264 Popes and Jews, 1095–1291
other letters employed colourful metaphors and similes to express his concern
about the influence of Jews on Christian society. one letter stated:105
Yet, while they [the Jews] are mercifully admitted into our intimacy, they threaten us
with that retribution which they are accustomed to give to their hosts, in accordance
with the common proverb: ‘like the mouse in a pocket, like the snake around one’s
loins, like the fire in one’s bosom’.106Innocent elaborated on the same simile later in the same letter:
For, as soon as they begin to gnaw in the manner of a mouse, and to bite in the
manner of a serpent, one may fear lest the fire that one keeps in his bosom burn up
the gnawed parts.107As we saw in Chapter Five, Clement IV employed the same image; indeed it seems
to have been a common saying picked up and used by medieval rulers, both secular
and religious, as, for example, by Charles of Anjou in his edict of expulsion of
1289.108
By contrast letters of Innocent III’s which seemed to countenance if not endorse
the idea of Jews as potential enemies of Christian society, those of his successors,
Gregory IX and Innocent IV, appear much less severe and more compassionate.
We have noted how in two letters concerned with the ‘Barons’ Crusade’ of 1236,
Gregory described with horror the massacre of Jews by crusaders.109 The letters of
his namesake and later successor Innocent IV were milder still. We saw in Chapter
Two how, following a plea from Jews for protection, Innocent complained in his
letter ‘lachrymabilem Judeorum Alemannie’ of 1147 to the archbishops and
bishops of Germany that Jews had been unjustly accused of eating the heart of a
murdered child, declaring that it was impossible they could have committed such
a crime.110 he reasserted that the papacy was the protector of the Jews and
that they were under ecclesiastical jurisdiction.111 Again, citing Psalms 63: 7, he
encouraged Thibaut IV of Champagne to do all he could to protect Jews in Spain
against the blood libel charge:
105 ‘Innocent III, ‘Etsi Judeos quos’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.114–16; Simonsohn, pp.86–8; robert
Chazan, ‘Pope Innocent III and the Jews’, Pope Innocent III and his World, ed. J. C. Moore (Aldershot,
1999), p.201.
106 Innocent III, ‘Etsi Judeos quos’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.114; Simonsohn, p.87: ‘... qui, tanquam in
nostram misericorditer familiaritatem admissi, nobis illam retributionem impendunt, quam, juxta
vulgare proverbium, mus in pera, serpens in gremio et ignis in sinu, suis consueverunt hospitibus
exhibere’.
107 Innocent III, ‘Etsi Judeos quos’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.114; Simonsohn, p.87: ‘... quia, cum jam
incoeperint rodere more muris et pungere sicut serpens, verendum est ne ignis receptatus in sinu cor
rosa consumat’.
108 robin Mundill, England’s Jewish Solution. Experiment and Expuslion, 1262–1290 (Cambridge,
1998), p.299.
109 Gregory IX, ‘lachrymabilem Judeorum in’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.226–8; Simonsohn, pp.163–4;
‘lachrymabilem Judeorum in’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.228–30; Simonsohn, p.165.
110 Innocent IV, ‘lachrymabilem Judeorum Alemannie’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.268–70; Simonsohn,
pp.194–5.
111 Innocent IV, ‘lachrymabilem Judeorum Alemannie’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.268–70; Simonsohn,
pp.194–5.