Jewish Ideas about the Papacy 45
Eugenius iii’s re-issue of the ‘Constitutio pro iudaeis’ at the beginning of his pon-
tificate was in anticipation of renewed pogroms on the eve of the Second Crusade.88
Yet there is no direct mention in the chronicle either of Eugenius iii or of ‘Quantum
praedecessores’—even though this general letter specifically regulated that:
All those who are encumbered with debts and undertake so holy a journey with pure
hearts need not pay usury on past loans; and if they or others on their behalf are
bound by oath or faith to usurious contracts we absolve them from them by apostolic
authority.89Unlike the anonymous chronicler of The Terrible Event of 1007 and Shelomo bar
Shimshon, Ephraim apparently considered this important papal pronouncement
irrelevant to the immediate purposes of his narrative. Yet although he says nothing
specific about papal activity, we can deduce from his text that Louis Vii took Eugenius
iii’s ‘Quantum praedecessores’ very seriously;90 as we have noted, Ephraim specific-
ally blamed the king for cancelling the interest owed to Jews by crusaders.91 indeed,
Louis identified Jews in particular as among the principal moneylenders in his
kingdom, and in 1146 issued a stern edict releasing crusaders from all obligations to
them beyond the repayment of the principal and forbidding them from recovering
interest lost through profits generated by pledges, especially on land.92
JEwiSH poLEMiCAL LitErAtUrE
Even more informative, though in a very different context from the sources we
have examined so far, is an entirely separate literary genre: polemical literature, an
important component of the great flowering of Christian and Jewish writing
during the High Middle Ages. in the twelfth century anti-Jewish polemic began to
emerge in western Europe, questioning and often contesting many traditional
ideas of the role Jews were supposed to play in the narrative history of Christian
1871; Kraus reprint, 1964), pp.12–13; ‘gesta regis Henrici Benedicti Abbatis’, in Rolls Series 49, ed.
w. Stubbs (London, 1867; Kraus reprint, 1965), Vol. 2, pp.83–4; pp.107–8. See, for example, the
discussion in richard Dobson, The Jews of Medieval York and the Massacre of March 1190 (York, 1974),
pp.1–26.
88 Eugenius iii, ‘Sicut iudaeis’, in Simonsohn, p.47. The bull has not survived and is known from
its quotation in later editions of the text. See grayzel, ‘The Church and the Jews in the Thirteenth
Century’, in Grayzel, Vol. 1, p.76. For scepticism about reading too much into papal texts about the
Jews especially with respect to continuity and change, see Kenneth Stow, ‘The pitfalls of writing papal
Documentary History: Simonsohn’s Apostolic See and the Jews’, Jewish Quarterly Review 85/3–4
(1995), 400: ‘Most notably, scholars have calculated the regularity with which the bull “Sicut iudaeis
non” was reissued as a barometer of so-called favourable papal stances’.
89 The Crusades. Idea and Reality, ed. L. riley-Smith, J. S. C. riley-Smith (London, 1981), p.59.
90 Eugenius iii, ‘Quantum praedecessores’ (1 December 1145), in Ottonis et Rahewina Gesta
Friderici I Imperatoris, 3rd edn, ed. B. von Simson (Hanover, Leipzig, 1912), pp.55–7. See also the
re-issue of ‘Quantum praedecessores’ (1 March 1146), in Neues archiv der gesellschaft für ältere Deutsche
geschichtskunde 45, ed. p. rassow (Berlin, 1924), pp.302–5.
91 Ephraim of Bonn, in Sefer gezerot sarfat ve-ashkenaz, ed. Habermann, p.121.
92 robert Stacey, ‘Crusades, Martyrdom and the Jews of Norman England 1096–1190’, in Juden
und Christen zur Zeit der Kreuzzüge, Vorträge und Forschungen 47, Konstanzer Arbeitkreis für mittelalter-
liche Geschichte, ed. A. Haverkamp (Sigmaringen, 1999), p.241; Stow, Alienated Minority, pp.113–14.