Popes and Jews, 1095-1291

Papal Claims to Authority over Judaism 169

in Chapter Six, Innocent III and Clement Iv both defended the principle that

Jews must remain servile to Christians by envoking the biblical notion of the ‘mark

of Cain’: a reference to Genesis 4, and the savage murder of Abel by Cain which

was traditionally compared with Christ’s crucifixion by Jews.27 Following St Ambrose

(c.340–397), many medieval commentators regarded Cain as representing the

Jews.28 According to Ambrose:

These two brothers, Cain and Abel, have furnished us with the prototype of the

Synagogue and the Church. In Cain we perceived the paricidal people of the Jews,

who were stained with the blood of their lord, their Creator, as a result of the child-

bearing of the virgin Mary, their Brother, also. By Abel we understand the Christian

who cleaves to God... 29

According to such exegesis, just as Cain was forced to serve Abel, so Jews must

serve Christians: Jews were to be spared in Christian society in order that they

might serve. Hence when Clement Iv complained that Jews in Poland were not

only employing Christian nurses in their homes, but forcing them to cohabit, he

used similar language,30 arguing that the Jewish people, like the fratricide Cain,

had become a fugitive upon the earth because the Jews had killed Christ, who, as

the seed of David, was their brother. Though Jews were not to be killed, in case the

law of God be forgotten—for a remnant of them must be saved—they were to be

subjected to deserved servitude until, their faces covered with shame, they were

compelled to seek the lord.31 Such high flown rhetoric, unusual among popes

but  particularly favoured by Innocent III and Clement Iv, was also frequently

employed by contemporary preachers and polemicists.

Papal concern to demarcate the correct theological position of Jews in Christian

society was strikingly visible in the decrees of the Fourth lateran Council. As we

noted in Chapter Three, arising again out of concern that Jews and Christians

might be tempted to form sexual relationships, sometimes marriage, and that this

might lead to conversions—something which ironically enough Jewish rabbis also

feared—Constitution 68 decreed that Jews must wear different clothing from

Christians:

A difference of dress distinguishes Jews or Saracens from Christians in some provinces,

but in others a certain confusion has developed so that they are indistinguishable.

Whence it sometimes happens that by mistake Christians join with Jewish or Saracen

women, and Jews or Saracens with Christian women. In order that the offence of such

27 Irven resnick, Marks of Distinction. Christian Perceptions of Jews in the High Middle Ages
(Washington D.C., 2012), pp.206–7; ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern
European Art of the Late Middle Ages (Berkeley, los Angeles, oxford, 1993), p.48.
28 resnick, Marks of Distinction, pp.206–7.
29 Ambrose, ‘liber Primus’, De Cain et Abel, Libri Duo, PL 14, col. 336: ‘Haec figura Synagogae et
Ecclesiae in his duobus fratribus ante praecessit Cain et Abel. Per Cain parricidialis populus intelligitur
Judaeorum, qui Domini et auctoris sui et secundum Mariae virginis partum fratris, ut ita dicam,
sanguinem persecutus est. Per Abel autem intelligitur Christianus adhaerens Deo... ’. See Mellinkoff,
Outcasts, p.63.
30 Clement Iv, ‘Peccatum peccavit’ (no date/1265–1268), Grayzel, Vol. 2, pp.110–12; Simonsohn,
pp.225–6.
31 Clement Iv, ‘Peccatum peccavit’, Grayzel, Vol. 2, pp.110–11; Simonsohn, pp.225–6.