The latest work by John Tolan on religious minorities in Christian Europe, and his first book on the Jewish communities, is more original and diverse in content than its title, might suggest. Founded on several decades of research, this is a wide-ranging, learned, and eminently accessible study of England's Jewish communities during the thirteenth century, and their complex, dynamic relationship with the Crown. Although I do not agree that, in the world of academic historians at least, the medieval English Jewry can still be characterized as a neglected chapter of English history (there is much original new scholarship on the subject being generated by scholars like Dean Irwin in the UK and Pinchas Roth in Israel), England's Jews had its genesis in a time when the study of the Jews of medieval England was confined to a small number of scholars, often working outside the discipline of History or beyond academe itself. Thankfully, the “othering” of English Jewish History is slowly but surely being reversed, and Tolan's new book represents an important part of that process. In this volume, we have a compelling exploration of the interactions of the Crown and its Jewish subjects that will add a great deal to our knowledge of the Jews of medieval England. This is relevant and pressing, as Tolan himself explains in his Introduction, and has become more so since the book appeared.

England's Jews comprises seven chapters, each containing what is effectively a discrete study within the book's broader purpose, the range of different subjects a telling indication of the complexity and diversity of the story, or stories, of medieval English Jewry (and of how much more likely remains to be told). Chapter 1 focuses on Isaac of Norwich, the prominent financier long imprisoned under King John but able to rescue his career in the early years of Henry III. Although, as Tolan acknowledges, Isaac was hardly typical among his contemporaries, his career sheds light on the experiences of Jewish lending networks, and the Jewish communities of England more broadly, in the troubled (and troubling) reign of King John. It also sheds light on the Jews' recovery under the young King Henry, when the Jewish financiers were permitted to resume their work. Chapters 2 and 3 address the topics of the bishops’ (especially Langton's) attempts to limit contact between Jews and Christians—and the pushback from a king determined to assert his dominion over his Jews—and of Simon de Montfort's expulsion of the Jews from Leicester. It is in the context of de Montfort's challenge to royal authority over the Jews that Tolan places Henry's establishment of the Domus Conversorum in 1232 (to ensure the welfare of Jewish converts to Christianity) and his promulgation of the Statute of Jewry of 1233.

Chapter 4 explores the fertile intellectual and practical collaboration between Jewish and Christian communities in Oxford, while chapter 5 addresses the concessions made to the Church in 1253 by a cash-strapped king who needed the bishops’ support for a new crusading tax on church revenues. Jews now had to wear identification badges, pay tithes to the church, and eschew the employment of Christian servants. In 1255, the formerly protective king (in a manner of speaking) gave credence to the blood-libel tale of Hugh of Lincoln and became the first European ruler to convict Jews of ritual murder. Blood-libel was thus, to Tolan, not a grassroots response but one fostered by the elites, and it boded ill for English Jewry. The final two chapters deal with the inter-relationship between civil war and anti-Jewish violence between 1258 and 1267 and, ultimately, the Jews’ ejection from England by Edward I in 1290. The long reign of Henry III is thus critical to Tolan's work. Rather than examining the history of English Jewry for clues to the reason for the Expulsion, Tolan sees Henry III's reign as “paradoxically … the high-water mark of Jewish integration into English society and the beginning of a precipitous decline” (2). So it is that Henry III looms large in each chapter's discussion, as the fate of England's Jews, from the prominent Isaac of Norwich to the least wealthy and influential, was contingent largely upon the king's financial health and the responses of those around him, including the Jews themselves, to his demands and expectations.

For a work so long in the making, it is somewhat surprising that no unpublished sources were used. The focus on what is essentially the canon of published primary-source material for English Jewry specifically, like the plea rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, and for government finance and administration more broadly, such as the Fine, Close, Patent and Pipe Rolls, means that important material has not been mined. A prime example is the wealth of plea rolls from the common law courts—tribunals within the king's jurisdiction—in which, despite the establishment of the multi-purpose Exchequer of the Jews, Jewish litigants can still be found. Equally, as Dean Irwin has repeatedly demonstrated, there is much to be learned about the relationship between the Crown and its Jewish subjects from the many unpublished chirographs housed in the National Archives and the records offices of English towns which had significant Jewish communities before 1290.

Nevertheless, the fact that Tolan has been able to confine himself to published resources in this original contribution is probably a good indication of just how much more can, and will, be written about the Jews of medieval England in the years to come. This is a sophisticated study of the shifting inter-relationships between the Crown, Church, and Jewish communities of thirteenth-century England and the catastrophic outcome for the latter. The accessibility of the work will help bring this knowledge to a wider readership.