The Jewish ‘monopoly’ of the slave trade in the early Middle Ages: the origins of an enduring historical motif

ABSTRACT

Phelan examines the evidence to support the claim that the assertion that Jews played a leading role in the slave trade in the period following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire originated with the work of a number of late nineteenth-century historians, particularly Heinrich Graetz and Wilhelm Roscher. He finds prior examples of this historical motif in the work of several earlier historians, and traces its origins back to the Henry Hart Milman’s History of the Jews published in 1829. His article demonstrates that Milman’s work was widely known and used throughout the nineteenth century, and examines the reasons behind the emphasis in his work on the mutual antagonism between Christians and Jews. Phelan then goes on to examine the adoption of this motif by late nineteenth-century Jewish writers, including the historian and folklorist Joseph Jacobs, and its appearance in standard reference works like The Jewish Encyclopaedia. He concludes with some reflections on the reasons for this surprising development, as well as some suggestions about the reasons for the renewed interest in this topic among historians in recent years.

keywords:

• early Middle Ages
• Henry Hart Milman
• historiography
• Jews
• Joseph Jacobs
• slave trade

The aim of this paper is a relatively modest one: to trace the origins and influence of a claim, repeated with unquestioning confidence by historians throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, that Jews were either dominant in or monopolized the slave trade in Europe at the time of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. In his survey of the (slender) evidence in support of this proposition, Michael Toch states that the ‘idea of an early medieval trade ascendancy goes back to a twin parenthood of the 19th century, to Heinrich Graetz, the Jewish author of the first full scale history of the Jews, as well as to the influential German economist Wilhelm Roscher’.¹ Neither Graetz nor Roscher can, however, legitimately be described as the parent of this theory; it is, as we shall see, found in the work of a number of earlier historians, and indeed had assumed the status of established and uncontested fact well before Graetz’s work appeared in English in the 1890s. Historical writing was, for much of the nineteenth century, shared between amateur enthusiasts and antiquarians on the one hand, and the emerging discipline of academic History on the other; the story of the development and propagation of this historical motif also illustrates the complex interaction between these two realms.² Simon Goldhill has recently shown that the histories of the Jewish people that emerged from this interaction were shaped by contemporary interests and controversies during a period when questions of emancipation, assimilation and the possibility of a return to the Promised Land were becoming important to Jews and non-Jews alike.³ The contention that Jews were largely responsible for the slave trade during the early medieval period was enthusiastically adopted not only by those keen to find support for their traditional animosity towards Jews, but also, strikingly, by many Jewish writers and historians themselves, who preferred to mitigate or contextualize the claim rather than question its foundation in fact.

Henry Hart Milman, The History of the Jews

The fons et origo of the suggestion, at least as far as the English-speaking world is concerned, seems to have been a work that aroused tremendous controversy on its first appearance, and continued to influence historical writing on the subject of late antiquity throughout the nineteenth century: Henry Hart Milman’s History of the Jews, first published in 1829.⁴ The book was Milman’s first venture into historical writing (he was a clergyman and occasional poet); he undertook the task in response to a request from the publisher John Murray, who had decided to launch a ‘Family Library’ as a kind of counterblast to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.⁵ Unfortunately for Murray, the ‘wild storm of disapproval’ unleashed by Milman’s book led to the abrupt termination of the series.⁶ This disapproval was prompted by Milman’s alleged attempt to subject the historical evidence on this topic to critical scrutiny after the fashion of the new German school of historiography, even when this evidence included the Old Testament, which was still, at this time, regarded as the inspired and unchangeable word of God by many orthodox Anglicans.⁷ In a letter of July 1829, Milman laments ‘the difficulty of finding a guide or authorities among the countless writers on the subject. I must confess,’ he continues, ‘that I think the subject has been fertile in nonsense; but, unhappily, much of the nonsense is sainted and canonized, and I suspect wise heads will be shaken at my views’.⁸

His discussion of the history of the Jews following their exile from the Holy Land attracted comparatively little interest, but it is here that Milman puts forward, casually but with an air of great certainty, the suggestion that the Jews monopolized the slave trade during the period immediately following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire:

