Introduction 19
The concern with heresy also encouraged fresh preoccupation with the possibility
of Christians converting to Judaism.
More generally, and like his contemporaries, Innocent III was disturbed by
the mere fact of a Jewish presence in Christian society. Hence he ordered Jews to
keep out of sight during Church festivals lest they ridicule the celebrations and
thereby weaken Christian belief.^87 Yet, though no less uneasy than his predecessors—
perhaps more so—he still recognized that Judaism was part of the Christian inher-
itance. The influence of millenarian thought, which led to his conviction that the
end of days was nigh, added weight to his acceptance of the traditional theological
precept that a remnant of the Jews would finally recognize Christ and be saved.^88
In the meantime it was his duty as pope to monitor the activities of Jewish com-
munities closely, thereby ensuring that Jews continue to fulfil their designated
witness role. Thus, despite new trends and pressures, Innocent, like the popes
before him, still stood out among many Christian contemporaries in insisting
repeatedly on the Church’s traditional teaching that the Jews—in this unlike any
other non-Christian group—had a special place to play in the divine plan and
were therefore to be protected.
Innocent’s direction of how Christian society should treat Jews is most apparent
in what he and his contemporaries regarded as the climax and crowning achieve-
ment of his pontificate: the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.^89 Its decrees about
Jews far exceed the range of previous councils, as did many of its canons on other
topics. It also differed greatly from its predecessors in its breadth of subject matter
and in the ways its decrees were publicized. Although neither Lateran I (1123) nor
Lateran II (1139) had issued decrees about Jews or Judaism,^90 anxiety in Jewish
communities about the possibility of legislation from councils at the Lateran which
might affect them negatively was well-founded.^91 under the guidance of Alexander
III, Canon 26 of Lateran III (1179) had confirmed and given a wider audience to
the age-old prohibition on Jews employing Christians as slaves, servants, or nurses,
and had threatened excommunication of Christians who lived among Jewish
communities.^92 It had also emphasized that in the law courts Christian testimony
should be admitted against Jews in the same way that Jews employed their own
witnesses against Christians. And it had enjoined secular authorities, again under
pain of excommunication, not to allow converts from Judaism to be financially
worse off than before their conversion.^93
87 Innocent III, ‘Etsi Judeos quos’ (15 July 1205), Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.114–16; Simonsohn, pp.86–8.
88 Innocent III, ‘De contemptu mundi’, PL 217, cols 701–46. See Alan Cutler, ‘Innocent III and
the Distinctive Clothing of Jews and Muslims’, Studies in Medieval Culture 3 (1970), ed. J. Sommerfeldt,
92–116.
89 Grayzel, ‘Jews and the Ecumenical Councils’, 299.
90 Grayzel, ‘Jews and the Ecumenical Councils’, 292–3.
91 Grayzel, ‘Jews and the Ecumenical Councils’, 296. For example, for a later sixteenth-century
Jewish text which recorded the twelfth- and thirteenth-century ecumenical councils of Lateran III
(1179) and Lateran IV (1215) and described the fear felt by Jews on the eve of these councils, see The
Shebet Yehudah of Shelomo ibn Verga, ed. A. Shohat (Jerusalem, 1947), p.146.
92 Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, Vol. 9, pp.25–6.
93 Tanner, Vol. 1, pp.223–4. See Dahan, Les Intéllectuels chrétiens et les juifs au moyen âge, p.116;
Grayzel, ‘Jews and the Ecumenical Councils’, 294.