108 Popes and Jews, 1095–1291
with the Cross’ (‘crucesignati’) were enthusiastic to answer a call made by the pope
himself in his capacity as Christ’s representative on earth, and the Council of
Clermont, assuring them of protection for their families’ interests and assets in their
absence, added to their confidence.30 Besides such material privileges there was also
the promise of spiritual rewards and in particular the grant of indulgences. Even
when popes authorized crusades elsewhere than to the Near East, they deliberately
equated them with the Holy Land crusade, since an important feature of the plenary
indulgence—or in the case of early crusades simply the remission of penance or
‘remission of sins’—was that it was especially associated with the recovery of
Jerusalem and the defence of palestine. Crusaders were fired by visions of the Holy
Land, and it is hardly surprising that in this heady atmosphere of religious fervour
Jews were often scapegoated as Christ-killers.
Crusaders’ fear of the Muslim enemy in the Near East almost certainly encour-
aged hostility towards Jewish communities. Christians thought of Jews, like
Muslims, as infidels, and it is not surprising that an infidel living in one’s midst was
often viewed as a similar threat—sometimes perhaps even a more dangerous one—
to the infidel living far away in the Near East. peter the venerable summed up this
mentality when he said of the crusades:
what is the good of going to the end of the world at a great loss of men and money to
fight the Saracens when we permit among us other infidels who are a thousand times
more guilty towards Christ than the Mohammedans... 31despite their shared heritage of the Old testament, to medieval Christians the prac-
tises and religious rites of their Jewish neighbours seemed alien and strange. Although,
as we have seen, learned Christians and Jews continued to engage each other in
rigorous intellectual discourse about their respective faiths at a highly sophisticated
level, such debates did not touch the lives of simple men and women. to the vast
majority of Christians, Jews, like heretics, remained a potentially dangerous and sub-
versive ‘Other’ in their midst: an easy target after setbacks and misfortunes. Ironically
enough, over time, papal calls for crusades would only foster the idea of Jews as
‘internal’ enemies of Christian society, despite repeated papal calls for protection.
The papacy sought to maintain control over the effects of crusading on the Jews
in a number of different ways. As we have seen, a constant one was the ‘Constitutio
pro Iudaeis’, sometimes issued to protect Jews specifically at times of crusade in
response to pleas from the Jews themselves for protection. during the Central
Middle Ages Calixtus II first issued this formal statement of protection, probably
from a growing concern for the safety of Jews in Europe after the destruction of
their communities by armies on their way to take part in the First Crusade.32 If so,
30 riley-Smith, The First Crusaders, p.106.
31 The Letters of Peter the Venerable, ed. g. Constable, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967): ‘Sed quid
proederit inimicos Christianae spei in exteris aut remotis finibus insequi ac persequi, si nequam blas-
phemi, longeque Sarracenis deteriores Iudaei, non longe a nobis, sed in medio nostri, tam libere, tam
audacter, Christum... ’. For the above translation, see Jeffrey richards, Sex, Dissidence and Damnation:
Minority Groups in the Middle Ages (London, 1991), p.92.
32 Calixtus II, ‘Sicut Iudaeis’ (1119–1124), Simonsohn, p.44.