[We] have ample evidence that one great branch of commerce fell almost entirely into the hands of the Jews, the internal slave-trade of Europe. It is impossible to suppose, but that this strange state of things must have inspired a sort of revengeful satisfaction into the mind of the zealous Israelite. While his former masters, or at least his rulers, the Christians, were wailing over their desolate fields, their ruined churches, their pillaged monasteries, their violated convents, he was growing rich amid the general ruin; and, perhaps, either purchasing for his own domestic service, at the cheapest price, the fairest youths, and even high-born maidens, or driving his gangs of slaves to the different markets, where they still bore a price. The Church beheld this evil with avowed grief and indignation. In vain Popes issued their rescripts, and Councils uttered their interdicts; the necessity for the perpetual renewal both of the admonitions of the former, and the laws of the latter, show that they had not the power to repress a practice which they abhorred.⁹

Unfortunately, but perhaps inevitably, given the fact that the publication was intended for a broad audience and not a scholarly one, Milman does not provide any of the ‘ample evidence’ upon which the claims in this paragraph are based; his work is not overburdened with scholarly footnotes. He does go on to mention the various papal edicts and pronouncements restricting Jewish slave-owning and slave-trading activity in relation to Christians, but, as Toch demonstrates, these ancient documents are themselves in need of careful interpretation, and Jewish domination, still less monopoly, cannot legitimately be deduced from them without the aid of some large and unwarranted assumptions.

There is, though, a clue to one of the sources for Milman’s claim in a footnote early in the third volume, in which he acknowledges his indebtedness to the work of the German-Jewish historian Isaak Markus Jost:

We differ from Jost, who is a pupil of Eichhorn, on many points, particularly the composition of the older Scriptures, but we gladly bear testimony to the high value of his work, which, both in depth of research and arrangement, is far superior to the desultory, and by no means trustworthy, volumes of Basnage.¹⁰

Jost’s Geschichte der Israeliten seit der Zeit der Maccabäer (History of the Israelites from the time of the Maccabees) appeared in Berlin between 1820 and 1829, and is (pace Toch) the first full-scale history of the Jews. Milman is careful to distance himself from Jost’s views on ‘the older Scriptures’; as a ‘pupil of Eichhorn’ and product of the Göttingen School, Jost’s views on the historicity of the events narrated in the Old Testament would have been anathema to many of Milman’s readers.¹¹ He is, however, much readier to accept Jost’s authority on matters relating to post-exilic Jewish history, and his account of the leading Jewish role in the early medieval slave trade is clearly pieced together from a number of suggestions in Jost’s narrative. Jost argues that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire placed Jews in an advantageous position in relation to commerce in general, but especially in relation to the trade in slaves:

The great and general movement of peoples, which completely changed the condition of Western Europe in the next two centuries (400–600 [ce]), could only be advantageous for the Jews: it facilitated their means of acquisition, made them the promoters of commerce—always valuable to the ever advancing conquerors—and, because they had such widespread connections and were able to make use of a common main language, gave them almost the entire trade. For the advancing peoples attached the greatest importance to the distribution of conquered lands and slaves among the warriors.’¹²

Jost embellishes this general observation with vignettes of Jewish slave owners ‘travelling back and forth [. . .] leading slaves around and bringing them to market’ in spite of ‘all attempts by the Church to interrupt this important element of their trade’.¹³ He also claims, in passages that must have attracted Milman’s attention, that the Jews were later drawn to England as a fertile source of new slaves following the Norman conquests in the Mediterranean and the closure of some traditional slave-trading routes.¹⁴

What Milman adds to Jost’s account is an emphasis on the motivation behind Jewish involvement in the slave trade in the history of antagonism between the early Christian and Jewish communities. For Jost, Jewish domination of this trade was largely a result of favourable circumstances; at a time of large-scale population displacements and the breakdown of authority, the ability to make use of international contacts and a common language was an inestimable advantage. Milman, in contrast, sees Jewish involvement in the trade as motivated, in part at least, by feelings of vengeance towards Christians who had, until only very recently, enjoyed the patronage and support of the Roman state apparatus. This emphasis on the mutual hostility of Jews and Christians can be found in one of the other books Milman acknowledges as a source for his own work: Arthur Beugnot’s Les Juifs d’occident.¹⁵ Both Beugnot and Milman see the historical relations between the two religions as characterized by persecution, with each taking advantage of opportunities (like the breakdown of the Roman Empire following the barbarian invasions) to assert its dominance over its enemies. Beugnot sees the hatred of Jews for Christians as, if not excusable, at least comprehensible in the light of the persecutions and injustices they had been subjected to during periods of Christian supremacy:

