For decades, scholars, fascinated by the relationship of the papacy to the Jews in
the High Middle Ages, have explored its development from the point of view of
the papal curia and by examining papal pronouncements, canon law, and conciliar
legislation.1 As we have noted, although papal perceptions of Jews throughout the
period are a well-established area of research, Jewish ideas about the papacy remain
a surprisingly under-developed topic. This chapter explores such ideas through a
range of contemporary and later sources including folktales and legends, popular
histories, chronicles, rabbinic responsa, disputational literature, and polemic. Jewish
writers were anxious to ensure the safety of their communities in western Europe
and grateful for statements of papal protection, but they were also highly critical of
Christian beliefs about the papacy, in particular the doctrine of apostolic succes-
sion. Though respectful of the papacy’s power, both spiritual and temporal, they
were dismissive of the Scriptural and theological formulations on which Christian
claims for apostolic authority rested. They fully acknowledged that popes had
always played and would continue to play an important role in safeguarding their
well-being and determining their future. Yet although contemporary and later
Jewish writers often valued papal protection more highly than that of monarchs,
emperors, or clergy, they recognized that its limits were circumscribed.
JEwiSH HiStoriogrApHY
Christian ideas about Jews and Judaism were formed by the clergy and the literate
higher echelons of society; it is more difficult to evaluate the degree to which
they typify the ideas of those who have left no record of their views.2 Similarly the
nature of the surviving evidence means that a Jewish perspective most frequently
derives from an exclusive and highly learned minority of rabbis and community
1 For a discussion of historicism and anti-historicism and its impact on the study of Jewish History
through the ages, see David Myers, Resisting History. Historicism and its Discontents in German-Jewish
Thought (oxford, 2003), pp.1–12; pp.157–72. Notable exceptions who have explored this complex
subject include Kenneth Stow and more recently, ram Ben-Shalom. See, for example, Kenneth Stow,
The ‘1007 Anonymous’ and Papal Sovereignty: Jewish Perceptions of the Papacy and Papal Policy in the
High Middle Ages (Cincinnati, 1984). And for example, ram Ben-Shalom, Exempla and Popes: Church
Imagery in the Spanish and Provencal Jewish Mentalité (pamplona, 2004), pp.177–90.
2 Anna Abulafia, ‘Christians and Jews in the High Middle Ages: Christian Views of Jews’, in The
Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries). Proceedings of the International
Symposium held at Speyer, 20–25 October 2002, ed. C. Cluse (turnhout, 2004), p.27.
1
Jewish ideas about the papacy