viii Preface
predicament of Jews within christian society through analysis of a wide range of
contemporary Hebrew and Latin documents. i break new ground by exploring not
only papal responses to Jews but also the other side of the story: Jewish ideas about
individual popes and the papacy as an institution.
There are good reasons for writing this book now. in recent years medieval
christian–Jewish relations have proved a fruitful area of academic research, and
both undergraduate and postgraduate courses in this field are very popular. at the
University of Reading i currently teach a third-year special subject Deviance and
Discipline: Church and Outcasts in the Central Middle Ages which examines the
medieval church’s attitude towards minorities in western christian society during
the High Middle ages, in particular its treatment of social outcasts such as lepers,
homosexuals, and prostitutes, and the status it afforded to a range of diverse reli-
gious groups including heretics, pagans, Muslims—and also Jews. indeed some of
my most important sources derive from material i regularly teach my students and
i thank them for their insights which have doubtless furthered this study.
Yet when discussing the relationship between the medieval papacy and Judaism
i often find that students understand little of how and why medieval popes made
pronouncements about Jews, and even less about what these Jews thought of indi-
vidual popes and the papacy. i soon came to realize that although much important
work had been done on papal ideas about Jews, the converse—Jewish ideas about
the papacy, itself a highly nuanced and complex research area deserving rigorous
and wide-ranging investigation—remained a surprisingly under-developed topic.
indeed, no recent academic book has focused specifically on both papal attitudes
towards Jews and Jewish attitudes about the papacy during the eleventh, twelfth, and
thirteenth centuries. Thus my aim is not merely to complement previous scholar-
ship, but to develop a substantially distinctive approach through a reappraisal of
the evidence. The study of religious history and of the papacy itself has never been
so popular at both a scholarly and non-specialist level, and both in my own univer-
sity and elsewhere, colleagues have encouraged me to believe that there is an urgent
need for such a study in english.
in analysing the development of papal pronouncements both protecting and
restricting Jews, manifested on the one hand by condemnation of crusader vio-
lence and the blood libel charge, and on the other by restrictions on Jewish rights
and calls for the talmud to be burnt as blasphemous and as heretical even within
Judaism, i develop a number of themes. The first is an examination of a range of
contemporary Hebrew sources in order to explore perceptions of popes and the
institution of the papacy through the eyes of rabbis and other leaders of Jewish
communities. The second is an analysis of individual papal pronouncements in the
light of political ideas and doctrinal beliefs with a view to ascertaining the signifi-
cance of such pronouncements at a time of a growing depiction of Jews in polem-
ical literature as enemies of christian society. This demands particular emphasis on
the language and rhetoric of papal correspondence and the influence of classical
and patristic texts on the formation, development, and direction of papal letters—
which in turn leads to my third theme: an appraisal of the relationship between
papal directives, canon law, and conciliar legislation, all of which increasingly