The hatred of Jews for Christians was undoubtedly very strong in the period before the Middle Ages, but had not attained the level of energy it reached at this time. The way in which the Talmud wants Christians to be treated is harsh, because it allows one to steal their goods, treat them as wild brutes, push them over a precipice if one sees them on the edge of it, and kill them with impunity; and it enjoins that imprecations be made against them every morning. I believe a Jew of the Middle Ages would have carried out these precepts with joy; and who would dare to blame him? Against so many injustices, is injustice not permitted in return?¹⁶

In a similar vein, Milman depicts the Jews taking pleasure in the barbarian despoliation of Roman Europe, and profiting from their dispersal to establish commercial networks, including networks of slave traders, which would enable them to benefit from what seemed to the Christian world a universal calamity: ‘True citizens of the world, they shifted their quarters, and found new channels for their trade as fast as the old were closed. But the watchful son of Israel fled to return again, in order that he might share in the plunder of the uncircumcised.’¹⁷

In spite of such moments, both Beugnot and Milman present themselves as friends of the Jewish people, lamenting their treatment at the hands of Christians across the centuries and, especially in Milman’s case, seeing in the miraculous survival of the Jewish people evidence of a divine Providence guiding their destiny. Milman was, in fact, praised by some in the small Anglo-Jewish community for ‘the liberal manner in which he has [. . .] written their history’, and was presented with ‘a piece of plate’, paid for by subscription, as a token of their appreciation.¹⁸ His emphasis on the mutual antagonism and even hatred between the two religions, and their equal willingness to exploit opportunities to persecute their enemies, is not uncommon in nineteenth-century histories of this topic, and serves as a reminder that the discursive alignments of the period were very different from those of the present day. Milman was affiliated with what Duncan Forbes long ago identified as the ‘liberal Anglican’ school of history, a group keen to incorporate the latest findings of German historiography into English scholarship as a way of bolstering the Church of England’s claims to legitimacy.¹⁹ One of the intellectual leaders of this group, and a personal friend of Milman’s since their time at Oxford together, was unquestionably Dr Thomas Arnold, the pioneering headmaster of Rugby School, who transformed the corrupt and corrupting public schools of England into machines for the manufacture of Christian gentleman, ready to export the virtues of English religion and culture to the far corners of the globe.²⁰ One of Arnold’s governing principles was an extreme version of Erastianism, a commitment to the close affiliation and even identity of church and state, a position that led him to voice his very public opposition to the various attempts to remove the civil disabilities on Jews put before parliament during the first half of the nineteenth century.²¹ Arnold’s view was a very straightforward one: Britain (or England, which stood for the whole country at the time in everyday discourse) was a Christian nation in which church and state were inextricably intertwined. The reigning monarch was the head of the Church, and, in that respect, the supreme authority on religious as well as secular matters. Under these circumstances, the idea of a polity in which non-Christians had rights equivalent to Christians, and could exercise various forms of civic authority, was simply unacceptable, as Arnold explained in a letter of 1836:

[The] Jews are strangers in England, and have no more claim to legislate for it, than a lodger has to share with the landlord in the management of his house. If we had brought them here by violence, and then kept them in an inferior condition, they would have just cause to complain; though even then, I think, we might lawfully deal with them on the Liberia system, and remove them to a land where they might live by themselves independent; for England is the land of Englishmen, not of Jews.²²

Milman does not seem to have played an active role in the Jewish Emancipation controversy; it is, at any rate, difficult to find any direct statements of his on the topic.²³ Arnold’s Erastianism was not, moreover, shared by all of his intellectual allies. A number of recent studies have emphasized the fact that the ‘liberal Anglican’ grouping ‘formed less a close circle than a network loosely connected through friendship, institutions, and patronage’, and for this reason encompassed a range of ideological positions.²⁴ There is, for instance, evidence that another member of the group, Connop Thirlwall, Bishop of St David’s, felt uncomfortable with some of the implications of Arnold’s Erastianism. In a speech delivered in the House of Lords in May 1848, in support of yet another attempt to bring forward a Jewish emancipation bill, Thirlwall cites the passage of Arnold’s referred to above as an example of his ‘extreme opinions’ on this topic.²⁵ Notwithstanding these differences of degree, however, a belief that England’s institutions and laws should reflect its Christian character is a fundamental part of the ‘liberal Anglican’ ethos, and it is possible that the emphasis on the history of antagonism between Christians and Jews in Milman’s History might, in part, be a product of this belief.

