Shabbat in the Sperrins?

Sometimes a historical nugget comes out of the woodwork that, when you read it, illuminates for but a moment a completely alternate pathway that our history may have taken.Such is the case with the 1607 proposal from Sir Thomas Shirley who proposed settling Jews from the continent in Ulster to King James I. I imagine most people, like myself, are unfamiliar with the exploits of a man who died nearly four centuries ago but the summary at the top of his entry on Wikipedia seems to give a rough outline of the man…

“Sir Thomas Shirley (1564 – c. 1634) was an English soldier, adventurer and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1584 and 1622. His financial difficulties drove him into privateering which culminated in his capture by the Turks and later imprisonment in the Tower of London.” 

Shirley, like many MPs at the time and since, seems to have had a pre-occupation with money and I would imagine his shade must be galled he missed out on the modern after-dinner circuit where his piratical anecdotes could have earned him a tidy sum.

It was on the subject of money that Shirley addressed his words to the King regarding how to entice the Jews to settle in his realm over three hundred years since they were forced out under Edward I’s Edict of Expulsion. Social restrictions limited the jobs Jews were allowed to do in Christian Europe, and many took up trading and banking roles as these were some of the few paths open to them. These occupations tended to enrich the people plying them and in a stunning example of collective hypocrisy created the stereotype of the greedy, money-grubbing, wealth-obsessed Jews which stalks the world to this day.

However, Shirley reckoned these wealthy Jews could be a lucrative source of taxation for the Crown and therefore proposed several possible schemes encouraging them to migrate to England (an idea that would definitely see him forced out of the modern Conservative party). One of these schemes involved Ireland. As Shirley wrote in his proposal…

“…I entertained them (the Jews) with a promise to become a suitor to your Majesty for the privilege for them to inhabit in Ireland, seeking to draw them thither, because doubtless their being there would have made that country very rich, and your Majesty’s revenue in Ireland would in short time have risen almost to equal the customs of England. For, first, they were willing to pay your Majesty a yearly tribute of two ducats for every head; and they, being most of them merchants, would have raised great customs where now are none; and they would have brought into the realm great store of bullion of gold and silver by issuing of Irish commodities into Spain, which will be of high esteem there considering their natures, viz. salted salmons, corn, hides, wool and tallow; of all which there will be great abundance if once the people give themselves to that industry, which doubtless they will do as soon as they find that their labours will procure them money.” 

We have to remember that this takes place in the context of the end of the Nine Years War and the Flight of the Earls, leaving the Crown with possession of a lot of land they were seeking to utilize. In a global context England was watching Spain (then their mightiest enemy) grow fat on the plunder and spoils of their depredations in the Americas, part of which was the establishment of agricultural plantations. Plantations were seen as a new ‘get rich quick’ scheme by a gentry enriched by the dissolution of the monasteries in the not too distant past and eager for a new source of wealth. Not to mention the Jews Shirley sought to entice were the descendants of those who had fled Iberia during the religious persecutions that had characterized the aftermath of the Reconquista and who had settled in what is today the Netherlands and Belgium but in this time period was the Spanish Netherlands. Shirley’s proposal would have apparently robbed the King of Spain to pay the King of England whilst pacifying Ireland, a win-win-win from the perspective of an Englishman!

Shirley’s plan, if implemented, had several features that could have seemed very attractive to the Crown. The Jews would have settled in Ireland and used their wealth to economically develop the country (which the Crown could tax) and as such they could employ the native Irish in this task, which would demonstrate the advantages of English rule and quieten the country. Ireland would thus be secured for the King against its possible use as a base by the Spanish and the French. And of course, the Jews would be within the realm of the King of England, but not within England itself and they could still be pressured to ‘contribute’ to government coffers at any moment of need by the government. Two religiously despised minorities kept at arms length but profiting England at the same time. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, everything of course. I can’t imagine in those religiously febrile times the native Irish being thrilled at their dispossession in favour of a demonized minority coming to their shores. Nor does it seem likely, despite the rosy picture painted by Shirley, that the European Jews he sought to entice would have been all that eager to set foot in isolated Ireland. It is unlikely any Jewish settlers would have engaged in agriculture under this scheme either as the point was to import a ready-made middle-class who would likely gain social-dominance by investing their wealth in Ireland, but this would likely reap intense resentment and social discord at the same time.

Ultimately, this proposal remains a historical curiosity. King James was clearly unswayed and instead opted to settle Ulster with Scottish and English Protestant colonists and Jews would not be allowed to return to England until Oliver Cromwell lifted the expulsion edict in the 1650s, nearly five decades later.

Few counter-factuals in my opinion can support the scheme succeeding. Most would likely culminate with the Jewish plantation of Ulster ending as another failure alongside previous efforts, but if on the off-chance it had succeeded, it would likely have precluded the need to settle Ulster with Scottish and English Protestants. Leaving aside the butterfly effect such a decision would have on world history (no Scots-Irish in America for one thing), we can muse at the possibility that rather than centuries of division between the planter and the gael, we could instead have had centuries of division between the gaels and an entirely different group of people!

Because I am sorry to say, division and conflict seem to be the only constants, no matter which timeline we are in.

I’m a firm believer in Irish unity and I live in the border regions of Tyrone.