I am in Oxford, on the path called Deadman’s Walk at the top of Christ Church Meadow. It runs west to east, past Merton College and the old city wall, and ends at what is now the Botanic Gardens, which is marked with a plaque: “An ancient footpath linked this cemetery with the medieval Jewish quarter along Great Jewry St, now St Aldates.
For over 800 years this path has been called Deadman’s Walk, a name that bears silent witness to a community that contributed to the growth of this city and early university throughout the 12th and 13th centuries. In 1290 all the Jews were expelled from England by King Edward I. They were not permitted to return for over 350 years.”
Like most 19 year olds, I understood very little about myself, or the world, when I arrived at Merton College in the early 1990s. I was a bookish, suburban Jewish child and I had arrived in a world of addling and deceptive splendour. Oxford is beautiful, of course. I spent last weekend marvelling at Merton College’s chapel and its upper library, which is 13th century: the oldest continually functioning academic library in the world. But Oxford University’s essential characteristic is not beauty: if you want simple beauty, go to Bath, which is open to all. It is, rather, a place of power and industry, to which beauty is merely incidental: this is what good English buildings looked like between the 13th and the 20th centuries, and if you can afford many gardeners to tend the flowers, all the better. I did not understand this at 19, and I did not understand my own alienation. I was frightened of Oxford, because I sensed its power and frigidity, and I read the fantasies of JRR Tolkien, for many years a fellow at Merton, to soothe me: perhaps Tolkien, who wrote a whole parallel England – his hero Frodo Baggins called himself Mr Underhill – was also frightened? I don’t think that now, but, as I keep reminding you, I was young.
To me Oxford seemed, among other things, a very un-Jewish place: as if we had been erased. I was projecting perhaps a little here: few fellows of All Souls College were as gilded as Isaiah Berlin, even if he was the first Jew to be elected fellow there, in 1932; and Albert Einstein, one of the German-Jewish scholars who came here as Nazism rose, was a fellow of Christ Church at the same time.
Einstein called his fellow dons “the holy brotherhood in tails” and moved to Princeton; Oxford, being Oxford, put his blackboard in a museum and his face in a stained-glass window. Berlin, who met Einstein in Oxford, thinks Einstein left because Oxford was too social for him, which made me laugh. Not all Jews are the same. Jews were allowed to study here from 1856 (though women would wait until 1920 to be allowed to sit for degrees) and could teach here from 1871 (the female caveat again applies).
To return to personal anecdote, sometimes I felt that Merton Chapel, which contains a Siberian jasper vase gifted by Alexander I, might fall on my head. But my old college rarely fails my adult self. The truth is that Merton is so old – it was founded in 1264 by Walter de Merton, bishop of Rochester and Chancellor to Henry III, and has the best claim to be the oldest Oxford college – that it has Jewish history. It is partially the history of conveyancing, but we will take it anyway. Jacob of London, son of Moses, a Jew, sold a house to Walter de Merton for his college. Members of the Jewish population of Oxford, which arrived in England with William the Conqueror, acted as landlords, and Jacob was one such. It was called John Halegod’s house, and it may have survived until 1591, when it was replaced by Warden Savile. Still, I stared at the site on Saturday, wishing I could see the original house – a building of similar age survives in this quadrangle, now the postgraduate student common room.
Still, I felt a strange belonging. The deed of sale is in the Merton archives dated 1266/67. Jacob signed it in Hebrew, though the signature is obscured by a fold in the parchment: ah, irony! Other Hebrew documents, called starrs, detail the sale of debts from Jews to Walter de Merton; or the transfer of land to Walter de Merton. We cannot know the precise circumstancesof the transactions, though we know that antisemitism was rising, and it was surely good to be helpful to Walter, a servant of the king.
Oxford was exempt from the worst acts of brutality that medieval England inflicted on its Jews. There was no murderous pogrom here, as at York in 1190, but we have something: during the Ascension Day procession of 1268, it was said that a Jew rioted and smashed the wooden cross. The whole Jewish population of Oxford was imprisoned on the order of Henry III and released on the promise that they would erect a new and better cross. It was of marble and gold and named “the Jews’ Cross”. The body is lost, though the base remains.
The Jewish population of Oxford declined, and within 25 years of Jacob’s sale of Halegod’s house to Walter, the Jews of England were expelled by Edward I. Like Tolkien’s fantasy England – and this is perhaps why I identified with him so keenly when I studied there– the history of Oxford Jewry is beneath my feet. I wander.
The Jewish quarter is under and around Christ Church, once Cardinal College, after its founder Thomas Wolsey who was also, in his way, expelled from Oxford’s history; after he failed to secure Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, he lost his properties and died. Saint Aldate was called Great Jewry Street then, and it was home to money-lenders, small traders and medicinal practitioners. The site of the old synagogue is under the north-west tower of Tom Quad; the site of the house of Chaim the Tall, hanged for coin clipping in the Tower of London in 1278, is in Lumbard’s Lane. Other fragments of Judaica remain: the Bodleian Library has a copy of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah and has housed the Collection of Chief Rabbi Oppenheimer of Prague since 1829.
I look at the plaque by the Botanic Gardens: it was raised in 1931, when Einstein was here. May their memory be blessed, it says in Hebrew, and I think of the words of the novelist Hilary Mantel: under every history, another history.
To get more from opinion, click here to sign up for our free Editor's Picks newsletter.