Thanks to an astute reader on a previous post, who pointed out that Ireland has repealed its law, enacted in 1181, which forbade Jews from possessing armor.
The Irish law was almost certainly based on the Assize of Arms, which was promulgated by England’s King Henry II in 1181. At the time, England claimed sovereignty over Ireland, so presumably the Assize remained part of Irish laws, even after Irish independence was recognized in 1921.
Other sections of the Assize of Arms required freemen to possess weapons and armor, with the particular implements depending on the subject’s socioeconomic rank. The Assize was one of many examples of the English policy of relying on a widely-armed populace for national defense.
The Jewish section of the Assize stated:
7. Item, no Jew shall keep in his possession a shirt of mail or a hauberk (an armored shirt made of mail or leather), but he shall sell it or give it away or alienate it in some other way, so that it shall remain in the king’s service.
Read narrowly, the Assize still allowed Jews to possess plate armor for their chests (although such armor, invented during the Roman Empire, had temporarily fallen out of use when the Assize was written), and to possess any form of armor for their arms, legs, and head, as well as to possess shields and any type of weapon.
For a burgess (citizen of a borough; similar to bourgeois), the Assize also specified the maximum amount of arms and armor which could be possessed.
Shari’a law forbids dhimmis (Jews, Christians, and sometimes Hindus) from exercising a wide variety of civil rights, including repairing the outside of religious buildings, possessing arms, and engaging in self-defense against Muslim attackers. (See Bat Yeor’s fine books for details.) Restrictions on Jewish possession of arms were common in many European Christian countries as well, and of course were also a characteristic of National Socialist law.
Some questions for commenters: do any states currently have specific laws placing special restrictions on weapons possession by Jews? Or on adherents of other religions? Is the Assize of Arms still part of the positive law of the United Kingdom, albeit an unenforced law?
And, BTW, thank you to the commenters on my information-seeking posts from the past couple weeks; you have helped advance public knowledge of various subjects, corrected errors, and demonstrated the enormous intellectual firepower of the VC’s readership.