The Story of the Jews Volume 2: When Words Fail: 1492--Present

by Simon Schama

Who actually paid for the Field of the Cloth of Gold where Henry VIII outdid even the Valois François I in chivalric ostentation and wrestling? Not the burghers of Norwich or the gentry of Devon, that’s for sure. The same was true of the infant Royal Navy, the beginnings of a merchant fleet, the forts and the parade armour. And in the end, Jewish money, which had paid for the building of so many of the greatest abbeys and monasteries of England, became available to the government commanding their destruction. The ‘Portuguese’ link was needed in ways theological as well as financial, so it helped that some of those men of business and medicine in Bristol, Southampton and London were apparently also rabbis with learned connections abroad. The case Henry VIII was building for his divorce from Catherine of Aragon was based on his reading of the Torah’s prohibition on marrying a brother’s widow. There was indeed such a ban to be found in Leviticus 18:16; but, as is the way of the Torah, the king, his chancellor Thomas More and Cromwell discovered that there was also an apparently contradictory injunction in Deuteronomy 25:5 actually requiring marriage to the widow of a dead brother when that union had produced no children. And this, exasperatingly, had been the case with Catherine and Arthur, Henry’s older brother. Converted New Christians seemed just the people to be helpful in such perplexing circumstances, and through them, rabbis were mobilised to deliver the judgements whi...