Popes and Jews, 1095-1291

54 Popes and Jews, 1095–1291

a king who had given an orchard to a person whom he loved and ordered this person

to kill anyone who entered the orchard. After a number of days the king wanted to

enter the orchard himself to check whether his command was being followed, and he

disguised himself and came to the gate of the orchard to enter by force and he said that

he was the king. And the guard, the person whom the king loved, said ‘You shall not

enter this place, because the king has ordered that no person shall enter this orchard,

and you are not the king’.147

So the guard did not recognize the king, told him that he was under orders not to

allow anyone to enter, and killed him when he tried to force an entry. Although the

king’s intention had been to show that the man he loved was a hero, he ended up

being slain at his hands. Here then a pope was depicted using a parable to explain

that it was not the Jews’ fault that they had killed Jesus.

in this case it is unclear whether the author has a particular pope in mind or

whether he relates the story as the kind of parable he thinks a pope might tell to try

to exonerate the Jews. given learned Jews’ knowledge of the New testament, he

may have known of the parable of the Vineyard (in the gospels of Mark 12: 1–11,

Luke 20: 9–18, and Matthew 21: 33–44) which tells a similar type of tale of the

murder of the son—who stands for Jesus—of the owner of a vineyard (god).148

The author of the ‘Edut Adonai Ne‘emena then explained why the pope’s parable

was misguided and which passages from torah could refute it:

Explanation: god has given the torah to israel and said (Exodus 20: 2-3): ‘i am thy

god, thou shalt not have false gods’ and (Deuteronomy 4: 15): ‘And you guarded your

souls for you did not see any image’ and he said (Exodus 33: 20): ‘and no man that shall

see me shall live’. And when Jesus came into the world he came in human form and

pretended to be god and they killed him. Had they known that he is god, they would

not have hurt him. And in the future as well, god shall save us through the Law.149

So the author refutes the pope’s explanation. Nevertheless, the fact that he describes

a pope attempting to portray the Jews’ role in the Crucifixion more positively con-

trasts starkly, for example, with Bede’s famously negative commentaries on the

parable of the Vineyard in which he accuses the Jews of deliberate deicide, as with

the views of various twelfth-century exegetes who argue that Jews put Jesus to

death out of pure malice and envy.150 Thus, contrary to both popular and intellec-

tual Christian ideas that the Jews had Jesus crucified because he did not live up to

the ‘ideal’ of the promised Messiah, we have a Jewish polemical text portraying a

pope arguing that according to Christian theology the Jews were not guilty of

Christ’s death and should therefore be protected.151

147 ‘Edut adonai ne‘emena’, in Mehqarim u-meqorot, ed. rosenthal, Vol. 1, p.420.
148 Mark 12: 1–11, Luke 2: 9–18, Matthew 21: 33–44, in Biblia sacra iuxta Vulgatam versionem,
ed. r. weber, 2 vols, 2nd edn (Stuttgart, 1975).
149 ‘Edut adonai ne‘emena’, in Mehqarim u-meqorot, ed. rosenthal, Vol. 1, p.420.
150 ‘Manifestissime Dominus probat Judaeorum principes non per ignorantiam, sed per invidiam
/ invidentiam crucifixisse Filium Dei’, see PL, 92, col. 251; col. 576; and ‘Vere enim Judaei oculum
pravum, id est, nequam habentes intentionem, questi sunt contra benignitatem Dei’, col. 88. See also
Abulafia, ‘Christians and Jews in the High Middle Ages’, p.26.
151 roth, ‘The Medieval Conception of the Jew’, p.300.