Introduction 23
of their duty to give spiritual leadership.^110 As we shall see in Chapter Two, in the
thirteenth century charges of ritual murder and blood libel, as well as host desecra-
tion and well poisoning, were not only better recorded, but also more numerous.
In response to pleas from Jewish communities, popes expressed disbelief and dis-
pleasure at these and other charges, some more convincingly than others. Innocent
III believed reports that the mysterious murder of a scholar in Sens, found dead in
a latrine, could well have been perpetrated by Jews, but there is no indication that
he equated the incident with a ritual murder charge.^111 On another occasion he
seems to have given credence to a tale of host desecration by a Christian woman
supposedly malignly influenced by Jews and to have welcomed the eventual out-
come: the conversion of a Jewish family to Christianity. This followed a purported
miracle in which the family discovered that their Parisian pounds (livres) had
miraculously changed to wafers.^112 Similarly, at the end of the century, Boniface VIII
seems to have accepted a story of host desecration, granting the petition of a certain
Raynerius Flamingi who asked to build a chapel on the site where Parisian Jews
had supposedly stabbed and boiled the host, whereupon the boiling water had
miraculously turned into blood.^113
Innocent IV, however, strongly rejected charges of ritual murder and blood libel.
When he re-issued ‘Sicut Iudaeis’ for the second time in 1247 he added a para-
graph denouncing the blood libel charge and threatening loss of honour and office
or excommunication for anyone who opposed his determination.^114 In a number
of other letters he also evinced disgust at the very idea of a blood libel and evidently
believed that he would fail to fulfil his role as pope if he did not insist on protection
for Jews.^115 Not only was he aware of the papacy’s age-old commitment to this pro-
tection, he was also dismayed that violence by Christians should sully the ideal of
a society which in its treatment of Jews ought to adhere to biblical and patristic
precedent. Indeed, so seriously did he take his responsibilities for the well-being of
Christian society as a whole that, with the canonists’ approval, he declared that
although infidels were not part of Christ’s Church, they were nevertheless part
of Christ’s flock and so subject to the pope, Christ’s vicar.^116 In his great work of
canon law, the Apparatus super quinque libris decretalium, he not only argued that
110 The charge that the Talmud was heretical or an ‘other law’ was first made by Gregory IX in 1239
and repeated one final time by Clement IV in 1267; in general when popes condemned the Talmud it
was for blasphemy. See Stow, Alienated Minority, pp.258–9.
111 Innocent III, ‘Etsi non displiceat’ (16 January 1205), Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.104–8; Simonsohn,
pp.82–4.
112 Innocent III, ‘Operante illo qui’ (10/8 June 1213), Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.136–8; Simonsohn, pp.98–9.
113 Boniface VIII, ‘Petitio dilecti filii’ (17 July 1295), Grayzel, Vol. 2, pp.196–9; Simonsohn,
pp.283–4. See Stow, ‘The Church and the Jews: St Paul to Pius IX’, pp.39–40.
114 For Innocent IV’s first re-issue of the ‘Sicut Iudaeis’, see Innocent IV, ‘Sicut Iudaeis’, Grayzel,
Vol. 1 , pp.260–2; Simonsohn, p.189. For his second re-issue and the additional paragraph denouncing
the blood libel charge see ‘Sicut Iudaeis’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.274; Simonsohn, pp.192–3.
115 Innocent IV, ‘Divina justitia nequaquam’ (28 May 1247), Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.262–4; Simonsohn,
pp.191–2; ‘Si diligenter attenderet’ (28 May 1247), Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.264–6; Simonsohn, pp.190–1;
‘Lachrymabilem Judeorum Alemannie’ (5 July 1247), Grayzel, Vol. 1, pp.268–70; Simonsohn, pp.194–5;
‘Sicut Iudaeis’, Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.274; Simonsohn, pp.192–3.
116 Innocent IV, Apparatus, Bk 3, Rubrica 34, cap. 8, p.176r; James Muldoon, Popes, Lawyers and
Infidels: the Church and the Non-Christian World 1250– 1550 (Philadelphia, 1979), pp.9–10; pp.30–1;
pp.45–6.