Aaron of Lincoln

Aaron von Lincoln (around 1123 , † 1186 ) was an English Jewish financier.

Life

Nothing is known about the ancestry of Aaron von Lincoln, nor is there any information about his early life and career beginnings. He probably came to the British Isles from France as an adult. In the second half of the 12th century he was one of the richest men and largest moneylenders in medieval England at the time, and his fortune was comparable to that of the king. He is mentioned for the first time in a pipe roll from 1166 as a believer of King Henry II . According to this, the English monarch owed the Jewish financier the very considerable amount of a little more than 616 pounds, which corresponded to almost 2% of the total annual income of the king, which amounted to around 35,000 pounds.

In many parts of England, Aaron established business relationships through Jewish loan brokers and for some time also worked with a competing Jewish financier, Le Brun of London. He lent large sums of money to the royal family, numerous nobles and high clerics, with which the latter often financed the expansion of their cathedrals, abbeys and monasteries. He contributed to the building programs of Lincoln Cathedral , St Albans Abbey , Peterborough Cathedral and nine Cistercian monasteries . Occasionally, prelates such as the Abbot of Meaux used the borrowed money to purchase lands pledged to Aaron.

After Aaron's death, the king confiscated his vast property as the reversal of a Jewish usurer for the English crown; He also took over Aaron's claims on the many debtors who had not yet repaid all of the outstanding monies.

literature

• Aaron of Lincoln , in: Encyclopaedia Judaica , 1971-72, Vol. 1, Col. 21f.
• Aaron of Lincoln , in: Jewish Encyclopedia , 1901-06, Vol. 1, pp. 16f.