The Papal Promise of Protection 89
torture the communion host which miraculously bled and then ‘resurrected’,
thereby proving that it was truly the embodiment of christ.129 Not only does
Boniface appear to have believed the story, but, following the confiscation of
the Jew’s house, he even granted his petitioner, a certain raynerius flamingi, the
(^) authority to build a chapel on the site where the host was said to have been boiled
but where again, in a miraculous turn of events, the boiling water had turned to
blood.130 A cult soon developed around the miraculous host in the parish church
of Saint-Jean-en-Grève which held the ‘holy knife’.131
in contrast to Boniface, in earlier decades innocent iV and Gregory X went out
of their way to refute such reports and charges. in his letters ‘divina justitia nequa-
quam’, ‘Si diligenter attenderet’, and ‘Lachrymabilem Judeorum Alemannie’, innocent
emphasized that he would not be fulfilling his role as pope if he did not insist
on protection for the Jews against such accusations.132 he complained bitterly
at charges of ritual murder—in this particular case that of a little girl—made at
Valréas in 1247 about which the Jews of the province of Vienne were so concerned
that they petitioned the curia for a special letter of protection:
if the christian religion were to give careful heed and rightly analyze by use of reason,
how inhuman it is and how discordant with piety for it to afflict with many kinds of
molestations, and to smite with all sorts of grave injuries, the remnant of the Jews, to
whom, left as witnesses of his saving passion and of his victorious death, the benig-
nity of the Saviour promised the favour of salvation, it would not only draw back its
hands from harming them, but as a show of piety and for the sake of the reverence of
christ, it would, at least, extend the solace of human kindness to those whom it holds,
as it were, in tribute.133
innocent realized not only that such accusations were false but that they were
an easy way for negligent christians to extort money and seize property from
Jewish communities, while at the same time providing an opportunity to scapegoat
the ‘other’ in their midst. Two months later, when he re-issued ‘Sicut iudaeis’ for
the second time in July 1247, innocent therefore added a paragraph denouncing the
blood libel charge and threatening deprivation of honour and office and a sentence
129 enders, ‘dramatic rumors and Truthful Appearances’, p.16.
130 Boniface Viii, ‘Petitio dilecti filii’ (17 July 1295), Grayzel, Vol. 2, pp.196–9; Simonsohn,
pp.283–4. See Kenneth Stow, ‘The church and the Jews: St Paul to Pius iX’, in Popes, Church and Jews
in the Middle Ages: Confrontation and Response, ed. K. Stow (Aldershot, 2007), pp.39–40; rubin,
‘desecration of the host’, p.365.
131 rubin, ‘desecration of the host’, p.365.
132 innocent iV, ‘divina justitia nequaquam’ (28 May 1247), Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.262–4; Simonsohn,
pp.191–2; ‘Si diligenter attenderet’ (28 May 1247), Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.264–6; Simonsohn, pp.190–1;
‘Lachrymabilem Judeorum Alemannie’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.268–70; Simonsohn, pp.194–5; ‘Sicut
iudaeis’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.274; Simonsohn, pp.192–3.
133 innocent iV, ‘Si diligenter attenderet’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.264; Simonsohn, p.190: ‘Si diligenter
attenderet religio christiana et recte discuteret examine rationis quam inhumanum sit et dissonum
pietati ut reliquias Judeorum, quibus Salvatoris benignitas sue salutifere passionis mortisque victricis
relictis testibus salutis gratiam repromisit, variis affligat molestiis vel diversis gravaminum conterat
nocumentis, non solum ab ipsorum injuria manus retraheret, verum etiam eis, quos habet quasi tribu-
tarios, saltem pietatis obtentu et ob christi reverentiam, humanitatis solatia exhiberet.’