90 Popes and Jews, 1095–1291
of excommunication for anyone who flouted his decree.134 Gregory X’s letter
‘Tenorem litterarum quas’ of 1274 re-issued innocent iV’s ‘Lachrymabilem
Judeorum Alemannie’ of 1247 on behalf of Jewish communities in Germany and
reiterated that such accusations of ritual murder were false, not least because Jews
were expressly forbidden in Jewish law from consuming any blood, let alone that
of humans.135
Yet, despite such papal interventions in response to particular allegations, Jews
became an increasingly popular target for such charges. Through the association of
Jews with the crucifixion, with blood, and with the representation of the cruel
male Jew—together with a growing iconography and literature of the christ-
child, the inevitable occasional unexplained deaths of children, and the increased
circulation of popular literature, especially by Benedictine houses—more accusa-
tions of ritual murder, blood libel, and host desecration emerged. Popes might
continue to reject them, but to stamp them out they would have had to pursue a
much more active ‘policy’, not merely that of intervening to emphasize protection
of the Jews in response to particular petitions and appeals and of re-issuing the
‘constitutio pro iudaeis’. They did not do so because the plight of Jewish commu-
nities was of relatively little concern to them, beset as they were with other reli-
gious, political, and social issues.136 indeed, even had they had taken a much more
proactive stance, their ability to prevent or control such charges from far away
rome was certainly very limited.
The LiMiTS of PAPAL ProTecTioN: JeWS
AS MAGiciANS ANd PhYSiciANS
Jews were often associated with magic. To what extent did the papal promise of pro-
tection extend to safeguarding Jews against charges of practising magic? Belief in
magic was extremely common in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries.137
one reason why Jews were sometimes accused of host desecration—of stealing and
mutilating consecrated wafers—was that they were believed to use them for magical
purposes, a crime of which christians were at times also accused. With the onset
of the inquisition in the thirteenth century, accusations of magic became more
and more assimilated to charges of heresy.138 The theory was that by use of a sacred
134 for innocent iV’s first re-issue of the ‘Sicut iudaeis’, see innocent iV, ‘Sicut iudaeis’, Grayzel,
Vol. 1, pp.260–2; Simonsohn, p.189. for his second re-issue and the additional paragraph denouncing
the blood libel charge, see innocent iV, ‘Sicut iudaeis’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.274; Simonsohn, pp.192–3;
MacLehose, ‘A Tender Age’, p.113.
135 Gregory X, ‘Tenorem litterarum quas’ (7 July 1274), Grayzel, Vol. 2, pp.123–6; Simonsohn,
pp.245–6.
136 Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.82.
137 Grayzel, Vol. 2, pp.305–6, footnote 2; richard Kieckhefer, ‘The Specific rationality of Medieval
Magic’, American Historical Review 99/3 (1994), 814; Aron Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture:
Problems of Belief and Perception, trans. J. M. Bak, P. A. hollingsworth (cambridge, 1988), p.219;
Sophie Page, Magic in Medieval Manuscripts (Toronto, 2004), p.5.
138 Bronislaw Geremek, The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris, trans. J. Birrell (cambridge,
1987), p.307.