Milman’s successors

Whatever the motivation behind Milman’s account of the Jewish role in slavery in the early Middle Ages, there is no doubt that it was enthusiastically adopted, and even straightforwardly plagiarized, by a number of historians in the English-speaking world throughout the nineteenth century. Central to each of these accounts is not only the repetition of Milman’s confident assertions about the leading role of the Jews in the slave trade, but also an elaboration, often with fanciful and imaginative additions, of his suggestion that this leading role was motivated by hatred and the desire for vengeance as much as by simple commercial considerations. James A. Huie’s 1840 history is typical in this respect, noting that ‘the internal slave trade of Europe­—a horrid traffic which had been much increased by the irruptions of the barbarians—was chiefly in the hands of the Jews’, and constructing a lurid fantasy based on recollections of The Merchant of Venice as well as on Milman’s authority to explain the phenomenon: ‘We may easily conceive that this merchandise in human flesh would prove a source of savage satisfaction to their revengeful spirits, as giving them in some measure a triumph over those who had so often insulted and oppressed them.’²⁶ Philip Henry Gosse tells the same story, in almost the same words, stating as a fact that the slave trade of Europe was ‘almost entirely’ in the hands of the Jews, and again allowing his imagination to dwell on the feelings of the slave traders, ‘gloat[ing] over the general ruin’ of Rome while ‘[gratifying] a more private revenge by visiting upon the captives whom he had purchased, Romans and Christians, the afflictions of his nation’.²⁷ Much the same story can be found in a whole succession of authors throughout the century, in both Britain and the United States. The wording varies slightly, but the combination of an insistence that the Jews were primarily responsible for the slave trade at this time and a suggestion that they were driven to take up this role by malice and inveterate hatred is fairly constant throughout. Even as late as 1888, an article in The Church Quarterly Review (on ‘The Conversion of the Jews’) laments the ‘miserable privilege of the Jews’ in ‘almost entirely’ controlling ‘the internal slave-trade of Europe’, and cites Milman as an authority.²⁸

As this last example suggests, a number of these writers seem to have been receptive to Milman’s version of history because it was consistent with a Christian and supersessionist narrative that saw the punishments and sufferings of the Jews as a kind of divine retribution for their rejection of Christ. The role of Milman’s work in popularizing this theory, and the importance of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant tradition in endorsing it, is suggested by the fact that the central claim does not seem to appear with the same regularity in European histories of the Jews written around the same time. In his revised version of History of the Jews, Milman notes with approval the work of his contemporary Georges-Bernard Depping, whose Les Juifs dans le moyen âge appeared in 1844.²⁹ Depping deals with Jewish involvement in the slave trade in his section on the commercial activity of the Jewish people during this period, but his account focuses on local circumstances and opportunities, noting that the Jews probably took advantage of the practice of enslavement in Moorish Spain and their international connections to establish a trade between France and Spain, but never suggesting that they were the leading or indeed only players in the international slave trade. Like his Anglo-American counterparts, however, Depping is willing to engage in speculation on the basis of minimal evidence, and keen to attribute the Jews’ readiness to engage in this trade to their deep-seated animosity towards Christians: ‘Jews, speculating on everything without scruple, and hating Christians on principle and because of their memory [of persecution], probably did not have any difficulty in making themselves providers [of slaves] to the Moors’.³⁰

Jewish historians

With the notable exception of Jost, whose work seems to have been overlooked by Jewish and non-Jewish historians alike since its first publication, the history of the Jews was, for the first half of the nineteenth century, in the hands of non-Jewish historians, with perhaps predictable results. During the second half of the century, however, a number of Jewish historians begin to construct their own versions of Jewish history. One might have expected them to question the hypothesis of Jewish dominance of the early medieval slave trade, but this is not the case. What we tend to find instead is a more or less grudging acceptance of the truth of the charge, coupled with some extraordinary attempts at mitigation and unexpected new embellishments. In what is clearly not in any sense a scholarly work, Katie Magnus’s Outlines of Jewish History, there is an admission that ‘[the] principal purchasers of slaves were found among the Jews’, but this is followed by a suggestion that the slaves who found themselves with Jewish masters were, relatively speaking, the lucky ones:

