Jewish Ideas about the Papacy 37
one particular section of the Sefer Yossipon is pertinent to this survey since it
describes the anointing of the Holy roman Emperor by the pope and details a
tradition which it claims had existed since the time of Louis ii (844–875).43 The
emperor must swear in front of the closed gates of Holy peter that: ‘if he will come
with god’s help into rome, he will elevate (my italics) as much as he can the roman
Church and the pope’.44 After this the emperor is duly anointed by the pope who is
described in fulsome terms as the ‘greatest bishop governing all bishoprics’, ‘the
bishop of rome’, and ‘the father of all bishops over all the world in government,
called in rome “pater” (father) which in greek is patron’.45 Here in a popular
Hebrew text from the High Middle Ages is an explicit reference to, and acknow-
ledgement of, a widely-held medieval theory of the correct balance of power
between the papacy and secular powers:46 the papal claim to wield spiritual
authority is not just over the clergy but also over the emperor himself, whose duty
on attaining the imperial crown is to serve the Church and the pope. Not only did
this give a Jewish perspective on papal–imperial relations, and in particular on the
transition from the tenth century—for a good part of which the papacy had been
under the thumb of the german emperors—to the eleventh century when it
underwent radical internal reform, but it acknowledged the papacy’s claims to
both spiritual and temporal power and declared that in relation to the former the
papacy was pre-eminent.
rABBiNiC rESpoNSA: A StriKiNg ExAMpLE
other important sources for understanding the Jewish communities of western
Europe are rabbinic responsa, pronouncements on a range of practical problems
from money-lending to marriage to kosher law.47 responsa are not easy to inter-
pret, not least because of the difficulty of determining whether they are contem-
porary practical responses to local difficulties or artificial constructs produced over
many decades as a result of complex academic discussion between rabbis and com-
munity leaders.48 This is not a medium where one would expect to find much
43 The Josippon, ed. D. Flusser, 2 vols (Jerusalem, 1978–9), Vol. 2, pp.33–4.
44 The Josippon, ed. Flusser, Vol. 2, p.34.
45 The Josippon, ed. Flusser, Vol. 2, p.34.
46 There is a very substantial body of scholarship dealing with the issue of the balance of power
between papacy and empire and Jewish self-government. See, for example, discussion in Bernhard
Blumenkranz, ‘The roman Church and the Jews’, in Essential Papers on Judaism and Christianity in
Conflict, ed. J. Cohen (New York, London, 1991), pp.193–230.
47 For correspondence between Jewish rabbis and authorities during the High Middle Ages, see, for
example, the discussion of the letters of David Maimuni and Solomon petit over petit’s ‘guide for the
perplexed’ in Stow, The ‘1007 Anonymous’ and Papal Sovereignty, p.7. For letters between Jews and
Christians see, for example, the discussion of the correspondence between wecelin, a convert to
Judaism, and Henry, a court cleric of Henry ii of germany, in the ‘De diversitate temporum’ of Alpert
of Metz in Anna Abulafia, ‘An Eleventh–Century Exchange of Letters between a Christian and a Jew’,
Journal of Medieval History 7 (1981), 153–74.
48 For an early but seminal work on the difficulties of interpreting rabbinic responsa see, for
example, irvin Agus, Rabbi Meir of Rothenberg, Vol. 1 (philadelphia, 1947), pp.xi–xxii; irvin Agus,
Urban Civilization in Pre-Crusade Europe. A Study of Organised Town-Life in Northwestern Europe