economic development which it began appears the secondary rôle of the Jew. Every one knows the mediaeval rule of Jewish Status. It was established here as everywhere else in Christendom. The Jew was the King's; that is, under the special protection of the State. If he were the subject of popular attack, that attack was an attack on the King's peculiar, and liable to speedy repression. The individual attacker was punished with special severity because the danger of mass-movement is always great where the populace is free to act in masses as it was throughout the middle ages, and the necessity for preventing individual attacks from spreading was correspondingly great. Now and then the popular feeling got out of hand and the monarch had to deal with numbers which he could not control; but as a rule the Jew, especially the rich Jew, enjoyed a privileged position, both in Northern France and throughout England. The Jew of the early Middle Ages in England was normally a well-to-do man and often an exceedingly rich man. Then, as now, a small number of Jews were much the richest men of their time.
He had most of the finances in his hands, and this immense privilege (which he has lost), that he alone was allowed to practise usury. Here we must pause a moment to define usury.
Usury then (as now) signified the receiving of interest upon unproductive loans. It is a practice which all moralists and all philosophers have condemned and which the Church in particular condemns. If you lend money to a man for a productive purpose: if, for instance, he is to buy a ship and trade with the money you advance, or to buy a farm and grow produce, then, of course, you are perfectly free to stipulate for a portion of the profit. But if you lend the money for a purpose not directly productive, as, for instance, to a man in grave necessity, or in lieu of charity, or to build such a building as a church, which will not produce a rent, or if in any other fashion you lend money to one who (to your knowledge) will not spend it in some reproductive agency, then it is immoral to demand interest.