Jews were so widely scattered by this time that they seemed to be always and everywhere at hand to buy, and to have the means equally ready to pay. They were the kindest of masters. ‘Remember how ye were slaves in the land of Egypt,’ is the preface to God’s law on the treatment of dependants. ‘For ye know the heart of a stranger,’ is further and tenderly urged. To the credit of these trading Jews, so often tempted to drive a hard bargain, to seem and often to be hard, and sordid, and grasping—to their credit be it said that they acted in the spirit of their Law, and proved the gentlest and most generous slave-owners the world has ever known. So fond grew the grateful slaves of their Jewish masters, that they very often desired to become Jews themselves, and were thus the indirect cause of an immense deal of harsh and suspicious legislation. The Church conscientiously abhorred Jews. It could not be expected to look on calmly at the possible manufacture of more of them. So council after council of the Church busied itself in devising plans to prevent, or in imposing penalties to punish, any conversions to Judaism.³¹

This is every bit as imaginative as the versions of history presented by Milman and his successors, with the Jews now featuring not as the stage villains of this historical drama but as the benevolent stewards of the victims of Rome’s decline and fall. In consequence, Magnus’s account sees the long list of Papal interdicts and allocutions on the subject of the Jewish involvement in the slave trade not as prima facie evidence of the extent of this trade, but as yet another instance of Christian abhorrence of Jews and unwillingness to accept (in her curious phrase) ‘the possible manufacture of more of them’.

A similar story can be found in the work of one of the leading Anglo-Jewish historians of the turn of the century: Joseph Jacobs. Jacobs deals with this topic in his Jews in Angevin England, a rich source of documentary evidence about the role of the Jews in England’s commercial and political life until their expulsion in 1290. Attempting to explain references to Jews in documents pre-dating the Norman Conquest, Jacobs speculates that they were probably directed at ‘passing visitors, and, above all [. . .] slave merchants’. He then goes on to repeat the by-now familiar charge that Jews were ‘the great dealers in this class of commodity’ before adding a remarkable embellishment of his own:

I would bring this conclusion into connection with the famous incident at the market-place of Rome, which led to the Christianising of England, and brought it into the European concert. We find Gregory, when he became pope, complaining of the sale of Christian slaves to Jewish slave-dealers in the north of Gaul [. . .] and it is probable, therefore, that they likewise crossed the Channel. Remembering that slaves have no nationality, I would suggest that if Gregory had stated the prosaic fact in his world-famous remarks about the chubby, blond-haired lads exposed for sale on the Roman slave-market, he would have said, ‘Non Angli nec angeli sed—Judæorum servi.’³²

This is not the only such embellishment in Jacobs’s otherwise sober and scholarly work. A little later on, dealing with the period following the Conquest when the Jewish community had become an integral though often resented part of the economy of Norman England, Jacobs makes the equally sensational claim that Strongbow’s invasion of Ireland in 1170, usually seen in Irish history as the beginning of English attempts at domination and settlement, was financed by one ‘Josce Jew of Gloucester’.³³

Jacobs gave wider currency to his views by contributing the entry on ‘The Slave Trade’ to the monumental Jewish Encyclopaedia (1901–6), co-writing it with the managing editor of the volumes, Isidore Singer. This entry treats the assertions made in The Jews of Angevin England as settled historical fact: ‘At the time of Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) Jews had become the chief traders in this class of traffic.’³⁴ Jacobs cites his own work as authority for his more speculative suggestions about the indirect role of Jewish slave traders in the conversion of England to Christianity, and makes use of the work of some of his fellow historians and contributors for his account of the development of the slave trade during the Middle Ages. Among these fellow contributors is a familiar name: Heinrich Graetz, one of the two historians identified by Toch as the ‘parents’ of the hypothesis of Jewish domination of the slave trade. Jacobs and Singer turn to Graetz for their section on the impact of the rise of Islam on the slave trade, accepting his view that the Islamic conquests opened up new trade routes and commercial opportunities for slave traders, and emphasizing the leading role of Jews in the trafficking of slaves from eastern Europe throughout the Mediterranean region as a whole: ‘According to Abraham ibn Ya’ḳub, Byzantine Jews regularly purchased Slavs at Prague to be sold as slaves. [. . .] Many, indeed, of the Spanish Jews owed their wealth to the trade in Slavonian slaves brought from Andalusia (Grätz, “Gesch.” vii.).’³⁵

