Levi's Vindication: The 1007 Anonymous "as It Really Is" [1 ed.] 0822945185, 9780822945185

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Levi’s Vindication: The 1007 Anonymous “as It Really Is”

Levi’s Vindication: The 1007 Anonymous “as It Really Is” Kenneth Stow

HEBREW UNION COLLEGE PRESS UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

HEBREW UNION COLLEGE PRESS UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS © 2017 Hebrew Union College Press Set in ITC Legacy Serif by Raphaël Freeman, Renana Typesetting Printed in the United States of America Awaiting c–i-p data MS Parma 2295 cc. 127v–129v is reproduced courtesy of the Biblioteca Palatina, Parma and the Ministero dei beni e delle attivatà culturali e del tourismo.

For Number 8

Contents Acknowledgmentsix Forewordxi Part One Introductory Essay: The 1007 and Its Story Chapter One: Avoidance

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Chapter Two: Deception

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Part two The “1007 Anonymous” And Papal Sovereignty: Jewish Perceptions of the Papacy and Papal Policy in the High Middle Ages Foreword123 Chapter One: Old and New Views: An Introduction

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Chapter Two: The Growth of Papal Policy

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Chapter Three: Jewish Perceptions of Papal Jewry Policy

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Appendix: MS Parma 2295, cc. 127–129

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Bibliography211 Index233

Acknowledgments I wish to thank Jason Kalman of HUC Press for inviting me to undertake this new introduction and the revision of the 1984 original. It is an opportunity I have long awaited. Some things take a long time to set right. At last, the moment and opportunity have arrived. And I was greatly helped. Jason Kalman made important comments as the worked progressed, as did also David Aaron. Sonja Rethy’s editing was a joy, built on mutual concern. I thank the many others at the HUC and University of Pittsburgh Presses who have labored to turn the manuscript into a printed book. I thank Adam Shear of the University of Pittsburgh for reading the book’s penultimate version. To my wife Estela go the greatest thanks for having put up over many months with my total immersion in the work. I dedicate the book to my eighth grandchild, soon to be born, but also, and (justly), to the memory of Israel Levi, the great scholar whose essay sparked my original endeavors and who, in his entire exemplary life as scholar and communal leader, set a standard that all medievalists, Jewish and non-­Jewish alike, should attempt to adopt as their own.

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Foreword In 1906, the great French medievalist and Chief R abbi of Paris, Israel Levi, wrote that the brief but difficult text, perhaps already known as the “1007 Anonymous” and which describes a massacre of northern French Jews and their eventual rescue at the hands of the pope, did not reflect real events. It could not be true, Levi said; nor did various other works that had been proposed as substantiating the authenticity of the 1007 narrative, but which Levi saw as either fictional or extraneous, persuade him otherwise.1 Levi’s message was not heard. Many subsequent scholars treated the 1007 text as beyond reproach, seeing it as commensurate with early eleventh-­century events. However, Levi was correct. The time the text authentically reflects, which was also the time of its composition, was the thirteenth century, specifically sometime between the years 1220 and 1246, and perhaps even so narrow a span as 1236–1239. To show that the text is late, that it represents the reality of the thirteenth century, but that, most of all, it opens a window onto Jewish political sophistication, has been my goal since I first engaged with the 1007 in 1984 and published the work that, now updated, follows this new, two-­chapter, introductory essay. I begin by giving the reader an idea of the narrative itself, a story, told in a brief seven hundred or so words, of an attack and forced conversion in the year 1007. The attack was provoked by the refusal of the Jews of France to accept baptism and become “one people”

1 Israel Levi, “Les juifs de France du milieu du IXe siècle aux croisades,” Revue des études juives 52 (1906): 162–68.

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with the other residents of the kingdom. The initiator was King Robert the Pious, urged on by his lay counsellors, following an inquisition into the nature of Jewish “knowledge” (probably referring to the Talmud and other rabbinic works). The attackers came from all levels of the populace; some are called simply “enemies.” Refusing to accept the royal ultimatum, many Jews took their lives in what they called “Kiddush haShem,” sanctifying God’s name. Pious women drowned themselves by jumping into a river. The title of principal antagonist shifts from King Robert to Richard Duke of Normandy, whose savagery is halted by a strange incident that persuades him to accede to the request of one Jacob ben Yequtiel of Rouen. Jacob asks Richard for permission to go to Rome to petition the pope about whether the persecution is legitimate. The pope, who remains unnamed, declares the persecution illegal. In the heat of these interchanges, Jacob declares to both the pope and Richard that the authority to allow or prohibit the Jews from observing their Torah lies exclusively in papal hands; the Jews live under direct papal jurisdiction. Then, after reiterating almost verbatim clauses drawn from the twelfth-­century papal letter of protection known by its incipit, its opening words, as Sicut Iudaeis non and winning the assent of his bishops after a fifteen-­day hiatus, the pope dispatches a legate to demand the immediate cessation of all violence. Jacob’s mission completed, he returns home as a hero, to “Lotharingia,” bearing with him a papal blessing to send word to Rome if ever again the Jews are threatened. Shortly afterward, Jacob again departs, this time to settle in Flanders, where, a brief time later, his soul (by implication) flies heavenward in holiness and purity. A straightforward, and authentic tale, it is said, that contains “a simple and simplistic message,” albeit, as it has come down to us, it contains various “anachronisms.”2 The authenticity of the events it describes is attested by the names of the characters mentioned, all of whom are known to have lived in the early eleventh century. It is, furthermore, a tale that reflects the purported turmoil at the

2 Robert Chazan, “Review of K. Stow, The 1007 Anonymous,” Speculum 62 (1987): 728–31.

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time of the year 1000, which can also be validated by comparing it to the texts of contemporary Christian chronicles. This is the scholarly consensus, which the following detailed methodological examination challenges. Apart from the names of the Duke of Normandy and the King of France, none of what the consensus purports is sustainable. There are no grounds for saying that the materials in the 1007 authentically reflect the early eleventh century. Establishing the correct thirteenth-­century dating of the 1007 is more than a question of precision. Properly dating it and explaining its complex workings, which will occupy us in this new, lengthy introduction, will prepare the reader to appreciate the real message of the 1007, whose exposition is the task of the 1984 original (as I shall refer to my first edition of that year). That message, delivered in the form of a fiction, offered a highly refined and sensitive baro­ meter of thirteenth-­century Jewish political life, one that provided contemporaries with a delicate gauge of papal and royal theories at a critical moment in their development and as they had an impact on Jews. Knowledge of both would aid the 1007’s fellows to avoid the many challenges then emanating from both papal and royal courts. For us, it is a gauge of the precision with which medieval Jews perceived their world. The 1007 also provides a measure of medieval Jewry’s insertion into the broader culture of its day. Beyond current political and legal thought, thirteenth-­century Jews had great knowledge of Christian literary themes and products. To show this level of Jewish cultural sophistication and participation is invaluable. Yet this is a subject that commentators on my original work have not engaged, concentrating, instead, on asking whether the 1007 describes real events and whether it was written in the early eleventh century, obscuring, in the process, the 1007’s true value. It is my hope that this time, commentators will be more receptive, starting with accepting a correct reading of the text itself. I ask those who would respond to or challenge my reading to do so not by sidestepping my argumentation, reiterating old refrains about a simplistic message or unspecified anachronisms, or by juggling

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always imperfect secondary sources one against the other – all of which have been done. Rather, I ask that my analysis be engaged on its own terms, explaining, for example, whether, and how, I have possibly misread canon law or medieval political thought, and especially papal theory and its application in real life. Have I blundered in technical matters that are critical to my reading, such as in interpreting the circulation of medieval coinage or in properly identifying motifs borrowed by the 1007 from thirteenth-­century vulgar prose? Have I misunderstood the history of developing royal and papal power or, as well, parliamentary mechanisms? Likewise, is my reading of the chronicles of the Quedlingsberg Annals, Ademar of Chabannes, and Raoul Glaber inaccurate – the ones Levi, in distinction from others, said did nothing to authenticate the 1007 and the events it pictures? Years of reflection and study have convinced me that I have not erred. As the reconstruction of the 1007 story found at the end of the first introductory chapter illustrates, with thirteenth-­century elements removed, most notably the twice-­repeated declaration that the Jews are under direct papal jurisdiction, the narrative is chaotic. Critics have also spoken of my reliance on anachronisms for dating the story, although they themselves never specify what the supposed anachronisms are, nor, more importantly, do they attempt to explain how anachronisms entered an earlier text. Yet, as it turns out, these anachronisms, attributing to eleventh-­century popes powers the papacy claimed only two centuries later, or erroneously naming a coin, turn out to be integral to the narrative’s development and to elucidating the author’s intentions. This is because the 1007 narrative was created out of whole cloth in the thirteenth century. It was composed as a purposeful fiction; it is not a true report to which accretions entered over the centuries. Cast in these terms, it should be clear that one intention of this introductory essay is to open a debate about the correct way to read a medieval Hebrew text – to point to the kind of steps scholars should take when confronting these writings. Until now, a doggish insistence on literalism has dominated: what the texts say is what they mean; at the very least they are built on a grain of truth that

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authenticates their contents. In some cases, this approach is justified, to wit, in studying themes of martyrdom associated with the massacres of 1096 and, in their wake, the mass burnings at Blois in 1171, both of which Jews and Christians report.3 Nonetheless, regardless of any light these materials may shed on the “real” past, judged by today’s historiographical standards they must be perceived as primarily literary in nature. The 1007, to re-­emphasize, is an outright fiction.4 Perforce, this introductory essay has been arranged thematically, even though my concentration on themes and textual dilemmas has meant that certain names or passages sometimes appear briefly, with a fuller treatment postponed till later on. It is on the context that the reader should focus when the chronicler Ademar of Chabannes and others like him are first mentioned. Ademar’s chronicles by themselves, and for themselves, are explored intensively in the introductory essay’s second chapter. The first chapter of the introductory essay, titled “Avoidance,” is intended to discuss what happens when textual details – such as the dates when coins the 1007 mentions circulated, the correct origin of an unusual literary expression, or when a particular technical term or legal idea come into being – are sidestepped. For instance, no solid evidence can be adduced to place the journey of the hero, Jacob ben Yequtiel, to Rome in the early eleventh century. Before the thirteenth century, it would have been risible, according to what is known of papal theory and its development, for Jacob of Normandy to go to Rome and petition the pope – whom Jacob calls “The King of the Nations” – directly. And Jacob would never have said that the Jews are under direct papal jurisdiction.5 No



3 The list of those who have commented on the Crusade chronicles is endless. I mention only the names of leading researchers in recent years: Avraham Grossman, Susan Einbinder, Mary Minty, Yisrael Yuval, Ivan Marcus, Jeremy Cohen, David Malkiel, Shmuel Shepkaru, and Robert Chazan, as well as my own contributions. Readers may easily find their books. 4 On the Blois letters, see Kenneth Stow, Jewish Dogs: An Image and Its Interpreters (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), chapter 4. 5 Walter Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages, 2nd edit. (Lon-

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pope claimed anything like that jurisdiction – excluding Rome where the pope was the city’s lay ruler – until the mid-­thirteenth century. There were previous Jewish approaches to the pope, but, as discussed in the second chapter of the 1984 original, these were made by the Jews of Rome for internal reasons. Moreover, not only would Jacob have had no reason to turn to Rome, neither would Richard Duke of Normandy have sent him, as the text says, regardless of the “wonder” the 1007 reports, which convinced Richard to act. Without the claim of direct papal jurisdiction, made, in fact, twice, the story would fall apart. Jacob’s journey to Rome and its results is the heart of the narrative. Another error which can be made in approacing the 1007 is to ignore simple “historical fact” when interpreting “events.” The argument that already in 1020 the pope had executed Jews, which would open the way to a general persecution at about that time, specifically, in 1007, regardless of whether the attack was lay or ecclesiastic in origin, comes unravelled when it is seen that Ademar of Chabanne’s report of the incident hinges entirely on the pope’s presence in Rome, when, in fact, at the time of the supposed events, he was in Germany. The introductory essay’s second chapter, titled “Deception,” compares the 1007 to three chronicles whose apparent confirmation of the 1007 narrative, as we have said, Levi rejected. A punctilious reading will show that what has happened has been the reverse. These chronicles do not verify the 1007. Rather, the 1007 has been exploited, wrongly, to verify the other chronicles. The matter, once again, is the correct way to approach the medieval chronicle. And a final introductory word. A special challenge was how to structure this book. Should I mix the new material with the old, should I present the corrected 1984 original before the introductory

don: Routledge, 1972), has claimed that hierocratic theory predated the thirteenth century by hundreds of years. Yet even he would acknowledge he was speaking of theory, not fact. To credit the 1007 for both knowing and acting as though theorizing hidden away in the most refined works – theory whose very existence is hotly disputed among scholars – was being applied in fact is not credible.

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essay, or should I place this essay first, then the revised original? I opted for this last. Attempting to combine the two sections made little sense: the object of the introductory chapters is methodological. The reader will learn something about the main points of the 1007, but my stress lies on the ways to arrive at an informed reading of its basic meaning. This includes researching the sidestepped topics just mentioned. The object of the original is to discuss the origins and nature of medieval papal policy toward the Jews and the way the Jews perceived that policy. Though related, mixing methodology and conclusions would have been to mix oil and water. There are exceptions to this rule, most notably, with the coinage offered to the legate, and there I insert cross references. Yet combining some of one thing, some of another would have confused readers. I also decided against putting the reworked original first. Were this truly a new book, this approach may have been justified. However, placing the metholodological discussion first allows readers to approach (or re-­approach) the original afresh. My concern is also that some who had never seen the original might read the study and then pay insufficient attention to the methodological discussion, which I consider of equal value to the original itself. I wanted to ensure both parts be read. Of course, the reader is free to read the parts of the entire study in reverse. I ask only that all readers read both parts. Pesaḥ, 2016 Buenos Aires and Haifa

Part One Introductory Essay: The 1007 and Its Story

Chapter One

Avoidance

Words. Words by themselves. Words in context. The tools of the historian’s trade, the tools also of the student of literature. When read well, they are no less precise than the numbers and symbols employed by the mathematician and scientist. But this simple truth is often disregarded, especially when acknowledging it requires tearing down hallowed structures. The interpretative history of the brief medieval Hebrew text commonly known as “The Terrible Events of the Year 1007” illustrates the point perfectly. More than three decades ago, I argued that the 1007 text was a fiction, that it reflects metaphorically on thirteenth-­century events, and that, in all probability, there never was a “terrible event,” neither in 1007, nor in any nearby year. I will now make my case again, with intense precision.

A Polished Narr at i v e The “1007 Anonymous” is an ingenious, highly polished creation. To say, as has been said, that it conveys “a simple message in simplistic terms” is to avoid, if not ignore, the details, the very words, if not the nature, of the text and its background. Such an assertion makes light not only of the text, but of the ideas or parallel writings it references. It is akin to calling Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Hamlet unadorned tales of multiple homicides. The 1007’s storyline read

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The 1007 and Its Story

literally may please the unsophisticated. Yet, for those alert to wider issues, the work is one of exquisite erudition.6 Whatever other factors have led me to place the text in the thirteenth century, the most determinate of them is its author’s deep awareness of contemporary papal and royal theory and, in particular, of the papal claim – never voiced directly prior to the writings of Pope Innocent IV at mid-­century – that in certain delicate spheres the pope exercises direct jurisdiction over infidels, including Jews. The roots of this claim date to no earlier than the later twelfth century.7 In the early eleventh, they were not even a remote thought.8 To ignore this claim and its origins with respect to the 1007 – as well as the debate that raged in the thirteenth century between the protagonists of royal versus papal power and authority – is to relinquish the historian’s duty. Neither embellishments, nor later additions, questions of papal and royal sovereignty are fundamental to the 1007 and its structure, indeed, to its genre as well. Complementing disregard for papal theory and its development is an equal disregard for the development of medieval lay rule. Until the thirteenth century, the constellation of kings, nobles, and clergy as the 1007 depicts it did not exist. Eleventh-­century rulers like Robert the Pious or Richard of Normandy, as we might expect from observing the actions of Richard’s descendant William, who brought Jews into England for the first time in 1066, protected their Jewish residents. The charters they issued invariably encouraged







6 Regrettably, also impeding a proper appreciation of the 1007, too few students of Jewish history have a solid grounding in papal theory and canon law, much less the history of the papacy, and for that matter of the medieval kingdom and political theory. Papal bulls, too, are usually misread, with their theoretical, often programmatic proemia, opening clauses, taken for the actio ones that indicate the action demanded. See Kenneth Stow, “Review Essay: Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews, vols. 1–8,” Jewish Quarterly Review 85 (1995): 397–412. 7 See W. Pakter, De His Qui Foris Sunt: The Teachings of the Medieval Canon and Civil Lawyers Concerning the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), chap. 1; and see n. 413 below. 8 See again Ullmann, Growth, but recall that his discussion is of rarified theory alone, whose existence is doubted by many.

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Jewish commercial activity, not forcible conversion. They had no reason to perpetrate massacres.9 One cannot replace inquiry into these issues by obiter dicta that my reading is “based on anachronistic thirteenth-­century terms,” presumably those embodying papal theory, which are called insufficient to redate the text.10 This, and similar assertions, lack consistency. The early eleventh-­century chronicler Raoul Glaber is said to tell stories, but subsequent discussion of his writings ignores the admission. The nature of eleventh-­, twelfth-­, or thirteenth-­century historical writing, in which, by recent critical consensus, literary, if not imaginative elements dominate, is passed over in silence.11

9 See Kenneth Stow, Alienated Minority, The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 64–66, 97–102. 10 Shmuel Shepkaru, Jewish Martyrs in the Pagan and Christian Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 145, has said this more strongly than anyone. His position seems to be that the text, as it has reached us, is late, with the presence of anachronisms. Caution, even for one holding the position that an attack truly occurred, would be to stop at just that, and to say very little more, assuming that the additions over time obscured too much. Nonetheless, writers like Shepkaru have insisted on pursuing the details as they see them, with the result, in my opinion, of becoming ensnared in a spider’s web, where every conclusion looks forced, relying on the comparison of documentation that is either vague, requires casuistic interpretation, or is just not historical (read, accurate) in our contemporary terms. When reading a medieval chronicle, the researcher must ask what is its nature, what are the lines that guide its author. Trying to deal with these chronicles, as I will explain at some length in the second chapter, as bearers of accurate information – if only one can tease it out – is a recipe for disaster, which then has to be papered over by claiming there are “touch-­ups” and anachronisms or by creating impossible interpretations of reality, here, specifically, of tangible papal and royal power in the early eleventh century, a claim no practicing medievalist would support. As I see it, the 1007 in its entirety is intentional fiction. It contains no anachronisms – except one that it itself intentionally created, a matter of coinage to which I shall return. 11 See Gabrielle Spiegel, Romancing the Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Karl F. Morison, History as Visual Art in the Twelfth-­Century Renaissance (Prince­ ton: Princeton University Press, 1990); J. C. Schmitt, The Conversion of Herman the Jew: Autobiography, History, and Fiction in the Twelfth Century, trans. Alex Novikoff (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); and Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). In addition,

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And the first reports ever of Jewish self-­sacrifice in the chronicles of Raoul Glaber and his contemporary, Ademar of Chabannes, both regularly adduced to support the authenticity of the 1007’s story, go unexplored, except for a brief mention of the still-­unfathomed Hebrew text about suicides from southern Italy published nearly a century ago by Jacob Mann.12 Acknowledgement that the mention of suicide in Ademar has been seriously questioned does not prevent treating Ademar and Glaber as Gospel truth. This kind of textual literalism fails to engage the 1007’s structure and contents. To set the record straight, it is necessary to raise methodological awareness. Medieval Hebrew writings must be read using the same literary tools employed by scholars of medieval Latin and vulgar literature. Likewise, the high degree at which Jews imbibed medieval culture and exploited it for their own writings must be appreciated. Every textual word must be pursued, which often means stepping outside the confined box of Jewish history to study subjects like medieval coinage, papal theory, and history. Historians must free themselves, as historians, from the passion to treat all mentions of an attack on Jews as real, permitting themselves to say that some alleged attacks did not occur. The sometimes slavish reverence toward ideas like the so-­called Augustinian theory that Jews were allowed to live among Christians simply because the former and their texts served as witness to Christian truth, must come to an end. If such a theory existed, it did so only from the thirteenth century, when, in one of his letters, Innocent III became the first to repeat Augustine’s citation of Psalm 59:12, which says

and recently, Valerie L. Garver and Owen M. Phelan, eds., Rome and Religion in the Medieval World: Studies in Honor of Thomas F. X. Noble. Church, Faith, and Culture in the Medieval West (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014). 12 The letter of Severus of Minorca in the fifth century sheds some light on a possible antecedent; on which, see Scott Bradbury, ed., Severus of Minorca: Letter on the Conversion of the Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1996); Jacob Mann, Texts and Studies in Jewish History and Literature (New York: KTAV, 1972), 1: 422–23. Reprint of 1931–1935.

