32 Popes and Jews, 1095–1291
political connections and ambitions. Furthermore, the extent of immediate papal
influence on Jewish communities varied immensely. particularly different from the
rest of Europe were the papal states and the city of rome itself where there was a
flourishing Jewish community which enjoyed the most favourable conditions, by
contemporary standards, of anywhere in Europe; as already noted, the papal states
remained the one area of medieval Europe from which Jews were never expelled.21
Furthermore, in the Comtat Venaissin from 1274 onwards the pope wielded direct
temporal as well as spiritual power and authority which sometimes ensured more
direct protection for Jewish communities in that territory.22
Hence it is difficult to use any Jewish sources to generalize about papal behav-
iour, except perhaps when secular rulers, primarily kings and emperors, are directly
compared and contrasted with popes. Nevertheless, informative conclusions about
how a number of Jewish communities in medieval Europe perceived the papacy can
certainly be drawn. in evaluating such perceptions it is occasionally helpful to com-
pare earlier individual works with later fourteenth-century writings. However, the
fact that in 1305 the papacy moved from rome to Avignon and for much of the
later fourteenth century was embroiled in the politics of the great Schism (1378–
- and the Conciliar Movement, meant that Jews in that later age wrote in a
substantially different context to suit rapidly changing needs.23
FoLKtALES AND LEgENDS: AN iNForMAtiVE
ExAMpLE
A variety of medieval Jewish folktales and legends have come down to us.24 often
the product of decades of oral traditions recorded in writing of later centuries
rather than contemporary to the events they describe, they contain scattered refer-
ences both to individual popes and to the papacy as an institution. Using such
sources to search for Jewish ideas about the papacy is therefore a difficult enter-
prise.25 First, the boundaries between history and legend are never sharply distin-
guished—which means that the texts are highly unreliable as sources for historical
evidence about any particular chronological period.26 Secondly, as already noticed,
they may be of limited use for understanding a Jewish society moulded to a great
21 Haverkamp, ‘The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages’, p.7; roth, The History of the Jews in Italy,
p.42. They were finally expelled in 1569 by pius V (1504–1572); see Stow, The ‘1007 Anonymous’ and
Papal Sovereignty, p.20. As we have seen, the expulsion of Jews from the papal states in 1569 was
revoked in 1585 and did not include rome, Ancona, or French papal territories, as was also the case
when it was briefly re-enacted in 1593; see Kenneth Stow, Alienated Minority: the Jews of Medieval
Latin Europe (Cambridge, Mass., London, 1992), p.304. Expulsions of the Jews, for example from
France during the reign of philip Augustus, became routine in Europe after 1291; see Cecil roth, ‘The
popes and the Jews’, Church Quarterly Review 123 (1936/7), 75.
22 william Chester Jordan, ‘The Jews and the transition to papal rule in the Comtat-Venaissin’, in
Ideology and Royal Power in Medieval France: Kingship, Crusades and the Jews, ed. w. Chester Jordan
(Aldershot, 2001), pp.213–32.
23 For this reason fourteenth-century texts are cited only if they serve to reinforce themes and issues
already found in the writings of our period (1095–1291).
24 Haverkamp, ‘The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages’, p.1.
25 See the excellent discussion in rosman, How Jewish is Jewish History?, pp.154–67; p.185.
26 Yerushalmi, Zakhor, p.45.