the concentration camp's thriving fashion workshop, where a group of female prisoners served as seamstresses for a vain elite
Anti-Semitism in Hitler’s Third Reich was fuelled by state-endorsed racism and personal greed. Perpetrators of the Final Solution put far more value on Jewish plunder than they did on Jewish lives, and high-ranking Nazi officials and their families were more than happy to wear clothes created by those they considered on a par with vermin. Nothing highlights this obscene indulgence more than the establishment of a fashion workshop – known as the Upper Tailoring Studio – in the middle of Auschwitz. Thousands of people were forced to work in sewing workshops set up in ghettos and concentration camps during the Second World War. However, this particular workshop was not for making or mending military uniforms. Instead, it was created purely for a vain elite who satisfied their love of fashion in the middle of a hell on Earth… A workshop for the commandant’s wife The Auschwitz commandant’s wife, Hedwig Hoess, had come a long way from her ‘back to the land’ rural roots when she first employed two local Polish seamstresses to sew in her villa overlooking the concentration camp. Hedwig called life in the villa “paradise”. There she could indulge in luxury items from the best couture houses of Europe. These included fabrics and fashions selected from the mounds of plunder being processed in vast warehouses in the camp, just a short distance from her beloved flower garden. Prisoners carried out the processing of goods, even coming across belongings of their own murdered relatives as they did so. When other officers’ wives and female guards grew envious of her wardrobe, Hedwig opened an elite dressmaking workshop – the Upper Tailoring Studio – inside the camp itself. A needle was a prized possession in the concentration camp universe. Deportees were deliberately humiliated on arrival at the camps by being forced to undress in public and hand over all their clothes before having all hair shaved. Thus vulnerable and degraded, they struggled to hold on to their identity. Those few who survived selections for the gas chambers were given filthy striped uniforms to wear, or a random item of civilian clothing. Having a needle meant being able to patch and repair clothes or even make ‘illegal’ items such as bras and knickers. Clothes were crucial for protection in harsh weather. Appearance was also a significant factor for morale among inmates who wanted to keep a sense of humanity. However, daring to wear ‘forbidden’ clothing could result in death if discovered. Work meant a slim chance of survival in the camps. Those who couldn’t work were quickly killed. On the whole, female deportees couldn’t boast the professional skills that would set them apart as potentially valuable to their oppressors – in the 1940s, few women were electricians or carpenters for example. Luckily, textile skills – part of a girl’s upbringing in this era – were valued in laundry details and mending rooms. The tailoring studio at Auschwitz was a unique and highly coveted workplace. It was indoors, there were washing facilities and, most importantly, the seamstresses gained a strong sense of camaraderie, which was crucial for survival. There were about 23 women in the workshop, with a clever, compassionate Slovakian inmate named Marta as their overseer. The women were chosen for their skills, or because they had connections with existing dressmakers. They weren’t protected from disease and beatings beyond the workshop walls, but it was at least a haven for part of the day. Defying the Nazi regime Most of the Auschwitz dressmakers were Jewish women. Some are known to historians only by their first names or nicknames. At least two were members of the French resistance: Alida Vasselin, a corsetière who was arrested in 1942 for hiding anti-Nazi leaflets in the corsets she sewed, and Marie-Louise Colombain, a partisan sergeant who carried out militant actions against the Nazis before her arrest in 1941. They despised their clients. One bold Hungarian Jewish dressmaker, Lulu Gruenberg, once dared to taunt Hoess’s young son with a tape-measure noose in the workshop, saying: “Soon you are all going to hang, your father, your mother and all the others.” A brief history of Auschwitz – the most deadly site of the Holocaust Auschwitz: the men behind the mass murder Jewish survivor Hermine Hecht reported that on Saturdays “exactly at noon, the SS big shots appeared to pick up their wives’ dresses”. Fittings took place at the workshops. The seamstresses were required to produce two outfits per client a week. They created new designs, and altered high-quality clothes brought into Auschwitz by Jewish deportees. Many SS clients ordered beautiful evening gowns in fashionable styles, to be worn to dinner parties, music concerts and cinema visits. They appeared to have had no qualms whatsoever about wearing the gowns of murdered innocents, or outfits created by enslaved prisoners. Irma Grese, one of the most sadistic SS guards, even had her own ‘pet’ dressmaker, a Viennese inmate – name unknown – who kept Grese immaculately turned out for all occasions. Attempted escape As the Soviets approached Auschwitz in the bitterly cold January of 1945, the SS evacuated the camp of loot and prisoners, including the dressmakers. The prisoners left on foot in what became known as ‘death marches’. Four of the tailoring studio dressmakers had organised civilian outfits as part of an escape plan. Marta, the overseer, and three young seamstresses – Borish, Lulu and Baba – approached a passenger train, hoping to blend in with other Polish people. Marta was warned off the attempt, but the other three were caught and shot on the spot. Marta was hidden by local Poles and in return for sanctuary, she sewed their clothes and survived the war. Lucy Adlington is an author, actor and costume historian. Her young adult novel, The Red Ribbon, is out now and was inspired by the true stories of the dressmakers at Auschwitz.
Laurence Rees joins us to explore some of the key debates in the history of the Nazi genocide of the Jews.
Historian, author and broadcaster Laurence Rees joins us to discuss his upcoming book The Holocaust: A New History and consider some of the key debates in the history of the Nazi genocide of the Jews.