36 Popes and Jews, 1095–1291
So Elhanan climbed to the top of a high tower and declared in front of everyone
that he did not believe in Jesus Christ. His cardinals thought he had gone mad and
plotted to kill him:
And when he realised that, he jumped from the tower to the earth and he said ‘god
forbid that those unclean gentiles should kill me because i believe in the god of my
father’. And immediately when his father, rabbi Simeon the great, heard that he
made the Name of god holy, he gave praise and glory to the place and he named it in
the name of his son.38in this second account many of the same themes remain but there is one important
difference: Elhanan is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice and become a martyr
(qiddush ha-Shem—to ‘make the name of god holy’) rather than remain a Christian
and a pope—just as we shall see in Chapter two, according to contemporary Hebrew
chronicles, some Jews during the First and Second Crusades were prepared to seek
martyrdom rather than convert.
popULAr LEgENDS: pApAL ACtiVitY
iN tHE SEFER YOSSIPON
Besides legends, popular histories are another key source for understanding ideas
about the papacy circulating in medieval Jewish communities. one such history,
the Sefer Yossipon or Sefer Yosef ben Gurion, of which approximately seventy manu-
scripts are extant, was probably compiled in Hebrew by a southern italian at the
beginning of the tenth century, before undergoing major interpolation in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries.39 references to it appear in Ashkenazy works from
the mid-twelfth century, although, like the Ma’aseh Book, it could not be printed until
the fifteenth century.40 For medieval Sefardic, Byzantine, and palestinian, as well as
Ashkenazy Jews, who believed much of its content to be the work of the first-century
writer Flavius Josephus, it was the single most important post-biblical chronicle and
therefore a vital piece of Jewish historiography.41 indeed it followed a long historio-
graphical tradition of the reading, copying, reshaping, and re-working not only of
Jewish texts, but also of Christian works which both served as sources for the history
of the Jews and as models for writers in future generations.42
38 Jellinek, Bet ha-midrasch, Vol. 6, p.139.
39 Steven Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium 1204– 1453 (Alabama, 1985), pp.134–7; Saskia Dönitz,
‘Historiography among Byzantine Jews: the Case of Sefer Yossipon’, in Jews in Byzantium. Dialectics of
Minority and Majority Cultures, ed. r. Bonfil, o. irshai, g. g. Stroumsa, r. talgam (Leiden, Boston,
2012), p.951; p.962; p.967.
40 Stow, The ‘1007 Anonymous’ and Papal Sovereignty, p.22; Yerushalmi, Zakhor, p.35; grossman,
‘The Cultural and Social Background of Jewish Martyrdom in germany in 1096’, pp.81–3;
Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, p.15.
41 Yerushalmi, Zakhor. pp.34–5; p.61; Myers, Resisting History, p.13; Dönitz, ‘Historiography
among Byzantine Jews’, p.954.
42 Yassif, The Hebrew Folktale, p.298; p.301; Dönitz, ‘Historiography among Byzantine Jews’,
pp.962–3; p.966.