The Papal Promise of Protection 93
popular medicine was widely practised by both christians and Jews at a more
‘grassroots’ level.148 By the mid thirteenth century medicine seems to have become
the most common profession among Jews after money-lending.149 A number of
rabbis—including Maimonides himself—practised as physicians.150
indeed some historians have argued that by the thirteenth century Jews
accounted for approximately fifty per cent of doctors in several european coun-
tries.151 certainly they seem to have been particularly common in the south of
france, italy, and Spain.152 Perhaps christians were more likely to tolerate Jews
than Muslims as physicians because, as Alexander ii had enunciated in ‘Placuit
nobis’, Jews unlike Muslims were not hostile to christians but prepared to serve
them—and perhaps Jewish doctors were willing to be paid less than their christian
counterparts. in 1285 honorius iV ratified the Constitutio super Ordinatione Regni
Siciliae, a set of provisions and ordinances for the kingdom, including a stipulation
that the fine for homicide should not exceed a hundred augustales for christians
and fifty augustales for Jews and Muslims.153 Since Jewish lives were regarded as
worth less than christians, Jewish work similarly was seen as less valuable. Jewish
physicians therefore were unable to charge as much for their services—which was
often an incentive for christians to seek their aid.
Yet increasingly in the thirteenth century there was a movement, probably ori-
ginating in the south of france, for more rigorous control of the medical profession
as part of a wider church initiative against heresy. Universities such as Montpellier
were encouraged to insist that no university member could practice medicine
unless examined and licensed by the bishop and his own examiners, unless he held
a licentia docendi conferred by the university itself.154 hence Jews would need to
be formally authorized before they could practice, certainly among christians.
once they had passed the examination, they might be granted a general license—
which differed from the special license sometimes issued to allow them to practice
among christians. Special licenses were occasionally granted to Jews by ecclesias-
tical authorities on religious grounds and were an absolution from the canonical
regulations which forbade Jewish doctors to practice on christians or for christians
to employ them.155
regulations prohibiting the association of Jewish physicians with christians
became increasingly prominent in civil legislation during the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. furthermore, if Jews were unable to cure their patients they might be
148 Popular Medicine in Thirteenth-Century England. Introduction and Texts, ed. T. hunt (cambridge,
1990).
149 Joseph Shatzmiller, Jews, Medicine, and Medieval Society (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London,
1994), p.1.
150 cecil roth, ‘The Qualification of Jewish Physicians in the Middle Ages’, Speculum: A Journal of
Medieval Studies 28/4 (1953), 836.
151 Shatzmiller, Jews, Medicine, and Medieval Society, p.1.
152 isaac Alteras, ‘Jewish Physicians in Southern france during the Thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries’, Jewish Quarterly Review, new series, 68/4 (1978), 14.
153 honorius iV, ‘Justitia et pax’ (17 September 1285), Grayzel, Vol. 2, pp.155–7; Simonsohn,
pp.260–1.
154 roth, ‘The Qualification of Jewish Physicians in the Middle Ages’, p.838.
155 roth, ‘The Qualification of Jewish Physicians in the Middle Ages’, p.842.