‘Did the forefathers of this miserable people think you meet with more rigorous Taskmasters in Egypt? They were only called upon to make brick: but nothing less than making gold seems to have been expected from the Jews in England.’ Thus de Bloissiers Tovey, writing in the eighteenth century, described the financial pressures on the medieval Anglo-Jew. His type of interpretation has left behind it a historiographical stereotyping which remains current even in the twentieth century, namely the association of Judaism and capital. Such a concept, linking Judaism inseparably to wealth, has coloured historians’ and many contemporary views for several centuries. One of the most forceful proponents of this attitude was William Shakespeare who put the following couplet into the mouth of Shylock's servant in The Merchant of Venice: ‘There will come a Christian by/Will be worth a Jewesses’ eye.’

Almost four hundred years after the Bristol tallage of 1210, the event to which this particular verse alludes, Shakespeare and the general populace still considered the Jews to be uniformly wealthy. Suchsentiments continued through the course of English literature and are expressed by Sir Walter Scott, who, in his Ivanhoe, portrayed Isaac the Jew as the great northern moneylender. The stereotyping also continued into the novels of Dickens whose Fagin became almost as infamous as Shylock. Rudyard Kipling took up a similar image in his Puck of Pook's Hill. This notorious misrepresentation, linking Judaism so inseparably to great wealth, has had much influence on our own society's view of the Jew.