Rebecca Abrams

Writer and journalist Rebecca Abrams looks at the unique and long overlooked role of medieval England in forging the darkest and most entrenched elements of modern antisemitism and explains why we need to own and confront this dangerous legacy. 

The first country to make Jews wear an identifying badge, the first to execute Jews on ritual murder charges and the first to expel its entire Jewish population, England in the 12th and 13th centuries pioneered a state-wide hostile environment towards its Jewish community.  The historic Oxford Synod of 1222, which enshrined anti-Jewish measures in English canon law for the first time, ushered in a century of virulent hostility marked by massacres, pogroms and, ultimately, mass expulsion. This unholy alliance of Church and Crown was not only catastrophic for England’s medieval Jews, it created a deadly blueprint for anti-Jewish persecution that spread throughout Europe for the next eight centuries.  What and who drove this shameful conduct towards a previously tolerated minority? Why is it still so little known? And how is it relevant to our understanding of religious and racial intolerance today? On the 800th anniversary of the Oxford Synod, Abrams brings this vital but overlooked history back to life and explains why we cannot afford to ignore it a moment longer.

Abrams is the author of eight works or fiction and non-fiction including Licoricia of Winchester: Power and Prejudice in Medieval England (forthcoming May 2022), and The Jewish Journey: 4000 Years in 22 Objects from the Ashmolean Museum. She teaches on the Masters in Creative Writing at Oxford University and is a regular literary critic for the Financial Times.