xii Preface
in chapter seven—The City of Rome—i explore the relationship between the
papacy and Jews in Rome, where the pope’s chief job was to be bishop of the city.
in chapter eight—Papal Rhetoric: Heretics, Muslims, and Jews—i return to the
theme of chapter two that, although popes determined that Jewish refusal to rec-
ognize christ estranged them from christian society, from the time of Gregory the
Great they also made it clear that Jews, unlike other minority communities, were
to be protected by christians and allowed to practice their religion unharmed.
such a policy of comparative toleration stemmed from the teaching of st augustine
of Hippo (354–430) that Jews played a special role in the history of salvation
because they are a living, although unwitting, testimony to the truth of christianity
and in particular to the importance of the old testament. i examine the use of
traditional language and rhetoric in papal letters and explore polemical themes
such as we have already noted—the augustinian ideas of spiritual blindness
(‘caecitia’), of Jewish stubbornness, obstinacy, and hardness of heart in refusing
to accept christianity (‘duritia’), and of distortion of the Faith in their deliberate
attempt to deny the authority of Jesus (‘Perfidia’).
drawing these different themes together, my conclusion explains the limited
and specifically servile role which Jews were expected to play in a typical papal
vision of ‘christian’ society that in itself promoted a gradual hardening of christian
attitudes. nevertheless, the aim of papal pronouncements was never to degrade the
Jews as such. Rather, it was to satisfy the requirements of both christian theology
and the developing idea of a specifically papal authority over Jewish communities.
Hence for both social and political reasons popes found it increasingly difficult to
retain the spirit of their continuing Pauline/augustinian theology in the changing
social and political conditions of the age.
in assessing the papacy’s response to petitions both from Jewish communities
themselves and from christians who sought advice about Jews, it is important to
consider the conditions under which papal letters were composed, the political
circumstances for which they were written, and the employment of notaries,
scribes, correctors, and bullatores (whose job was to ensure the proper tax was
exacted for the document) at the curia. it is often hard to judge whether letters
were drafted under a pope’s personal supervision, or whether notaries were left a
free hand to compose in the appropriate and traditional terminology. to what
extent did an original petition become part of a papal letter? did the pope accept
petitions presented to the curia as they stood or did he model these petitions to suit
his own agenda?
it is also difficult to assess how long a letter took to arrive at its destination once
it had been despatched from Rome, and just as important as when it actually
arrived, is when curial officials judged it would reach its recipients. to what extent
and at what point in their creation popes were personally involved in the produc-
tion of their correspondence, whether they themselves composed the text of their
letters or at least parts of them, and, if they did, then how many, remain questions
of ongoing scholarly debate. Yet although it is not possible to be certain about
the proportional input of pope, curial vice-chancellor, and notaries to the most
important letters, it seems likely that the pope himself dictated some and that the