2 Popes and Jews, 1095–1291
relations earlier in the eleventh century;^3 others that during the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries we see a gradual decline in the protection that popes were willing to
afford the Jews and that, despite continuing to pay lip service to this as an ideal, by
the second half of the thirteenth century they had adopted a more suspicious and
aggressive stance.^4 Yet others argue that that there was no great change during the
period and when from time to time, in particular in the thirteenth century, popes
advocated more Jewish segregation, they did so on the basis of much earlier papal
pronouncements, canon law, and conciliar legislation.^5
THE CONCEPT OF A ‘PAPAL POLICY’
A significant problem with all three interpretations is that they often depend
on the concept of an overarching ‘papal policy’ towards the Jews.^6 Hence, the
papacy either changed its position dramatically after the First Crusade, or by
the second half of the thirteenth century it had markedly done so, or it did not
change its stance at all throughout the High Middle Ages. In other words his-
torians have employed the phrase empirically—either because they have—quite
understandably—tried to discern unity behind the numerous and various papal
demands and pronouncements, or—perhaps less laudably—for convenience’s sake
in an attempt to simplify discussion of papal–Jewish relations.^7 For example, in
3 See, for example, Solomon Grayzel, ‘The Papal Bull “Sicut Judeis”’, in Studies and Essays in
Honour of Abraham A. Neuman, ed. J. Cohen (Leiden, 1962), p.250; Hans Liebeschütz, ‘Relations
between Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages’, Journal of Jewish Studies 16/1–2 (1965), 37; Israel
Levi, ‘Les Juifs de France du Milieu du IXe siècle aux croisades’, Revue des Études Juives 52 (1906),
161–8; Stow, The ‘1007 Anonymous’ and Papal Sovereignty, pp.17–18; John Gilchrist, ‘The Perception
of the Jews in the Canon Law in the Period of the First Two Crusades’, Jewish History 3, Part 1 (1988),
9; John Watt, ‘The Crusades and the Persecution of the Jews’, in The Medieval World, ed. P. Linehan,
J. Nelson (London, New York, 2001), p.146. See also the discussion in Kenneth Stow, ‘The Church
and the Jews: St Paul to Pius IX’, in Popes, Church and Jews in the Middle Ages: Confrontation and
Response, ed. K. Stow (Aldershot, 2007), pp.4–6. For opposition to this view see, for example, Robert
Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade (Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1987), pp.197–210, and espe-
cially p.199: ‘I would argue that such a view of 1096 as a turning point, first of all is not supported by
the data, and, second, reflects a seriously flawed understanding of the historical process’. For a more
nuanced interpretation of this view of the importance of the First Crusade, see Kenneth Stow,
‘Conversion, Apostasy and Apprehensiveness: Emich of Flonheim and the Fear of Jews in the Twelfth
Century’, Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 76/4 (2001), 929: ‘The old question whether the
crusades were a watershed in Jewish–Christian medieval relations is too all-embracing to receive a
properly rigorous historical answer. But that the crusades were a psychological divide marking the
elimination of trust seems undeniable for both Jews and Christians’ and 930: ‘put otherwise, the reac-
tion of Christians to the events of 1096 added a major spark to the conflagration of animus directed
so strongly against Jews during the twelfth century’.
4 See, for example, Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.12; Grayzel, ‘Popes, Jews and Inquisition from “Sicut” to
“Turbato”’, p.151; Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity
(Berkeley, 1999), p.317; Cohen, The Friars and the Jews, pp.242–64.
5 See, for example, Stow, ‘The Church and the Jews: St Paul to Pius IX’, p.22.
6 No recent historian has questioned the use and wider implications of the phrase ‘papal policy’
when discussing the attitudes of medieval popes towards Jews.
7 There are many examples over a long period of scholarship of the use of this phrase in a more or
less general or nuanced way; see, for example, Cecil Roth, ‘The Popes and the Jews’, Church Quarterly
Review 123 (1936/7), 75–91; Cecil Roth, The History of the Jews in Italy (Philadelphia, 1946), p.104;