Papal Claims to Authority over Judaism 197
sentence of excommunication against those who refused to give them up.230 In
another letter of the same year he similarly ordered the king of Portugal to seize ‘all
the books belonging to the Jews’ when they congregated in their synagogues on the
first Saturday of lent, and cited the Talmud as the most important reason why the
Jews ‘remain obstinate in their perfidy’.231 Employing the same language of ‘per-
fidy’ he commanded the bishop of Paris, the prior of the Dominicans, and the
Minister of the Franciscan friars in Paris to ensure that the Jews of France, England,
Aragon, navarre, Castile, león, and Portugal be forced by the secular arm to con-
sign their books to the flames.232
Although, like his eleventh- and twelfth-century predecessors and his thirteenth-
century successors, Gregory IX could not read Hebrew and relied on converts such
as Donin to inform him of its content, he regarded the Talmud as especially perni-
cious because he believed it encouraged Jews to remain hard of heart, contained
blasphemies, sought to rival the unique authority of Scripture, and even encour-
aged Jews to ignore the old Testament itself.233 The last point is particularly
important since, as we have discussed, according to the traditional teaching of
the Church, Jews, because they upheld the old Testament, were allowed to live
unharmed in Christian society as witnesses to the truth of the new. Gregory firmly
believed that the force of this role would be diminished by Jewish compliance with
Talmudic regulations.234 He therefore ruled that Jews who followed the teachings
of the Talmud were heretics who offended against Jewish law and that he had
authority to call for the book to be burnt as heretical.
Hence, confronted by disturbing allegations, Gregory reacted vigorously by ini-
tiating an innovative campaign.235 We have seen how it began with a series of papal
letters despatched in 1239, all of which began by levelling charges: the addressees
of the first set were the archbishops of the major European kingdoms; the addressees
of the second were influential European monarchs.236 In these letters Gregory
alerted the ecclesiastical and secular leadership of Europe to hitherto unsuspected
problems.237 Yet his letters do not spell out the nature of these false and offensive
teachings.238 He was perturbed—as he saw it—that Jews were not content with,
but rather neglected, the old law and that they falsely claimed that it was passed
on orally to Moses and had then been written down by later sages and scribes. He
was also disturbed to find that the Talmud exceeded the Bible (both the old
Testament and new Testament) in length.239
230 Gregory IX, ‘Si vera sunt’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.240–2; Simonsohn, pp.172–3.
231 Gregory IX, ‘Si vera sunt’ (20 June 1239), Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.242; Simonsohn, p.173: ‘universos
libros Judeorum’; ‘in sua perfidia retinet obstinatos’.
232 Gregory IX, ‘Si vera sunt’ (20 June 1239), Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.242; Simonsohn, p.174.
233 Pakter, Medieval Canon Law and the Jews, p.72; Judaism on Trial, ed. and trans. Maccoby, p.19.
234 For a discussion of the condemnation of the Talmud, see Cohen, The Friars and the Jews,
pp.60–76; Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, pp.319–25.
235 The Trial of the Talmud: Paris 1240, ed. Chazan, p.32.
236 The Trial of the Talmud: Paris 1240, ed. Chazan, p.18.
237 The Trial of the Talmud: Paris 1240, ed. Chazan, p.43.
238 The Trial of the Talmud: Paris 1240, ed. Chazan, p.4.
239 The Trial of the Talmud: Paris 1240, ed. Chazan, pp.44–5.