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“do not slay them, lest my people forget.”13 Augustine himself knew nothing of the theory’s existence. To question long-­held assumptions is the same prescription for interpretation I proposed in the original 1984 edition. I traveled, at that time, new and, for the most part, unknown paths. Previously, and with the exception of Israel Levi, in 1906, those who addressed the 1007 did so by trying to prove that the narrative describes “what actually happened”; and they bolstered their arguments by citing early eleventh-­century Latin materials. The mention of supposedly parallel events apparently erased any distinction between the events themselves, however real, and the way the 1007 reports them, or, for that matter, between the time of the events and the date of the reportage. Even critics like Robert Chazan and Norman Golb have said that the writing down of the 1007 was not contemporary to the events (the de Rossi ms. that contains it is from centuries later); Chazan says the end of the eleventh century, Golb, sometime in the twelfth. That means there are at least four generations, eight or nine decades, separating the events (as portrayed) and the text itself.14 Historians today debate near-­contemporary events and disagree about what took place and why only forty or fifty years ago. Why should anyone expect a precise reckoning from a chronological gap at least twice that long, especially when the text is a medieval one, in which, as a matter of course, authors introduced their own perceptions into the narrative?

Possible Compromise Some commentators, sensing perhaps that where there was smoke,

13 See below on Ademar of Chabannes and Raoul Glaber, neither of whom seem to have heard of any such theory, sure testimony to this theory’s inexistence. 14 Golb, Les juifs de Rouen au moyen âge: Portrait d’une culture oubliée (Rouen: Publications de l’Université de Rouen, 1985), I note in fairness, was not responding to my arguments. He voiced his opinions in a study that appeared at the same time as mine. Norman Golb, “The Jews of Rouen,” Michigan Medieval Reviews (summer, 1999), (electronic).

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there might also be some fire, have sought a middle ground, negotiating between authorial intentions and actual events. Avraham Grossman proposes that we may be dealing with a text with two layers, one which was revised after 1096 and reflects later realities, yet overlaying a kernel of original truth.15 Similarly, David Malkiel, who engages with the 1007 principally to argue it does not adumbrate the Crusades of 1096, agrees that there is more in the 1007 than first meets the eye, including an important message about the papacy. The events, though, he regards as real, albeit he raises doubts whether the texts of Glaber and Ademar are corroborative. Perspicaciously, he sees the reference in the 1007 text to a “golden thread” as mysterious and mythical; we shall soon learn that this term was intentionally borrowed from an early thirteenth-­century romance.16 Mark Cohen, too, calls the events real, but, in a note, suggests that the text as we have it is a much later composition that reflects a Jewish mode of preserving memory. It exploits the past to interpret the present, even if the past had to be modified (literarily) to make the point. This, he goes on, would call for a modification of Yosef Yerushalmi’s view that Jewish chroniclers spoke only of the distant past or the immediate present.17 An attractive compromise. The message of the 1007 is central, so why quibble about the events the 1007 records, which, of themselves, are secondary or which can be treated that way within the bounds of other interests? The answer is that the events are not secondary, certainly not 15 Avraham Grossman, Hakhame Tzarfat haRishonim (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 1995, 1997), 19, n.30, implies the text indeed may be a thirteenth-­ century composition with thirteenth-­century ideas. See also Grossman, “Shorshav shel Kiddush haShem beAshkenaz haKeduma,” in Sanctity of Life and Martyrdom: Studies in Memory of Amir Yekutiel, ed. I. Gafni and A. Ravitzky (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 1994), 112. 16 David Malkiel, Reconstructing Ashkenaz: The Human Face of Franco-­German Jewry, 1000–1250 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 62–70, wants to see 1007 as not adumbrating the Crusades, a claim or a subject I never made or raised. Malkiel also never touches the question of papal theory. 17 Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 261, n. 100.

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methodologically. Besides, a comparison of the 1007 with contemporary eleventh-­century historical writing and materials, both Jewish and Christian, does nothing to persuade us that the incidents reported by the 1007 were real. Indeed, such a comparison provides grounds for saying there were no attacks on the Jews on or about that year at all, and certainly not those the 1007 describes. In the event, if we see the 1007 as a bearer of memory, why does that memory have to be one of real things? Paul Connorton has shown that there are different kinds of memory, among which are learned and social memory, but he also points out that there is a memory of perceptions that is divorced from anything that really happened and reflects, instead, what people think, or believe, took place. The perception enshrined in the 1007 is that attacks which began in the distant past were perpetrated by the same lay leaders who, in the thirteenth century, were the Jews’ most determined opponents. Whatever the rigors of an increasingly harsh canon law, without the cooperation, if not the initiative, of the St. Louises of France, the Edwards of England, and the Jameses of Aragon, all of whom complied with or went well beyond canonical demands, thirteenth-­century Jews would not have felt existentially threatened. And this they surely did, as witnessed, for example, by Meir ben Shimon in his Milḥemet Mitzvah, who begs an archbishop to follow the lead of the pope, not the king, in regulating lending at interest. No “kernel of truth,” therefore, is needed to explain the 1007. It makes sense as a bearer of imagined memory and as a metaphor for expressing what later writers hesitated to say outright; and imagined memory, as some readers likely already know, is a prime attribute of medieval chronicles, Christian as well as Jewish. Thus Yerushalmi’s oversight, who, in his examination of medieval Jewish historical writing, neglected to ask whether the authors of the chronicles he studied had a different sense of the past from ours and of its mode of written expression: Did they have interest in the past for its own sake? Did they have any sense of the past at all, and were they able to discern that past and present were not the same? For the medieval historian was the past anything more than the present cloaked in past tense?

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The 1007 and Its Story

It is these questions that Gabrielle Spiegel – who has been joined in studies of medieval historical writing by scholars like Karl Morrison, J. C. Schmitt, and Brian Stock – has, in her Romancing the Past, taught us to ask.18 As Schmitt, in particular, has shown through a line-­by-­line analysis of the “life” of Hermann of Cologne, the so-­ called autobiography is composed of one Premonstratensian motif after another; the real Hermann is unknowable. Yet for the authors of Hermann’s life (there was more than one) these motifs were as real as real life itself. Similarly, Heather Blurton has traced a series of liturgical patterns in The Life and Miracles of William of Norwich, revealing William as Christ, martyr, and priest, together forming a unified Church.19 And Brian Stock, who has studied Raoul Glaber and Ademar, sees their writings as so dominated by motifs of reform and soteriology laced with imagination and excess that any attempt to view what they say uncritically is stymied before it begins. Nor is there any reason to assume that Jewish writers, who demonstrably knew the works of contemporaries, whether chronicles, Chansons de geste, or even Romance, used criteria that were any different from those employed by Christian contemporaries. They copied from Christians as well, as did Shlomo bar Shimshon when he wrote of Crusaders venerating a goose. The 1007, I will show, knew and copied a critical phrase from Glaber.20

False R educt ion A further methodological misstep is reduction, most notably in shrinking the many thirteenth-­century elements discussed in the

18 See Spiegel, Romancing; Morison, History as Visual Art; J. C. Schmitt, The Conversion of Herman the Jew; and Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy, cited above, n. 11. 19 Heather Blurton, “The Language of the Liturgy in the Life and Miracles of William of Norwich.” Speculum 90 (2015): 1053–75. 20 I am not speaking of the criterion Robert Chazan calls “patterning,” when he argues that what was linked to biblical citation was unreliable, as opposed to that which was not and represented reality. Such a criterion would perplex Stock, Blurton, and Schmitt; see Robert Chazan, “The Facticity of Medieval Narrative: A Case Study of the Hebrew First Crusade Narratives,” AJS Review 16 (1991): 31–56.

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1984 original to the two words “anachronism” and “touch ups,”21 accompanied by implicitly dismissing the 1007’s use of terminology and ideas reminiscent of the mid-­twelfth-­century (or later) Crusade chronicles. These are the very terms – for instance, hasidei ‘elyon, which is also present in the Orleans manuscript of events at Blois in 117122 – that Avraham Grossman, following Yitzhaq Baer,23 identify in the 1007 and say typify the Crusade texts almost as a refrain. What, too, of lo’ ‘amad ‘al nefesh, a complex expression that stands out in both the 1007 and Shlomo bar Shimshon?24 And does not Jacob ben Yequtiel’s soul at least by inference fly heavenward, as does that of R. Amnon of Mainz, or Ahimaaz’s Theophilo? Is this not some kind of the heavenly reward said by Shmuel Shepkaru to 21 Shepkaru, Martyrs, 145, n. 41. “Stow based his arguments on anachronistic thirteenth-­century terms. In my opinion, there are ample reasons to place the (1007) account in the early eleventh century. This is true especially in regard to the first section of the account, the stories of persecutions and voluntary death. The second section, about the activities of R. Jacob Ben Yequtiel may have been touched up later. If indeed the account were written in the thirteenth century, we would have seen the language and notions of the First Crusade Hebrew chronicle . . . ​ For instance, the notion of heavenly rewards, which dominates these chronicles, is completely absent.” Shepkaru does not specify what the anachronisms and touch-­ups are. 22 A date, 1171, that far postdates 1007. 23 Grossman, “Shorshav,” 112, who knows this material through and through, says the 1007 contains Crusade-­like references. Nor is it easy to grasp Shepkaru’s dogged commitment to the single issue of heavenly reward as the sole gold standard for deciding whether a document was composed pre-­or post-­1096. In a lengthy private note of November 18, 2002, Mary Minty questioned the basis of Shepkaru’s thesis that the idea of heavenly reward entered Jewish thought in 1096 as a result of Jewish-­Christian contact or acculturation. She finds the idea in late ancient texts. Even more, then, should Shepkaru’s single-­mindedness about the chronicles be questioned. 24 See the further discussion of lo’ ‘amad, in discussing Romans 8:32. Yitzhaq Baer, “Hamegamah hadatit hahevratit shel ‘Sefer Hasidim,’” Studies in the History of the Jewish People (Jerusalem: Mercaz Shazar, 1985) 2: 180; and the text in A. M. Haberman, Sefer Gezerot Tzarfat ve’Ashkenaz (Jerusalem: Ofir, 1971), 32. Shepkaru questions whether the interpretation is that parents and children killed each other, or prevented the deaths. This is defensible, but in context it does not ring properly. The 1007 is talking about deaths, not about being spared.

12

The 1007 and Its Story

be essential in Crusade accounts, albeit Jacob himself is no martyr, nor is he intended to be one?25 Yet if the 1007 does precede the Crusades and their chronicles, does not what amounts to the first Hebrew description of self-­ inflicted martyrdom deserve a full discussion? Paralleling it to a statement by Ademar on suicides that I will address in the next introductory section is risky; that statement’s authenticity as integral to Ademar’s text has been questioned multiple times. In any case, the 1007 should not be judged by the same criteria as a Crusade chronicle. The martyrdoms the 1007 narrates set the stage and are limited to the opening paragraphs, while the remainder of the text goes elsewhere, and the hero, Jacob ben Yequtiel, as just said, is no martyr. Indeed, if, as Chazan claims, the purpose of the 1007 is to glorify Jacob – a claim that has its merits, as long as the text is not reduced to that alone – then what the 1007 offers in its closing paragraphs is a typical story of origins. It is comparable to the life told of Abu Aaron in the Megillat Ahimaaz or of Rabbi Hanokh in Ibn Daud’s Sefer HaKabbalah, whose central feature is the eventual disappearance of the hero. In Hanokh’s case, he fails to have a son, which frees the community this hero headed, or founded, to pursue its independent way.

Lit er ary Accultur at ion To address the 1007 as primarily a source of information about events is to ignore its literary genre. Its political message about the proper relationship between Jews and the authorities, lay and religious, is conveyed through a story that uses contemporary literary tools and is itself a cross between the Chansons de geste and a Romance – the principal medieval literary forms. Susan Einbinder has argued that other texts, in particular the Orleans manuscript 25 The 1007 says vatetze nafsho betaharah, which signifies some kind of ascent. The single martyred individual in the 1007 is one Shneor/Senior, whose precise role in the drama I shall discuss below. Below, too, we shall look at the name Yequtiel itself, which, like so much else, has been taken for granted by researchers. On the Flanders settlement, see again below.

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describing the massacre at Blois in 1171, fit this format perfectly. The 1007 as a Romance would not be unique; I note, too, that some of its vocabulary rings of texts like that of Blois, for instance, referring to the French King’s ’ohavav or makarav, the first of which Einbinder has shown to be “feudal dependent,” not “lover,” as thought in the past. The second, makarav, often read as “friends,” means business partners, as a close reading of the Crusade chronicles reveals.26 This shared vocabulary and genre suggests a shared time of composition. To read the 1007 within a literary framework is highly informative about Jewish medieval acculturation, cultural borrowing, and the conversion of external elements into something intrinsically Jewish.27 Jews took what they learned and inverted it, throwing Christian claims back into the Christian face. A good example is when Jacob ben Yequtiel does not bow down to the pope, perhaps, it has been suggested, because the pope was wearing a cross.28 But another explanation is more cogent.

Exeget ical Acumen About proskynesis, bowing down to rulers, the comments of Giacomo Grisoffi, an early modern Italian convert interrogated by the

26 Lay rather than secular, for there is no such thing as secular in the Middle Ages. Stow, Jewish Dogs, 102–4, and Susan L. Einbinder, who reopened the issues in “Pucellina of Blois: Romantic Myths and Narrative Conventions,” Jewish History 12, no. 1 (1998): 29–46, esp. 30, and expands the discussion in Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 45–69. 27 See recently, Elisheva Baumgarten, “Shared Stories and Religious Rhetoric: R. Judah the Pious, Peter the Chanter and a Drought,” Medieval Encounters 18 (2012): 36–54, who argues that both worked from a common story, a point that is apt in reading medieval chronicles of all kinds. 28 It is not clear how the late Elliott Horowitz arrived at this suggestion (see Reckless Rites [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006]). Perhaps his acute associative skills prompted him to relate Jacob’s refusal to the inverse, found in the contract of the hazzan-­become-­Metropolitan-­Opera-­tenor, Richard Tucker, which freed Tucker from wearing a cross should he sing the role of a Catholic priest. http://​ bit.ly/2mQkxeU

14

The 1007 and Its Story

Papal Inquisition in Modena, are revealing (the distorted Hebrew transliteration is in the original transcript): I know that when the [Jews] talk about someone going to church, they say generally the people are going to tuma’ava, which means a disgrace. They call the holy water unclean water, or, in Hebrew, mayim tamei. They call the body of our Jesus Christ guf tame – which means an impure body. When they hear us singing the Ave Maria and the Christians kneel on the ground approaching one and the other, they say the words of that verse of David, Ipsi obligati sunt, et ceciderunt: nos autem surreximus et erecti sumus [Psalm 20 verse 9 – They have been bound, and they have fallen. But we have risen up, and we have been set upright], which, as the Jews understand it, means that those who kneel (the Christians) are small, unlike those others (the Jews) who stand on foot and are being raised in the grace of God. Their words are these: ema caru, venafalu, vehanacnu camnu, vanit odad.29 Grisoffi, of course, is referring to the practice of Jews to stand at significant moments during the service, while Christians kneel, and, if so, his citation of the verse from Psalm 20 reflects a common pairing that Jacob’s refusal to bow down might well bring to mind, certainly to educated medieval Jews who knew the Hebrew Bible backward and forward.30 In real life, they had to know, such an affront would have been as intolerable as it was unthinkable. But in the 1007’s literary context, it could easily remind the educated



29 I thank Kathy Beller for this text and translation. The psalm in the original is ‫ֵה ָּמה‬ ‫ָּכ ְרע ּו וְ נָ ָפל ּו וַ ֲאנַ ְחנ ּו ַּק ְמנ ּו וַ ִ ּנ ְתעוֹ ָדד‬ 30 Admittedly, one cannot verify this pairing, much less that the 1007 itself was thinking of it, including Rashi’s interpretation. Yet the only reasonable way to explain Grisoffi is that he was citing something commonly thought or said. He may even have known the Rashi, but under interrogation by the Inquisition he sagely chose not to mention it. Hence, if Grisoffi could make this pairing, very likely others before him did as well, including the 1007. In context, this interpretation makes perfect sense, as well as with respect to the continuity of the 1007 story, increasing the likelihood my interpretation is correct. Besides, without it, we are left with an interpretative blank.

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not only of Psalm 20:9 itself, but of Rashi’s interpretation, which converts despair into hope. For Rashi says: hem yikhr’u: veyipolu venitgaber ‘aleihem, “they will fall, but we shall triumph,” a triumph assured in the psalm’s following verse (20:10): adonai hoshi‘a, hamelekh ya‘anenu bayom koreinu, “God has saved, the King will answer us on the day we call out,” a theme of the Simḥat Torah haqafot and more regularly, the weekly havdalah that concludes the Sabbath. The pairing of the prostrate Christian and the upright Jew, implying the defeat of adversity, was critical. Immediately after Jacob refrains from bowing down, he calls the pope the Vicar of God and admits the power, if not the right, of the pope to decide the Jewish fate. It was a bitter surrender. Without it, however, there was no way to assure Jewish rights. It had to be made palatable, and that, Jacob’s defiantly not bowing down, ve-­nit‘oded, neatly accomplished. The papal yoke, the 1007 was implying, fortifying his literary sanguinity with political acumen, is momentary; in the end, we, the Jews, shall triumph.31 In the present, however, the pope, as the 1007 proceeds to tell him, is but one rung below God, zulati hatzur, clearly translating the title Vicarius dei, the Vicar of God, which was invented by Innocent III in the thirteenth century. In a legal opinion written specifically to make this point, the distinguished sixteenth-­century canonist Cardinal Pier Paolo Pariseo cited Innocent III on the subject directly.32 31 On proskynesis see Geoffrey Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 106. This segment must reinforce our view of the text as literary. In real life, it never would have happened. The violation of protocol could only have infuriated the pope, especially the kind of weak pope one finds about the year 1000. 32 Commenting on a text of Innocent III, later to be edited into the canon c. quanto, de translatione episcopi (X. 1, 7, 3) that Pariseo cites in his Consilia, Venice 1570, vol. 4, no. 2, saying: Et factum ab ipso reputetur factum a deo/ what he, the pope does, is the same as that done by God. Innocent himself, whom Pariseo cites verbatim, had written: Romanus pontifex qui non puri hominis sed veri Dei vicem gerit in terris / the pope, who bears not (the guise) of man, but the representation of God on earth, divina potius auctoritate /and who acts by divine authority. Innocent, of course, became pope in 1198, and if the extremely knowledgeable Pariseo attributes the concept to him (as, for that matter, do all modern commentators), then we, too,

16

The 1007 and Its Story

There is a second message here, too: if the 1007 is exploiting an interpretation of Rashi, its text could not have been composed before Rashi’s day in the late eleventh century, if not the early twelfth. In addition, as the discussion of Jewish protection in the original 1984 edition explains, the first real papal guarantee of Jewish life is the papal letter Dispar nimirum est of 1063, in which Alexander II wrote that Jews are not to be attacked, since semper parati servire sunt, they are always prepared to serve – meaning they accept the rule of the Church and its canons.33 To which, Rashi, seen through the 1007’s very possible allusion, replies: nitgaber, ve’adonai hoshi‘a: “We will overcome and God will redeem.”34 For the moment, the 1007 is implying, “we accept the Christian claim to superiority. Ultimately, it will prove false. For the moment,” as in the message of the Yossipon – had the 1007 read it? – “the watchword is quietism, accepting our lot.”

