222 Popes and Jews, 1095–1291
Polemical attacks on Anacletus were not only political but also anti-Jewish, with
Innocent II calling his usurpation ‘an insane Jewish perfidy’ (‘Iudaicae perfidiae
furorem’). Peter the venerable in his Tractatus contra Judaeorum inveteratam duri-
tiem declared:
I don’t know whether a Jew can be a human being for he will neither accede to human
reasoning nor yield to authoritative statements that are divine and from his own
tradition.112And despite his zealous defence of Jews during the Second Crusade, Bernard of
Clairvaux claimed in a number of letters that a Jewish offspring on the throne of
St Peter was an injury to Christ himself;113 indeed he used Jews as a standard
of comparison for different types of heresy and sin.114 Thus, as we noted earlier, his
attitude to Jews was ambivalent; in his actions on the eve of the Second Crusade
he showed great kindness to Jewish communities, yet his political rhetoric followed
traditional anti-Jewish lines.
So the evidence suggests that the idea that Jews were not just servants but
also potential enemies increased in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This
was due not least to the fact that the period saw a growing number of anti-Jewish
polemics—missionary, apologetic, faith-strengthening, or a combination of these—
in circulation:115 Walter of Châtillon’s Dialogus contra Iudaeos (1170); Alain of
Lille’s De fide catholica contra hereticos (Book 3 of which was entitled Contra
Iudaeos) (1180–1190); Peter of Blois’s Contra perfidiam Iudaeorum (end of the
twelfth century); and William of Bourges’s Bellum Domini contra Iudaeos et contra
Iudaeorum hereticos (1230).116 All these works evinced serious concern about the
danger to Christian souls from any type of social intercourse with Jews. Indeed
112 Peter the venerable, ‘Tractatus contra Judaeorum inveteratam duritiem’, PL 189, col. 551:
‘Nescio plane utrum Judaeus homo sit, qui nec rationi humanae cedit, nec auctoritatibus divinis et
propriis acquiescit.’ See Richards, Sex, Dissidence and Damnation, p.95.
113 Innocent II, ‘Apostolicae sedis consueta’ (6 October 1131), PL 179, cols 102–4; Bernard of
Clairvaux, Opera Sancti Bernardi, ed. J. Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, H. M. Rochais (Rome, 1957–1971),
vol. 7 (Rome, 1974), pp.309–19; pp.320–1; pp.335–6; vol. 8 (Rome, 1977), pp.134–6. See David
Berger, ‘The Attitude of St. Bernard of Clairvaux toward the Jews’, Proceedings of the American Academy
for Jewish Research 40 (1972), 104–8; Anna Abulafia, ‘The Intellectual and Spiritual Quest for Christ
and Central Medieval Persecution of Jews’, in Religious Violence between Christians and Jews: Medieval
Roots, Modern Perspectives, ed. A. S. Abulafia (Basingstoke, 2002), pp.72–5.
114 Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘Sermo mihi ad vos’ (1146), ed. in Jean Leclercq ‘L’encyclique de Saint
Bernard en faveur de la croisade’, Revue Bénédictine 81 (1971), 298–9. See Berger, ‘The Attitude of St
Bernard of Clairvaux toward the Jews’, 104–5; David Berger, ‘Christian Heresy and Jewish Polemic in
the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’, Harvard Theological Review 68/3–4 (1975), 288.
115 Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews. History, p.287.
116 Walter of Châtillon, ‘Dialogus contra Iudaeos’, PL 209, cols 423–58; Alain of Lille, ‘Liber ter-
tius contra Iudaeos’, in ‘De fide catholica contra hereticos’, PL 210, cols 399–422; Peter of Blois,
‘Contra perfidiam Iudaeorum’, PL 207, cols 825–70; William of Bourges, Bellum Domini contra
Iudaeos et contra Iudaeorum hereticos, Sources Chétiennes, ed. G. Dahan (Paris, 1981), pp.66–273.
There is, of course, a large amount of secondary material on all these people. See, for example, Peter
Browe, Die Judenmisson in Mittelalter und die Päpste, Miscellanea Historiae Pontificiae 6 (Rome,
1942), pp.102–3; Gilbert Dahan, La Polemique chrétienne contre le judaisme au moyen âge (Paris,
1991), p.232; Richard Dobson, The Jews of Medieval York and the Massacre of March 1190 (york,
1974), p.19.