224 Popes and Jews, 1095–1291
and minority Jewish identity. yet there was no reason for popes to suppose any
combined effort by Jews and heretics to undermine Christianity. Although miti-
gated and unmitigated Cathars had different views on the Old Testament—the
latter seem to have accepted the books of the Prophets—both forms of heresy
were unsympathetic to Judaism.124 Furthermore, although Jews held positions of
importance at the courts of supposedly heretical as well as orthodox nobles in the
south of France, there is no evidence that they were more favoured by heretics than
by orthodox Christians.125
Nevertheless, it is possible that, as part of their attempt to assert control over the
Church, some popes, in particular Innocent III, encouraged concern over ‘internal’
dangers from minority groups, including Jews, thereby both contributing to a
feeling of insecurity and a perceived need for papal control.126 In 1270 the death
of two Christian converts to Judaism at Weissenberg in Alsace, one of them the
prior of a mendicant order, sparked fears of the conversion of a newly Christianized
population; a fear already expressed by the papal legate at the Council of Breslau
in 1266:
Since the Poles are a new plantation on the soil of Christendom, we must continually
be on our guard lest the Christian population here, where the Christian religion has
not yet taken deep root in the hearts of believers, succumb to the influence of the
counterfeit faith and the evil habits of the Jews living in their midst.127Certainly, although—unlike papal dealings with heretics—there was never a drive
by popes to eliminate Jews through crusade and inquisition, awareness of the
external Muslim threat in the Near east and Spain may have increased their anx-
iety more generally about non-Christians in Christendom itself, while the very
idea of Holy War may have helped engender a drive for a uniformly Christian
society.128 This insistence on society’s uniformity would in the long term prove
catastrophic for Jewish communities.
Such ideas were certainly encouraged by the friars. Mendicants such as Raymond
of Peñafort, Spanish Dominican Master General and adviser to Gregory IX, and the
Catalan Dominican Raymond Martin, who wrote the influential polemic Pugio
Fidei,129 as well as the Dominican Paul Christian, the Jewish convert who not only
took part in the Disputation of Barcelona but embarked on extensive preaching
missions in Aragon, all argued that Jewish adherence to the Talmud was heretical
124 John O’Brien, ‘Jews and Cathari in Medieval France’, Comparative Studies in Society and History
10/2 (1967), 216.
125 O’Brien, ‘Jews and Cathari in Medieval France’, 220.
126 Robert Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe,
950–1250 (Oxford, 1987), pp.1–5, passim.
127 Grayzel, Vol. 2, p.245: ‘Item cum adhuc terra Polonica sit in corpore Christianitatis nova plan-
tatio, ne forte eo facilius populus Christianus a cohabitantium Judeorum superstitionibus et pravis
moribus inficiatur quo levius atque citius Christiana religio in fidelium cordibus in his partibus est
plantata,’ see translated in Richards, Sex, Dissidence and Damnation, p.97.
128 Christendom and Its Discontents, ed. S. L. Waugh, P. D. Diehl (Cambridge, 1996), pp.229–30;
Jonathan Riley-Smith, ‘Christian violence and the Crusades’, in Religious Violence between Christians
and Jews: Medieval Roots, Modern Perspectives, ed. A. S. Abulafia (Basingstoke, 2002), pp.9–11.
129 Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews. History, pp.313–15.