After a thousand years of uneasy cohabitation, Edward I decided that there was no place for Jews in his Kingdom.
Few countries can claim to have a clean record when it comes to the treatment of Jews, and England is no exception. Confined by law and custom to trade and money-lending, Jews were both indispensable to the economy and the target of suspicion and resentment, leading King Edward I to give an infamous order.
The story of the once magnificent Temple in Jerusalem, the city God chose for Israel’s capital.
All that remains of the Temple in Jerusalem is a 187ft section of the western wall, after the rest was destroyed during a rebellion against the Roman Empire in AD 66-74; the heart of the ruined Temple Mount is now occupied by a mosque. The Temple’s history reaches back to the tenth century BC and King Solomon, who first built a House for Israel’s God to dwell among his people.
After the Great War, the British Government did keep one of her many wartime promises to her allies.
In a letter dated November 2nd, 1917, towards the end of the Great War, Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour assured prominent banker Lord Rothschild that the British Government would do what it could to carve out a homeland for Jewish people in what was then part of the Ottoman Empire. The promise was kept, and this is how the Colonial Office List for 1946 summarised the formation of British Mandatory Palestine.