In July 2022, I took my family to England, and we visited the Tower of London. We saw the ravens and the Crown Jewels, and I also noticed an admirably frank informational sign stating “King Edward I built St Thomas’s Tower as a grand river entrance and luxurious royal apartments in the late 1270s. The building work was partly funded by a heavy tax that Edward imposed on England’s Jewish community.” Those certainly were heavy taxes. Between 1219 and 1272, the English Crown imposed 49 levies on Jews, for a total of £300,000. To give a modern equivalent, that’s about half a billion pounds from a Jewish population of no more than 5000.

You will recall that by 2022, there was already an active movement to identify historic beneficiaries of the transatlantic slave trade, expose them, and hold them to account, for example by encouraging them to make a financial contribution to addressing the legacy of slavery. That led, for example, the Church of England, to allocate £1 billion for that purpose. There had also been a spate of statue-toppling, tearing down images of men who had been active in the slave trade; most notably Edward Colston, whose statue was torn down in Bristol in 2020.