Preface xi
crusades often provoked. Yet from the eleventh century onwards crusading itself
affected papal attitudes: comparable with heretics, they lived in europe as an
‘internal’ and marginalized minority group of non-catholics.
chapter Four—Jews and Money—develops the theme of marginalization, exploring
how—since Jews were denied equal status with christians and were barred from
many positions of importance in a profoundly christian society—their livelihoods
and even their survival often came to depend on their ability to lend money at
interest. Furthermore, largely because of papal pronouncements, in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries lending at interest became an area of commerce increas-
ingly possible only for Jews, while those needing to borrow money to fulfil their
crusading vows were obvious targets for moneylenders. so in lending to christians,
and in particular to crusaders, Jews could not ignore the policies of popes who both
authorized crusades and pronounced on money-lending. This chapter explores
how financial transactions affected papal–Jewish relations, since the spiritual power
of the papacy and the military power of the crusaders would often clash with the
relative powerlessness of Jewish communities.
The theme of papal power versus Jewish powerlessness is evident in papal corres-
pondence—in particular in letters concerned with crusading which reveal espe-
cially clearly traditional papal teaching towards Jews. The influence of their
rhetoric must be understood in the context of the increase in the temporal power
of the papacy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—following the reforms of
the eleventh century—and the expansion of the papal states which augmented the
papacy’s confidence in its role as the ultimate spiritual authority in europe, while
that in its turn encouraged an ever more urgent drive towards a greater definition
of christian society and belief. chapter Five—Papal Claims to Authority over
Judaism—argues that as canon law developed from the 1160s onwards, it both
augmented and justified the papacy’s central role in europe, while also encour-
aging in the faithful the sense of a common christian purpose superseding terri-
torial identities and directed by the pope. Popes sought to clarify relations between
christians and Jews on an ongoing basis and in particular reacted to a newly
perceived threat to christianity from the talmud, eventually declaring that their
authority extended over all infidels, including Jews, as well as over christians, and
that they had a duty to prevent heresies within Judaism itself. in the thirteenth
century they became increasingly preoccupied with the idea of a separation of the
two faiths and this attitude coloured, although without fundamentally changing,
subsequent statements of protection.
in chapter six—The Papacy and the Place of Jews in Christian Society—i examine
the theme of conversion. Furthermore, i discuss how the papacy’s desire to direct
christian treatment of Jews through the ecclesiastical courts inevitably led to sig-
nificant clashes with secular authorities who also claimed authority over ‘their
Jews’, while increasingly in the thirteenth century the newly-established mendi-
cant orders encouraged popes to demand that Jews be compelled to listen to con-
versionary sermons. i therefore compare and contrast the language of papal rhetoric
with that of other types of contemporary christian rhetoric and polemic, not least
the influential missionary preaching of the friars.