254 Popes and Jews, 1095–1291
‘unbeliever and disbelief, along with treachery’, to ‘intentional and malevolent infi
delity... and treachery’.49 others, that although there was undoubted increasing
papal concern about the supposed danger to Christian souls from all intercourse
with Jews, which, as we have seen, was given formal expression in Canon 27 of the
Third lateran Council of 1179, nevertheless ‘Perfidia’ lacked the negative force of
the modern translation ‘treachery’; rather it implied a mixture of ‘distortion of faith’
and ‘a deliberate denial of Jesus’.50 hence it was a theological term rather than a
term of denigration.
So although such language appears to us very harsh, it was a mere commonplace
in medieval rhetoric, not at all unique to papal correspondence, and not deliberately
abusive as some historians have suggested.51 hence Jews were frequently described
as ‘perfidious’ in language based on the Good Friday liturgy of the roman rite,
which contained a prayer that the ‘perfidious Jews’ might come to acknowledge
Christ:52
o omnipotent eternal God, you who do not reject even the Jewish perfidy, hear our
prayers, which we offer for the blindness of that people, so that, by the acknowledged
light of your truth, which is Christ, they may be rescued from their darkness. Through
the same lord. Amen.53The decision not to kneel at this prayer had been introduced into the roman lit
urgy by GalloFrankish reformers, possibly in the eighth and certainly in the ninth
century.54 From then on such language became increasingly common.
As well as referring to Jewish blindness (‘Judaice caecitas’), popes also referred to
Jewish obduracy (‘Contumacia’ or more frequently ‘duritia’).55 ‘Caecitia’ signified
the Augustinian idea of the Jews’ spiritual blindness.56 So, for example, in a letter
of 1229 to the bishop of Strasbourg, Gregory IX ruled that in the case of a man
who had been ‘saved from the error of Jewish blindness and brought to the true
49 Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews. History (Toronto, 1991), p.9; Marie Therese
Champagne, The Relationship between the Papacy and the Jews in Twelfth-Century Rome: Papal Attitudes
toward Biblical Judaism and Contemporary European Jewry (Ph.d. dissertation, louisiana State
university, 2005), p.81.
50 dobson, The Jews of Medieval York and the Massacre of March 1190, p.19; Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.92,
footnote 2.
51 For example, Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews. History, p.47.
52 The phrases are ‘Judei perfidi’ (‘perfidious Jews’) or ‘perfidia Judeorum’ (‘the perfidy of the Jews’).
See Innocent III, ‘Etsi Judeos quos’ (15 July 1205), Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.114–16, passim; Simonsohn,
pp.86–8, passim; ‘licet perfidia Judeorum’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.92–4, passim; Simonsohn, pp.74–5, passim.
53 ‘omnipotens sempiterne deus, qui etiam Judaicam perfidiam a tua misericordia non repellis:
exaudi preces nostras, quas pro illius populi obcaecatione deferimus; ut, agnita veritatis tuae luce, quae
Christus est, a suis tenebris eruantur. Per eumdem dominum. Amen.’ See Josef Jungmann, The Mass
of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development, trans. F. A. Brunner (london, 1959), Vol. 1, p.244.
54 Theodor Klauser, A Short History of the Western Liturgy: An Account and Some Reflections, 2nd
edn (london, new York, 1979), p.81; Bernhard Blumenkranz, Juifs et Chrétiens dans le Monde
Occidental, 430–1096 (Paris, 1960), p.92; osterreicher, ‘Pro perfidis Judaeis’, 90–5.
55 For example, Innocent III, ‘Quanto populus Judaice’ (5 december 1199), Grayzel, Vol. 1,
pp.96–8, passim; Simonsohn, p.77, passim.
56 St Augustine, The Fathers of the Church, Vol. 27, trans. C. T. Wilcox and ed. r. J. deferrari
(new York, 1955), Ch. 1, p.392; Ch. 5, p.398; Ch. 7, p.403; p.405; p.406; Ch. 8, p.406; Ch. 9, p.411;
Ch. 11, p.413. See Stow, Alienated Minority, pp.19–20.