Papal Claims to Authority over Judaism 193
of ‘heavy and immoderate usury’ of Christians by Jews, rather than an outright
ban, were an attempt to prevent the exploitation of crusaders while at the same
time to permit a controlled money-lending both essential to economic prosperity
and necessary for popes if they were to ensure crusading success. Hence they
declined the option of simply forbidding money-lending or regulating the rate of
mortgage as they did for money-lending.
We have also noted particular papal concern with Jews allegedly blaspheming
and mocking Christianity. In the twelfth century Alexander III ordered Jews to
keep their windows and doors shut on Good Friday in order not to disturb the
Christian festival.196 We have seen how in ‘Etsi non displiceat’ of 1205 Innocent
III complained to Philip Augustus about the activities of Jews in France, in par-
ticular recalling how Jews publicly insulted belief in the Crucifixion by saying that
the Christians believed ‘in a peasant who had been hung by the Jewish people’.197
He claimed that on Good Friday French Jews ran amock in the towns, laughing at
Christian veneration of Jesus on the Cross in an attempt to put them off their cele-
brations, and he insisted that they be punished for such blasphemies.198 In a fur-
ther letter of the same year to the archbishop of Sens and the bishop of Paris he
lamented that French Jews were insolent enough as to insult Christianity public-
l y. 199 In 1208 he complained yet again about their activities to the count of nevers,
referring specifically to Jews as ‘blasphemers of the Christian name’,200 while
writing to the archbishop of Sens in 1213 he related a miracle which had sup-
posedly occurred following Jewish mockery of the Eucharist.201
From Innocent III onwards such recorded suspicions and fears of Jewish
mockery and blasphemy increase in papal correspondence. So, in 1220 Honorius
III ordered the archbishop of Tarragona to ensure protection for a certain Isaac, a
Jew of Barcelona and physician to James I of Aragon, but with the proviso that
he and his family refrain from blaspheming against Christ and his Faith and from
injuring Christians.202 In 1225 he complained that the archbishop of Colosza and
his suffragans had violated the statutes of the Council of Toledo and of lateran Iv,
which stated that a blasphemer of Christ should be given no preferment in public
office, by allowing Jews to be so preferred.203 In the same vein in 1233 Gregory IX
ordered the archbishop of Compostella to remind the king of Castile and león
that the ‘perfidious’ Jews should never in the future grow insolent, but ‘in servile
fear they should ever suffer publicly the shame of their sin’204 In a letter of 1239 to
196 Alexander III, ‘Quia super his’, Simonsohn, p.50.
197 Innocent III, ‘Etsi non displiceat’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.106; Simonsohn, p.83: ‘in rusticum quem-
dam suspensum a populo Judeorum’.
198 Innocent III, ‘Etsi non displiceat’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.104–8; Simonsohn, pp.82–4.
199 Innocent III, ‘Etsi Judeos quos’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.114–16; Simonsohn, pp.86–8.
200 Innocent III, ‘ut esset Cain’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.126; Simonsohn, p.93: ‘Blasphematores enim
nominis Christiani’.
201 Innocent III,’ operante illo qui’ (10/8 June 1213), Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.136–8; Simonsohn,
pp.98–9.
202 Honorius III, ‘Illum te gerere’ (3 September 1220), Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.156; Simonsohn, p.110.
203 Honorius III, ‘Intellecto jamdudum’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.170–2; Simonsohn, pp.120–1.
204 Gregory IX, ‘Judei quos propria’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.206; Simonsohn, p.146: ‘Judei perfidi’; ‘sed
sub timore servili pretendant semper verecundiam culpe sue’.