In v er sion of Images To make the point, the 1007 resorts to literary inversion. In his first audience with the pope, Jacob ben Yequtiel tells the pontiff davar seter yesh li’ eilekhah, “I have a secret to share,” which is a citation of the Judge Ehud (Judges 3:19) speaking to Eglon the King of Moab, who then slays Eglon with a two-­edged sword. In the 1007, Jacob takes the pope aside to an attic, as Eglon was taken, but rather than killing him Jacob spouts flattery, addressing the pope as the Vicar of God whose rule, the 1007 goes on, Jews accept. This sophisticated inversion skillfully alludes to a second. For must accept the attribution. We must accept as well that the 1007’s reference to the pope as zulati hatzur, vicem dei, should by itself end all discussion about its chronological origins. 33 Edited into a canon by Gratian, in his Decretum, it is found as C. 23, q. 8, c. 11; see Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See, 39. 34 Rashi here is meant both literally and figuratively. He may not have been replying directly to Dispar nimirum est, but there is every reason to believe that Jews understood the attempts of the Church and its laws to restrict them as subservience, and when they could, they responded, both in their hearts and by hints on paper: we shall overcome.

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the same text from Judges appears in one of the so-­called “Blois letters” from the late twelfth century, which, as I have shown in the book Jewish Dogs, are filled with literary irony. The French king, on being told the Jews have a secret to share, is petrified, as if he knows the story of Eglon, and he reacts by refusing to enter a private chamber with them.35 He is so afraid that, to avoid a bitter fate, he orders the Jews honored. Readers of these letters needed no explanation to understand the sarcasm embedded in this counter-­ to-­fact scenario that the 1007 exploited to the hilt. The opposite of the French king, his pope readily accepts the invitation to a private interview, reinforcing one of the 1007’s principle themes, that the king is dangerous while the pope is reliable, and sharpening its moral as well. Only the pope can be trusted to observe the limits he sets, but that is only so long as the Jews act astutely – when they know what to say, when to say it, and how. If this level of understanding is folk wisdom, as the 1007 has also been called, these were highly sophisticated folk.36

Jew ish Sophist icat ion Jewish understanding of Christianity and its bases went beyond knowledge of the popes. In 1984 I pointed to the 1007’s use of the term moqesh to indicate not just a snare, but an impedimentum – an impediment preventing the joining together of all Christendom into a societas fidei, the “one people” that the king tells the Jews he 35 See Stow, Jewish Dogs, chapters 3 and 4, which explain that these letters are referred to as such only because they immediately follow the report of the Blois massacre of 1171 in the same de Rossi manuscript, on which, see Benjamin Richler and Malachi Beit-­Arie, Hebrew Manuscripts in the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma (Jerusalem: Jewish National and University Library, 2001), 461. 36 The 1007 was also correct. Even during the harsh times of the early modern ghetto, at least until the end of the eighteenth century, Jews could trust that the popes obeyed their laws, or at least they claimed they did, including in extensive written argumention, to which Jews, aided by Christian lawyers, often responded with highly technical legal appeals; the popes always were a source of physical protection; see Kenneth Stow, Anna and Tranquillo: Catholic Anxiety and Jewish Protest in the Age of Revolutions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 65, 145, and 151.

18

The 1007 and Its Story

desires. With their unique Torah, and shades of the book of Esther, the Jews alone were preventing the realization of the perennial yearning for the unity of all mankind under Christ, what Paul had described as the unus panis, multi sumus, that single loaf of bread, though we are many.37 The ninth-­century Agobard of Lyons used the Latin impedimentum in just this sense.38 The achievement of a world liberated from the Jewish impedimentum was the wish of the early eleventh-­century French chronicler Raoul Glaber, too; and the 1007 knew it. It is more than likely that he had read Glaber’s work, the opening of whose discussion of the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem in 1009 he seems to replicate when he writes: Vayehemu ‘amei ha’aretz, literally, “the people, like dogs, snarled”; the allusion is to the snarling dogs in Psalm 59: 6–7, 14–15. We are reminded even more of Psalm 83:3–5, where those who snarl plot together to destroy God’s people. This verse the 1007 changed slightly to make his text read: “the peoples of the world snarled, roared, or simply rose up together [whose cry resonated with the king, queen, and royal ministers] to destroy and eliminate the Jews, . . . ​the moqesh to achieving ‘am ’eḥad, one people . . . ​which they [the royal council, echoing the people] decided to do with one heart, unanimously.”39 Glaber begins his discussion by saying: 37 The term “one people” is biblical, in the story of Shechem and the rape of Dinah (Gen. 34). Jacob’s sons tell the people of Shechem that if they circumcise themselves, they will be one people, exchanging daughters in marriage. The Jews end by slaughtering the Shechemite males and plundering the women and property. The 1007, we have begun to see, is not above inversions of meaning at every opportunity. Whether there is one here, I leave to the reader to decide. “One people” (through conversion) is, from the Jews’ point of view, another way of saying “to eliminate them.” 38 I first discussed Agobard on the societas fidei in a brief essay, “Agobard of Lyons and the Medieval Concept of the Jew,” Conservative Judaism 29 (1974): 58–65, and repeated what was said in Alienated Minority, 33–36, which was then repeated by Jeremy Cohen in Living Letters of the Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 39 There is also howling or roaring, as the waves in Jeremiah 31:35, which, furthermore, is linked to the divine covenant: “This is what the Lord says, He who appoints the sun to shine by day, who decrees the moon and stars to shine by night, who

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The [word of the attack] spread through the whole world. And by the common consent of all Christians, it was decreed that Jews should be chased out of the lands and cities where they dwelled; and [thus they were and were slaughtered].40 The thought is identical and its mode of expression too close to that of the 1007 to be coincidental. The sole difference, to which we shall return, is that the 1007 is equivocal about whether the decision is by acclaim or that of the king carrying out the will of his people.41 stirs up the sea so that its waves roar, the Lord Almighty is His name.” However, I think the idea of dogs snarling is the preferable one, as Psalm 59: “They return at evening, snarling like dogs, and prowl about the city. See what they spew from their mouths, the words from their lips are sharp as swords, and they think, ‘Who can hear us?’ But You laugh at them, Lord; You scoff at all those nations.” Then the borrowing of Psalm 83:3–6:

ָ ֶ‫ ַעל ַע ְּמ ָך יַ ֲע ִרימ ּו סוֹ ד וְ יִ ְתיָ ֲעצ ּו ַעל ְצפוּנ‬.‫ֹאש‬ ָ ‫שנְ ֶא‬ ָ ‫ִּכי ִה ֵנּה אוֹ יְ ֶב‬ ‫ ִּ ​כי נוֹ ֲעצ ּו‬. . . ‫יך‬ ׁ ‫שא ּו ר‬ ׂ ְ ָ‫יך נ‬ ׂ ַ ‫יך יֶ ֱה ָמיוּן ו ְּמ‬ ָ ֶ‫לֵ ב יַ ְח ָ ּדו ָעל‬ .ּ‫יך ְ ּב ִרית יִ כְ רֹתו‬

40 “Utque divulgatum est per orbem universum comuni omnium Christianorum consensu decretum est ut omnes Judaei ab illorum terris vel civitatibus funditus pellerentur. Sicque universi odio habiti, expulsi de civitatibus, alii gladiis trucidati, alii fluminibus necati, diversisque mortium generibus interempti; nonnulli etiam sese diversa caede interemerunt, ita scilicet ut digna de eis ultione peracta, vix pauci illorum in orbe reperirentur Romano”; J. P. Migne, Patrologia, Cursus Completus, Series Latina, 221 vols. [Paris, 1844–1902], (henceforth, PL 142: 658). . . . (Just a few lines down, after Glaber says that [soon Jews appeared again], he adds: “Tunc quoque decretum est ab episcopis atque interdictum ut nullus christianorum illis in quocumque sociaret negotio” [unless a Jew expressed a desire to convert.]) See below, in the second section of the Introduction, on Richard Landes’s reading of this passage, which is uniquely his own, in “The Massacres of 1010: On the Origins of Popular Anti-­Jewish Violence in Western Europe,” in From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews and Judaism in Medieval Christian Thought, ed. Jeremy Cohen (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996): 79–112. 41 Whether we have a reference here to quod omnes tanget ab omnibus approbetur is not clear, but it would not be out of place, even for Glaber. This is the phrase made famous at the English Parliament of 1295, but was really first used in tenth- a­ nd eleventh-­century Italian cities. Approbetur does not mean “agree,” but as Gaines Post demonstrated, “hear.” “What touches all, must be aired, given a hearing, before all”; Studies in Medieval Legal Thought: Public Law and the State, 1100–1322 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964). I believe it is also what Rabbenu Tam intended by his phrase “da‘at kulam”: not “unanimity,” as is commonly said, but “public airing.” See K. R. Stow, “Holy Body, Holy Society: Conflicting Medieval Structural

20

The 1007 and Its Story

The metaphorical snarling dogs constitute another marvelous inversion. By turning the Jews’ assailants, Glaber’s “peoples,” into dogs, the 1007 has applied to Christians the very epithet the latter so often used to disparage Jews. It is the scorned Christian dogs who pollute and destroy unity, not, as the Christians say, the Jews. And by further implication, if Christians actually guide themselves by the words in Psalm 59:12, which say “do not kill them” – a verse cited by Augustine but which afterward, as we noted earlier, lay dormant until it was invoked by Innocent III, who preceded the 1007’s composition – then the protection they offer is not that of friends, but of keepers. The snarling dogs let us live, but they bind us with harsh restrictions. They protect us, but only so long as they believe we do not offend. The 1007 understood Glaber correctly once again when, for emphasis, he added that the king and his ministers acted “with one heart.”42 However, by mocking implication, much as when Jacob did not bow before the pope, the 1007 assures his audience that the destructive desires of their enemies will be thwarted. For, as the 1007’s readers once more knew, Psalm 59 continues by saying: “You, Lord, scoff at them”; their plans will come to naught.

Special K nowledge The 1007 wrote this with the knowledge that for some, the wish to see the Jews eliminated was rooted in the ecclesiastical past. Giovanni Miccoli has observed that Glaber’s claim that vix pauci illorum in orbe reperirentur Romano, that “soon [after 1009] few Jews were to be found in the Roman [Latin] world,” anticipates the later eleventh-­century Peter Damian, who tells his interlocutor Onestus that it is better to devote himself to his real tasks than to the Jews,



Conceptions,” in Sacred Space, Shrine, City, Land, ed. B. Z. Kedar and R. J. Zvi Werblowsky (New York: NYU Press, 1998). 42 ‫ויהי לב המלך והשרים אחד לכולם והסכימו בעצה זו‬. The Hebrew is a touch opaque. Does kulam (all) refer to just the king and the ministers, or, as I believe, “one with all the others.” The king and the ministers are actually agreeing with the common thought. The text says “the kingdom decreed,” not the king.

Avoidance

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qui iam pene de terra delete sunt, “who have been nearly removed from the earth.”43 Damian, in turn, was echoing St. Jerome, who says: Judaei delete sunt propter abjectam legem Evangelii, “the Jews have been eliminated because they have cast down the law of the Gospels.”44 By alluding to Psalm 59, together with Psalm 83, to say that divine help will prevent the nations from fulfilling their evil scheming, the 1007 was rebutting not only Glaber, but also deeply-­seated Christian tradition, perhaps aware of the Christian exegetical chain. Moreover, that Glaber, whose text precedes that of Damian chronologically, was demonstrably repeating Jerome obliges us to investigate, as we shall, whether Glaber was describing real events or expressing a deeply-seated wish – a motif and method that Brian Stock says typifies Glaber’s writing.45 We may also note that stories of attack and destruction, whether of the multitudes or individuals, circulated easily with no need for authentication. The most famous is that of the Jewish Boy of Bourges, whose father cast him into a

43 ‫ להשמיד להרוג ולאבד כל היהודים אשר‬:‫ ויהמו גויי הארצות ויערימו סוד לאמר‬.‫בימי רוברט מלך צרפת‬ ‫ ישנו עם אחד מפוזר‬:‫ ויועץ המלך והמלכה עם שריו ופחותיו בכל גבולו סביב מלכותו ויאמרו לו‬.‫בארץ‬ ‫בכל המדיגות ואיננו שומע אלינו וחוקיו ותורתו שונים מכל העמים; ועתה לכה ונכחידם ולא יזכר שם‬ ‫ ויהי‬.‫ יומת‬,‫ שמי אשר לא יאות אלינו ולא ישמע לדברנו‬,‫ ונעביר קול בכל ארצך‬.‫ כי הם לנו למוקש‬,‫ישראל‬ .‫לב המלך והשרים אחד לכולם והסכימו בעצה זו‬ Giovanni Miccoli, Due note sulla tradizione manoscritta di Pier Damiani: antilogus contra iudaeos ad Honestum (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1959): see J. P. Migne, Patrologia, Cursus Completus. Series Latina. Paris, 1844–1905), 145, 41A (also 142:658, with Migne’s punctuation). (Henceforth, Migne, PL). 44 Migne, PL 24: 90. 45 It is not that medieval chronicles invent everything they say. But they tell things as they want people to hear them, or as they themselves have had them reported to them, or, even more, as they wish them to be. For example, in the Milagros de Nuestra Señora, we have tales of Jews in Toledo molding wax in the form of Jesus to reenact the crucifixion, as told by Gonzalo de Berceo in about 1260, although Berceo lies literally at the farthest corner of nowhere in Rioja, in central Iberia, hundreds of kilometers away from Toledo. We need not challenge Gonzalo’s sincerity, but we certainly do need to doubt whether what he reports actually occurred. Readers should recall Berceo when examining the stories of wax images in Trier and Limoges (actually Le Mans). Indeed, should we take Gonzalo at his word, then, preposterously, we must accept ritual murder tales as true and precise. Gonzalo de Berceo, Los Milagros de Nuestra Señora, ed. Brian Dutton (London: Tamesis, 1971).

22

The 1007 and Its Story

furnace upon learning that the boy had consumed a Eucharistic wafer. This story, with Eastern origins and which appeared first in Europe in the sixth-­century chronicle of Gregory of Tours, was repeated many times over during subsequent centuries.46 The perspicacity of the 1007 in identifying and riffing on Christian motifs smacks of genius. In this same way the chronicle attributed principally to Shlomo bar Shimshon contains terrifying descriptions of the mutual slaughter of parents, children, and relatives “until their blood ran together.” These slaughters are echoed by the 1007, who, as mentioned earlier, writes that “the father did not stand on the life of his son, nor did the son on that of the father.”47 However, the echo is not only of Shlomo bar Shimshon, but of Romans 8:32, which says: qui etiam Filio suo non pepercit, “the father did not spare his son”; the Latin parco and the Hebrew lo ‘amad resonate one with the other. More, the 1007 has raised the slaughtered Jewish sons to sanctity, taking the place of Christ. This is much as in the Trier Crusade story, recently analyzed by Eva Haverkamp, and on which I commented in my essay on the “Cruel Father,” where the slaughtered Jews are themselves the (as though Eucharistically) sanctified bread of the motzi’.48 What greater denigration of Christianity and its teachings could there be? And given the demonstrated perspicacity of the 1007 in countering

46 On Bourges, Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). The legends of William of Norwich that began to circulate in the later twelfth century had a similar history; see John McCulloh, “Jewish Ritual Murder: William of Norwich, Thomas of Monmouth and the Early Dissemination of the Myth,” Speculum 72 (1997): 698–740. 47 Haberman, Sefer Gezerot, 32, cited for easy access, including online.

.‫ לבלתי חלל את השם הנכבד‬,‫האב לא עמד על ניפש הבן ולא הבן בשביל האב‬ The definitive edition is Eva Haverkamp, Hebräische Berichte über die Judenfolgungen während des Ersten Kreuzzugs (Hannover: Hahn, 2005). 48 Eva Haverkamp, “Martyrs in Rivalry: The 1096 Jewish Martyrs and the Theban Legend,” Jewish History 23 (2009): 319–42. On Jewish children as Christ figures, see Kenneth Stow, “The Cruel Jewish Father: From Miracle to Murder,” in Studies in Medieval Jewish Intellectual and Social History: Festschrift in Honor of Robert Chazan, ed. David Engel, Lawrence Schiffmann, and Elliot R. Wolfson (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

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subtle Christian teachings, I do not doubt for a moment that here, too, as with Glaber, the polemic was real and intentional. It also seems undeniable that the 1007 was exploiting an already composed chronicle of Shlomo bar Shimshon.

A Long Tr adit ion By inverting Christian teachings, whether via Glaber, proskynesis, or the details of Christian teaching, the 1007 has identified himself with a long tradition. One can point to the debates of Wazo of Liege, who bests a Jew, wagering a finger against wine, and Hananel, in the Megillat Ahimaaz, who defeats the bishop of Oria, wagering his Judaism against a horse. Likewise, a Christian Theophilo is condemned for consorting with a Jewish magician, but saved by the Virgin, while Ahimaaz tells the story of Theophilo the martyr.49 There is no way to know whether between these mirror-­tales, as I like to call them, there are direct links and if they are responding to each other directly. Their themes are easily classed as ones that circulated freely. The following pair, however, is so close in particulars that negating the presence of a challenge by one and a direct response by the other is hazardous. The first is the tale of the death of Bishop Eberhard of Trier, reportedly in 1066, which is said to have been caused by Jewish sympathetic magic performed by burning the bishop’s waxen image.50 The second is the story of the apostate Sehoq (can anybody take this name, joke or laughter, seriously?) ben Esther Israeli, reportedly dated to 992, which claims, just as with Eberhard, that to prevent their conversion the Jews 49 Valerie Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), who describes the Christian Theophilo, condemned for consorting with a Jewish magician, but saved by the Virgin (to enter the Cantigas); the Jewish Theophilo, in The Scroll of Ahimaaz, ed. Benjamin Klar (Jerusalem: 1974, reprint of 1944); repents for opting for conversion, teshuvah, and he flies heavenward on the eve of Yom Kippur (an aura of tefillah), after having done the tzedaqah of giving his wealth, via his daughter, to a poor man (thus, teshuvah, tefillah, vetzedaqah which sweeten, not cancel, the gezerah). 50 For Eberhard, see Julius Aronius, Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden in frankischen and deutschen Reiche (Berlin: Simion, 1902), no. 160.

24

The 1007 and Its Story

fashioned a waxen image of someone called sar ha’aretz, the ruler, very possibly a bishop. However, in the end, the Jews appear to have been saved; and according to some researchers, this story may throw light on the 1007, since it has always been thought to take place in Ademar of Chabannes’ city of Limoges. Ademar’s History speaks of conversion, possibly forced, only eighteen years after Sehoq’s intrigues.51 Surely, through the Sehoq story, Ademar is supported and the reality of the 1007’s events verified? Not so. For Tuomas Heikkilä has shown that the Eberhard story as told is a myth.52 Eberhard died naturally, during a mass, on a Saturday before Easter in 1066, but the continuator of the Gesta Treverorum writing in the 1140s, enhanced the record of Eberhard’s death and added the magic, out as he was, says Heikkilä, to justify and romanticize events during the attacks of 1096, when, according to Shlomo bar Shimshon, this very bishop may have offered protection in return for conversion. Whatever this story’s origins, it was written down no earlier than eighty years later, and without a doubt it preceded the composition of the story of Sehoq. It was Christians who initiated tales of this kind. Jews responded.53 Surely no Jew would invent a story accusing his fellows (Judas-­like, do note) of practicing deadly sympathetic magic, when Jews knew that dangerous accusations of magical indulgence went back to the early Middle Ages, to wit, to the just-mentioned Christian Theophilo.54 The story of Sehoq, therefore, though placed in 992, even if real,

51 The ms. ends abruptly in the middle, leaving readers to wonder. See Robert Chazan, “The Persecution of 992,” Revue des études juives 129 (1970): 217–21. 52 Tuomas Heikkilä, “Pogroms of the First Crusade in Medieval Local Historiography: The Death of Archbishop Eberhard of Trier and the Legitimation of the Pogroms,” in Medieval History Writing and Crusading Ideology, ed. Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen and Kurt Villads Hens with Janne Malkki and Katja Ritari (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2005), 155–62. The story of Sehoq is in Haberman, Sefer Gezerot, 13. 53 Malkiel, Reconstructing, 276, n. 57, believes the Hebrew text is borrowing from a Christian one. 54 Bernhard Blumenkranz, Juifs et chrétiens dans le monde occidentale, 439–1096 (Paris: Peeters, 1960), e.g., 103, 112, discusses accusations of magic in various locations.

