Pogrom in Yorkshire

THE KING'S PERSONS (284 pp.)--Joanne Greenberg--Holt, Rineharf & Winston ($4.95).

London, 1189: the coronation of King Richard Coeur de Lion. Suddenly a Jew, pushing through the assembled throng to present a gift to the new King, jostled a Christian. "Assassins," cried the Christian, and the mob turned savagely on the hated and distrusted Jewish delegation. Beating, kicking and slashing, the Christians surged through the Jewish quarter of London putting the torch to its tinderbox houses. From the capital, the flames of anti-Semitism fanned northward into Cambridge, Norwich, Lincoln, and finally to the city of York, where in an orgy of bloodletting the city's Jewish population was systematically massacred during its Passover celebration.

Smoldering Decay. Joanne Greenberg. a Colorado housewife and part-time medievalist, spent five years digging into the historical records on the York slaughter for her first novel. The result is a fascinating and minute examination of 12th century English life. The feudal structure was beginning to decay. Paranoid religious fanaticism sapped the strength of the monastic community, and the power of the baronies was gradually being clipped by the Crown. Lack of funds postponed the start of the Third Crusade, which was expected to revive both faith and the church's fortune. As setback piled on setback, the smoldering resentment of Britain's Christians focused on the Jews.

Though the Crown declared that "all Jews are under the protection and defense of the liege King" and they were commonly known as the King's Persons, Jews were nevertheless outcasts in a Christian society that viewed them as heretics. They were prohibited from owning land or holding titles, and lived by the illegal profession of moneylending. Bled by royal taxes, the barons and priests were forced to mortgage their lands to the moneylenders for gold and silver.

Pariah & Servant. The richest of York's moneylenders was Baruch of Northstreet. He flaunted his wealth on his bejeweled fingers, had no qualms about cheating the Christians who kept him a social pariah. But Baruch's son Abram was his father's despair. A failed rabbi, Abram despised Baruch's vanity and usury, refused to learn the lending trade, struck up a friendship and a religious dialogue with a simple Catholic monk. To the consternation of his parents. Abram also gradually fell in love with Bett, their poor Christian servant girl.

Author Greenberg is placed in the ambivalent position of having written a bad novel and a good book. Her plot reads like a combination of Abram's Irish Rose and a study of that tedious 20th century malaise, Lack of Communication. But if her fiction is wanting, her historiography is not. With painstaking care, she has woven each of the skeins of medieval life into a vivid tapestry that shows the loutishness and insensitivity of the baronial landholders, the obtuseness of the peasantry, the twisted fervor of churchmen who found virtue in the wholesale slaughter of heretics, and the disturbing contrast between the warmth of Jewish communal life and the demeaning nature of usury.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.