The City of Rome 245
work for Jews and stipulated harsh penalties if they did. The language of Lateran
iii hardly suggests the closer relationship between Alexander and the Roman Jews
that the evidence from his 1165 adventus and the employment of Jechiel might
imply. Historians have wondered whether during his period of exile, from 1167 to
1177, Alexander’s contact with Roman Jews may have diminished, or whether his
relationship with the Jews of Rome was altered in 1179 with the decrees of Lateran
iii.145 Yet there is no reason to suppose that the legislation of the council affected
the pope’s personal relationship with the Roman Jewish community which he would
have viewed as an entirely separate matter from his theological convictions.
nevertheless, there is no doubt that the Third Lateran Council was Alexander’s
lasting legacy with regard to restrictive legislation on Jewish society.146 We have
seen how during his pontificate and more generally in the twelfth century, contact
between the pope and the Roman Jewish community included a ceremonial trad-
ition in which the Jews acknowledged their allegiance to the pope as their temporal
lord, while the pope in response urged their protection. The employment of Jechiel
on the one hand and the legislation of Lateran iii on the other reveals that papal–
Jewish contacts in the twelfth century took different forms—ranging from toler-
ation and respect to increased restriction.147 Jews were officially protected by the
papacy and some like Jechiel even served in positions of authority at the curia,
but later on at the beginning of the thirteenth century, following the legislation
of Lateran iV, its decrees officially and definitively barred Jews from holding public
office.148 it is the papal rhetoric of both protection and restriction to which we
now turn.
145 Champagne, The Relationship between the Papacy and the Jews in Twelfth-Century Rome, p.187.
146 Champagne, The Relationship between the Papacy and the Jews in Twelfth-Century Rome, p.187.
147 Champagne, The Relationship between the Papacy and the Jews in Twelfth-Century Rome, p.97.
148 Champagne, ‘“Treasures of the Temple” and Claims to Authority in Twelfth-Century Rome’, p.118.