60 Popes and Jews, 1095–1291
flattery or a desire to curry favour in order to ensure protection for Jewish com-
munities, but reflected an honest appreciation by rabbis and learned Jews of the
reliability of papal protection.
MESSiANiSM: tHE rELAtioNSHip BEtwEEN
popE AND MESSiAH
Jewish appreciation of papal power had a distinctive religious dimension. Through-
out the High Middle Ages the superseding of Mosaic Law, the rejection of the
Jews, the election of the gentiles, and the messianic status and divinity of Jesus
remained subjects of major controversy between Christians and Jews, and from the
early thirteenth century onwards required a particular resonance in the context
of a growing millenarian and messianic fervour.184 A number of Hebrew texts
emphasized not only that the papacy offered protection to Jewish communities but
that papal authority would play a crucial part in god’s plans for salvation, and in
particular that the pope would be a significant figure in any future messianic
redemption.185 in the twelfth century too many Christians—for their part—were
fascinated with the idea of the end of times and assigned the Jews an active role in
the coming of the Antichrist.186 Similarly, certain Jewish sects developed messianic
movements, and several Jewish writers claimed that the Messiah would order the
pope to tell the kings of Christendom to release His people so that they might wor-
ship the true god.187 The philosopher Maimonides (1135–1204) had a clearly
developed theology of who the Messiah was and when he would appear, while
Abraham Abulafia (1240–after 1291), Kabbalist, poet, and philosopher—like his
Christian contemporaries who followed the teachings of Joachim of Fiore (c.1135–
1202)—wrote extensively about the coming apocalypse and the Messiah’s
advent.188 indeed Abulafia visited rome in 1280, had a number of visions in the
184 Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb, p.264; David ruderman, ‘Hope Against Hope: Jewish and
Christian Messianic Expectations in the Late Middle Ages’, in Exile and Diaspora. Studies in the History
of the Jewish People Presented to Professor Haim Beinart, ed. A. Minsky, A. grossman, Y. Kaplan
(Jerusalem, 1991), pp.185–202.
185 Blumenkranz, ‘The roman Church and the Jews’, p.218.
186 Joachim of Fiore, writing at the end of the twelfth century was the exception. See Abulafia,
‘Christians and Jews in the High Middle Ages’, p.25.
187 Amos Funkenstein, Maimonide, nature, historie et messianisme. Traduit de l’hébreu par Catherine
Chalier (paris, 1988), p.26; p.28. See the discussion of isaac ben Yedaiah in Mark Saperstein,
Decoding the Rabbis: A Thirteenth-Century Commentary on the Aggadah (Cambridge, Mass., 1980),
pp.102–20.
188 Funkenstein, Maimonide, nature, historie et messianisme, pp.33–7. Note that Maimonides con-
sidered islam to be a much purer expression of Monotheism than Christianity. See Funkenstein,
Maimonide, nature, historie et messianisme, p.91. For Maimonides’ philosophy in relation to the study
of the torah, see Hava tirosh-Samuelson, ‘Maimonides’ View of Happiness: philosophy, Myth, and the
transcendence of History’, in Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honour of Yosef Hayim
Yerushalmi, ed. E. Carlebach, J. M. Efron, D. N. Myers, pp.189–213, passim. For Maimonides and the
idea of philosophy as an exact science, see Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, pp.122–30. For his
specific views on the coming of the Messiah, see Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, pp.131–55;
Hames, Like Angels on Jacob’s Ladder: Abraham Abulafia, the Franciscans and Joachimism, pp.2–3; pp.1–10;
pp.102–6; Abulafia, ‘Christians and Jews in the High Middle Ages’, p.21. For Maimonides’ knowledge