By the time Graetz completed his History, the idea that the Jews dominated and even monopolized the slave trade during the early medieval period had the authority of several decades of historical writing behind it.³⁶ It is perfectly easy to understand why non-Jewish historians like Milman might have promoted this idea. It is, though, much more difficult to see why Jewish writers like Jacobs and Graetz should not only have accepted it, but enthusiastically promoted it. Part of the reason, certainly in the case of Jacobs, might be due to his assimilationist desire to present himself to the public as both a Jew and an Englishman. The incidents he invents or embellishes usually have the effect of enmeshing the Jews more deeply than had formerly been realized into the history of England in order to show that they were not, as Arnold suggested, aliens and strangers, but key players at decisive moments. There is even a kind of perverse pride in the hitherto unacknowledged extent of Jewish influence on events. A similar tendency can be seen in many of the entries in The Jewish Encyclopaedia, which tend to aggrandise the Jewish role in events even where this might seem to reflect badly on the history of the community. In the section on ‘Commerce’, for instance, which Jacobs also co-authored, there is an account of the leading role played by ‘Marano’ families in the development of colonial trade between Europe and the Americas, including what is euphemistically referred to as the ‘West-India trade’:

The Jewish trade from Jamaica became so extensive that the English traders of that island petitioned against Jews being allowed to trade from it unless they became endenizened. By 1753 the greater part of the British trade with the Spanish West Indies was in the hands of the Jews, especially the trade of Jamaica with the Spanish main.³⁷

Such moments suggest that Jacobs and his fellow contributors, like other Jewish historians of the period, saw the pageant of past history, with all its cruelties and sufferings, as part of a shared but distant past rather than as something that had any bearing on their present existence as full citizens of modern Europe and the United States.

The persistence of a historical motif

In one respect, the emergence and persistence of this historical motif can be seen as a product of the uneven development of history writing during the nineteenth century. As Philippa Levine has pointed out, the idea that English-language historians were ‘backward’ in comparison to their professionalizing continental counterparts oversimplifies a complex situation in which the ‘amateur’ historians of the period gradually evolved networks and institutions to support their activity.³⁸ Milman was certainly not a Casaubon figure, toiling away in ignorance of the work of his French and German contemporaries. He saw himself as a kind of intermediary between the two realms, ‘more open than many of his contemporaries to continental intellectual breezes’ and unusual in his ability to read the products of the new historiography in the original German.³⁹ He also saw himself as a historian in the tradition of Gibbon, synthesizing existing knowledge into a readable narrative aimed at a cultured and literate but relatively broad readership.⁴⁰ Part of his aim, as his footnote on Jost indicates, was to disseminate the new historical methods emanating from Germany without alarming or alienating his readers, and the result is a narrative that almost insensibly transforms the hints and suggestions in its sources into historical facts while concealing or minimizing the extent of its indebtedness to these sources.

This story also, however, serves as a reminder of the seemingly ineradicable tendency of historical interpretation to solidify into unarguable fact if placed in the right ideological solution. Milman and the Christian supersessionists were not, for the most part, motivated by overt hostility to Jews, but had a strong interest in depicting the history of Christian–Jewish relations as one characterized by relentless antagonism and conflict, while Jacobs, Graetz and their contemporaries were promoting a version of European history which at least found a prominent place for Jews, even if not always a wholly reputable one. It is not surprising that this enduring myth has been challenged in recent years, as the debate about the relation between the past and the present has assumed a more urgent and polemical character, especially in relation to issues surrounding slavery and the slave trade.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joseph Phelan

Joseph Phelan is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at De Montfort University, Leicester. He is one of the editors of the Longman Annotated English Poets edition of Poems of Robert Browning (6 vols to date). He also edited The Brownings’ Correspondence and an edition of the poems of Arthur Hugh Clough. He is the author of The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (2005) and The Music of Verse: Metrical Experiment in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (2012), as well as a number of articles on various aspects of nineteenth-century literature and culture. Email: [email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9815-1071

Notes

1 Michael Toch, ‘Was there a Jewish slave trade (or commercial monopoly) in the early Middle Ages?’, in Stefan Hanß and Juliane Schiel (eds), Mediterranean Slavery Revisited (500–1800) (Zurich: Chronos 2014), 421–44 (422).

2 On the development of the discipline of History in nineteenth-century England, see Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986).

3 Simon Goldhill, ‘What has Alexandria to do with Jerusalem? Writing the history of the Jews in the nineteenth century’, Historical Journal, vol. 59, no. 1, 2016, 125–51.

4 Henry Hart Milman, The History of the Jews, 3 vols (London: John Murray 1829). Subsequent references are to this edition unless otherwise stated.