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was not composed until the mid-­twelfth century, and possibly later. It neither enlightens us about the events Ademar recounts, nor, for that matter, about the chronological origins of the 1007. Besides, as Chazan has correctly argued, and as we shall soon elaborate, the city of Limoges in this tale is really Le Mans, meaning there is no intrinsic link between the story and the events Ademar describes for Limoges.55

Benedict VIII The same applies to Ademar’s story of the execution of Jews in Rome in 1020 by Pope Benedict VIII, allegedly for desecrating a cross and causing an earthquake. Were this story verifiable, it would support calling the 1007 true to life. But this event never happened. It is true, as I wrote nearly three decades ago in Alienated Minority, that the eleventh century marks a change in the weather for Jewish stability. Canon law was jelling to protect Jews, but also to limit their freedoms. Jews, in addition, were becoming more directly subservient to lay rulers, on whose charters, which once were an addition to existing rights, they now were coming to depend as the sole justification for their presence in a specific locale.56 Yet from here to executions the leap is giant. Were Ademar’s account true, it might reflect the mocking of images attributed to one Schneor/Senior in the 1007, about whom it is said vayeharef giluleihem vayegadef pesileihem, “he scorned their images and cursed their statues.” But there are a number of reasons why it is not true, beginning with its potentially precedent-­setting nature.57 Stories of Jews disparaging images, or even desecrating 55 Chazan, “The Persecution of 992,” 217–21. Chazan’s explanation of an atmosphere of “general violence” seems to depend on Salo Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews (henceforth SRH) (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1958), 7:77, where Baron writes: “Western Jewry’s relations with its Christian neighbors had become ever tenser. When Christian missionary undertakings were coupled with the use of force and when popular and governmental persecutions became a recurrent phenomenon, Jewish poets often reacted vehemently.” 56 See Stow, Alienated Minority, 59–64. 57 Horowitz, Reckless Rites, 156, points to the report sent from Sens to Yosef Tov Elem

26

The 1007 and Its Story

them, whose origins may possibly lie in the late ancient world, were circulating by Ademar’s eleventh-­century day.58 Nonetheless, actual charges of desecration became prevalent only from the twelfth century. They were also rare, and nearly all were dismissed.59 One would need precise evidence to verify Ademar’s tale. Ingeniously, Elliott Horowitz tried to provide this evidence by accepting Vogelstein and Rieger’s redating of the story to 1021. He noted that in that year, Passover and Easter coincided, with Good Friday falling on the day hametz was to be burned60 and that a Jew about the Jews of Sens, who were greatly afraid because of an “abomination” that had been “shattered”; Horowitz cites the text brought by Jacob Agus, in Hebrew, Responsa of the Tosaphists (New York: Talpioth, 1954), no. 1. He, and others (Shepkaru, Martyrs, 329), see this as cross desecration, which is overreaching. We must guess at the exact meaning of the responsum, and since to‘evah, the word in question, could also be a church, the destruction might refer to a natural disaster about which Jews were uneasy. There is too little to go on as a basis to suggest gross radicalization. In the event, Agus has a habit of pre-­dating his texts, for instance, the one about to be examined about the pope as “Head of the Bishops,” which the original editor, Mueller, dates decades later than Agus does. Much indeed needs examining, including why in a text, whose real subject is inter-­communal aid, the question of a to‘evah enters. The text, any text, requires careful vetting, before hastening to use it interpretatively. Why, one might also ask, do other Christian chronicles not mention the event? 58 The possibility should not be discounted that this accusation’s origin can be traced to the charges in the Justinianic Code of 527 that each year Jews burned an image of Jesus, Corpus iuris civilis, Code, Bk 1, title 9, law 10: “The Governors of provinces shall prohibit Jews from burning or exhibiting the representation of the Holy Cross, with the sacrilegious intention of bringing it into contempt, on the festival day when they celebrate the punishment of Haman.” 59 See Pamela A. Patton, “Constructing the Inimical Jew in the Cantigas de Santa Maria: Theophilus’s Magician in Text and Image,” in Beyond the Yellow Badge: Anti-­ Judaism and Antisemitism in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture, ed. Mitchell B. Merback (Leiden: Brill, 2008). For example, in Cantiga 34 of the Escorial codex (Escorial T.I.1, fol. 50r), one of the oldest tales in the Marian tradition, a Jew who throws a stolen image of the Virgin and Child into a latrine is seized and killed by demons (fig. 1). However, as Katherine Beller’s soon-­to-­appear studies show, the stories circulated long before actual accusations, a finding supported, Beller reports, by the work of Sara Lipton, who has shown that though Mary is greatly discussed, actual images of her are late. 60 Horowitz’s explanation in “Medieval Jews Facing the Cross,” [Hebrew], in Yehudim

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may have intentionally crossed two utensils before throwing them into the fire. A “Jew from the Greek congregation,” as Ademar puts it, reported the incident to the pope.61 The redating nonetheless depends on whether there was an earthquake in 1021, an event Vogelstein and Rieger seek to verify for that year by adducing a number of medieval chronicles. Yet as is so often the case, these chronicles – each of which refers to the event with the laconic 4 Idus Maii terrae motus factus est, “on May 11, there was a great earthquake” – appear to be copying each other’s texts.62 One of the chronicles also says the event occurred in Bavaria, across the Alps and hundreds of kilometers from Rome. Ademar, too, reports an earthquake, but Vogelstein and Rieger say there was none in Rome in 1020 – nor in 1017, which earlier date, they tell us, is provided by the great, later sixteenth-­century church historian mul hatzlav, ed. Yom Tov Assis ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2000), 128–30, which Horowitz reintroduces in his Reckless Rites , 161–62; Hermann Vogelstein and Paul Rieger, Geschichte der Juden in Rom, 2 vols. (Berlin: Meyer and Müller, 1895), 1:211. 61 As Pertz, the editor of Ademar in the MGH notes, Ademar in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, Georg Heinrich Pertz, ed. (Hannover: Hahn, 1891; reprint, Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1968), 4:139, this last is a variant, which the text of Baronius discards. In addition, see Jules Chavanon, Adémar de Chabannes, Chronique (Paris: Picard, 1897), 175, which is the site of the cross story as Blumenkranz has it in Les auteurs chrétiens latins du moyen âges sur les juifs et le judaïsme (Paris: Peeters, 1963), 252; Chavanon, 206, the story repeats, as does, on 205, the story of letters sent to Jerusalem. The repetition is vaguer. However, the first version is clear that somebody told the pope right away. Chavanon lists the specific reference to a “Greek” synagogue as an addition. 62 Horowitz, Reckless Rites, 160–61, says the redating was made on the basis of “external evidence.” To be precise, the evidence comes from the four, very minor, laconic chronicles just mentioned. Each of the four, listed by Vogelstein-Rieger and found in the Monumenta Germania Historica, Scriptores, III , 144, 146, and V, 5, 120, simply lists random events with no sense of consequentiality or links between them. The contents are uniform, saying, for 1021: “Terrae motus 4 Id. Mai factus est magnus; 4 Idus Maii terrae motus factus est; Terrae motus magnus 4 Idus Mai factus”; and “Ingens terrae motus in Baioaris contigit.” That is, on May 11 (4 from the Ides of May), there was a big earthquake. Only one says where it occurred, not to mention that there are tens of parallel chronicles that say nothing about this event. Baioraria is medieval Latin for Bavaria.

28

The 1007 and Its Story

Caesar Baronius in his monumental, thirty-­seven volume Annales Ecclesiastici. The Annales set the standard for such histories, all of which, however, suffer from the same disease that plagued Baronius’s near-­contemporary historians of saints’ lives, the Bollandists, in Antwerp.63 Namely, they strive to validate the authenticity of their sources, but not the information the sources contain, for instance, the various blood libels the Bollandists purvey as true.64 Vogelstein and Rieger also say that Baronius’s account is almost literally that of Ademar (fast wörtlich mit ihm übereinstimmt), which is mostly, but not precisely, true, since Baronius substitutes a “great wind” for the earthquake and, as said, dates the desecration to 1017. No doubt he saw it as complementary to the story of heresy in Orleans in that year, in which the guilty were burned at the stake for beliefs and behaviors that sounded like Judaizing.65 Baronius also includes Jews among the dead, alongside Christians; nearly the whole city of Rome, he writes; Ademar, who speaks of both the earthquake and a great wind, refers only to (unspecified) grave danger.66 63 64 65 66

This is the same Caesar Baronius Horowitz lists simply as “a later chronicle.” Vogelstein-­Rieger, 1:213, and see Stow, Jewish Dogs, chapter 2, on the Bollandists. See below, in the revised 1984 original, for this heresy. Caesar Baronius, Annales Ecclesiastici (Lucca: Venturin, 1744), 16:508. For the Orleans events, Baronius relies on Raoul Glaber, making his account suspect from the start. As for the cross desecration, Baronius’s version is very much like, but not precisely Ademar’s, and this includes especially not mentioning an earthquake: “His diebus in Parasceve post crucem adoratam usque Sabbatum sanctam circa vesperam consussa est Roma a vi ventorum et pene omnes Romani mortui sunt tam Christiani, quam Judaei. Et quidam Judaeus Christianis intimavit, quod in Parasceve in synagoga Judaeorum imaginem Christi deluserunt, sicut fecerant Domino parentes eorum. Quod Benedictus Papa sollicite inquirens et probans, mox Judaeos, qui hoc egerant, iussit decollari, quibus decollatis, cessaverunt venti” (Italics in original). Haec ibi. In fragmentis etiam Francorum historiae post recensitos Manichaeorum errores atque supplicium, subiiciuntur ista: [He goes on that at about this time in Aquitania there was a prodigy, namely] tribus diebus de coelo pluit sanguis, qui cadens super carnem hominis, aut super lapidem non poterat lavari; si vero super lignum caderet, lababatur. Ademar in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, Georg Heinrich Pertz, ed. (Hannover: Hahn, 1891; reprint, Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1968), 4:139. His diebus in parasceve post crucem adoratam Roma terrae motu et nimio turbine periclitata est. Et

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Also difficult, and regardless of the usefulness of their contents, the chronicles Vogelstein and Rieger cite say the earthquake occurred on May 11, far too late for both Passover and Easter; indeed, in 1021, Passover fell on April 6, while Easter preceded it by four days.67 These chronicles, therefore – and regardless of their accuracy – rather than amplifying, add confusion to Ademar’s story, which times the desecration and earthquake to Easter. Ademar’s story, essentially repeated by Baronius, also emerges as the sole report of the desecration.68 And, as it happens, it was on Ademar’s date, 1020, not 1021, that both Passover and Easter occured on the same day, April 17.69 To be sure, desecration during the ceremony marking the ridding of one’s household of leaven, as Horowitz proposes, is entirely possible. Nor does substantiating it require redating or going beyond Ademar’s account. Except for one unavoidable fact. Adeconfestim quidam Iudaeorum (de schola Grecia) intimavit domno papae, quia ea hora deludebant sinagogae Iudeorum Cruxifixi figuram. Quod Benedictus (VIII ) papa sollicite inquirens et comperiens, mox auctores scleris capitali sententia dampnavit. Quibus decollatis, furor ventorum cessavit. (From here, Ademar goes on immediately to the story of the colaphisation). One wonders whether Baronius’s inclusion of Jews in the 1020 storm is not a conflation of this section of Ademar with Ademar’s description in his History of the Abbey of Limoges of the pestilence following the Holy Sepulcher destruction, where even Ademar admits Jews die. 67 The dates I have are probably Julian, although this point is irrelevant, since one adds the same number of days to arrive at the Gregorian date for both festivals. The weekday would probably change, although Easter must fall on a Sunday. The dates are found by consulting one of many sites on the internet under: “Easter/ Passover, date, 1020, 1021.” 68 Horowitz, Reckless Rites, 162, claimed that I ignore other sources, but, in fact, those other sources, the minor chronicles just discussed, do no more than repeat Ademar. Horowitz’s assertion that Baronius adds the important information that the wind ended on the Saturday is incorrect, as the reader may confirm for him or herself by reading the last lines of both Baronius and Ademar as cited in the immediately preceding note. Horowitz also gives the reference to Baronius as Annales 16:42, when the correct page is 16:508. 69 Earthquakes are reported constantly in medieval chronicles; hence, any such report of itself is meaningless for establishing something further. In the end, we must read Ademar’s text for what it says, not for what one may want to make of it.

30

The 1007 and Its Story

mar’s story hinges on a Jewish delation directly to the pope and an immediate papal response.70 But on Easter of 1020, Pope Benedict was far away from Rome, in Bamberg, Germany, with Emperor Henry II, where both remained for some time.71 He received no first-­hand report from anyone in Rome. As for the “Greek” Jew, he appears only in what most researchers have called “a variant” in Ademar’s manuscript, making him, in all likelihood, into a trope, a Judas who betrays his fellows as in the story of Sehoq – a perfect Ademarian touch.72 But let us go back to Senior, where we began this instructive digression about the perils of trying to juggle medieval texts to emerge with a true account. Of all the segments in the 1007, this is the most puzzling – but also heretofore completely unstudied. After telling of mass deaths, why single out an individual, who will then disappear from the script? The rest of the 1007 is too calibrated to accept this as carelessness. I think it was not. The Hebrew expression leharef ulegadef, “to curse and berate” (their statues), is not the 1007’s invention. It appears a number of times in the midrash Leviticus (Vayiqra) Rabbah. The midrash, whose subject is variations on punishment by fire, reads: “the evil kingdom, because it curses and berates by saying ‘who is there for me in the heavens,’ (Ps. 73) is punished by fire (Daniel 7). . . . Israel, however, who are despised and bowed low in this world are com-

70 Malkiel, Reconstructing, 65–66, treats Ademar’s desecration story properly, as “lacking corroboration . . . [and] plucked from their [its] contextual environment.” 71 On Benedict in Germany, see Paolo Brezzi, Roma e l’Impero medioevale, 774–1252 (Bologna: Licinio Cappelli, 1947), 199–200. Brezzi goes on to say that Benedict wished to pursue reform, but understood that first he had to get the state of the church and its properties physically in order, which led him to court the good will of Emperor Henry II. There was also the renewed Byzantine menace in the Mezzogiorno. Arriving at Bamberg at Eastertide, the pope consecrated the new cathedral there, obtained a charter from Henry II confirming the donations of Charlemagne and Otto the Great, and visited the monastery of Fulda. 72 Landes insists the variant is integral, a point to which we return toward the end of our discussion.

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forted only by fire, as it says (Zechariah 2): ‘And I shall be, said the Lord, a wall of fire around [them].’”73 Not everybody could have been expected to know this midrash, but the sophisticated 1007 was not writing for popular consumption. His sub-­message, which we have already noted, was virtually identical with that of this midrash, to wit: The evil kingdom, the lay forces assaulting us, the forces who curse by denying our God – “who is there in heaven?” they ask – will not triumph. Israel, however lowly and subservient, will be saved. But it will be at the right moment. In the present, anger, berating, and desecration will bring death, as it does (in the midrash) to the evil kingdom, regardless of Israel’s righteousness. Senior may be a martyr, but he was also precipitous; at this time, cursing the gilulim, the statues, of the evil kingdom, to be identified with its rulers, brings death (as it well may have for some in the thirteenth century). Instead, there is a need for diplomacy, for turning to the pope, fully aware of his laws and limits. For in the words of the 1007, he, the pope, the head of the memshelet reshut, the just kingdom, will, in the end, serve as God’s instrument: zulati hatzur, the Vicarius dei. In this light, this seemingly inexplicable episode in so highly programmed a text, one that, till now, has been left unexamined, is plausibly interpreted.

The Date of the 1007 Legends of t he Gr ail We are now ready to brave the thicket of the central question: when exactly was the 1007 composed? The matter needs settling for once and for all. But on what may we rely for an answer? Once again, we must look at the text’s sophistication, which makes it clear that the 1007 was written not one day before the year 1220 and almost

73 ‫ אלא‬,‫ מי לי בשמים אינה נידונית‬:)‫ על ידי שהיא מחרפת ומגדפת ואומרת (תהלים עג‬,‫מלכות הרשעה‬ ‫ אבל ישראל שהם‬,‫ חזה הוית עד די קטילת חיותא והובד גשמה ויהיבת ליקידת אשא‬:)‫באש (דניאל ז‬ .‫ ואני אהיה לה נאם ה׳ חומת אש סביב‬:)‫אלא באש שנאמר (זכריה ב‬, ‫נבזין ושפלים בעוה״ז אינן מתנחמין‬ Midrash Vayiqra Rabbah, 7:6; and see Marcus Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (New York: Jastrow Publishers, 1982), 505.

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certainly not after 1246 and, possibly, no later than 1239.74 Let us begin with the terminus ante quem, 1220, starting from the middle section of the 1007, which could not possibly have been composed – composed, not simply adjusted or garnished – before that date. The key lies in the question medieval Christianity incessantly posed to itself: how best to protect the Corpus Christi, whether in what was called the “true body” of the Eucharist or in the physical bodies of those who, as a unified body, constituted the corpus mysticum, the Church and the society of the faithful, threats to which were thought to be ubiquitous. As Lisa Lampert has shown, besting the enemies of the Corpus Christi was a featured theme in medieval Romance literature, especially in the late twelfth-­and early thirteenth-­century stories of the Grail – the recipient that held Christ’s blood or a chalice that itself is deemed Eucharistic. In many of these Romances, the arch-­enemy is the Jews, and protecting the Grail demanded joining battle with Judaism and, sometimes, with Jews themselves: the Knight of the Grail, Lampert concludes, “by defeating the Jew, [thus] comes, at least in part, to create his identity,”75 his sword, in the form of the cross, making him a protagonist of Christian triumph.76 The 1007 understood this perfectly; and, as elsewhere in its account, the text responds, through an inversion, to insist that this sword may be wrongly used. It does this by exploiting the version of the Grail Romances known as The Quest for the Holy Grail. The Quest – it has been firmly established – was 74 The following is based on the closing section of Stow, “Cruel Jewish Father.” 75 Lisa Lampert-­Weissig, “Why is This Knight Different from All Other Knights? Jews, Anti-­Semitism, and the Old French Grail Narratives,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 106 (2007): 224–47, who also cites Fanni Bogdanow, “The Grail Romances and the Old Law,” in Arthurian Studies in Honour of P. J. C. Field, ed. Bonnie Wheeler (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 1–14; and Anne Marie D’Arcy, “Li Anemis Meismes: Satan and Synagogue in La Queste del Saint Graal,” Medium Ævum 66 (1972): 207–35. 76 Lampert-­Weissig, 246: “These Jewish figural symbols, while not central to the plot, come to haunt the Grail narratives. The Christian knight is defined by his opposition to the Jew, and the stories of Arthur and the Grail, so foundational to Europe’s mythic narrative of itself, become defined against the Jews . . . ​Christianity’s central institutions and symbols become defined by their opposition to Jews and Judaism.”

