84 Popes and Jews, 1095–1291
no sense blind to who christ was but fully aware of what they had done in killing
him.99 it is not hard to see how in the popular imagination this could encourage
the suspicion that those who had spilt God’s blood might seek to re-enact the
crucifixion by annually killing christian children at Passover.100
certainly in contemporary literature we find numerous references to Jews as
a particular threat to children. The theological idea of Jewish stubbornness
(‘duritia’)—which we will explore in chapter eight—may have become associ-
ated in popular culture with the idea of the male Jew as ‘hard-hearted’, ‘stubborn’
and hence a threat even to his own offspring. Since the Jewish male was circum-
cised, he could never be fully converted but would always show traces of his Jewish
past: that contrasted with Jewish women and (female) children who had no such
physical characteristic and whom it was believed could be more easily influenced,
converted, and brought to the christian faith.101 in his De Gloria Martyrum—
dated c.590, but becoming increasingly popular after 1100—Gregory of Tours
relates how a Jewish boy, after witnessing and taking communion, was punished by
being thrown into an oven by his father but remained unharmed because he was
protected by the Virgin Mary.102 The boy, as well as his mother and many other
Jews, subsequently converted to christianity; the father on the other hand was
burned alive in the oven. in this tale of ‘The Jewish Boy’, while the child and
mother saw the error of their ways and earned salvation through conversion—a
common motif of a Jewish family in christian narratives—the father remained a
figure of evil. The tale became so popular that it was retold in a number of different
versions in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.103 Similarly in Matthew Paris’
99 richards, Sex, Dissidence and Damnation, pp.94–7.
100 Perry, Schweitzer, Antisemitism, pp.47–8.
101 Miri rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New haven, 1999; repr.
2004), p.71; Miri rubin, ‘desecration of the host: The Birth of an Accusation’, in Medieval Religion:
New Approaches, ed. c. hoffman Berman (New York, London, 2008), pp.367–8.
102 William MacLehose, ‘A Tender Age’: Cultural Anxieties Over the Child in the Twelfth and
Thirteenth Centuries (New York, 2008), p.115: ‘de puero iudeo cum aliis communicante. Quidam
puer iudeus accepit cum aliis corpus christi quem pater eius in fornacem ardentem misit. erat autem
super altare ubi communionem acceperat imago beate uirginis quam ipse diligenter inspexerat.
cum autem esset in fornace apparuit ei beata uirgo in specie imaginis quam super altare uiderat et eum
eciam sine sensu caloris liberauit. hoc bituricas factum est.’ in 1329 John XXii wrote a general letter
to all christians telling them that Philip Vi (1328–1350) of Valois had informed him that a certain
Jew who had accepted baptism falsely and had been baptized and had taken the name William, con-
tinued to practise Judaism secretly and one day in the cistercian monastery of cambon, in the diocese
of cambrai, he five times stabbed with a sword an image of the Virgin Mary painted on one of the
walls. See John XXii, ‘Gloriosus deus’ (22 March 1329), Grayzel, Vol. 2, pp.336–7; Simonsohn,
pp.357–9. When the news of this act spread, William lied that he was blameless and so went unpun-
ished until a certain John flamens of Lessines, a carpenter, hearing that no fitting punishment had
been imposed for the man’s crime, challenged him to a judicial ordeal by duel (this was perhaps illegal,
since done without the authority of a court of law). See Grayzel, Vol. 2, p.337, footnote 2. With a duel
William felled the Jew and when the Jew was bound to the stump of a tree to be burnt, he publicly
confessed his guilt. A chapel was then built in the monastery in front of the image of the Virgin Mary
in order to honour her who had been so dishonoured. The incident seems to have taken place in 1322.
The pope acceded to the king’s request and granted a remission of sins to anyone who made a pilgrimage
to the chapel. here then is an example of a pope seeming to believe charges of disrespect for the Virgin
Mary. See Grayzel, Vol. 2, p.337, footnotes 1 and 3.
103 rubin, Gentile Tales, pp.8–28.