5 The story of the book’s origins is told in Arthur Milman, Henry Hart Milman, D.D.: Dean of St. Paul’s: A Biographical Sketch (London: John Murray 1900), 83–98. The combination of clergyman and historian was not unusual at the time. According to Philippa Levine, 16 per cent of members of ‘English historical, antiquarian and archaeological communities’ during the nineteenth century were professional clergymen: Levine, The Amateur and the Professional, 9.

6 Milman, Henry Hart Milman, 85. The link with the demise of the ‘Family Library’ is made by Arthur Penrhyn Stanley in his obituary notice of Milman: Stanley, ‘The late Dean of St. Paul’s’, Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 19, 1868, 177–87.

7 Dean Stanley described it as ‘the first decisive inroad of German theology into England’ (cited in Milman, Henry Hart Milman, 86). John Rogerson, in contrast, suggests that ‘what is really surprising to the modern reader of The History of the Jews is how traditional it is, and how little it displays any evidence of the influence of German scholarship’; Rogerson argues that the furore generated by the book indicates ‘how sensitive the Church and the general public’ were to any hint of this forbidden knowledge at the time: Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge 1984), 184.

8 Letter to Harness, 16 July 1829, quoted in Milman, Henry Hart Milman, 84–5.

9 Milman, History of the Jews, III, 207–8.

10 Ibid., III, 156. The ‘Basnage’ referred to here is the French Protestant historian Jacques Basnage de Beauval (1653–1723) whose Histoire des Juifs appeared in 1706, and was translated into English in 1708. Milman regards Basnage as ‘untrustworthy’ because of the latter’s clear hostility towards the Catholic Church.

11 Ibid.

12 Izaak Markus Jost, Geschichte der Israeliten seit der Zeit der Maccabäer, 9 vols (Berlin: Louis Duien 1820–9), V (1825), 38: ‘Die grossen und allgemeinen Bewegungen der Völker, welche in den nächsten zwei Jahrhunderten (400–600) den Zustand des westlichen Europa ganz und gar änderten, konnten für die Juden nur vortheilhaft sein: sie erleichterten ihnen die Mittel zum Erwerb, sie machten die Juden als die Beförderer des Umsatzes, der den stets vordringenden Eroberern erwünscht sein muss, fast unentbehrlich und gaben ihnen, weil sie eine so weil verbreitete Verbindung hatten, welche eine gemeinschaftliche Hauptsprache erleichterte, fast den ganzen Handel in die Hände. Denn die vorrückenden Völker legten den meisten Werth auf Vertheilung der eroberten Ländereien und Sklaven unter die Krieger.’ Jost’s history has not, as far as I have been able to discover, ever been translated into English. This and all subsequent translations, unless otherwise stated, are by the author.

13 Ibid.: ‘Mitten in den überall herrschenden Unruhen, sieht man Juden hin- und herreisen, sogar Sklaven herumführen und zu Markte bringen, und alle Versuche der Kirche, ihnen diesen wichtigen Handelszweig zu verderben, scheitern.’

14 Ibid., VII (1827), 103.

15 Milman states that he consulted a book which he calls ‘Les Juifs dans le Moyen Age’, by ‘M. Beugnot’ in the 3rd edition of his History of the Jews, 3rd edn, 3 vols (London: John Murray 1863), I, xxxii.

16 Arthur Beugnot, Les Juifs d’occident (Paris: Lachevardière fils 1824), Part Two, 22: ‘La haine des Juifs pour les chrétiens, dans les temps antérieurs au moyen âge, avait sans doute été très-forte, mais elle n’avait pas cependant atteint le degré d’énergie auquel elle s’éleva dans ce temps. La manière dont le Thalmud veut qu’on traite les chrétiens est dure, car il permet qu’on vole leur bien, qu’on les regarde comme des bêtes brutes, qu’on les pousse dans le précipice si on les voit sur le bord, qu’on les tue impunément, et qu’on fasse tous les matins des imprécations contre eux. Je crois qu’un Juif zélé du moyen âge aurait accompli avec joie ces préceptes; et qui eût osé l’en blâmer? Contre tant d’injustices, l’injustice ne sera-t-elle donc pas permise?’

17 Milman, History of the Jews, III, 206.

18 Letter from Mr Magnus to John Murray, 17 March 1834, quoted in Samuel Smiles, A Publisher and His Friends: Memoir and Correspondence of the Late John Murray, with an Account of the Origin and Progress of the House, 1768–1843, 2 vols (London: John Murray 1891), II, 301.