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not composed before the year 1220, and, as we are about to see, the 1007’s borrowing from it is transparent.77 In the 1007 narrative, Richard Duke of Normandy raises his sword to strike Jacob ben Yequtiel. But as he does so, its baldric (the shoulder belt), described as a petil zahav attached to the blade, “flips over in his grip (qishrei ‘etzba’otav) and pierces his palm,”78 at which point the Duke announces that this wound has given him understanding: Jacob should go to the pope.79 The allusion is incontestable. The Duke’s sword is the weapon known as the Espee aux estranges renges, the sword that is the key player in the just-­named Quest for the Holy Grail, while the 1007 has transposed onto the Duke the various destructive mishaps experienced in the Romance by those who tried and failed to wield it. Its marvelous baldric was woven by the knight Perceval’s sister, into which she braided strands of gold, the petil hazahav, and her own hair, which, too, was golden, and from which the sword gained its name.80 The 1007’s reference 77 La Queste del Saint Graal, ed. Albert Pauphilet (Dijon: Melun Librairie D’Argences, 1949), composed of course in Old French. On the dating to 1220, see Thomas E. Kelly, Le haut livre du Graal, Perlesvaus (Geneva: Droz, 1974), 9, which, in turn, dates the 1007, too. Its unequivocal use of the Queste places it in this year or after. 78 Later, he says: “I know from the petil (clearly, the gold thread that is truly metallic and sharp) that wounded me.” Petil zahav as an expression is rare, a golden thread, which here might refer to a gold cord woven into a sword’s tassel for strength. The Queste has no tassel, but a baldric, a belt with fringes, never to be detached. 79 To make the context Jewish, it is the God of Israel who determines the outcome. Thus: “and the petil hazav (golden tassel/belt) of the sword flipped over (lit: turned upside down) in the grip of his fingers (qishrei ‘etzba’otav – the joints between the fingers and the palm) and pierced his palm.” Jacob ben Yequtiel, whom the Duke wanted to kill, then cites Deuteronomy 4:32, where Moses says God has never done for others as He has for the Jews, nor will He do so. That is, attacking Jews, God’s people, is no path to God; hence, the Duke: “I know from the [golden thread in the] belt that just pierced me, that now is not the hour to kill you.” 80 The original Conte de Graal, 1181, hints that this sword, which it does mention briefly, may be harmful to a wrongful wielder. However, its misuse causes injury or worse only in La Queste del Saint Graal, which offers three horrific examples. By contrast, in Chrétien de Troyes, Conte del Graal, the text says: “The lord invested the young stranger with the sword, holding it by the renges (the baldric, or belt), [but here, they] were worth a treasure.” In the Queste, the baldric originally is a

34

The 1007 and Its Story

to the petil hazahav ensures his allusion is not missed. Surely, he was not the only Jewish author reading courtly literature. Norman Golb missed the allusion, although I confess that it was sheer serendipity on the internet that brought the Quest to my attention, serendipity that was propelled, however, by a certainty that the Grail was at the bottom of it all; in 1984, I, too, was in the dark. Had Golb caught the allusion, he may not have struggled so greatly to explain what happened. In his book on the Jews of Rouen, published close to the same time as my original, he wrote that the 1007’s knowledge of Hebrew was faulty, which led him (the 1007) to adopt odd expressions, perhaps himself translating from another language. Golb also claims to possess a better version of the Hebrew than the one published by Haberman, although a comparison of a photographic copy of the manuscript with the episode as Haberman transcribed it shows no discrepancies.81 According to Golb, the petil zahav is to be read as “the blade’s gold rim [which] turned about in the joints of his [the duke’s] fingers, and he pricked his palm.” Yet would not such a gold rim be found, if ever, on a ceremonial sword? A gold rim on a battle sword would be soft and dull, certainly unfit – as the 1007 says was the Duke’s intention – for cutting off anybody’s head. What was golden, rather, as just said, was the thread in the baldric that “pierced” the duke’s palm, causing a painful, if superficial, wound, a wound deep enough, however – or, in a literary context, one significant enough – to make the duke reflect and reconsider, which he does, because our sword – “vile” (vil) hempen belt, which Perceval’s sister remedies with a belt principally of her own hair, but with gold interwoven. The Queste proceeds to say that of the three Grail knights, only Galahad can grasp the hilt securely (the other two, Bors and Perceval, failed) entitling him to wield the sword safely; see Ben Ramm, “‘Por coi la pucele pleure’: The Feminine Enigma of the Grail Quest,” Neophilologus 87 (2003): 517–27, who notes, too, that the hair is described as golden. Notably for us, Perceval’s sister is sometimes pictured as Mary (526). The precision in borrowing, from the later Quest, not the earlier Conte, is striking. 81 Golb, History and Culture of the Jews of Rouen in the Middle Ages. [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 1976), 171–73; Golb says that Haberman just copied Berliner, which is faulty; MS Parma, de Rossi, 563, fols.127v–129v. I checked the important phrases against the ms, and Haberman is correct.

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as Malkiel observed, although without knowing the exact reason or source – is the mythical one of the Quest.82 Golb may have been tripped up by the 1007’s saying that to gain stability the duke tied the tail of his horse to a rope. Not an everyday practice, tail-­tying does exist, and, I am told, is used in training difficult animals.83 But on what does the duke reflect? The answer lies in the Quest’s basic storyline that only the truly elect of the three Grail knights, Galahad, who is to lead the actual quest for the Grail, can hold the sword fast. The sword itself must never be detached from its belt, the baldric, whose hilt also bears the warning: “no man can grip the weapon except for its rightful owner; any man drawing the sword unworthily shall be killed or maimed” – as happens in the Romance to Kings Varlan, Nascien, and Parlan (otherwise, faithful Christians and just kings), and also, superfluo dictu, to the duke in the 1007.84 82 Norman Golb, The Jews in Medieval Normandy: A Social and Intellectual History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3–11, mistranslates the petil hazahav as “the blade’s gold rim.” He writes that “Richard is about to draw his sword and . . . ​ he seizes ‘his horse’s tail’ – rather than the expected reins or stirrups. The Hebrew is also unclear as to exactly how the duke wounds himself. . . . but the blade’s gold rim turned about in the joints of his fingers and he pricked his palm.” This is an incorrect reading of the Hebrew. Golb also sees close contact between Duke Richard and King Robert, an idea which Stock, as we shall see, severely challenges. As for Malkiel, perspicacity is tied to hesitancy, for in his notes, Malkiel admits to have read my observation in Jewish Dogs, 257–60, that the sword episode was linked to the Grail (I still did not know it was the Quest and was thinking of Chrétien de Troyes in 1181). Had Malkiel agreed, Reconstructing, 63, he would have had to date the 1007, which he refrains from doing, at the late twelfth century at the earliest. YouTube has numerous visual examples of tail tying. I thank Zohar Segev for pointing this out to me. 83 ‫ והנה פתיל הזהב אשר על הלהב‬,‫ ויקשור בזנב םוםו וישלוף החרב להמיתו‬.‫ורצה לחתוך ראשו בחרבו‬ ‫נתהפך בקשרי אצבעותיו וירקור כפו‬. 84 La Queste del Saint Graal, ed. Albert Pauphilet, esp. 227, describes “renges ouvres de or et de soie et de cheve mout richement.” See also 228 for Galahad’s grasping the sword, and, for the misfortunes of the three kings, 204–10. In Parlan’s case, a lance flew out of the air to kill him; this is close to and perhaps the precise model for what happens to the Duke in the 1007, with the exception that in the 1007 the Duke must remain alive to suit the story line. See Andrea M. L. Williams, “The Enchanted Swords and the Quest for the Holy Grail: Metaphoric Structure in La Queste del Graal,” French Studies 48 (2004): 385–401, esp. 393 and 396: “ The Espee

36

The 1007 and Its Story

The parallel is complete, and so, too, as elsewhere in the 1007, is the inversion, the fruit of the 1007’s intimacy with contemporary vulgar literature. And just as the identification of the sword is unmistakable, so is the implication. The quest for the Grail and the pursuit of Christian unity is pursued falsely (not correctly, as much of the Grail literature implies) by pursuing Jews.85 The knight who wields the sword against them cannot be God’s chosen. Hence, the duke is wounded, which he understands as a call to desist from his brazen attempt to thwart the divine will, and, accordingly, he sends Jacob ben Yequtiel to a higher authority, the Vicar of God, the pope; a happy ending, one worked, however, as Jews reading this story would have surely understood it, by the divine will. It is God who ensures that Jacob ben Yequtiel comes to no harm. Nonetheless, for even that will to be effective, it is indispensable that its human agent Jacob have a sure grasp of the world in which he, Jacob, lives, including – and perhaps reminding us of Senior’s precipitousness – its balance of powers.86 It is enticing to call this allusion to the Grail-­sword a late insertion into an earlier tale. However, in its absence, the rest of the story falls apart. Without the sign given to Duke Richard, there is no way to move from the initial persecution to the meeting of Jacob ben Yequtiel with the pope. Does not the duke say, reminiscent of the Book of Esther (8:8), that once a decree is sealed, it cannot be as estranges renges is protected by a multiplicity of enchantments, chief among them . . . ​its hilt cannot be gripped, except by him for whom the sword is destined.” (388) “ . . . on the blade there is engraved another warning, declaring that any man drawing the sword unworthily shall be killed or maimed” (393; Citing La Queste del Saint Graal, ed. A. Pauphilet, and also 209). La Queste, says Williams, “interprets the Grail legend in a Christian context, and suggests that succeeding in the Quest is equivalent to finding Grace, or to the achievement of communion with God.” (385) 85 He was not alone in his borrowings: see Susan Einbinder, “Signs of Romance: Hebrew Prose and the Twelfth-­Century Renaissance,” in Jews and Christians in Twelfth-­Century Europe, ed. Michael A. Signer and John Van Engen (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2000), 224; and also, Kirsten A. Fudeman, Language and Identity in Medieval French Jewish Communities (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 86 ‫אולי ירחמו עליכם מן השמים‬

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revoked?87 Something far more dramatic than the wound itself was needed to make the duke change his mind and void the decree, and that something was the wound’s significance with respect to the pursuit of the Grail. It is the heart of the story around which the entire continuation of the 1007 revolves, the moment of revelation to Christian enemies that it is not they, but the pope alone, whose right it is to decide the Jewish fate. No mere anachronism, it is the story itself.

Histor ical and Lit er ary Inconsist encies One may also add that regardless of the Grail motif, something historical does not make sense. When Duke William of Normandy conquered England in 1066, he introduced Jews as economic agents. Had Duke Richard differed so radically from his sucessor of only sixty years later? Indeed, was not the eleventh century a time when rulers of all stripes in northern Europe, like Bishop Rudiger of Speyer in 1084, were inviting Jews to settle? Had William of Normandy’s near predecessor sought forcibly to convert or kill the same Jews whom William found a positive asset? Possibly, yes, of course, but the onus of proof is on those who would say so. All other signs say no. Which is also to say that the behavior of Duke Richard in the 1007 with respect to the expected behavior of the real Duke at that time is puzzling in the extreme.88 The gap between the probable behavior of the real duke in the early eleventh century and the duke of the 1007 is far too great to overcome by saying that, as with other legends of the early Middle Ages, the 1007 was slowly reworked. Nor can one easily make a parallel claim that an original oral legend evolved, with many additions, into an innovative written one, as happened, for instance, with the early Spanish epic El Cid. Among other things, we can trace with some certainty the time from the real Cid’s death in 1099 to the first oral accounts that circulated in the mid-­twelfth century and 87 See toward the end of this first section for this verse and its deeper meaning. 88 See among others, Stow, Alienated Minority, 62–64, 97–102, as well as standard histories of Jews in England, all of which begin with William.

38

The 1007 and Its Story

the eventual transposition of the oral story into writing in 1307.89 By contrast, the 1007 appeared fully formed. There is no antecedent, oral or written, nothing approaching the conflicted textual history of the Crusade chronicles, not to mention that because so much is legendary in Chansons de geste, as in El Cid one can never know what is genuine beyond a shadowy identification of the characters themselves. There are other possible twists. It is known that, about the year 800, three men said to be the sons of the Northman Ragner Lothbrok actually lived, but whether Ragner himself was real or only an imagined focus for legendary exploits is much debated.90 Moreover, when comparing the 1007 with Chansons de gestes or the Romances certain shared qualities emerge that argue for a later date, for notable instance, the use of Direct Discourse.91 Characters in earlier chronicles or other writings rarely speak, especially in those from the Carolingan era. The dying speech of Emperor Louis the Pious by the chronicler Thegan is exceptional. In the chansons and the 1007, Direct Discourse is constant; and the earliest chanson, that of Roland, comes from no earlier than the late eleventh century, with its first manuscript dating to later in the twelfth. The Direct Discourse in the 1007 could not possibly predate this time. In addition, a comparison of the 1007 with chronicles like those of Ademar and Raoul Glaber leaves no doubt that the styles of writing and composition spring from two different worlds, with a laconic telling of events in the latter, as opposed to articulated dialogues and detailed reporting in the 1007. No simple chronicle, the 1007 is literature, prose literature – with respect to which the dis 89 This is the epic of Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar (1043–1099), the Christian hero called by his Moorish enemies El Cid; see Rita Hamilton, trans., The Poem of the Cid: A Bilingual Edition with Parallel Text (London, New York: Penguin Classics, 1975). 90 See Roberta Frank, “Viking Atrocity and Skaldic Verse: The Rite of the Blood-­Eagle,” The English Historical Review 99 (1984): 332–43. 91 On Direct Discourse and its birth, see Peter Dembowski, “Author’s Monologue and Related Problems in the Romances of Chrétien de Troyes,” Yale French Studies 51 (1974): 102–14. The point is how the author floats in and out of direct speech, monologues, etc. This seems to match the 1007 author perfectly.

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tinguished Michel Zink tells us that: “Until the end of the twelfth century, French literature was entirely in verse. Prose literature was inexistent.”92 It is hard to imagine a work of Hebrew prose like the 1007, certainly written in a French milieu, preceding that time.

Circumspect ion What that prose said, however – the content of its discourses – required care. Some things had to be said with circumspection. Care was needed in addressing fellow Jews, to tell them that they must, as Alexander II had phrased it in 1063, be always ready to serve: semper parati servire; not to be servants and, heaven forbid, slaves, but to accept the yoke of the ecclesiastic canons with their limitations. These canons had begun to be enforced universally in the thirteenth century, including the novelty of special marks on clothing to promote the ancient Church aim of keeping physical distance between Jews and Christians, thus to prevent ritual contamination of both laity and priests. From the late fourth decade of the same century, Jewish literature would also be attacked. This last, I believe, the 1007 was aware of (although he did not know the on-­again off-­again Dominican-­led attempts at preaching and conversion of the 1260s and 70s, if only because his text was composed before that time). There was a measure of wisdom, therefore, in masking what he had to say, which he did by pretending that his story referred to centuries earlier.

T elltale Coins One way of doing this was by reference to what the 1007 thought were long-out-­of-­use coins. Jacob ben Yequtiel offers to pay the expenses of a legate who is to travel and spread the message of the twelfth-­century papal bull of protection Sicut Iudaeis non.93 The payment is two hundred pounds of local money, one hundred Anjou 92 Michel Zink, Introduction à la littérature française du moyen âge (Nancy: Le Livre de Poche, 1990), 65; the translation is mine. 93 This bull and its origins is discussed fully in the second chapter of the 1984 original. See there.

40

The 1007 and Its Story

and one hundred Limondis (please bear with the transliteration for now). In the 1984 original (which has been slightly modified to reflect what I am now saying), I argued that through the coinage, one could be sure the 1007 was a product of the thirteenth century. At the time, as I said, I had no knowledge of the The Quest for the Holy Grail, which, as we just saw, establishes the year 1220 as the 1007’s earliest date of composition. The argument was that the 1007 intentionally chose coins that were out of circulation at the time of his writing. Readers like David Malkiel, who has otherwise seen many of the problems in an early eleventh-­century dating, suggested I was imputing too much historical memory to medieval Jews. In fact, I intended just the opposite. The 1007 did not expect readers or hearers, as the case might have been, to know in which years the various coins circulated. He wanted coins whose names people may have heard, but which their everyday experience told them were no longer in use. And here he erred, anachronistically, in fact, even more greatly than I originally thought. For he himself was unaware that neither of the coins he mentioned circulated in Normandy in the early eleventh century, and it is in Normandy where the events of the 1007 take place. Jacob ben Yequtiel hails from Rouen, and without a Norman setting, the presence and actions of the Duke of Normandy are out of place.94 We must presume the coins Jacob has on hand, too, were Nor 94 When he gets to Rome, Jacob addresses the pope saying “Yehudi ’ani me’eretz rehoqah,” (“I am a Jew from a land far away”). This is puzzling; see the text immediately below taken from the right-­wing, religious daily Mekor Rishon, of all places – an apt commentary on the idea of identifying as a Jew somebody newly arrived: “The Talmudic decisors overwhelmingly were of the opinion to accept any man who said he was a Jew as such.” https://musaf-­shabbat.com/2016/01/01/ ‫הגישה הרווחת בין הפוסקים הייתה לקבל כל‬

‫ ״וזה‬:‫ כתב הרשב״א על יהודי שהגיע מארץ רחוקה‬,‫ למשל‬,‫ כך‬.‫אדם שמעיד על עצמו שהוא יהודי‬ ‫ אין מדקדקין אחריהם והרי הם ישראלים‬,‫אין בו ספק כלל שכיון שהם מחזיקים עצמם כישראל‬ ‫ ״כיון דאמר יהודי‬:‫ כך כתבו גם רבנו תם‬.)‫ טז‬,‫גמורים כמיוחסים שבישראל״ (שו״ת הרשב״א ב‬ ‫ ״מכאן נלמד דכל מאן דאתי‬:‫ הריטב״א‬,)‫אני מחזקינן ליה בחזקת ישראל״ (ספר הישר סי׳ נ ו־שלו‬ ‫ ״מעשים בכל יום שאורחים באים‬:)‫(= כל מי שבא) ואמר ישראל אני נאמן״ והסמ״ג (לאוין קטז‬ ‫ואין אנו בודקין אחריהם ושותים אנו עמהם יין ואוכלין משחיטתם״‬.

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man and were ones he brought with him to Rome.95 And as with other parts of the 1007, its reference to coinage has been accepted with no quarrel or investigation. Thus following Gross’s reading of Limondis as Limoges in Gallia Judaica, Golb says the 1007 is referring to the coins of Anjou and Limoges, which, he adds, circulated throughout the “feudal period.”96 However, Gross based his reading solely on the 1007 and the story of Sehoq ben Esther, with no additional corroborative evidence.97 Coins known as barbarins, after the beard of St. Martial, the city’s patron saint, were minted in Limoges, but they were not minted until the beginning of the twelfth century. Limoges monies of any kind also had a good range of circulation, yet that range was limited to the West and Center of France, never the North, in Anjou (actually Maine) or Normandy.98 Besides, even if the 1007, for whatever reason, did intend coins minted in Limoges, why did he not call them barbarins, their common name? There were also comital coins issued by the Count of Limoges, but these appeared only from 1211.99 In short, that by Limondis the 1007 meant coins of Limoges is improbable to impossible, regardless of whether its composition was in the early eleventh century or the thirteenth. With respect to the coins of Anjou, the angiovis, Robert Chazan

95 Norman coins are discussed in detail by Francoise Dumas in a study that appeared in 1986. Etienne Fournial’s earlier, 1970, work, Histoire monétaire, which I used in 1984, is still useful, as is F. Poey d’Avant, Golb’s source, published over a century earlier, in 1858. For good measure, there is Philippe Le Bas, Dictionaire Encyclopédique (1843). The discussions are highly technical and not always transparent. Françoise Dumas, “La monnaie dans les domaines Plantagenêt,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 29 (1986): 53–59 (Numéro 113); and Dumas, “Les monnaies normandes (Xe–XIIe siècles) avec un repértoire des trouvailles,” Revue numismatique, 6 (1979): 84–140, Numéro 21; F. Poey d’Avant, Monnaies féodales de France (Paris, 1858), 1: 352, as well as Fournial, Histoire monétaire, cited in 1984. 96 Golb, Les juifs de Rouen, 10. 97 As I did as well in 1984, which I now emend. 98 D’Avant, Monnaies, 1:352. 99 Le Bas, Dictionaire Encyclopédique (Paris, 1843), LIMOGES (vicomtes de) [Haute-­Vienne, chap. 1. dép.]. Monnayage concurrent de celui de l’abbé de Saint-­Martial, il paraît avoir débuté en 1211; à la fin du XIIIe siècle, il supplanta les derniers abbatiaux et dura jusqu’en 1360 (p. 174).

