Introduction 3
the 1940s the renowned Hebrew scholar Irving Agus argued that during the
second half of the thirteenth century:
the policy of degradation and humiliation of the Jew, that had been so relentlessly
pursued by the Church for a thousand years, also received powerful support from the
highest authorities of the state, and thus fully obtained its objectives... The Jew did
not passively submit to this policy of complete humiliation.^8Or, in his ground-breaking work of the 1960s The Church and the Jews in the
Thirteenth Century, Solomon Grayzel—perhaps proposing the most striking example
of the idea of a consistent papal agenda—argued that there was a deliberate ‘policy of
degradation’,^9 and described:
the strenuous efforts which the Church was making in the direction of eliminating the
Jew from Society. Not the safety of the individual Christian, but rather the pursuit of
a fundamental Church policy is here involved, the policy, namely that Jewish life must
be such as to prove unmistakably that God had spurned Judaism.^10Grayzel thereby conveyed the impression that, instead of being sensitive to the con-
cerns of both Christians and Jews which developed and changed over time, throughout
the High Middle Ages popes pursued a uniform, consistent, and un-altering agenda
as part of a particular and carefully planned papal programme towards the Jews.
Such an impression is at best misleading. First, it encourages gross exaggeration
of papal interest in the Jewish communities of medieval Europe, and in particular of
the importance of such communities to popes.^11 Secondly, it promotes an abstract
conception of the papacy, rather than an examination of particular pontiffs,
p.112; George La Piana, ‘The Church and the Jews’, Historia Judaica 11 (1949), 117; 120; 125; 131;
142; Hans Liebeschütz, ‘Judaism and Jewry in the Social Doctrine of Thomas Aquinas’, Journal of
Jewish Studies 13/1–4 (1962), 64; Solomon Grayzel, ‘Jews and the Ecumenical Councils’, in The
Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Volume of the Jewish Quarterly Review, ed. A. A. Neuman and S. Zeitlin
(1967), 309; Kenneth Stow, ‘The Church and the Jews: from St Paul to Paul IV’, Bibliographical Essays
in Medieval Jewish Studies (New York, 1976), pp.109–65; Kenneth Stow, ‘Hatred of the Jews or Love
of the Church: Papal Policy Toward the Jews in the Middle Ages’, Antisemitism through the Ages
(Jerusalem, 1980), pp.71–89; Stow, The ‘1007 Anonymous’ and Papal Sovereignty, passim. The phrases
‘Church policy’, ‘policies of the Church’ and ‘Jewish policy’ are also frequently used, again with more
or less nuance; see Grayzel, ‘The Papal Bull “Sicut Iudeis”’, p.257; Liebeschütz, ‘Judaism and Jewry in
the Social Doctrine of Thomas Aquinas’, 64; Solomon Grayzel, ‘The Talmud and the Medieval
Papacy’, in Essays in Honour of Solomon B. Freehof, ed. W. Jacob et al. (Pittsburgh, 1964), p.234; Salo
Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews: Late Middle Ages and Era of European Expansion,
1200–1650, Vol. 9: Under Church and Empire, 2nd edn (New York, London, 1965), pp.3–54; Church,
State and Jew in the Middle Ages, ed. R. Chazan (New York, 1980), p.8; Cohen, ‘Recent Historiography
on the Medieval Church and the Decline of European Jewry’, p.262; Cohen, Living Letters of the Law,
pp.319–21; Cohen, The Friars and the Jews, p.244; Stow, ‘The Church and the Jews: St Paul to Pius
IX’, pp.1–70, especially pp.1–55.
8 Irving Agus, Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg. His Life and his Works as Sources for the Religious, Legal,
and Social History of the Jews of Germany in the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1947), Vol. 1, p.xl.
9 Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.41–75, passim and especially p.41.
10 Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.41.
11 The phrase ‘royal policy’ is also frequently used to describe the attitudes of European monarchs
to the Jews. See for example, Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews, passim. In this context the
phrase is useful because kings and their magnates had ownership rights over Jews who lived in their
territories. This was not the case with popes, except in the papal states.