19 Duncan Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1952).

20 Milman and Arnold were part of ‘a club of young Masters of Arts’ who dined together regularly at Oxford: Milman, Henry Hart Milman, 51n.

21 On Jewish emancipation and the debate it prompted, see U. R. Q. Henriques, ‘The Jewish emancipation controversy in nineteenth-century Britain’, Past and Present, no. 40, 1968, 126–46. Henriques sees Arnold’s Erastianism as a kind of rationalization of an underlying antisemitism.

22 Letter from Thomas Arnold to W. W. Hull, 27 April 1836, quoted in Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D., 2nd American edn, 2 vols in 1 (New York and Philadelphia: D. and George S. Appleton 1846), 274–5.

23 In his 3rd edition of History of the Jews, published in 1863, Milman acknowledges that the cause of Jewish emancipation has eventually been successful, and pays tribute to the personal qualities of the first Jewish Lord Mayor of London, but does not provide any insight into his personal views on this development: Milman, History of the Jews, 3rd edn, III, 423.

24 Joshua Bennett, God and Progress: Religion and History in British Intellectual Culture, 1845–1914 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2019), 20; see also James Kirby, Historians and the Church of England: Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870–1920 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2016), 32–9.

25 Connop Thirlwall, Remains, Literary and Theological of Connop Thirlwall, Late Lord Bishop of St. David’s, ed. J. J. Stewart Perowne, 3 vols (London: Daldy, Isbister & Co. 1878), III, 225. Interestingly, Thirlwall also cites Jost’s Geschichte in this speech to dispute the assertion that Judaism necessarily involves a ‘bitter hostility towards our Saviour’ (III, 216).

26 James A. Huie, The History of the Jews, from the Taking of Jerusalem by Titus to the Present Time (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd 1840), 46.

27 Philip Henry Gosse, The History of the Jews, from the Christian Era to the Dawn of the Reformation (London: The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge 1851), 299–300 (Gosse cites Huie in his notes).

28 ‘The conversion of the Jews’, Church Quarterly Review, vol. 26, no. 51, 1888, 185–204 (188). Other examples of the recycling of Milman’s work can be seen in Matthew A. Berk, The History of the Jews from the Babylonian Captivity to the Present Time (Boston: M. A. Berk 1847); and E. H. Hudson, A History of the Jews in Rome: B.C. 160–A.D. 604 (London: Hodder and Stoughton 1882).

29 G.-B. Depping, Les Juifs dans le moyen âge: essai historique sur leur état civil, commercial et littéraire (Brussels: Wouters et Ce 1844). Depping was in fact German in origin.

30 ‘[L]es juifs spéculant sur tout sans scrupule, et haïssant les chrétiens par principe et par souvenir, ne firent probablement pas difficulté de se faire les fournisseurs des Mores’: Depping, Les Juifs dans le moyen âge, 44.

31 Lady [Katie] Magnus, Outlines of Jewish History, From B.C. 586 to C.E. 1885, 2nd edn revd Michael Friedländer (London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1888), 107.

32 Joseph Jacobs (ed.), The Latin phrase at the end of the passage quotes and imaginatively supplements Pope Gregory the Great’s famous observation on seeing English slaves in the market at Rome: ‘These are not Angles but Angels—slaves of the Jews.’

33 Ibid., 51–2; ‘Strongbow’ was the nickname given to Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke (1130–76).

34 [Isidore Singer and Joseph Jacobs], ‘Slave-trade’, in The Jewish Encyclopaedia, 12 vols (New York: Funk and Wagnalls 1901–6), XI (1906), 402–3 (402), available at https://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13798-slave-trade (viewed 1 March 2024).

35 Ibid.

36 Graetz’s Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart was first published in 11 vols between 1853 and 1876.

37 [Richard Gottheil, Joseph Jacobs, Herman Rosenthal and Friedman Janovsky], ‘Commerce’, in The Jewish Encyclopaedia, IV (1903), 186–93 (190), available at https://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/5219-discount (viewed 1 March 2024).

38 See Levine, The Amateur and the Professional, 86; and Kirby, Historians and the Church of England, 6.

39 Bennett, God and Progress, 117, 119.

40 Milman was a great admirer of Gibbon’s work, and produced an edition of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the publisher John Murray in 1838–9.