42

The 1007 and Its Story

has said that this was the money of Angers, the main urban place in Anjou, apparently intending to say that this was a coin circulating in the early eleventh century. However, Angevin coins reached Normandy only from the mid-­to later twelfth century, between 1135 and 1154, when they also supplanted the local money of Rouen. The coin of Limondis Chazan understands as that of Le Mans, as do William Chester Jordan, and I.100 However, although Chazan says the Le Mans coinage was common in Normandy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in fact, it began to circulate there only from the end of the eleventh century and into the twelfth.101 There is also a catch. The value of the Le Mans coins was twice that of the Angevins. One hundred Angevins were worth only fifty coins of Le Mans, and to rectify the mismatch, people sometimes specified payment was being made in “double Angevins.”102 The 1007 treats the two coins as equal in value. Jacob says: “I have here two hundred litrot, half Angevins, and the rest Limondis.”103 An explanation is needed. But before resolving this problem, we must ask what justifies reading the Hebrew Limon(d)is as Le Mans? Chazan has specified that the major Jewish communites in pre-­Crusade France were Auxerre, Blois, Chalons sur Marne, Le Mans, Orleans, Paris, Reims, Rouen, Sens, and Troyes.104 Limoges is absent. More direct information is provided by Avraham Grossman, who cites Rabbenu Tam saying that Yosef Tov Elem, often associated with Limoges, is really from Le Mans. Rabbenu Tam locates Tov Elem in Anjou and 100 Wm. C. Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 58. 101 Chazan, “Review,” says the eleventh century, implying the whole century, which is not correct, as it was only the end of the century. However, one must deal with both coins, not just one. 102 To complete the record: the Limoges coin, as reported by Fournial, weighed (and was surely valued at) ten percent less than that of Anjou (0,239/0,272 3d./3d. 10g). Once more, no equivalent. 103 Later he mentions 100 shekels of silver. Is one a livre and the other a mark? It is hard to say. Shekel translates as “weight.” 104 Chazan, “The Persecution of 992”; see also Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 11.

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Limorg.105 And, indeed, Limoges makes no sense. To read the texts as Limoges would put Tov Elem in two regions distant from each other by more than three hundred fifteen kilometers. By contrast, Le Mans, as a city in Maine, which was then absorbed into Anjou, the neighbor of Normandy, does make sense, and even more so when we learn that Tov Elem’s responsa reached neighboring Champagne. The relocation of Tov Elem from Limoges to Le Mans will resurface when discussing Ademar of Chabannes. For now what matters is that it is fairly, if not completely, certain that the 1007 means coins of Anjou and Le Mans. Yet this identification seems only to confuse matters, since, as was said, the value of the two coins was unequal.106 But what if the 1007 was unaware of this disparity, just as he was unaware that neither of the coins circulated in Normandy in the early eleventh

105 In discussing Tov Elem, Avraham Grossman cites a responsum published by David Cassel in Berlin in 1848, and found in a work edited by Sh. Y. Rapoport, which refers to “Yosef Tov Elem,” who led the kingdoms [sic] of Limorg ‫ לימורג‬and Anjou ‫אניו‬. The spelling of Limorg in Latin letters is Rapoport’s. For some reason, though, Grossman, who spells Limorg in Hebrew as ‫לימורגש‬, does not follow Rapoport’s caution against reading Limorg as Limoges. However, if we take into account that endings like rg or rgs in medieval Hebrew are pronounced softly, e.g., Brie/ Brey as Brays(h), Troyes as Troys(h), Le Mans is a better bet than Limoges. In the Blois letters, we get variants for Pontoise, which are Ponterirt, Pontiyeh, and also Pontisarae in Latin. Following this line of reasoning, nothing should keep us from reading Limorg as Le Mans, which, I take to be some kind of ng ‘ayin (as one hears among Portuguese and also in Rome, shmang yisrael, for example), to give us Le Mahng = Le Mans. See Avraham Grossman, Hakhame Tzarfat, 46–82, esp. 46–48, and also “The Attitude of the Early Scholars of Ashkenaz Towards the Authority of the ‘Kahal,’” Annual of the Institute for Research in Jewish Law 2 (1975): 175–99. Also David Cassel, Rechtsgutachten der Geonim (n.p., Friedlander, – 1848). Significantly, too, since Yosef Tov Elem’s seat was Le Mans, not Limoges, this means – once we have converted the other references to Limoges to the correct Le Mans – that the single reference to Jews in Limoges is that which we shall meet when examining Ademar’s chronicle. 106 Etienne Fournial, Histoire monétaire: Angevins: deniers frappés par Charles, comte d’Anjou, frère de Louis IX, à partir de 1246. Mansois: deniers frappés par le même Charles d’Anjou, en sa qualité de comte du Maine. Les deniers mansois portent les légendes suivantes: K. FIL. REGIS FRANCIE et, au revers, + ANGEVINs DOVBLEs, ce qui explique le cours de 1 mansois pour 2 angevins.

44

The 1007 and Its Story

century? After 1204, Philip Augustus, in the wake of extending his rule to most of France, proscribed the use of anything but the Livre Tournois (Turenne), and by 1220 (note: the year of The Quest), the Angevin was out of circulation, including, of course, in Normandy. But so was the coin of Le Mans. However, by 1246, matters changed.107 At that time, says Fournial, there was great commotion, fear that the royally sponsored Livre Tournois and Parisis would be insufficient to guarantee a good monetary flow, and, in response, the then King Louis IX began to allow the use of the once prohibited coinage. To rephrase, there was a twenty-­six year period when the monies mentioned in the 1007 were not in circulation. People knew about and probably remembered these coins, just as they were the coins 107 Fournial, 83 and 174. The French Kings had tried to forbid the comital coins, but people, fearing there would not be enough Tournois and Parisis, pushed Louis IX to renew old coinage. He allowed money of Nantes, and then these two; one can see here that the 50/50 would work if it is an Angevin Doubole. Nantois: deniers frappés à Nantes par Jean le Roux (descendant de Louis VI), duc de Bretagne, portant le blason de la maison de Dreux. Philippe Auguste (1180–1223) travailla activement à diffuser la monnaie royale par tout le royaume. Il battit des deniers > dans les terres réunies au domaine (Bourges, Déols, Issoudun, Montreuil, Sens), mais aussi hors du domaine (Laon). Peu à peu, les populations s’habituaient à utiliser la monnaie du roi. Deux grandes innovations sous ce règne. La première fut la diffusion du denier parisis inauguré sous Louis VII. Il fut imposé à l’Artois, dot de la reine Isabelle de Hainaut, puis au Vermandois après la mort du comte Herbert IV. La deuxième fut l’adoption du denier tournois après que Philippe Auguste eut mis la main sur une partie des domaines des Plantagenêts (cf. chap. III, § II). Désormais, la monnaie du roi courait dans une vaste région. Dans les terres des barons, les espèces royales ne pénétrèrent que lentement. Ce n’est, par exemple, qu’en 1238 qu’on relève pour la première fois l’utilisation du tournois royal dans le Forez. Mais leur diffusion s’accéléra dans la première moitié du XIIIe siècle, parallèlement avec les progrès de l’économie d’échange. Aussi bien, Louis IX, vers la fin de son règne, put-­il, en matière de monnaie, affirmer hautement quelques principes que ses successeurs réitérèrent avec force à maintes reprises et qu’ils parvinrent à faire triompher. See also J. H. Round, Calendar of documents preserved in France illustrative of the History of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 1 (London: Public Record Office, 1899), doc. 550, who says that 100 lbs. Anjou are enough to support 7 canons for a year. This is piddling, to say the least. Limoges is barely mentioned in this huge collection.

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that reappeared in the years after 1246. But two things they did not know, or had forgotten, especially once a decade or so had passed without the coins being in circulation. First, that the coins of Le Mans were worth twice the coins of Anjou, and, second – for who kept records of such things? – that the Anjou, let alone the Le Mans, had not circulated in Normandy until the mid-­twelfth century. This includes the 1007’s author himself.108 And so he made his anachronistic – but telltale – blunder. If the petil hazahav gives away the date before which the 1007 could not have been composed, the year 1246, or very shortly afterward – when circulation of the monies of Le Mans and Anjou were renewed and, no doubt, in their old disparate values – is the date after which the 1007 could no longer have been written (as it is). After 1246, the 1007 could not have made his hero offer a gift in monies unequal in value, while describing them as though they were equal. That was possible only at a moment when those monies were out of circulation and the discrepancy was forgotten. Most likely, furthermore, this was toward the end of the twenty-­six year window, when memories had grown even dimmer. Put otherwise, in the early eleventh century, the money sequence in the 1007 neither could, nor would have, been written as it is, and, as in the case of the petil hazahav, this sequence is an integral part of the story, not window dressing for color that somebody may have added later. Admittedly, the foregoing is a reconstruction, and reconstructions are always subject to scrutiny. That scrutiny, however, should be carried out only through careful, and carefully laid out, research into the circulation of monies in Normandy in the early eleventh century.

Sicut Iudaeis Non The same applies to another decisive piece of evidence, the decla 108 Malkiel, Reconstructing, 278, n. 78, seems to misread me, thinking I meant people knew which coins were circulating about the year 1000. I meant only that the 1007 intentionally used coins no longer in circulation, whose names people likely knew. In this new version, I have given a more precise explanation.

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ration of protection that Jacob ben Yequtiel asks the pope to issue, whose wording virtually reproduces the words of the papal bull Sicut Iudaeis non. We must heed the words of Yitzhaq Baer, who accepts as true the events as told in the 1007, yet also confirms that one sentence in the 1007 accurately reflects this bull, which prohibits forced conversion, unjust seizure of property, and physical harm. To highlight the congruity, Baer translates this sentence into Latin.109 Yet the most optimistic estimate for the initial issue of Sicut Iudaeis non is about 1120. Sicut Iudaeis non did not exist earlier. It certainly does not predate 1063, when Alexander II issued the bull out of which is carved the canon Dispar nimirum est. Dispar was a text with a long life. Jews in Rome were still citing it in demands made as late as the 1790s.110 Nonetheless, Dispar is not programmatic as is Sicut Iudaeis non. It refers to physical protection alone; only later, in a separate missive of 1065, did Alexander denounce forced conversion.111 In the event, the first full written copy of Sicut Iudaeis non in our possession dates to the late twelfth century, during the reign of Pope Alexander III (1159–1181). Alexander refers to predecessors through Calixtus II, earlier in the century, which is why the date of 1120 is usually given for the bull’s initial appearance. Yet in what form, what formulae? The kernel is adopted from Gregory the Great, with its pithy – to paraphrase – what is permitted the Jews is permitted, but what is forbidden is forbidden. The rest? Most likely, until sometime in the mid-­twelfth century, the formulations were still rudimentary. As I wrote in 1984, the initial appearance of the bull was as a local document, a tuitio charter of privilege specifically for Roman 109 Baer, “Hamegamah” (orig. in Zion, 3 [1948]: 4, where he points to the high similarity between the 1007 and the wording of Sicut Iudaeis non, even translating the Hebrew back into Latin: ut nullus Christianus praesumat occidere judaeum nullo modo nec nocere nec suam illi(s) pecuniam auferre nec compellat eos invitos ad baptismum venire.

,‫ ולא לעשקו מיגיעו‬,‫ ולא להזיקו‬,‫שלא יהא גוי רשאי להרגו מתורתם לצאת ישראל בשום ענין‬ ‫ולא להכריחם‬ 110 See Stow, Anna and Tranquillo, 65, 145, and 151. 111 Migne, PL 146: 1386–87; Simonsohn, The Apostolic See, 1: 37, number 39.

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Jews – the protection it guarantees of Jewish property, for example. It was not intended to apply elsewhere, and this continued to be the case for some time, which likely explains why Gratian, when he finished composing his Decretum, in 1140, which would become the standard textbook of medieval law, incorporated Dispar alone. 112 Of course, to call the initial formulation of Sicut Iudaeis non that of a tuitio charter means applying to it Friedrich Lotter’s sound argument that Jews negotiated their charters. Could not this have been the case in the year 1007, too? One might suggest that the actual wording of the bull corresponded to a precise Jewish request, as formulated, for instance, in the words of a real Jacob ben Yequtiel.113 But if this improbability is true, Jacob’s efforts would have been worthless. The massacres in the 1007 took place within a span of weeks, which is about the same amount of time it would have taken Jacob to get to Rome. More time would then have been needed for negotiation – the pope himself in the story asks for fifteen days – and for drafting in the papal chancellery, and, finally, for the legate to prepare for the journey and set out.114 By then, all the Jews of northern France would have been massacred or forcibly converted; I am merely following the storyline in the 1007 text. There is more. As just noted, during the later twelfth century, the text of Sicut Iudaeis non was still undergoing slight, but vital, changes; in fact, through the year 1188. And it is these, not Alexander III’s earlier version, that the 1007 reflects. The text of Alexander III reads that it is prohibited ad baptismum venire compellat. This would seem to mean “no Jew is to be pressed into baptism,” and, indeed, compellat is the word Baer, an outstanding Latinist among his many virtues, alighted upon. However, very likely first entering into the formulation of Clement III in 1188 and repeated in the version of 112 See Emil Friedberg, ed., Corpus Iuris Canonici (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1879–1881). 113 Friedrich Lotter, “The Scope and Effectiveness of Imperial Jewry Law in the High Middle Ages,” Jewish History 4 (1989): 1.31–59; one wonders if the Roman names in the 1007 are borrowed from the text of Benjamin of Tudela, but this is purely speculative. 114 Not a throw-­out or formality, the fifteen days are a formally established period, on which, see below, at note 168.

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Innocent III shortly afterward, there is a variation that became permanent.115 It reads Ut nullus Christianus invitos vel nolentes eos ad baptismum per violentiam venire compellat, that no Christian should press them to be baptized, willing or unwilling, by force. This is a diplomatic text, perfected at a time when the art of documentary formulation was peaking and precision valued. The addition of “through violence” can only mean that compellat did not necessarily mean, indeed, it was not commonly understood to mean, violent force; the addition was substantive, not rhetorical. To specify violence, Alexander II had spoken of violenter coegisse, and Gregory the Great used vi, by force.116 The natural tendency to translate with the cognate, here, “compel” for compellat, is deceptive, as is almost always the rule with cognates. A clear example of compellat meaning goad, urge on, or press, but not force, will appear in the full discussion of the chronicle of Ademar later on, as will also Ademar’s use of cogo (coegisse) in its precise meaning of push, or, even more precisely, to bring into the flock. Harper’s Latin Dictionary, but, more importantly, Calonghi, the gold standard of Latin-­Italian dictionaries – Italian having been the daily language of the papal curia even then – does not give “force” as cogo’s primary meaning.117 The need to define conversionary violence is one that occupied centuries of canonists. In his oft-­cited bull Maiores, Innocent III distinguished “absolute” from “conditional” force. Canonists and church courts considered this distinction real. The sixteenth-­ century Pope Paul III, alongside professor of canon law and Cardi-

115 Sicut Iudaeis non, the bull (Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the Thirteenth Century [New York: Hermon Press, 1966], 1: 92, number 5; Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See, 1: 66, no. 66 and p. 75, no. 71): Nullus etiam Christianus eorum personas sine judicio potestatis terre vulnerare, aut occidere, vel suas illis pecunias auferre presumat, aut bonas. The sentence on baptism is earlier, as cited here above in the text. Alexander III is Simonsohn, 1: 51, no. 49. A reissue by Celestine III has been lost, 1: 68, no. 64, p. 68, which Simonsohn says has not survived: 1: 51, no. 49. 116 Gregory, in Simonsohn, The Apostolic See, 1: 4, number 5; Alexander II is 1: 39, p. 37. 117 Charlton Lewis, Charles Short, and E. A. Andrews, Harper’s Latin Dictionary (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1879), s.v. “cogo”; Ferrucio Calonghi, Dizionario latino-­ italiano (Torino: Rosenberg and Sellier, 1898), s.v. “cogo.”

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nal Pier Paolo Pariseo, opposed the establishment of an Inquisition in Portugal in the 1530s just because, they said, the conversion of all Portuguese Jews in 1497 had been forced absolutely, and their baptism was, therefore, invalid. The question arose again in the mid-­eighteenth century with respect to the baptism of children invitis parentibus, whose parents objected; the most famous example is that of Edgardo Mortara and Pope Pius IX, a century later, in 1858.118 When, therefore, the 1007 uses lehakhriham, literally, “to force,” in its formulation, it hard to imagine that he is referring to anything other than the fully developed, 1188 formula of Clement III: per violentiam.

T he Fat e of Jew ish Book s We may also move forward, thirty years, beyond Clement III and Innocent III, to Gregory IX. In the 1230s, this pope reissued Sicut Iudaeis non, as well as two other letters with similar phraseology. However, the latter of the two, from 1233, conditions protection on the Jews refraining from blasphemy. Innocent III had already added to his version of Sicut Iudaeis non a warning against Jews plotting against Christianity, which resonates of cautionary clauses in the so-­called Pact of Omar given Jews in Muslim lands, from which, in my opinion, Innocent adopted his wording and ideas.119 In Gregory’s more specific warning, one may perhaps espy the seeds of the furor soon to erupt over rabbinic literature and the Talmud. But not quite, for on September 5, 1236, Gregory lashed out in a letter to the higher clergy in Bordeaux and environs against actions by Crusaders, who, he wrote, had killed the enormous number of 2,500 Jews who had refused to convert and whose bodies they had exposed to the birds. The Crusaders had also [wrongly] “burned their [the Jews’] books.” Gregory addressed the same protest to the king himself, concluding, in both cases, that Christ wishes only for conversion through “complete freedom of will.”120 118 See on these issues, Stow, Anna and Tranquillo, 169–70. 119 See n. 41 in the 1984 original on this text. 120 Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, 201, n. 70, and 226, n. 87.

