Appendix
The Historiography
The present book is firmly rooted in recent work by scholars such as Solomon Grayzel,
Shlomo Simonsohn, Kenneth Stow, edward Synan, Anna Abulafia, nora Berend, peter
Browe, Robert Chazan, Jeremy Cohen, Mark Cohen, Gilbert dahan, Alfred Haverkamp,
William Chester Jordan, Gavin Langmuir, and Miri Rubin, all of whom have contributed
greatly to our understanding of the social and legal status of Jewish communities in
Christian europe during the High Middle Ages, especially with reference to increasing
charges of blood libel and host desecration, the growth of both Christian and Jewish po-
lemic, and the effect on Jewish communities of pogroms perpetrated by crusaders on their
way to take part in crusades, both to the near east and within europe. particularly relevant
to my own research have been the writings of Grayzel, Simonsohn, and Stow.
For reasons of space i can only list some of the most important books in this scholarlytradition. in 1965 edward Synan produced The Popes and the Jews in the Middle Ages (new
York, London, 1965) which has remained an important piece of scholarship to this day and
which has certainly influenced this study. Kenneth Stow has written extensively on
Jewish–Christian relations—for example his book Jewish Dogs: An Image and its
Interpreters: Continuity in the Catholic-Jewish Encounter (Stanford, 2006)—and he is the
only recent historian to have examined papal–Jewish relations in any real depth in english.
His overriding concern, however, has been with the early modern period: hence Kenneth
Stow, Conversion, Christian Hebraism and Hebrew Prayer in the Sixteenth Century, Hebrew
Union College Annual, 47 (1976); Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy, 1555–1593
(new York, 1977); The Jews in Rome, 2 vols. ed. K. Stow (Leiden, new York, 1995–1997),
and Jewish Life in Early Modern Rome: Challenge, Conversion and Private Life (Aldershot,
2007). Stow’s two monographs specifically on medieval europe are The ‘1007 Anonymous’
and Papal Sovereignty: Jewish Perceptions of the Papacy and Papal Policy in the High Middle
Ages (Cincinnati, 1984) and Alienated Minority: the Jews and Medieval Latin Europe
(Cambridge, Mass., 1992). The former discusses both papal attitudes to the Jews and
Jewish perceptions of the papacy, but in a limited context, largely in relation to a single
eleventh-century chronicle. in any case, Stow’s book—written in the 1980s—is now rela-
tively out of date—there have been substantial advances in the study of Jewish–Christian
relations since its composition.
The aim of my own book is not simply to complement such previous scholarship, but tore-focus the existing awareness of historians through attending to detail on central but often
neglected themes with regard to specifically papal–Jewish relations. Works especially rele-
vant to this theme are those by Anna Abulafia: Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-Century
Renaissance (London, new York, 1995), Christians and Jews in Dispute: Disputational Literature
and the Rise of Anti-Judaism in the West (c.1000–1150) (Aldershot, 1998), Religious Violence
between Christians and Jews: Medieval Roots, Modern Perspectives, ed. A. S. Abulafia
(Basingstoke, 2002), and most recently Christian-Jewish Relations 1000–1300: Jews in the
Service of Medieval Christendom (Harlow, 2011). All these books are concerned with dif-
ferent types of contact between Christians and Jews: intellectual, ideological, economic,
political, and religious.