The Papacy and the Place of Jews in Christian Society 223
Alain of Lille again grouped heretics and Jews together as enemies of Christians,117
while in his Pugio Fidei (The Dagger of the Faith, c.1280), Raymond Martin claimed
that Jews living in Christian europe were both a physical and spiritual threat.118
The term ‘Platonist’ is often applied to the period 1100–1150 when Plato was
the most important philosopher read in the Schools.119 Then in the thirteenth
century most of the major works of Aristotle became known in the West through
Arabic learning and Latin translations of Arabic and Greek texts. Increasingly
steeped in Plato and Aristotle, both twelfth- and thirteenth-century scholars were
profoundly interested in the tension they saw as existing between the dictates of
reason—an innate, God-given faculty human beings used to understand truths
about the world and which separated man from animals—and the requirements of
Faith. Indeed as early as the eleventh century St Anselm had emphasized in the Cur
Deus Homo the necessity of converting the Jews by Reason:
... For, in proving that God became man by necessity, leaving out what was taken
from the Bible, viz., the remarks on the persons of the Trinity, and on Adam, you con-
vince both Jews and Pagans by the mere force of reason.. .120
Similarly, as we saw in the previous chapter, for many twelfth- and thirteenth- century
polemicists, the refusal by Jews to accept the truth of Christianity implied that
they were without reason: hence irrational and even animal-like.121 At the same
time Jewish anti-Christian polemic became more prevalent as at an intellectual
level meetings and confrontations between the two sides increased. yet there is
little evidence that popes were involved in their production, nor that they were
even aware of such growing polemic on both sides.122
The Christian idea that Jews and heretics wished to undermine the teachings of
the Church and Christian society as constituted had a certain basis in fact. Little con-
temporary heretical polemic survives, but Jewish polemic indicates knowledge of
heretical doctrines and the tactics employed by both Jews and heretics against
Christianity.123 Or perhaps anti-Christian rhetoric was used to safeguard a threatened
117 Alain of Lille, ‘Liber tertius contra Iudaeos’, cols 399–422; William of Bourges, Bellum Domini
contra Iudaeos et contra Iudaeorum hereticos, pp.66–273. See Peter Browe, Die Judenmission in
Mittelalter und die Päpste (Rome, 1942), pp.102–3. Such polemics reflected canon law collections
which occasionally grouped Jews and heretics together since both were non-Christians; for example:
Chapter 5, Quaestio 7 of Causa 2 of Gratian’s Decretum stated that as non-Christians pagans, heretics
and Jews could not bring accusations against Christians in a court of law. See Gratian, C.2.q.7.c.25,
col. 489. See Gilbert Dahan, Les Intéllectuels chrétiens et les juifs au moyen âge (Paris, 1990), p.114;
Heinz Schreckenberg, Die Christlichen Adversus-Judaios-Texte (11th-13th Jahrhundert) mit einer
Ikonographie des Judenthemas bis zum 4 Lateranskonzil (Frankfurt am Main, 1988), p.147.
118 Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews. History, p.314.
119 Brian Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century (Princeton, 1972), p.279.
120 St. Anselm, ‘Cur Deus Homo’, Book 2, xxii., in S. Anselmi Cantuariensis archiepiscopi opera
omnia/ad fidem codicum recensuit Franciscus Salesius Schmitt, ed. F. S. Schmitt, 6 vols (edinburgh,
1946–1961), vol. 2 (1946), p.133: ‘Cum enim sic probes deum fieri hominem ex necessitate, ut etiam
si removeantur pauca quae de nostris libris posuisti, ut quod de tribus dei personis et de ADAM teti-
gisti, non solum Iudaeis sed etiam paganis sola ratione satisfacias,... ’.
121 Abulafia, Christian-Jewish Relations 1000–1300, pp.205–6; pp.209–10.
122 Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews. History, pp.296–7.
123 Berger, ‘Christian Heresy and Jewish Polemic in the Thirteenth Century’, 302–3; 288.