This September, the Bayeux Tapestry returns to English soil for the first time in nearly a thousand years. Seven and a half million visitors are expected to file past its seventy metres of embroidered conquest at the British Museum—626 characters, 202 horses, and fifty-eight scenes depicting the most consequential invasion in English history. They will see Harold’s oath, William’s fleet, the arrow in the eye. What they will not see, anywhere in those seventy metres, is who helped pay for it.

A persistent tradition holds that Jews from Rouen helped finance William the Conqueror’s 1066 crossing. The direct evidence is thin. The contemporary sources—William of Poitiers, the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio, and the Tapestry itself—record papal endorsement, baronial levies, and Flemish mercenaries but say nothing about Jewish capital. The earliest firm documentation of Jews in England dates to William’s own reign, when a community appears to have crossed from Normandy in the Conquest’s wake.

Yet what happened next is suggestive. William and his successors classified English Jews as servi camerae regis—servants of the royal chamber, simultaneously protected and available for fiscal extraction. By the twelfth century, Jewish financiers were functioning as the monarchy’s private credit line, funding castles, crusades, and........

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