The relationship of the papacy to the Jews during the High Middle Ages is a vital
part of the long and tumultuous history of Christian–Jewish relations which has
fascinated generations of historians. The period from Urban II’s call for the First
Crusade in 1095 to the year 1291, which during the pontificate of Nicholas IV
witnessed the fall of the last crusading stronghold of Acre and the expulsion of Jews
from England, is crucial for understanding the wider context of the Christian
Church’s attempts to shape medieval western European society within which papal
concerns for Jews developed.1 By addressing the papal angle I hope to have deep-
ened our understanding of the social and legal status of Jewish communities in the
light of papal authorization of crusading, prohibitions against money-lending, in-
creasing charges of ritual murder and host desecration, and the growth of Christian
polemical literature.2 Furthermore, by evaluating the development of papal pro-
nouncements protecting and restricting Jews, manifested on the one hand by con-
demnation of crusader violence and the blood libel charge, and on the other by
restrictions on Jewish rights and calls for the Talmud—a religious text for Jews se-
cond only to the Torah—to be burnt as blasphemous and as heresy within Judaism,
I have chronicled the development of new and important themes in the history of
medieval papal–Jewish relations.
First there is the language and rhetoric of papal correspondence and the influ-
ence of classical and patristic texts on the formation, development, and direction
of papal thought. As we have seen, the majority of papal statements about Jews
were carefully worded responses to secular and religious authorities which can only
be understood if read in the context of the great political, social, and economic
changes of the age and by appreciation of the characters and concerns of individual
pontiffs and the theological precepts underlying their pronouncements.3 Usually
popes reacted to events, although sometimes they took the initiative.4 Papal pro-
nouncements about Jews were primarily responsive: if Christians complained about
1 Seminal works include Edward Synan, The Popes and the Jews in the Middle Ages (New York,
London, 1965); Kenneth Stow, The ‘1007 Anonymous’ and Papal Sovereignty: Jewish Perceptions of the
Papacy and Papal Policy in the High Middle Ages (Cincinnati, 1984).
2 For example, Anna Abulafia, Christians and Jews in Dispute: Disputational Literature and the Rise
of Anti-Judaism in the West (c.1000–1150) (Aldershot, 1998); Robert Chazan, Daggers of Faith:
Thirteenth-Century Christian Missionizing and Jewish Response (Berkeley, 1989); Jeremy Cohen, The
Friars and the Jews: the Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, 1982); Mark Cohen, Under Crescent
and Cross: the Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1994); Gilbert Dahan, La Polémique chrétienne contre
le Judaisme au Moyen Age (Paris, 1991).
3 See especially Kenneth Stow, Alienated Minority: the Jews and Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge,
Mass., 1992); Kenneth Stow, ‘Papal and Royal Attitudes toward Jewish Lending in the Thirteenth
Century’, Association for Jewish Studies Review 6 (1981), 161–84.
4 Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews. History (Toronto, 1991), pp.298–9.
Conclusion