The York Massacre, as Described by Ephraim of Bonn
(1189 - 1190)
Afterwards, in the year 4551 (l. - 4550 = 1190) the
Wanders came upon the people of the Lord in the city of Evoric (York)
in England, on the Great
Sabbath [before Passover] and the season of the miracle was changed
to disaster and punishment. All fled to the house of prayer. Here Rabbi
Yom-Tob stood and slaughtered sixty souls, and others also slaughtered.
Some there were who commanded that they should slaughter their onlv
sons, whose foot could not tread upon the ground from their delicacy
and tender breeding. Some, moreover, were burned for the Unity of their
Creator. The number of those slain and burned was one hundred and fifty
souls, men and women, all holy bodies. Their houses moreover they destroyed,
and they despoiled their gold and silver and the splendid books which
they had written in great number, precious as gold and as much fine
gold, there being none like them for their beauty and splendour. These
they brought to Cologne and to other places, where they sold them the
Jews.
Roth adds: "This is virtually the only episode
in medieval Anglo-Jewish history recorded in detail in the contemporary
Hebrew sources, with the exception of the garbled account of the Expulsion
(divided into two stages, with a thirty-year interval between them!)...While
there are three elegies referring to the York massacre, there is no
mention of subsequent events in any other of the very many similar compositions
that are known. The later martyrologies speak in general terms of the
'martyrs of England', and somewhat more specifically although very succinctly
of the London massacre of 1263. It is desirable to mention this in order
to emphasize the very slight prominence of English affairs in the eyes
of continental Jewry, at least after the massacres of 1189-90, which
clearly had a permanent effect.
From: Ephraim of Bonn's Hebrew account of the York
Massacre published in Neubauer and Stern's Hebreische Berichte ueber
die Judenverfolgungen waehren der Kreuzzuege (Berlin, 1898), and incorporated
in Joseph haCohen's sixteenth-centuruy chronicle Emek haBakha ("Valley
of Tears"), translated in A History of the Jews in Fngland by Cecil
Roth, Chap 2.
Sources: Medieval
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