Popes and Jews, 1095-1291

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Introduction 25


decreed that Jews who had induced Christians to adopt their Jewish rites must be


appropriately punished.^122 Overall, Clement’s letters, more even than those of


Innocent III, display a harsher rhetoric than most of his predecessors.


The papal employment of friars as inquisitors was highly significant.^123 ‘Turbato


corde’ marked another milestone for the papacy because the powers given to such


inquisitors often led to the stated aim of protection being undermined—not least


because the very protection of Jews remained a continuing source of tension


between popes, bishops, emperors, and kings. Nevertheless, ‘Turbato corde’ ushered


in no radical change in papal attitudes towards the Jews.^124 Clement himself,


as  well as his thirteenth-century successors Gregory X (1271–1276), John XXI


(1276–1277), Nicholas III (1277–1280), Martin IV (1281–1285), Honorius IV


(1285–1287), Nicholas IV (1288–1292), and also Boniface VIII continued, like


their predecessors, to re-issue ‘Sicut Iudaeis’. But papal commitment to the idea of


overseeing a truly and wholly Christian society had now become paramount.


Clement’s ruling that the mendicant orders investigate the affairs of Jewish com-


munities was a natural extension of this vision, even though Martin IV’s second


re-issue of ‘Sicut Iudaeis’ (1281) contained an additional clause limiting the


freedom of action of the Inquisition with regard to Jews, preventing inquisitors or


indeed anyone else from employing force against them in their investigations.^125 So


after ‘Turbato corde’ the old idea of protection and the new idea of enquiry theor-


etically operated side by side, but while popes advised temporal powers to protect


Jews, they could not force them to do so: expulsions from Europe, beginning in


France during the reign of Philip II Augustus (1180–1223), became routine after


1291.^126 Even in the papally-governed Comtat Venaissin and Avignon there were


frequent jurisdictional difficulties for Jews.^127 The papal states thus remained one


of the few areas of medieval Europe from which Jews were never expelled; their


expulsion from there was deferred until 1569.^128


122 Clement IV, ‘Turbato corde audivimus’, Grayzel, Vol. 2, pp.102–4; Simonsohn, pp.236–7. See
Harvey Hames, The Art of Conversion, Christianity and Kabbalah in the Thirteenth Century (Leiden,
2000), pp.2–9; Maurice Kriegel, ‘Prémarranisme et Inquisition dans la Provence des XIIIe et XIVe
siècles’, Provence historique 29 (1977), 314; Joseph Shatzmiller, ‘L’Inquisition et les juifs de Provence
au XIIIe siècle’, Provence historique 23 (1973), 327. Contemporaneous to Clement’s letter were
works by Raymond Martin and Raymond Lull which sought to convert Jews as well as Muslims to
Christianity. See Raymond Martin, Pugio Fidei adversus Mauros et Judaeos, ed. Voisin and Carpzovi,
passim and Pugio Fidei adversus Mauros et Iudeos, ed. Lanckisi, passim; Raymond Lull, El ‘Liber
praedicationis contra Iudaeos’ de Raymond Lull, ed. Vallicrosa, passim. See Chazan, Daggers of Faith,
pp.25–37.
123 Cohen, The Friars and the Jews, passim.
124 Grayzel emphasizes a significant change of attitude with the issue of ‘Turbato corde’ (and its
re-issue by Nicholas IV in 1288 and 1290): ‘But that was the spirit of Sicut. unfortunately for both
sides the spirit of Turbato had replaced it’. See Grayzel, ‘Popes, Jews and Inquisition from “Sicut” to
“Turbato”’, p.188.
125 Martin IV ‘Sicut Iudaeis’, Grayzel, Vol. 2, pp.147–50; Simonsohn, pp.254–5.
126 Roth, ‘The Popes and the Jews’, 75.
127 Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews. History, pp.451–3; p.460.
128 The expulsion was revoked in 1585. In any case, it did not affect Rome, Ancona, or the French
papal territories. This was also the case when it was briefly re-enacted in 1593, see Stow, Alienated
Minority, p.304. For the Jewish community in Rome in the twelfth century, see Marie Therese
Champagne, The Relationship between the Papacy and the Jews in Twelfth-Century Rome: Papal Attitudes

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