Last year I visited Lincoln for the first time. It’s difficult to resist the elevated beauty and dominant cathedral, but also hard to avoid the plaque inside, full of contrition, explaining the 13th-century blood libel, where local Jews were accused of murdering a child so as to use his blood during their rituals. The result, predictably, was yet another wave of anti-Semitism, and Jews tortured and murdered.

Such obscenities would be repeated about Jews throughout mediaeval England until their eventual expulsion in 1290. Yet even after England forcibly removed the Jewish population, the Christian idea of the Jew as an outsider, whose only role in the Biblical story was a stubborn refusal to listen to God – then to reject and crucify Jesus the messiah – remained paramount within popular co

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