Jew of the Week: Licoricia of Winchester

A Medieval Jewish Banking Pioneer

Licoricia (d. 1277) was born to a Jewish family in medieval England. After becoming widowed at a young age and being left with four children to take care of, she survived by working as a moneylender. As women did not have the legal right to be involved with banking at the time, she was able to cut deals using a male attorney. Licoricia grew her business rapidly. By 1242 her reputation was so impressive that she married David of Oxford—then the richest Jew in England—who actually divorced his wife, with permission from King Henry III, in order to marry Licoricia! Unfortunately, her new husband died just two years later and the king used the opportunity to imprison Licoricia in the Tower of London and extract from her a whopping 5000 marks. She paid the fine, and from it 4000 marks were used to rebuild Westminster Abbey. Licoricia returned to Winchester and further expanded her finance business. Aside from King Henry III, her other notable clients were Queen Eleanor of Provence and Simon de Montfort. In 1275, King Edward I prohibited Jews from moneylending. (This didn’t help him: while Jews only charged 2 or 3 percent interest, the Lombards that replaced them charged up to 50 percent!) Two years later, Licoricia was murdered in her home in an unsolved mystery. Licoricia’s son Benedict was the only Jew in medieval European history known to have become a guildsman, allowing him to be an official citizen and permitting him to own real estate. He was ultimately hanged. Her other son Asher was temporarily imprisoned in Winchester Castle, where he inscribed the following message on the wall of his cell that still survives today: “On Friday, eve of the Sabbath in which the [Torah] portion Emor is read, all the Jews of the land of the isle were imprisoned. I, Asher, inscribed this.” In 1290, King Edward expelled all Jews from England, and they would not return until the 1600s, partly thanks to the efforts of Rabbi Menashe ben Israel. Last week, the city of Winchester unveiled a statue of Licoricia, on Jewry Street in front of her historic home. At the base of the statue is the Torah verse to “love your fellow as yourself” in English and Hebrew.

12 Women in History Who Impacted Jewish Scholarship

Practical Jewish Meditation

Words of the Week

The worst offenders are preachers who preach and expound to the masses what they themselves do not understand. Would that they keep silent about what they do not know.

– Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (1138-1204), “Maimonides”

Jew of the Week: Rabbi Panigel

The Rabbi Who Captured a Lion, and Saved Israeli Farmers

Raphael Meir ben Yehuda Panigel (1804-1893) was born in Bulgaria—then part of the Ottoman Empire—the only child of a wealthy and religious Sephardic Jewish family. When he was 3 years old, the family moved to Jerusalem. Despite being orphaned at 15, Panigel soon became a respected rabbi in the Holy City. At just 27 years old, the community appointed him as their official emissary to travel around the world to teach Torah and to collect funds in support of the old yishuv, the Jewish community that struggled to make a living in the Holy Land. In 1845, he was received by Pope Gregory XVI and inspired him to support and protect Jewish communities in Christian lands. Rabbi Panigel made several trips across North Africa, gaining a reputation as a holy miracle-worker. In one famous incident that happened in Tunis, a lion escaped from the city’s zoo and was terrorizing the locals. Incredibly, it was Rabbi Panigel that captured the lion. When he was asked how he did so, he replied that one who is righteous and fears God need not fear anything else. In 1880, Rabbi Panigel was appointed the Rishon LeZion, Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, and in 1890, the Ottomans made him hakham bashi, chief authority representing the Jewish community. He composed a penetrating work called Lev Marpe with novel Torah and Talmudic insights. He was also instrumental in developing heter mechira, allowing Jewish farmers in Israel to continue working during the Sabbatical shemitah year (such as this year) in a kosher way. As the shemitah of 1889 approached, the struggling Jewish immigrants of the First Aliyah worried how they would survive if they had to let the land lie fallow, considering the country was then completely undeveloped. After consultations with other Torah luminaries, Rabbi Panigel found a way to work around the shemitah restrictions, allowing the faithful farmers to survive while also adhering to Torah law. Rabbi Panigel was the first to institute heter mechira, a practice which continues in Israel to this day. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the famous “father of Modern Hebrew”, wrote of how he was inspired by Rabbi Panigel and described him as being of “electrifying” holiness, like one of the Biblical Patriarchs.

What is Shemitah, the Sabbatical Year?

Words of the Week

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
– Albert Camus

Jew of the Week: Victor Goldschmidt

Father of Geochemistry

Victor Moritz Goldschmidt (1888-1947) was born in Switzerland, the son of a Jewish-Austrian chemist. The family moved to Norway in 1901 and Goldschmidt went on to study chemistry and geology at what would become the University of Oslo. He got his Ph.D at just 23 years of age, and won a prestigious award for his dissertation. That same year he became an associate professor. In 1929, Goldschmidt became the chair of minerology at the University of Göttingen, but resigned six years later to protest anti-Semitism, returning to Oslo. One of his key discoveries was the mineralogical phase rule, followed by a longer list of the Geochemical Laws of the Distribution of Elements. For this ground-breaking work (and for literally writing the first textbook on geochemistry), he has been called the “Father of Geochemistry”. By 1942, the Nazis had occupied Norway and arrested Goldschmidt. He was taken to the Berg concentration camp where he fell severely ill. He was about to be deported to Auschwitz when a group of colleagues intervened and convinced the Nazis that his scientific knowledge would be useful to them. Goldschmidt was eventually able to escape to Sweden, and from there he was smuggled to England by a British intelligence unit. He assisted the British war effort, was elected to the Royal Society, and continued his work at the Macaulay Institute for Soil Research. He would return to Norway following the war, but died soon after. Goldschmidt received many awards, including being knighted by the king of Norway. The region of Goldschmidtfjella in Norway is named after him, as is the mineral goldschmidtite (KNbO3).

Words of the Week

The fact that the universe had a beginning, that it obeys orderly laws that can be expressed precisely with mathematics, and the existence of a remarkable series of “coincidences” that allow the laws of nature to support life – do not tell us much about what kind of God must be behind it all, but they do point toward an intelligent mind that could lie behind such precise and elegant principles.
– Renowned biologist Francis Collins, The Language of God