x Preface
on our understanding of the history of medieval italy, of the crusades, and more
widely of europe’s developing cultural and religious heritage.
what is the rationale behind the book’s structure? in the introduction i examine
the idea of papal pronouncements as responses to secular and religious authorities
in the context of the continually changing economic and social conditions of medi-
eval europe, the developing idea of the nation state, the growing bureaucracy and
centrality of the papal curia, and the different characters and lengths of pontificate
of those who governed the apostolic see. i argue that traditional christian theology
ensured that popes were committed to protecting the Jews, but that they also
believed that they must ensure the spiritual welfare of christian society—and that
this led them increasingly to restrict Jewish activities. My introduction also
provides an overview of recent historiography.
such historiography reveals that Jewish ideas about the papacy remain a surpris-
ingly underdeveloped area of research. in chapter one—Jewish Ideas about the
Papacy—i explore such ideas through a range of contemporary and later sources
including folktales, chronicles, responsa, and disputational literature. Jewish writers
were obviously concerned to ensure the safety of their communities in western
europe and grateful for statements of papal protection. They were also highly crit-
ical of christian beliefs about the papacy, in particular the theory of apostolic
succession. Yet they fully acknowledged that popes had always played and would
continue to play an important role in safeguarding their well-being and deter-
mining their future. nevertheless, although contemporary and later Jewish writers
often valued papal protection more highly than that of monarchs, emperors, or
other clergy, they also knew it had its circumscribed limits. 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.
chapter two—The Papal Promise of Protection—explores the papal angle. it shows
how the papacy sought to protect but also control the Jews by a number of dif-
ferent methods, in particular by the promulgation of general letters or ‘encyclicals’.
appeals from the Jewish communities encouraged six popes in the twelfth century
and ten in the thirteenth to re-issue ‘sicut iudaeis’, a letter of protection for Jews
originally issued in the sixth century by Gregory the Great (590–604) which in the
High Middle ages became known as the ‘constitutio pro iudaeis’. sometimes it
was re-issued to refute popular charges and increasing accusations against Jews: in
particular of ritual murder, host desecration, and blood libel.
with the onset of the crusades and the resulting mob violence, this ‘constitutio
pro iudaeis’ was also increasingly re-issued in light of a new recognition of the need
for Jews to be protected. From the eleventh century popes called for crusades against
Muslims in the near east and pagans in the baltic, and, from the thirteenth
century, against heretics and political enemies of the church. although they
never authorized crusades against Jews, Jewish communities suffered indirectly
from papal calls for crusading. chapter Three—The Impact of the Crusades—
emphasizes how living in christian europe, but no part of its mainstream culture,
Jews were particularly vulnerable to the violence which papal authorization of