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financial dealings forbidden by the Christian church.
In 1244 Moses Crespin inherited from his father Jacob a
house in Milk Street, just off Cheapside. At a time when
most Londoners lived in wooden houses, Jewish money
lenders like Crespin lived in stone houses. Moses or his
father built the mikvah in the cellar of the house. The
Norman nobility, always in need of funds, relied on Jewish
moneylenders, conferring on them special status but also
subjecting them to special taxes whenever their coffers
needed topping up but in 1290 and heavily in debt King
Edward I ordered all Jews to be expelled. Anyone who had
owed money to Jewish money lenders now owed it to the
King. Moses Crespin and his family were among the 3,000
to 16,000 Jews (accounts vary) who were deported from
England at this time. The house in Milk Street, valued at
£3 19 shillings, was confiscated and, as is the way of
things, it was given to Martin Ferraunt, a servant of
Queen Eleanor.
Jewish people would not be permitted to settle in England
again until the 1650s in the time of Oliver Cromwell.
Some Spanish merchants known as Marranos stayed and
worshipped publicly in Christian churches and secretly
in Jewish synagogues. Not going to church wasn’t an
option - they’d have stood out a mile. A few years after
being allowed back officially an established community
of Sephardic Spanish and Portuguese Jews built what is
today the oldest synagogue in England, tucked away in
a courtyard off Bevis Marks at the edge of the City Did
you see Eastender’s Dot Cotton, the actress June Brown,
on BBC1’s
Who Do You Think You Are?
She could trace
her family back to members of the East End Sephardic
Jewish community worshipping at Bevis Marks.
If you visit the beautiful Bevis Marks Synagogue, (as we
do on our Jewish London tour) as you enter look for a
narrow little box nailed to the right hand doorpost.
This is a mezuzah, a Hebrew word that means doorpost.
Some Jewish rabbis interpret Jewish law to require a
mezuzah to be fixed to the front door frame of every
Jewish house to fulfil the
mitzvah
or commandment from
the Torah (the Jewish holy book) to inscribe the words of
the
Shema
on the
knobposts of your house
. Each mezuzah
is a piece of parchment, usually contained in a decorative
case, inscribed with the prayer
Shema Yisrael
from the
Book of Deuteronomy which begins:
Hear, O Israel, the
Lord our God, the Lord is One
.
The words are written in black indelible ink with a quill by
a scribe known as a
sofer stam
who has undergone many
years of meticulous training. Unlike the term in English,
a Hebrew scribe is more than just a calligrapher – in fact