Apology after 800 years

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/03/2022 (1663 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As my grandmother, used to tell me, “It’s never too late to apologize.” She was right, of course. “Apologizing helps repair relationships by getting people talking again, and makes them feel comfortable with each other again,” American psychologist and family counsellor Elizabeth Scott has written.

Apologies can also be symbolic. Canadian prime ministers, most especially Justin Trudeau, have issued many apologies: for centuries of wrongdoing against Indigenous peoples; for the 1914 Komagata Maru incident, when Sikhs and others were not permitted to disembark from a ship in a B.C. port and forced to return to India; for the internment of Japanese and Italians during the Second World War; and for the federal government’s abysmal treatment of German-Jewish refugees in the 1930s.

Acknowledging historical injustices is arguably better than pretending that they never happened in the first place. Yet it is debatable whether they actually influence current prejudices and attitudes.

Sometimes, these apologies take a long, long time to be offered. In the case of an upcoming apology by the Church of England or Anglican Church, it is 800 years in the making.

In a few weeks, a prayer service — approved by the current head of the Church, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby — will be held in the Diocese of Oxford led by the Bishops of Oxford and Lichfield and the Council for Christians and Jews. The service will incorporate an act of repentance for an 800-year-old anti-Jewish edict as well as for “the millennia of anti-Judaism of the Church, and [the Church’s] complicity and responsibility in antisemitism,” explains the Reverend Dr. Richard Sudworth, the current Secretary for Inter Religious Affairs to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

In April of 1222, Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1207 to 1228, convened a synod or church council at Oxford. (Until 1534 when the Church of England split from the Roman Catholic Church, Langton and other archbishops were in full communion with the Pope.)

There had been rulings in England that taxed Jews unfairly and forced them to reside in segregated areas, among other discriminatory treatment they were subjected to. At the Synod of Oxford, Jews were forbidden to erect new synagogues and own slaves. And, reiterating the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, Jews (and Muslims) were required to wear different clothing than Christians. The chief aim of this last canon, which later led to Jews being forced to wear badges, was to ensure that sexual relations did not take place between Christians and non-Christians.

During the time the synod was proceeding or shortly after it concluded, Robert of Reading, a young deacon and a student at Oxford University, who had fallen in love with a Jewish woman and converted to Judaism, was burned alive by lay officials for this perceived heresy.

Sixty-eight years later, on July 18, 1290, Edward I expelled Jews from England, the first European country to implement such a measure — but not the last. Thousands of Jews left, while a smaller number hid their identities, converted to Christianity (or pretended they did) and remained. Oliver Cromwell, who had deposed Charles I during the English civil war in the 1640s, unofficially permitted Jews to resettle in England in 1655 and thereafter the community gradually re-established itself.

While the forthcoming apology is repentance for the Church’s past actions towards Jews, Archbishop Welby also has acknowledged its crucial importance at this moment in time. According to a report issued in early February by the Community Security Trust, the London-based charity and Jewish communal organization, there were 2,255 antisemitic incidents in the U.K. in 2021, more than in any year since 1984 when these statistics were first recorded. These incidents ranged from hateful graffiti to several violent public attacks on Jews.

In one of the worst incidents, last May a rabbi in the town Chigwell, just north of London, was brutally beaten by a group of teenagers when he got out of his car to speak with them after they blocked his vehicle. In another case in October, two young Jewish teenage girls were attacked by several teenage girls, who shouted “Dirty Jews” at them and grabbed one of the victims by the throat.

It would be comforting to believe that the Church’s apology for an 800-year-old anti-Jewish decree might cause these teenagers and many others like them to reflect on centuries of Jewish persecution and the irrationality of such hate. But given today’s prejudices and hostilities towards Jews and other minorities, it’s hard to be optimistic that this situation will change any time soon.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.