The King’s Jews aims to provide a concise but comprehensive synthesis of medieval English Jewish life, spanning the full two hundred years of the community’s existence and addressing a range of topics, from geographic settlement, economy, and community to religious observance, Jewish-Christian social relations, ecclesiastical policy, and interreligious polemics. As the author of a highly respected study of the 1290 expulsion of Jews from England (England’s Jewish Solution: Experiment and Expulsion, 1262–1290 [Cambridge, 1998]), Robin Mundill seems well qualified to achieve this task. Although the argument forwarded in England’s Jewish Solution—that financial profit was not King Edward I’s primary motivation for expelling the Jews from his realm—has not gained universal acceptance, the book has been widely praised for its thorough exploitation of royal archives and for the wealth of detail provided about Jewish financial activities. Those same qualities are also in evidence in The King’s Jews, which is replete with interesting anecdotes and characters culled from myriad documents and secondary studies. Unfortunately, the sources with which Mundill is most familiar—royal financial records—do not constitute an ideal basis for discussion of Jewish social or religious life, and his fascination with detail, which well suited a focused study of one event, is less appropriate for a broad overview. Too often, both narrative and analysis are swallowed by a mass of names and dates, and chronological development is obscured.

Mundill’s first chapter (“Colonisation and Confinement”) discusses the original arrival of Jews to Britain and their subsequent settlement patterns. In this chapter, both the charms and the problematic aspects of the book are on ample display. Mundill cannot forgo a good story, no matter how unlikely or tangential: he repeats the long-standing speculations regarding possible ancient and early medieval Jewish visits to England, as well as legends associating Jews with Glastonbury and the stone of Scone. When we come to post-Conquest history, we are on firmer ground, as many dozens of documents have been culled for information concerning Jewish places of residence. The final two pages of the chapter provide an admirably clear summary of the overall settlement trajectory.

Chapter 2, “Jews and the Economy,” covers Mundill’s field of expertise and offers a wealth of well-documented information about Jewish lending. The lists of items taken in pawn will fascinate historians of material culture, and students will scurry to follow the footnotes revealing the riches of the archives of Westminster Abbey. Context for much of this is lacking, however: there is no clear description of when, how, and why Jews entered the credit market, and the nonexpert reader is likely to gain the misleading impression that all English Jews engaged in credit lending and that only Jews lent money at interest (although some Christian lenders, including monasteries, are mentioned in passing). Chapter 3, “A Community within a State,” usefully sketches the outlines of Jewish communal organization but would likewise benefit from greater contextualization. No background is provided for the 1286 papal injunction ordering confiscation of the Talmud, and as (Christian) urban communes are never mentioned, Jewish communal structures are made to seem rather more anomalous than they actually were. The discussion of Jewish ritual is problematic: the laws of kashruth (and consequently the existence of Jewish vintners and the tensions revolving around meat markets) are not clearly explained, and “the Seder” seems to be considered a separate festival, rather than simply the word for the Passover meal (65).

The next three chapters deal with different aspects of Jewish-Christian relations. Chapter 4 (“Saints and Martyrs”) surveys a series of ritual murder libels and anti-Jewish accusations and attacks. Although the chapter opens with a warning, the author nevertheless assumes that the libels reflected widespread, even universal, Christian opinion. Mundill does not engage the growing body of scholarship that does not deny the existence of deep anti-Jewish animus and Jewish-Christian tension but seeks to nuance the story, stressing Christian diversity of opinion and documenting numerous Jewish-Christian cultural similarities and borrowings. Indeed, chapter 5, “Christians and Jews,” which examines Jewish-Christian social interactions of various kinds, offers a much richer picture than the preceding chapter would lead one to expect. In addition to the expected complaints about Jewish usury, we read here about Jewish-Christian friendships, Christians employing Jewish doctors, and Jews and Christians renting properties to one another, carousing together, telling jokes to one another, and committing crimes together. This intriguing evidence amply supports the conclusion that Jewish-Christian coexistence was possible, and one wishes that the author had borne this in mind when analyzing the anti-Jewish rhetoric generated by clerics and chroniclers.

Chapter 6, “Church and Synagogue,” addresses Christian theological attitudes toward Jews. Again, there is much information of interest, but the author unfortunately has little feel for the nuances of theology. “The Church” is treated throughout as a single, unified entity rather than a collection of disparate and sometimes conflicting orders, members, and institutions (as is “the Synagogue,” an abstraction with even less claim to reality), and the “bivalence” inherent in Christian theological approaches to Judaism, while acknowledged, is not consistently kept in mind. Some scholars’ solid, specific observations are converted into overly broad generalizations: Synagoga is not always portrayed in art as broken and defeated (123), Judaism was not inevitably considered a “blind heresy” (126), and the Talmud was not outlawed “throughout Europe” (128).

The final chapter, “Dissolution and Diaspora,” returns to the subject of Mundill’s first book, offering a roughly chronological survey of the events leading to Edward’s order of expulsion and citing a range of primary and secondary sources in addition to England’s Jewish Solution. Even here, the narrative is not as clear as one might wish, although the argument—that the king was motivated by a combination of factors, political, financial, and religious—is surely right.

In sum, The King’s Jews is the product of much research and contains much information of interest and value. Even experts in the field will encounter characters and cases they did not know. But they will also be frustrated by errors, inconsistencies, and anachronisms. And the lay reader will emerge confused and sometimes misinformed about medieval English Jewish life. We must still wait for the ideal concise and comprehensive survey of this fascinating topic.