Popes and Jews, 1095-1291

220 Popes and Jews, 1095–1291

part of that toleration.97 Innocent III declared that it is acceptable to God that

the Jews who had been dispersed should live and serve under Catholic kings and

emphasized that they had been ‘mercifully admitted into our intimacy’ because

they were prepared to serve:98

We, therefore, asked our dearest son of Christ, Philip the illustrious King of France,

we also ordered the noble Duke of Burgundy, and the Countess of Troyes, so to retrain

the excesses of the Jews that they shall not dare to raise their neck, bowed under the

yoke of perpetual slavery, against the reverence of the Christian Faith; more rigidly to

forbid them to have any nurses nor other kinds of Christian servants in the future, lest

the children of a free woman should be servants to the children of a slave; but, that

rather as slaves rejected by God, in whose death they wickedly conspired, they shall,

by the effect of this very action, recognize themselves as the slaves of those whom

Christ’s death set free at the same time that it enslaved them... 99

He described Jews as the slaves of those whom Christ had freed and argued that

they were socially inferior to Christians because their refusal to accept Christ

consigned them to perpetual servitude.100 Gregory IX similarly emphasized that

Christians accepted Jews in their midst only out of mercy and pity.101

This emphasis on Jews as the natural servants of Christians remained dominant

throughout the thirteenth century. In the late twelfth century the eminent theolo-

gian Peter the Chanter (d.1197) had urged:

Slay them not... For (the Jews) are our book carriers and the bearers of our texts and

the witnesses to Christ’s Passion; they must clean the streets of Christendom rather

than be rich and they must perform public service to Christian society... 102

Peter’s pupil Thomas of Chobham (c.1160–1233/36) thought Jews should be

‘preserved’ and given ‘work of a base sort’ so they ‘cannot exult themselves over

Christians’.103

quos’ (15 July 1205), Grayzel, Vol. 1 , pp.114–16; Simonsohn, pp.86–8; Gregory IX, ‘Ad similitudinem
Dei’ (23 January 1234), Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.210.

97 There is a large historiography on the language of Jewish service in medieval society which
cannot be discussed in detail here. See Abulafia, Christian-Jewish Relations 1000–1300, pp.51–5.
98 Innocent III, ‘etsi Judeos quos’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.114; Simonsohn, p.87: ‘qui, tanquam in nos-
tram misericorditer familiaritatem admissi.. .’.
99 Innocent III, ‘etsi Judeos quos’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.114; Simonsohn, p.87: ‘Rogavimus igitur
charissimum filium nostrum in Christo, Philippum, regerm Francorum illustrem, mandavimus etiam
nobilibus viris... duci Burgundie, et... comitisse Trecensi, ut taliter reprimant Judeorum excessus, ne
cervicem perpetue servitutis jugo submissam presumant erigere contra reverentiam fidei Christiane,
inhibentes districtius, ne de cetero nutrices, vel servientes habeant Christianos, ne filii libere filiis
famulentur ancille, sed, tamquam servi a Domino reprobati, in cujus mortem nequiter conjurarunt,
se saltem per effectum operis recognoscant servos illorum, quos Christi mors liberos et illos servos
effecit.. .’.
100 Innocent III, ‘etsi Judeos quos’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.114–16; Simonsohn, pp.86–8; ‘etsi non
displiceat’ (16 January 1205), Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.104–8; Simonsohn, pp.82–4.
101 Gregory IX, ‘Ad similitudinem Dei’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.210.
102 Peter the Chanter in Gilbert Dahan, ‘L’Article Iudei de la Summa Abel de Pierre le Chantre’,
Revue des Études Augustiniennes 27 (1981), 126: ‘Ne occidas eos... Ipsi enim sunt capsarii nostri et
baiuli codicum nostrorum et testes dominice passionis, mundatores platearum. Debent esse non div-
ites et publici servi ecclesie... ’. See Abulafia, Christian-Jewish Relations 1000–1300, p.198.
103 Thomas of Chobham, Summa Confessorum, Art. 7.4.6.11, in Analecta Medieaevalia Namercensia,
25, ed. F. Broomfield (Louvain, 1968), pp.433–5, especially p.434: ‘sustinendi sunt inter nos et