The Impact of the Crusades 115
a lot of their fortune has been taken away, for thus the king of France has ordered that
in the case of anyone who volunteers to go to Jerusalem, if he owes money to the Jews
his debt will be forgiven.66As we noted in Chapter One, Louis vII of France had decreed the cancellation
of interest on debts owed by those volunteering to crusade to Jerusalem, because
frequently Jews had loaned money to these people.67 we have seen how Ephraim
noted that in England the Second Crusade had less severe repercussions for Jews
because King Stephen wished to defend them from crusader excesses.68
One might expect that the pope would again be highlighted over the issue of
protection in Ephraim’s chronicle. Indeed some historians have argued that
Eugenius III’s re-issue of the ‘Constitutio pro Iudaeis’ at the very beginning of his
pontificate was in anticipation of renewed pogroms on the eve of the Second
Crusade.69 Yet Ephraim makes no direct mention of Eugenius or of ‘Quantum
praedecessores’—even though Eugenius specifically regulated that:
All those who are encumbered with debts and undertake so holy a journey with pure
hearts need not pay usury on past loans; and if they or others on their behalf are
bound by oath or faith to usurious contracts we absolve them from them by apostolic
authority.70So unlike Shelomo bar Shimshon, Ephraim apparently considered this important
papal pronouncement irrelevant to his narrative. Yet, although he says nothing spe-
cific about papal activity, we can deduce from Ephraim that Louis vII took
‘Quantum praedecessores’ very seriously.71 Ephraim blamed the king for cancelling
the interest that crusaders owed to Jews.72 In fact, although ‘Quantum praedeces-
sores’ set out particular procedures for money-lending to crusaders, it said nothing
66 Ephraim of Bonn, in Sefer gezerot sarfat ve-ashkenaz, ed. Habermann, p.121.
67 Ephraim of Bonn, in Sefer gezerot sarfat ve-ashkenaz, ed. Habermann, p.121; Kenneth Stow,
Alienated Minority: the Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, Mass., London, 1992), p.113;
robert Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France. A Political and Social History (Baltimore, London,
1973), pp.34–6.
68 Ephraim of Bonn, in Sefer gezerot sarfat ve-ashkenaz, ed. Habermann, p.121. By contrast several
chroniclers recorded an outbreak of violence in England in 1189–90 on the eve of the Third Crusade.
See richard dobson, The Jews of Medieval York and the Massacre of March 1190 (York, 1974),
pp.1–26.
69 Eugenius III, ‘Sicut Iudaeis’, Simonsohn, p.47. The bull has not survived and is known from its
quotation in later editions of the text. For a proponent of this view, see Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.76. However,
for scepticism about reading too much into papal texts about the Jews especially with respect to con-
tinuity and change, see Kenneth Stow, ‘The pitfalls of writing papal documentary History:
Simonsohn’s Apostolic See and the Jews’, Jewish Quarterly Review 85/3–4 (1995), 400: ‘Most notably,
scholars have calculated the regularity with which the bull “Sicut Iudaeis non” was reissued as a bar-
ometer of so-called favourable papal stances.’
70 Eugenius III, ‘Quantum praedecessores’, p.57; ‘Quantum praedecessores’, p.304: ‘Quicunque
vero ere premuntur alieno et tam sanctum iter puro corde inceperint, de preterito usuras non solvant
et, si ipsi vel alii pro eis occasione usurarum astricti sunt sacramento vel fide, apostolic eos auctoritate
absolvimus’; see trans. in The Crusades. Idea and Reality, ed. L. riley Smith, J. S. C. riley Smith
(London, 1981), p.59.
71 Eugenius III, ‘Quantum praedecessores’, pp.55–7. See also in the re-issue of Eugenius III,
‘Quantum praedecessores’, pp.302–5.
72 Ephraim of Bonn, in Sefer gezerot sarfat ve-ashkenaz, ed. Habermann, p.121.