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The 1007 and Its Story

Gregory’s earlier letter, of 1233, together with that of 1236, as distinct from royal and noble behavior, is a perfect setting for an author like the 1007 to express his angst. The king and the nobles are untrustworthy: they kill Jews and burn their books. When the king in the 1007 text asks the Jews to reveal da‘atkhem – not your dat, religion or belief, but da‘at, your learning, your books – he speaks for both himself and the nobles who have joined him “with one heart,” their “common consent.” By contrast, the pope is trustworthy, a source of protection, even if at a price. At the same time, the 1007 intimates, Innocent III’s warnings against Jewish machinations (whatever the 1007 imagined them to be), and Gregory IX’s caution about blasphemy must put Jews on guard. To protect themselves, they should know what to expect, whether from lay rulers or the pope: what were the limits of each. Indeed, three years after 1236, everything would change. The popes would cease defending Jewish literature, even if, ultimately, they wavered. Innocent IV, despite his assertion of jurisdiction over Jewish liturgy and other texts, still consented to the return to the Jews of indispensable books. I believe Innocent IV knew as well that the attack on the Talmud in the late 1230s as a “new law,” a nova lex, orchestrated, as it was, by the scripturally oriented Parisian Masters, was also a disguised attack on non-­scriptural law of papal origin in the newly minted body of canon law, the Decretales, issued in 1234.121 Nonetheless, later moderations aside, after the opening salvo against the Talmud in 1239, a defense of the kind found in Gregory’s 1236 letter would never again be forthcoming. If, then, the 1007 was 121 Innocent IV on the Talmud is discussed in Stow, Jewish Dogs, 121, 123–24, noting other opinions. But see now the interesting contribution of Yosef Schwartz, who sees the action as a coordination of university professors, Church, and the king, much as in the attack on the Templars in the early fourteenth century. This approach makes sense, certainly more than blaming the friars. However, I still argue that the truly dominant party were the University Masters, who were about to begin an all-­out rebellion against the popes. See Yosef Schwartz, “Authority, Control and Conflict in Thirteenth-­Century Paris: Contextualizing the Talmud Trial,” in Jews and Christians in Thirteenth-­Century France, eds. Elisheva Baumgarten and Judah D. Galinsky (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

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composed after 1220 and before 1246, as solid evidence has shown, what more appropriate moment during that quarter century than in the years immediately succeeding the letter of 1236 and prior to 1239? But we must not be hasty. To begin with, we must establish when the king began attacking Jewish literature. If, as I believe, it was at Paris that the whole Talmud affair began, with the king and queen involved from the start, then a date close to 1239 or 1240 for the 1007’s composition is not improbable. Yet perhaps a better date is after August, 1247, with the king remaining intransigent, while Innocent IV allowed the return of specified books. With respect to the discussion of coinage, the earlier date is preferable, but 1247, when the Angevin and LeMans coins had just begun to reappear, is still a possibility. Moreover, we have noted that the 1007 is highly aware of papal claims to direct jurisdiction: the Jews, he has Jacob ben Yequtiel say to the pope, are under memshelet reshutkhah, “your jurisdiction.” And those claims were made first by Innocent IV in his guise as the canonist Sinabaldo Fieschi sometime about 1245. Innocent’s compromise on the Talmud, as opposed to the king’s intransigence, presented the opportunity to tell – actually, to create – the 1007 tale, much as the atmosphere in France following Philip Augustus’s temporary expulsion of Jews between 1182–1198 had prompted the composition of the Blois letters a half century earlier. The 1007, as I keep stressing, is a work of sophistication, not “some simple and simplistic advice with regard to Jewish political affairs.”122 Indeed, its sophistication, which we have seen with regard to Christian literature and in its grasp of the struggle over Jewish writings, is on bright display when it delves into papal theory. Here, the 1007 shines, just as once more it betrays its time of composition.

Papal T heory The 1984 edition deals with this subject at some length. Here, though, I briefly stress two central points. Jacob ben Yekutiel, we

122 Chazan, “Review,” cited also by Malkiel, Reconstructing, 278, n. 78.

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The 1007 and Its Story

recall, says I have found no one save God higher than you on earth. You, the pope, are the Vicarius dei, the Vicar of God or Christ, a strictly thirteenth-­century term, as is also a second term, melekh hagoyim, “The King of the Nations”; in Latin, rex omnium gentium as applied to the pope rather than Christ. The pope is further credited with direct control over Jews, be-­memshelet reshutkhah, which, as the late Walter Pakter demonstrated in detail and as amplified by Benjamin Kedar, was not asserted before Innocent IV’s commentary on the Decretales.123 The assertion of papal auctoritas, authority, was no minor issue. It lay at the heart of the claims of the imperial papacy, from the time of Innocent III through, minimally, Boniface VIII, thus throughout the thirteenth century. If auctoritas, as opposed to the lesser potestas, power, is emphasized multiple times in the 1007 – king and duke have power, but the pope alone exercises authority as Vicar of God – it is this hierarchy of rule that the duke, through the miracle of his wound, comes to accept. Not a later addition, this is a crux of the story. There is also the term ’apifior for pope, which, too, seems to have appeared only in the thirteenth century. The mid-­twelfth-­century Shlomo bar Shimshon, for example, says pifius.124 Unless, then, we wish to make Jewish writings the source of papal theory and practice – the same kind of lemma that arises with the wording of Sicut Iudaeis non: does the line replicating Sicut Iudaeis in the 1007 precede or come after the bull, with the answer being obvious – we must concede the 1007’s thirteenth-­century origin, not to mention recognize his enormous intimacy with thirteenth-­century ecclesiastical theory.

123 Walter Pakter, De His Qui Foris Sunt, chap. 1; B. Z. Kedar, “Canon Law and the Burning of the Talmud,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 9 (1979): 79–82. Pakter was published in 1988 as Medieval Canon Law and the Jews by Gremler Press, Ebelsbach, 1988. 124 Samuel Kraus, “Apiphior,” Revue des études juives 34–35 (1897): 218–38.

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Papal W eak ness At the start of the eleventh century, papal titles like The King of the Nations and especially God’s Vicar would never have been heard. Bishops, too, were not under the “headship of the popes.” Rather, and as a matter of course, they were fixtures in royal entourages and, with rare exceptions, royally or nobly appointed; invested, in ecclesiastical terms. Through about the year 1000, there were also serious questions, debated in the papal curia itself, whether the pope had judicial standing in disputes between episcopal sees and their holders.125 More to the point, popes like Benedict VIII, in the second decade of the eleventh century, may have made claims about shaking off Saxon, Imperial tutelage, but in practice, they had to recognize the authority of the emperor. We recall that in 1020, Benedict VIII travelled hundreds of miles to meet Henry II in Bamberg at Eastertime (he was not in Rome executing Jews), where the two conferred about the renewed Byzantine menace in the Mezzogiorno and Benedict consecrated a new cathedral, obtained a charter from Henry II confirming the donations of Charlemagne and Otto the Great, and visited the monastery of Fulda. No wonder Henry IV was shocked in 1073, when he was challenged by Gregory VII. In Rome itself, the state of papal affairs at the start of the eleventh century was dim. The late Paolo Brezzi, long the doyen of Roman medievalists, wrote that local interests dominated the city in the period 1002–1012, which left the popes to look to the other side of the Alps in the hope of enhancing their power. “Rome,” Brezzi wrote, was “closed in on itself,” chiusa in sè stessa, retta dal forte polso di un patrizio scelto tra i membri della più illustre delle famiglie locali, controlled by the strong hand of a patriciate composed of members of the most illustrious local families. Purely ecclesiastical matters of internal reform, to the extent possible, may have been left to the popes, but fundamental questions of who would be pope were a matter of which clan of Roman nobility was dominant at 125 The dispute over the episcopal see at Rheims between Gerbert of Aurillac, the future Sylvester II (999–1003), and Arnulf of Orleans is discussed in the 1984 original.

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the moment. When Sergio IV died in 1012, Benedict VIII, previously a layman, became pope thanks only to support from the Tuscolani family. Sergio’s own predecessor John XVIII was deposed five years into his reign, in part because of the fall of his sponsors, the Crescentii. Sergio himself, like Benedict, was put into office by the Tuscolani. Benedict’s defeated competition, a certain Gregory, had popular support and that of the Stefaniani family.126 To fortify this argument comes the characterization of Vogelstein and Rieger: John XVIII and John XIX were “Machlose Geschoepfe des Cresentius” (powerless creations of the Crescentii).127 When Shepkaru seconds Chazan, saying that “In line with a number of sources, both Latin and Hebrew, Chazan concludes that at the turn of the eleventh century, the pope extended his governmental authority within the religious and secular realms,” we must question the origins of this conclusion.128 Which of the early eleventh-­century papal puppets is intended? In 1984, I noted that long ago Pfister and then much afterward Duby scoffed at the idea that the pope could have moved the then weakling king of France, Robert the Pious, to divorce his wife. Compliance with papal demands was at royal will. With respect to Jews, the situation was hardly conducive to papal initiatives of any kind, let alone those that flew in the face of a royalty or nobility committed to violence. 126 Paolo Brezzi, Roma e l’Impero medioevale, 179–94. 127 Vogelstein and Rieger, 1: 211, who also say Benedict VIII and John XIX were warlike lords from Tusculum (near Rome), whose interests were worldly. 128 Shepkaru, Martyrs, 149. Shepkaru’s discussion of the 1007 goes from page 145 to 153. I find it to rely heavily on the contrasting of chronicles and various materials that have no concrete relationship one to another, for instance, to cite Rashi on Isaiah 53:9, as reflecting on the 1007, when, in fact, Rashi is first and foremost parsing the biblical text (apropos earlier comments, it is one thing when the 1007 uses Rashi, quite another to say that Rashi is reflecting on the 1007, which, of course, is our only direct narration of the supposed events). That Rashi knew Jews had been punished by rulers is almost a truism, which could apply to anybody from the Babylonians to the Romans, but absolutely with no certainty to events shortly before his time. Rashi’s reference could also be to the events of 1096, since we do not know exactly when Rashi ceased writing. To suggest, as does Shepkaru, that Rashi means Robert the Pious seems to me to be overreaching.

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Roman Influence Yet could not Roman Jewry have gotten help for their fellows in France, as they did for themselves in Rome after the mid-­eleventh century in the form of Dispar nimirum est and, eventually, Sicut Iudaeis non, as I described the Roman Jewish situation in 1984? Norman Golb and Irving Agus say they could, and did. Their main support is the diary of Benjamin of Tudela in combination with the 1007. Benjamin appears to imply that it was not out of the ordinary for Jews to come to the papal court. Yet, here, Benjamin, who normally glorifies all things Jewish, holds back: not Roman Jewry as a whole, he tells us, but only one person, titled the master of the fabric of the papal palace – a position held since at least Renaissance times, and probably much earlier, by a high prelate, often a Cardinal – had unrestricted access to the papal abode.129 In the event, to rely on a description from the later twelfth century, when Benjamin was writing, as though it conveys an accurate picture of goings on more than a century earlier, is perilous. Not to mention, if Jews did have direct, or even indirect, influence in the papal court about the year 1000, then why must we wait beyond the year 1007, until 1063 or 1065, for a text like Dispar nimirum est to be issued? A text like the version of Sicut Iudaeis non found in the 1007 would also have rendered Dispar nimirum superfluous had the latter first appeared as a sequitur, rather than the predecessor to Sicut Iudaeis that it is. Cautioning us further not to interpret possible Jewish access to the popes as influence is the Jews’ status in medieval Rome, where Jewish residence was not based on sufferance (toleration) or a charter. In Rome, where Jews had lived since ancient times, they were cives, as defined by Roman law, or what we might call citizens. When

129 It is doubtful that anyone other than a prelate held this post in Benjamin’s day, too, suggesting that Benjamin may have exaggerated wildly the role of a Jewish functionary in the papal court, something that Benjamin was not adverse to doing, of instance, in the glories he ascribed to the Babylonian Exilarch. On Benjamin, see M. Adler, ed. and trans., The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela (London: Oxford University Press, 1907), esp. 5–7. Benjamin says, though, that there are only two hundred Jews in Rome.

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they petitioned for a text like Sicut Iudaeis non or Dispar nimirum est it was not to gain entry, it was to obtain special, additional rights.130 Rome was also no metropolis. Movement about the city would not have been restricted, so that Jews wandering in and out of the papal court of itself signifies nothing. Besides, as I argued in the 1984 original with respect to the Pierleoni, it was the patronage of this family to the Jews who lived in Pierleoni territories that resulted in the issuance of both Dispar nimirum est and Sicut Iudaeis non. Finally, if Jews were indeed influential, why does Chris Wikham, in his recent book on Rome in the eleventh through the start of the thirteenth century, not mention Jews at all? This is a book of social history that studies everyday life, including living and working arrangements in great detail. As far as Wikham is concerned, Jews played no noticeable role.131 Was this oversight, or is there simply no documentation, suggesting that Jewish influence, whatever it was, was hidden from view? What is known, or surmised, about Jews in early eleventh-­century Rome, therefore, tells us nothing about the 1007 or its origins.

Self-­Help It is, however, not only on the question of possible Jewish influence that Golb and Agus base their arguments; to Golb we shall return when speaking about the papal legate.132 Agus rests his case on a responsum.133 The actors are a deceased debtor and a creditor whom the debtors’ heirs have not paid. The creditor petitions a ruler to 130 See Osvaldo Cavallar and Julius Kirshner, “Jews as Citizens in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy: The Case of Isacco da Pisa,” Jewish History 25 (2011): 269–318. 131 Chris Wickham, Medieval Rome: Stability and Crisis of a City, 900–1150 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 132 Golb, Normandy, 8, says there were people going in and out before the pope, much like the Yehiel mentioned by Benjamin of Tudela about 1165. The text, as in the note above, does not support this. Note that Benjamin, about 1165, uses papa for pope – correct Italian – but not yet ’apifior; Adler, The Itinerary, 5–7. 133 The responsum is discussed by I. A. Agus, “Control of Roads by Jews in Pre-­Crusade Europe,” Jewish Quarterly Review 48 (1957): 93–98; and the original Hebrew in Yoel Mueller, Teshuvot hakhame Tzarfat veLotair (Vienna, 1881), no. 34. The responsum is

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get his money back. The ruler replies: “I cannot apply force to heirs of the debtor. If you go and press the pope, who is the rosh hahegmonim, ‘the head of the bishops,’ he will command that (unnamed) bishop to force the heirs to pay, [which I cannot do] since they do not dwell be-­memshalti, ‘under my jurisdiction,’ and I do not want that bishop ‘to hate me’.” The creditor sets out, spending his own money for the journey. And the pope did well by him (lit. ken); he ordered the bishop to force the heirs to pay. As with all responsa, we cannot know whether this is a school exercise or if the question is real, or possibly a real incident that has been modified to sharpen a legal conundrum. This kind of manipulation was the norm in schools of non-­Jewish law. That it was also the practice in Jewish schools is, to me, beyond doubt. Nonetheless, in a legal text, even a fiction cannot stray too far from reality. Using as proof the line in the 1007 that Jacob ben Yequtiel would provide a letter of salvus conductus, safe conduct, to all the communities [telling them] to honor (welcome) the papal legate, presumably richly, Agus argues that Jews controlled the roads and were able to protect travelers.134 Such letters, as Agus shows, did exist, but one must be careful not to exaggerate their importance, which is precisely what Agus does when he exuberantly mines the 1007 to argue that the idea of freely going to the pope, even for things as inconsequential as collecting an overdue debt of one individual Jew to another, was not fantasy. The idea of approaching the pope is reasonable; for what, and when, is something else. Agus would also have us believe the responsum is from the early eleventh century, accepting as he does the 1007 as verity. However, Mueller, the editor of the responsum’s text, is more persuaded the issuer was Rabbenu Tam in the mid-­to later twelfth century. I wish to push its composition another five decades or so further. Three terms in the responum support this claim. The first is nifiorah, for



also discussed in the 1984 original. The conclusions are the same; however, each of the discussions covers a complementary point, and, hence, I have let both stand. 134 ‫ ואמסור בידו כתב חתימתי בכל הקהילות שיכבדוהו‬is the line in the 1007 Agus is building on, but the line is clearly bravado.

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pope, the second is rosh hahegmonim, head of the bishops, and the third is memshalti, jurisdiction. Despite the orthographic resemblance, the first term, nifiorah, is not pope. However, to justify its use, one has to assume the thirteenth-­century ’apifior already existed, which allows the substitution of nifiorah, a corruption of pifiora, which is the royal litter that is carried by high officials, one after the other, in hegemonic order, as in a chain of command, including a dux and a hegmon. The source, Jastrow tell us, is Avodah Zara 11a.135 The second term, rosh hahegmonim, can only be from the thirteenth century when the pope took command of the Church in practice, not just in the theory laid out in the late eleventh-­century Gregorian Reform. Most interestingly, although the title, or status, of “Head of the Bishops” is in use today, in the Middle Ages it seems to have appeared only in Hebrew. Here was an accurate Jewish perception of reality, yet one that did not exist before about 1200. The third term, memshalti, my jurisdiction, we have seen points squarely to the thirteenth century. As Gavin Langmuir explained in his pioneering essay Tanquam Servi, from 1223 and afterward, the French king established the principle of kingdom-­wide legislation by covenanting with his counts and dukes about Jews. Together, they agreed to assign Jews to respective domains of noble and royal jurisdiction with the status of tanquam servi, that is, like slaves, but not, strictly speaking, slaves.136 From this moment, French 135 Marcus Jastrow, Dictionary 1168–69. The key word in the responsum is nifiorah, which is a corruption of sorts, as Jastrow, 1169, explains, of pifiora, a royal litter. Jastrow cites Avodah Zara 11a nifra naqit nura papifiora ldukhsa duschsa, “the torchbearer carries the light in front of the litter, the chief lectarius (behind the litter carries the light) for the dux, the dux for the hegmon, the hegemon for the comes; does the comes carry the light before the people (that follow the procession)?” The Targum which appears in Google Scholar is nifiorah dipifiorah. This is then a chain of hegemony, in which no term intrinsically refers to the church, but could be made to do so. The midrash is about the ‘amud ha’esh in the desert. And it is found in Judah Eisenstein, Osar midrashim (New York: s.p., 1915), 71, and other places. 136 On this, see Gavin Langmuir, “Tanquam Servi, The Change in Jewish Status in French Law about 1200,” in Les juifs dans l’histoire de France, ed. Myriam Yardeni (Leiden: Brill, 1981). It must be appreciated that tanquam servi is a legal category, one invented to give the Jews, otherwise lacking one, a legal status, both to justify and

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Jews would learn all too well the vices and virtues of this status, including, especially as far as the 1007 was concerned, how it was affected by the clash between competing claims to jurisdiction that, sharpened by political theorizing on both sides, pitted the papacy against increasingly powerful lay rule.137 By whose memshelah, whose authority, were the Jews governed? The Jews were beginning to see advantage in the possessor of that authority being the pope. As the responsum exemplifies, from about the later twelfth century, or the early thirteenth, the idea of turning to the pope was beginning to spread throughout the northern French Jewish world. The responsum, with the exaggeration of going to the pope for almost anything, may thus be an example of medieval Jewish irony of a kind with the irony I have discussed in examining the Blois letters. The irony in this instance emphasizes that there are moments when the pope is available.138 However, that this was so could only have been known from experience. And the earliest example of that experience, a turning away from darker papal letters of former times (which will be examined below), was the letters of Alexander II in 1063 and 1065; and how much the more the bull Sicut Iudaeis non of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, capped by the papal claim to direct jurisdiction over Jews – Jews who are be-­memshalti – made in the mid-­thirteenth century.139 It remained for the 1007 to tie the strings together.

Jacob ben Y equt iel Let us turn to Jacob ben Yequtiel himself. Chazan has suggested that the purpose of the 1007, other than to impart “simple truths,” to qualify their residence in the kingdom and dukedoms. Thomas Aquinas would convert the term, or one like it, into “civil servitude.” This is, in fact, the status of everybody today with respect to the modern state – being directly dependent on our governments. 137 On the clash of lay and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, see the discussion in the 1984 original. 138 On irony, see Stow, Jewish Dogs, 111–18. 139 On early papal letters, see the discussion of Leo VII and Erfurt, and also Simonsohn, The Apostolic See, 1: 27–33.

