Perpetual Enemy, Intimate Alien: Somerset v. Stewart’s Effect on the Legal and Political Status of the English Jews

Abstract

By redefining villeinage as applicable only to those of English heritage, Somerset v. Stewart inadvertently expanded Englishness to encompass English Jews, who had been associated with villeinage both in the medieval and early modern periods. The sudden cessation of legal and political references to Jewish villeinage post- Somerset constitutes a reframing of Jewish history, with the goal of reestablishing the boundary between Englishness and Jewishness. To fully understand Somerset’s contribution to the making of Englishness, we must, therefore, look beyond the case’s impact on racial slavery and consider the role the case played in legally and politically redefining English Jews as fundamentally non-English.