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‘Jews' Houses’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Cecil Roth
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Extract

It is well known that there are numerous ancient sites and buildings in this country whose nomenclature brings (or brought) them into hypothetical association with the Jews. It will be best, therefore, to begin this enquiry by drawing up a provisional list:

The JEWRY WALL, Leicester.

MARKET JEW, Cornwall.

JEWS' MOUNT, Oxford. H. E. Salter, Oxford City Properties, 1926, 207–12.

The JEWS' HALL, Winchelsea.

The JEW GATE, Newcastle: otherwise Silver Street, a name dating at least from the 17th century. Archaeologia Aeliana, 2 Ser., XXIV, 156–7.

The JEWS' MEADOW, Horsham. N. & Q., 1936, 1, 27.

The JEWRY, Martley, Worcs.: an Elizabethan house.

To the above must be added sites no longer identifiable on the ground but known from historical records:

The JEWS' WAY, Bury St. Edmunds: Gibson's Camden, p. 451.

The JEWS' HOUSES, Southampton: Rot. Orig. Abbrev., 11, 103 b [1282]: J. S. Davies, Hist, of So'ton, 1883, 456. They were situated just outside the s. gate of the Castle.

The JEWS' TOWER, Winchester. Liberate Rolls, 1249, pp. 235–6.

JEWS' TIN JEWS' HOUSES Cornwall. Max Müller, Chips from a German workshop, III, 320.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 25 , Issue 98 , June 1951 , pp. 66 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1951

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References

1 See my History of the Jews in England, p. 103.

2 I advance the hypothesis in my new book on the Jews of Medieval Oxford (Oxford Historical Society, 1951), 109–10.

3 Compare the impressive work on the subject newly published : ‘Excavations at the Jewry Wall site, Leicester’, by Kathleen M. Kenyon. S. of A. Research Committee’s 15th Report, 1948.

4 R. Anschel, Les Juif s de France, 41–57 (‘Toponymie Juive’).

5 Cf. Baron, Social and Religious History of the Jews, II, 12.

6 Murray’s ‘Handbook for travellers in Greece’, 1854 : W. Ettinghausen (Eytan) in the Jewish Quarterly Review, N.S. XXXVI, 1946, 419–21.

7 Geography, 11, 235.

8 Itinerary, ed. Adler, p. 2. I have revised the rendering.

9 For an illustrated account of these, see ANTIQUITY, X, 1936, 72–6.

10 It is conceivable that the vaguely Jewish nomenclature of other places (e.g. Moyses’ Hall, Bury St. Edmunds ; Synagogue Well, Frodsham, Cheshire) may be due to the same association of ideas.

11 Canterbury Tales : Sir Thopas, 2053–4.

12 F. Landsberger, History of Jewish Art, 166,192.

13 Might it not also be explained as ‘omne ignotum pro Judaico’? Ed.

14 As I showed in 1934 ; see my brochure, ‘Medieval Lincoln Jewry and its Synagogue’, published by the Jewish Historical Society of England. Belaset of Wallingford, who was executed in 1279, is not, as I then thought, identical with Belaset, daughter of Master Benedict of Lincoln, one of the most eminent of medieval Anglo-Jewish scholars.

15 J. W. F. Hill, Medieval Lincoln, Cambridge, 1948, 217–23.