Hello, I'm Lucy Worsley, chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces.

You're listening to our podcast that explores the history and stories of our six palaces.

These talks are a collection of some of our best live events.

I really hope you enjoy listening.

The Tower of London has an intriguing yet relatively unknown Jewish history.

This series, compiled from our archives, reveals some fascinating stories from the towers shared past with the Jewish community.

In this talk, our panel explores the role the Tower of London has played in Jewish history,

from 1066 to the modern day.

We have two speakers this evening.

The first is Sally Dixon Smith, who is collections curator for historic royal palaces at the Tower of London.

With her is Dr. Daniel Viltmann, who is a historian

and a film scholar. He's the director of the Leo Buck Institute. So first of all, I'm going to

ask Sally, first of all, to tell us a little bit about her work looking at the Jewish history

and its connection to the Tower. Well, hello and welcome to the Tower of London.

I've been in the very fortunate position last year of being able to do dedicated research

on the medieval history of the Jews and the Tower of London, which was sponsored by the Charles

Wolfson Charitable Trust and the Grosses Company of London. We're very grateful for their support

in that. What I've been particularly looking at, as Lauren already said, the earliest

provable Jewish community in this country dates to the time of William the Conqueror.

William the Conqueror brought Jewish people from Normandy with him and created, if you like, a settlement especially.

But where the documents get far better and for looking at Tower History is in the period between 1189,

when there is at the coronation of Richard I, there is a pogrom, there is horrible violence

...