Jewish Ideas about the Papacy 63
‘The Messiah will do more than everybody and will strengthen his heart in the ways of
the Lord, and will come and order the pope and all the kings of the nations to let the
people of god worship Him, and he will use wonders and will not fear them at all.
And he will dwell in the city of rome until he will destroy it.’201The same theme of the relationship between the pope and the Messiah con-
tinued in later fourteenth-century Jewish writing. in his Vikuah Ha-Rashbatz,
Simeon ben Zemah Duran, otherwise known as rashbatz, a rabbinical expert who
fled Spain and became rabbi of Algiers after the persecutions of the anti-pope
Benedict xiii in 1391, described popes as working deliberately to reinforce the lie
of Christianity,202 claiming that they regularly announced the coming of the
Antichrist in their general letters to the Christian faithful.203 He also noted that
Christians interpreted the Book of Daniel, which they thought prophesied oppos-
ition to israel, as saying that the Antichrist’s arrival would constitute a deliberate
attempt to confuse Jesus’ teaching and referred to St John the Evangelist who in his
Epistles (1 John 2: 18, 22; 1 John 4: 3; and 2 John 1: 7) and in his gospel (John
14: 30) claimed that anyone who did not believe that Jesus was from god was the
Antichrist.204 These words, rashbatz argued, encouraged popes to invent lies
about the Antichrist’s coming, thereby better to confirm the false teachings of
Christianity:
And his [St John’s] words therefore re-enforced the popes when they began sitting in
their chair of governance to invent falsehoods in order to send them to all the coun-
tries to notify them that the Antichrist has already come into the world.205As we have observed, the belief that popes and the papacy not only had played but
would continue to play an important role in safeguarding the well-being of Jewish
communities and determining their future is not itself surprising; medieval Jews
were fully aware of how the mechanics of power could serve their interests. Yet
assumptions about some future interaction between a pope and the Messiah pro-
vide a different but intriguing insight into their beliefs about the papacy’s protective
as well as theological significance.
pApAL–JEwiSH rELAtioNS iN JEwiSH SoUrCES
From this examination of a diverse if limited number of Hebrew texts—folktales,
chronicles, rabbinic responsa, disputational literature, and polemic—it is unsur-
prising but immensely informative to discover that throughout the High Middle
Ages Jewish perceptions of the papacy were varied and changing. Although friendly,
201 Nachmanides, ‘Vikuah ha-ramban’, in Osar wikuhim, ed. Eisenstein, p.90; Kitve rabenu
Mosheh ben Nahman, ed. Chavel, Vol. 1, p.312; see also translations in rankin, Jewish Religious Polemic
of Early and Late Centuries, pp.193–4; Judaism on Trial, ed. Maccoby, pp.122–3.
202 Simeon ben Zemah Duran, ‘Vikuah ha-rashbatz’, in Osar wikuhim, ed. Eisenstein, p.126.
203 Stow, The ‘1007 Anonymous’ and Papal Sovereignty, p.23.
204 Simeon ben Zemah Duran, ‘Vikuah ha-rashbatz’, in Osar wikuhim, ed. Eisenstein, p.126.
205 Simeon ben Zemah Duran, ‘Vikuah ha-rashbatz’, in Osar wikuhim, ed. Eisenstein, p.126.