Abstract
Papal policy was, most often, Church policy. The popes enunciated the will of God—the ultimate sanction for worldly authority. Mendicant orders, Inquisitors, bishops, and Church councils consistently followed papal initiatives. Medieval popes believed that they had inherited Rome’s imperial right to rule the Churches of the former empire, the lands of the Western Roman Empire, and the Jews who inhabited this territory. Papal Jewish policy was embodied in the popes’ decrees, pronouncements, encyclicals, bulls, letters, and canon law, and also came to penetrate medieval secular law. St. Augustine’s theological construct, the “Witness People”,1 the fading influence of Roman law, and the arbitrary exercise of “Christian mercy and pity”2 served as the three bases of papal Jewish policy.
The Jewish religion is a plague and deadly diseased weed and must be pulled out by its roots.
Pope John XXII
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Notes
St. Augustine, “Reply to Faustus, the Manichaean”, in Disputation and Dialogue, ed. E E. Talmage (New York 1975), 31; and Commentary on Psalms 58 and 59,in J. P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae, Cursus Completus, Series Latina, 36–37:705.
PL 13:363–64, in Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews: History (Toronto 1991), 9n27.
Walter Ullmann, “[St.] Leo I and the Theory of Papal Primacy”, Journal of Theological Studies 11 (1960): 25–51.
Seiferth, Synagogue and Church in the Middle Ages: Two Symbols in Art and Literature (New York 1970), 34–35.
J. N. D. Kelly, The Oxford Dictionary of the Popes (Oxford 1986), 65–69.
Bernhard Blumenkranz, ed., Les auteurs chrétiens latins du moyen age sur les Juifs et le Judaisme (Paris 1963), doc. 128a–b.
Walter Ullman, A History of Political Thought (Baltimore 1970), 105; Guido Kisch, The Jews in Medieval Germany (Chicago 1949), 339; Jaroslav Pelikan, The Growth of Medieval Theology (Chicago 1978), 268.
Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World (New York 1962), 336.
Michael Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, England, 1963), 153, 164–71, 275–76, 474.
A. K. Ziegler, “Pope Gelasius I and His Teaching on the Relation of Church and State”, Catholic Historical Review 27 (1942): 412–37.
Quoted by Richard McBrien, Catholicism (Minneapolis 1981), 2785.
Philippe de Mézières, Le Songe du vieil pèlerin (1389), ed. G. W. Coopland (Cambridge Eng. 1969), 225.
Pope St. Gregory VII, “Epistola II: Ad Alphonsum Regem Castellae”, PL, 148:604–5; in Blumenkranz, Les auteurs chrétiens, doc. 238.
Walter Pakter, De His Qui Foris Sunt: The Teachings of the Medieval Canon and Civil Lawyers Concerning the Jews (PhD Dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1974), 10–11.
Pakter, De His Qui Foris Sunt, 12–14, and William Jordan, “Christian Excommunication of the Jews in the Middle Ages”, Jewish History (Spring 1986): 35.
Raymond of Peñaforte, “Summa de poenitentia et matrimonio”, in Church, State, and Jew in the Middle Ages, ed. Robert Chazan (New York 1980), doc. 4, 40.
Ravyah, 452, in Exclusiveness and Tolerance, ed. Jacob Katz (New York 1975), 39.
Joseph Shatzmiller, “Jews ‘Separated from the Communion of the Faithful in Christ’ in the Middle Ages”, in Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, MA, 1979), 307–14.
Pakter, De His Qui Foris Stint, 16, 336n45.
Zefira Rokeah, “The State, the Church, and the Jews in Medieval England”, in Antisemitism Through the Ages, ed. Shmuel Almog (Oxford 1988), 113, 125 n75.
Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews (Philadelphia 1940), 4:220.
Shatzmiller, “Jews ‘Separated from the Communion of the Faithful in Christ’ in the Middle Ages”, 308–9; John of Joinville, Joinville and Villehardouin: Chronicles of the Crusades (Harmondsworth 1963), 177–78.
Grayzel I, 22–82; Malcolm Hay, Thy Brother’s Blood (New York 1975), 36, 102; Cohen, The Friars and the Jews, 243–44; Norman Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium (New York 1970), 63; Walter Ullmann, Medieval Papalism (London 1949), 77–81, 141; Charles Lea, History of the Inquisition in Spain (New York 1908), 1:82.
