The events surrounding the violent death of the Jews of York in March 1190 continue to exert a strong fascination: accounts of these events demand a radical and troubling act of empathy and imagination. How could something so horrible, so bloody, and so resonant in its foreshadowing of future horrors, happen in this place, at this sturdy bailey under grey northern skies? The setting is at once familiar, a corner of a beautiful small city, and obscene: a Yorkshire Masada, a place where a lethal combination of lucre, zeal and vengeance made a perfect deadly storm. Clifford's Tower is a deeply affecting site, and has been profoundly generative, as the essays in this volume show. This volume of essays demonstrates just how broad the ramifications of that day in 1190 are: from the specifics of the moment itself, to the religious, financial, cultural and political issues which surround it and came to be attached to it.

However, the hard facts of the 1190 massacre are hard to locate: neither the bodies nor the twelfth-century buildings survive, records and witnesses from the time are scant and predictably partial. When the remains of the medieval Jewish cemetery at York were excavated in the 1980s, as the Jewbury burial-ground site was prepared for a new life as a supermarket carpark, it was hoped that physical evidence of the massacre would emerge, but no such evidence presented itself. The events at Clifford's Tower are, then, largely memorial: made out of, and enduring through, memory, put together from the few narratives we have available.