Grayzel, “The Papal Bull Sicut Judeis”, in Essential Papers, ed. Jeremy Cohen, 249.
Simonsohn I, docs. 35–38. also Chazan, Church, State, and Jew, doc. 7, 99–100; Simonsohn I, doc. 39; Blumenkranz, “The Roman Church and the Jews”, in Essential Papers, ed. Jeremy Cohen, 199.
Neubauer and Stern, Hebräische Berichte, 64; Jean-Pierre Torrell, “Les juifs dans l’oeuvre de Pierre le Vénérable”, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 30 (1987): 345.
Issued by Popes Lucius III (in 1184–85) and Celestine III (in 1193). Simonsohn I, docs. 60, 61, 65, 66.
Ibid., docs. 372–75. See also Diana Wood, “Infidels and Jews: Clement VI’s Attitude Toward Persecution and Toleration”, in Persecution and Toleration, ed. W. J. Sheils, (Oxford 1984), 121–24.
Mordechai Breuer, “The ‘Black Death’ and Antisemitism”, in Antisemitism Through the Ages, ed. Almog, 141–51; Ziegler, The Black Death, 103, 106–7.
Graetz, History of the Jews, 3:596, 611, 4:101–12, 222–25, 545; Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, 1:178–79.
Cecil Roth, ed., The Ritual Murder Libel and the Jew (London, 1934), 26, 30–31; also, Elphege Vacandard, “Question du meutre rituel”, Etudes de critique et d’histoire religieuse, III (Paris, 1912). Cecil Roth described Ganganelli’s report as “one of the most remarkable, broad-minded, and humane documents in the history of the Catholic Church.” Roth, The Ritual Murder Libel and the Jew, 26.
Malcolm Hay, Thy Brother’s Blood (New York 1975), 129.
William Monter, Ritual, Myth, and Magic in Early Modern Europe (Brighton, England, 1983), 18; R. Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder (New Haven 1988).
Simonsohn I, doc. 42. Similar protection was offered by Frederick I and Frederick II. Pakter, De His Qui Foris Sunt, 290; James Parkes, The Jew in the Medieval Community (New York 1976), 79–80, 85. For a Jewish report on Henry, see Hebermann, Sefer Gezerot, in Church, State, and the Jew, doc. 8, 113–14.
Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews (Ithaca 1982), 85; Simonsohn I, docs. 243–45.
Ibid., doc. 278.
Leon Poliakov, The History of Antisemitism (New York 1973), 2:317–18; Graetz, History of the Jews, 4:657–59.
James Reites, S. J., “St. Ignatius of Loyola and the Jews”, Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits (September 1981): 16.
Harry Cargas, A Christian Response to the Holocaust (Denver 1981), 10.
Paul Grosser and Edwin Halperin, Antisemitism: The Causes and Effects of a Prejudice (Secaucus 1979), 198; Nicholas de Lange, Atlas of the Jewish World (New York 1984), 37; Sam Waaganaar, The Pope’s Jews, 232–34.
Charles Dupaty, Lettres sur l’Italie, in The Pope’s Jews, ed. Waaganaar, 235.
Dagobert Runes, The War Against the Jews (NewYork 1968), 44–45; Waagenaar, The Popes Jews, 253–54.
Peter De Rosa, The Vicars of Christ (New York 1988), 194–95; A. Berliner, Geschichte der Juden in Rom (Frankfurt 1893), 3:205–8, in Poliakov, The History of Antisemitism, 2:325–26.
Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church (Oak Harbor, WA, 1997). For more on Spanish Inquisition and Catholic racism, see the postscript at the end of this book.
Ibid.
In letters of January–October 1482. Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews: docs., 1464–1521 (Toronto 1990), docs. 1017–21.
De Iudaeis et Aliis Infidelibus [Concerning Jews and Other Infidels], published in Venice in 1558.
Kenneth Stow, Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy, 1555–1593 (New York 1977), 64–65, 125–48.
Gerard Sloyan, Why Jesus Died (Minneapolis, 1995), 2; see also Sloyan, The Crucifixion of Jesus (Minneapolis 1995), 2, 5.
Jeffrey Russell, Dissent and Reform in the Early Middle Ages (Berkley 1965), 52.
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© 2008 Robert Michael
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Michael, R. (2008). Papal Policy. In: A History of Catholic Antisemitism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230611177_7
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