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is to glorify Jacob ben Yequtiel. Jacob is being honored, but exactly how is something else. Shepkaru, for instance, sees him as one of the leaders of northern Jewry, although it is not clear why.140 Jacob is certainly well off. However, the 1007 is silent about the source of Jacob’s wealth. Agus would see him as a great merchant, yet because he has a large amount of cash and precious metals with him, he might also have been a lender. Regardless, Jacob announces “I have come ‘al ra‘ati min hayehudim,” in my suffering, or misery, from the Jews. The singular self-­reference makes little sense. Was he saying he was carrying the burdens of all his people? Perhaps; and ra‘ati is indeed the word as written in the manuscript. But let us recall that the manuscript is from centuries later. I would like to suggest that, originally, the manuscript had be-­da‘ati, “on my own initiative”; a change from daled to resh requires the slightest slip of the scribal hand, or even a slight erasure.141 If so, if the original was da‘at, was Jacob challenging rabbinic leaders or a lay communal council, the forces that were competing in his day to head the communities themselves? It is notable that not one rabbi figures in the story.142 Moreover, explicit or implicit, the initiative is Jacob’s alone, and there is no reason either to accept or reject the idea that he enjoyed a formal leadership-­role. Jacob, as we have noted, is portrayed as one of those mythical Jewish heroes along the lines of Ahimaaz’s ancestors, or Abu Aaron, or Ibn Daud’s Rabbi Hanokh, who eventually disappear. Jacob is also given the unusual and notable name Yequtiel. In the 1090 charter of Emperor Henry IV, one of the heads of the Community is the son of a Yequtiel. The Rokeah mentions an Abu Aaron son of 140 Shepkaru, 331, n. 81, sees the term qatzin, official, as determinant, but one usually sees tovim or hashuvim at this time, and I take qatzin as awarded to glorify Jacob, not indicative of a formal status. 141 In the so-­called Blois letters, in a ms. from Treviso in 1453, copied from an earlier version in Speyer, Count Henri of Troyes is called, in Hebrew, Heinrich, a good example of minor emendation. 142 The free-­standing resh in the ms. attached to the names of the Roman Jews does not, as Agus often claims in other instances, mean rabbi. The term Nasi following one of them is like Exilarch, but is not to be taken literally.

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Kalonymos and Rabbi Yequtiel, and his relative R. Shmuel HaNasi. The poems of Ibn Gabirol refer to a Yequtiel HaSefardi.143 Yequtiel, of course, is one of the names listed by the Yalkut shimoni as belonging to none other than the biblical Moses himself.144 Leader or not, the 1007 has given his hero a name that would make readers associate him with significant persons in other places and perhaps membership in the illustrious Kalonymos family. It is also reasonable to expect that a letter issued by such a person would be respected in other communities. Yet, if we read the “sealed” letters of safe-­conduct Jacob offers to give the legate as complementary to Jacob’s earlier refusal to bow before the pope – both intrinsically polemic, if not messianic, enhancements – the value of the letters as safe conducts becomes secondary. Their greater virtue lies in their intimations of Jewish power (not actual power as Agus portrays it), giving voice to Jewish dreams of someday overcoming Christian hostility. Jewish dependency on the pope, therefore, is temporary. It will last only until God intervenes, one of the 1007’s recurrent themes.

Subt let y The subtlety of the 1007 text is enormous. Everything counts, even the tiniest details, including the names and titles of Roman Jewish leaders. They are referred to as hashuvim, important ones, an honoric, if not formal position, that appears also in the Scroll of Ahimaaz and was likely common in all Italian Jewish communities. Common, too, are the names of the hashuvim, which are also typical of Rome. Was the 1007, resident as he surely was in northern France, copying these names from Benjamin of Tudela? Otherwise, there is no way

143 For these references, see Abraham Grossman, “Hagiratah shel mishpahat Kalonymos meItaliah leGermaniah beyemei habeinayim,” Zion 40 (1975): 154–85, esp. 156; and Zion 48 (1983): 233–35; also Haberman, Sefer Gezerot, 125; and esp. the Charter of Henry IV of 1090, in Amnon Linder, The Jews in the Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), no. 603. 144 Attributed to Shimon HaDarshan, thirteenth century; on Leviticus, remez 428; and Exodus, remez 166.

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further to identify these people, real or fictional. Still, this segment of the 1007 describing Jacob’s dealings in Rome, including his magnanimity to fellow Jews, enhances his figure. More importantly, it indicates the need for organization and patience when making appeals. The pope will act, but deliberately – does he not ask for fifteen days to confer with his bishops? – not at the drop of a hat. Even the responsum understands that turning to the pope entails a complex legal procedure.

T he Legat e Does this apply also to the role of the papal legate? We have observed that in real life, the legate’s mission would have been abortive. Most of northern France’s Jews would have been dead or converted long before he set out. Symbolically, however, the legate-­sequence, from start to finish, reinforces the idea that well-thought-out Jewish intervention pays off. The legate’s needs must be met, his travels and reception planned. A real legate, of course, never existed, even if attempts have been made to identify one. Blumenkranz speaks of a bishop of Piperno (Priverno) as a possibility, one Pietro, who was sent on a papal mission, and who was in office from 1008–1029, overlapping neatly with the 1007’s four-­year itinerary.145 However, Pietro’s mission ended in two years, and as far as can be ascertained, it had nothing to do with Jews. Norman Golb suggests improbably that the legate was to seek help from none other than the French King Robert, the same king the 1007 accuses of stirring up the attack and forced conversion. There is also a problem with the “four years.” Pope John XVIII was deposed and died in 1009, two years after the year 1007, the victim of warring Roman factions. Would not this event have cut the legate’s mission short, as well as it automatically would have cancelled his mandate? Golb and Richard Landes try to overcome this dilemma by suggesting the 1007 should be redated to 1009 or

145 Pius Gams, Series episcoporum ecclesiae catholicae (Regensberg: Hiersemann, 1873), 732, where he lists a Benedictus as bishop from 993 and a Petrus from 1010 (to 1017?).

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something similar.146 Landes’s suggestion that the Hebrew author made a mistake reckoning the match of Hebrew and Latin dates is intriguing, linking the attack on French Jews to the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in that year. We might be tempted to accept this redating, were it not that, as we are about to see, Landes’s other calculations with regard to the chronicles of Ademar and Glaber, where this event features, are unsustainable.147 Finally, with respect to the legate, there is an additional matter that nobody has considered. The popes had a chancery where papal letters were catalogued and preserved. Where, then, is the brief the pope gave to his legate to circulate? If an early eleventh-­century pope issued a text much like the final Sicut Iudaeis non, there should be a record. Considering the multiple stops on the supposed legate’s journey, we might at least expect a copy of the brief to have been unearthed at some place along his route, if not in Rome itself. A copy of a letter attributed to Leo VII, for example, though missing from papal archives, has been found in Mainz.148 But with respect to the brief the 1007 legate was supposed to be carrying, there is only silence; for like the legate himself, this brief never existed.149 Indeed, between the time of the possible letter of Leo VII in 937 and

146 Golb, Normandy, 9, juggles the dates of exactly when the persecution took place, to calculate when Jacob would have arrived in Rome, and whether the pope would have been John XVIII to 1009, Sergius IV to 1012, or Benedict VIII 1012 to 1024. Of course, none of this works for a single pope, as the text seems to imply. With the turmoil that always accompanied – still accompanies – the death of one pope and the election of a new one, it is absurd to think that during the interregnum anybody was sending out legates or that the Jews themselves, perhaps fearful of supporting the “wrong” candidate, would have approached the pope with a major request. 147 Richard Landes, “The Massacres of 1010,” 82–86, and n. 17, there 148 See below, in the section titled “Erfurt and Leo VII” on the identification of Leo’s letter. 149 This very firm conclusion rests not only on the near certainty that no legate existed to carry the letter, but on the knowledge that so much correspondence otherwise was preserved in one form or another. There is a limit to historical “maybes,” and here it has been resoundingly reached.

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that of Alexander II in 1063, not one papal document concerning Jews has survived.150

T he Royal Court The legate is not the only problematic figure. The king in the 1007 is surrounded by sarav vepahotav, not hegmonav: lay nobles and officials, not bishops. Lay officials are characteristic of the thirteenth century, a subject about which much has been written.151 They are wholly atypical for the early eleventh century, when bishops – loyal to the kings who appointed them, not the popes, who did not – were the rule.152 There is also the matter of the duke. In the thirteenth century, following the feudal default of the English King John Lackland as Duke of Normandy to the French King Philip Augustus, the Duke and the King of France were one and the same person. The 1007 had no problem “coordinating” between the two. In the real, non-­ fictional eleventh century, coordination, specifically with Richard, the duke named in the 1007 text, was imperfect. Richard joined Robert the Pious in the case of heretics at Orleans in 1017, but he broke ranks, as Stock tells us, when it came to the contemporary Count Rainard of Sens, eventually pardoning him. This is the same Rainard whom more than one chronicler, including Glaber, berates for Judaizing and consorting with Jews. Stock also notes that there is no Duke of Normandy in the various persecution stories of Gla 150 Simonsohn, The Apostolic See, p. 34, number 35 – which he takes to be the letter secured by Jacob b. Yequtiel – says “the text has not survived.” Yet had this letter existed, Alexander II’s Dispar nimirum est of 1063 would have looked radically different. 151 The classic essay on this subject is Joseph R. Strayer, “The Laicization of French and English Society in the Thirteenth Century,” Speculum 15 (1940): 76–86; and, more recently, see also the collection of essays on this subject in Susan Reynolds, Janet Nelson, and Jane Martindale, eds., Law, Laity, and Solidarities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). 152 Shepkaru, Martyrs, 160, and 156, too, notes this, and adds that in Ademar’s chronicle, King Robert and Queen Constance come to Orleans accompanied by bishops, who are not named in the 1007.

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ber beyond that of Orleans, where a snitch, Arefast, is the duke’s vassal.153 In addition, as Jordan reminds us, before the thirteenth century, king and duke were essentially independent of each other. This would make the implicit alliance of the two in the 1007, far more binding than Duke Richard’s simple presence at Orleans, an eleventh-­century impossibility.154

Flander s Another matter of grave doubt is Jacob’s resettlement in Flanders. In the closing section of the 1007, Jacob settles and dies in Flanders. Those who insist on verifying the authenticity of the events in the 1007 have made valiant attempts to justify the actuality of this settlement. Baron objects to what he calls the otherwise normally precise work of Jean Stengers, who says that Jews did not settle in Flanders, nor were they invited there, until the thirteenth century. However, Baron’s evidence is the 1007, which is circular, using material that itself needs to be proved to demonstrate or disprove something else.155 Golb says the 1007 report of settlement is correct 153 Stock, The Implications of Literacy, 456–72, and various other locations, including on Rainard. 154 Jordan, French Monarchy, 52–53, who makes no mention of the 1007. 155 Note again Baron, SRH, vol. 7, p. 177, whose sole reference in this note is to his own chap. 20, nn. 8 & 74, where he discusses the legend of Elhanan the Jewish pope. Baron then uncharacteristically tries to support the 1007’s authenticity, n. 74, by pointing out, as does Golb, that the invitation to Flanders was legitimate, since the Duke’s name was Baldwin. Henri Gross, Gallia Judaica, 72 (Paris: Peeters, 1897), says the text should read Baldwin/Bodouin. However, the name Baldwin fits nearly every Flemish count from sometime in the ninth century, which is to say this evidence is not good. Baron’s rejection of Stengers (SRH 4:265) has no grounds; Jean Stengers, Les juifs dans les Pays-­Bas au moyen âge (Palais des Académies, Bruxelles ), 3–10. Malkiel’s remark that to reject the factuality of the report is to argue from silence is to grasp at straws – actually, to rely on a hackneyed expression, since the silence in this case roars, mightily disturbed as it is by the evidence, or more precisely, Stenger’s intensive search that yielded no evidence. To argue from a medieval chronicle or literary text, whichever one wishes to name the 1007, that a settlement existed, when, in fact, no other source confirms it, when, indeed, the absence of any record following detailed research says no source exists, suggests we should begin from doubt, to dispel which, one needs first to prove the 1007

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because, following Baron’s reasoning, the name of the count, Baldwin, is accurate. One has to modify the Hebrew slightly to arrive at a reading of “Baldwin,” but this is not the problem. Rather, it is that Baldwin was the name of nearly every Flemish count. The only evidence, apart from the 1007, for a Jewish settlement in Flanders before the thirteenth century is the sixteenth-­century chronicle of Pierre d’Oudegherst, which says Jews were expelled because Count Charles wished to be rid of Jews and usurers, since they were guilty of killing Christ.156 As Stengers correctly objects, this text cannot be treated as historically accurate. Regarding the thirteenth century, Jordan, whose research is meticulous, says that in the year 1212, “virtually no Jews [were] living there [in Flanders].”157 Which is exactly the point. There were few or no Jews in Flanders in the thirteenth century, because there were almost certainly no Jews previously. For me, and as already indicated, Jacob ben Yequtiel’s settlement in Flanders is explicable only because it allows the 1007 to have Jacob disappear, as is the fate of heroes in other Jewish stories of origin, while his soul departs heavenward in purity. Without Jacob and his family vanishing, there is no way

contains authentic early eleventh-­century materials, whose inexistence is the central argument of my entire essay. 156 This is hardly a reliable source, not only because of its content, but also because of its enormous chronological distance from what went on. Robert Stacey in an oral communication has said that there is no reason a count of Flanders would have invited Jews before that date. 157 Jordan, French Monarchy, 69: “virtually no Jews living there (1212).” Salomon Ullmann, Histoire des juifs en Belgique jusqu’au 18e siècle (Antwerp: Delplace, Koch, 1927), mentions the only earlier reference to Jews, of 1119, taken from Pierre d’Oudegherst: Les chroniques et annals de Flandres, 1571, p. 116: “lesquels tendoyent pour tenir le peuple en bonne paix, & concorde. Il [le Bon conte Charle] chassa & bannit de Flandre, tous juyfs & vsuriers, lesquels avoyent auparavant illec vefcu soubs tribut: disant qu’il ne les vouloit souffrir, jusques à ce qu’ils eussent fatisfaict, & amendé, le meurdre par eux cómis, en la personne du fils de leur Seigneur.” Stengers rightly calls this report fantastic, 85–86, and says there are no Jews in Flanders until the thirteenth century. He points also to the essay of Israel Levi of 1906 and rejects as parallels to the 1007 the chronicles of Glaber and Ademar.

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for the 1007 to perpetrate his fiction and escape questions about Jacob’s descendants. Still, a small mystery is left. Jacob goes to Flanders with his son Judah, the one he left as hostage with the Duke of Normandy. The 1007 seems to be intimating that once the legate completed his task, the son was set free. Hostages – important people kept as prisoners – were anything but rare in the Middle Ages, most famously, King Richard of England at the end of the twelfth century. However, why the duke would have wanted a hostage from Jacob is not clear, unless this is just another way of saying Jacob – to be sure, the fictional Jacob – as a personage, was truly important. We are also, perfectly in synchrony with the spirit of the 1007, reminded of the story of Joseph, separated for a time from his father Jacob – now Jacob ben Yequtiel – but ultimately restored to him, although our Jacob plays more the role of Moses going to Pharoah than that of the passive, grieving Jacob of Genesis.158 But, then, did we not recall that Moses also bore the name Yequtiel, as in Jacob ben Yequtiel?

T he Esot er ic Some things in the 1007 are not obvious, perhaps most notably the resort to fiction and an esoteric approach. More than one reader has questioned why I have claimed the esoterism exists.159 Yet how otherwise could a Jew, any Jew, writing in the thirteenth century, say outright that the king was dangerous? Nonetheless – and as I wrote in 1984 – disguising the story to circumvent the king was not the principal justification for writing by innuendo. Rather, how could the 1007 tell the Jews directly that their best hope was 158 I thank Jason Kalman and the editorial staff of the HUC Press for this idea. 159 Both Chazan and Malkiel, 278, nn.78–79, latched on to the first suggestion, esoterism in order to hide from the king. However, both failed to see its immediate rejection in favor of the two-­pages-­long explanation in the 1984 edition, that the esoterism was for internal consumption, telling the Jews how to swallow being under papal dominion, but also how to understand where advantage might be had. Since both Chazan and Malkiel see the 1007 reflecting real events, they apparently questioned as well the idea that the 1007 was creating a fiction about how to approach the pope.

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the pope, with his ambivalent policies, protecting them, on the one hand, but doing everything possible, on the other, to prevent “excessive [Jewish-­Christian] familiarity,” as papal letters phrase it, and, beyond that, ensuring Jewish submissiveness, including by attacking their treasured writings? The 1007 knew that for contemporary thirteenth-­century Jewish ears, this advice would be highly disturbing. His story may have been one ultimately of hope, yet the time of that hope was the (distant) future. In the present, Jews must find the strength to endure papal duality, while they, along with the popes, contended with royal resistance, a message that was best conveyed through a parable, that is, through esoterism, saying one thing, meaning another.

Memshalah Let us, finally, return to the word memshalah, “jurisdiction.” The central aim of the 1007 is to explain, in the guise of a Jewish Chanson de geste that is also something of a Romance, the jurisdictional claims of the pope over the perforce subservient Jews. That the hero, by virtue of his faith in God, deflects a sword vicariously rather than by wielding a real one makes the fictional adventure so very much an epitome of medieval Jewish realities. This would have been especialy true by the thirteenth century, when various laws had forced Jews to disarm.160 To explain the popes and their claims effectively in this light presented a complex challenge. As the responsum of Agus shows, Jews were not always sure where jurisdiction lay. By the thirteenth century, the question of lending and debts, the one asked in the responsum, had become something of a football kicked between lay and ecclesiastic forces, with the papacy, as I have shown elsewhere, taking the more permissive side. Meir ben Shimon said clearly that the pope was a better support of Jewish lending than the King Louis IX.161 What of Judaism itself? Who had the authority to 160 See Guido Kisch, The Jews in Medieval Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 109–10, 132–34. 161 See Kenneth Stow, “Papal and Royal Attitudes Toward Lending in the Thirteenth Century,” AJS Review 6 (1981): 161–84.

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guarantee its protection and quash attempts at forced conversion? The 1236 bull of Gregory IX illustrates the lay of the land. Only the pope could be trusted, if conditionally. To convey his message, the 1007 called the pope by every available title indicating status and power. He then followed with two forceful statements by Jacob ben Yequtiel, separated by about one hundred or so words in the text – we must remember he is creating these conversations, not reproducing real ones – and, in both, the same person is saying the same thing.162 The single difference between the two is whom Jacob is addressing; the emphasis is in the

162 Even were the conversations real, it would still be the same person, saying the same thing to two different people, and about each other. To wit, first: you [the duke] do not have the power; the pope does. Second: they [the duke and king] have usurped your [the pope’s] power. That I reversed the order of these two mutally reinforcing statements in the 1984 original and joined them together using a parenthesis and dots to indicate the jointure was, however, questioned, indeed, to the point that the result was called a conflation. Yet conflation occurs when one puts together two unrelated texts to create a third that distorts and is distorting, usually pejoratively. As one online dictionary puts it: “when you conflate two different ideas, (you) take parts of one and parts of another to build your own Frankenstein version of things.” This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, what one finds in the 1007. Nonetheless, Robert Chazan chose to use the term in his “Review,” anxious, as he likely was, to support his earlier essay, which argues that the 1007’s events were real (Robert Chazan, “1007–1012, Initial Crisis for Northern European Jewry,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 39 [1972]: 101–18). Most probably, he took as conflation the (inconsequential) reversed order and the fact that to accomplish the jointure of the two statements, I had to change the “you” in the statement to the duke to “they.” The pronoun rightly should have been placed within the parenthesis that was inserted to show the two statements had been joined, with dots to indicate a gap. But for some reason, surely a typographical error, the text reads as follows: “ . . . For) they do not.” As one knowledgeable of the text, Chazan should have grasped that the error was nothing more than typographical and that no distortion, the sine qua non of conflation, had crept in. In the revised edition, this error has been corrected, in part, by splitting the two statements to ensure clarity; everything else, however, remains the same, that is, translations and interpretation. Why David Malkiel, who is clear that Jacob is delivering a message to the pope, followed Chazan by using “conflation” is disappointing. What, to repeat, we really have here, is the author of a fiction stressing his point by repetition. See further comment in note 411, below.

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repetition. Indeed, since these statements convey the essence of his message, the 1007 has Jacob say it twice: first, to the duke: “You do not have memshalah over the Jews, to make them desert their Torah or to harm them in any way; that belongs to the pope.” Second, to the pope: “You are the head of the nations . . . ​and therefore, out of my misery (or on my own initiative), I came to you to cry out from the Jews who are under your just authority, memshelet reshutkhah, for evil men have arisen, killing many and forcibly converting others.”163 The 1007 is translating the Latin ius iudicandi or potestas iudicandi, the right of judging, or even auctoritas iudicandi, the authority to judge, all three important terms in the thirteenth-­century jockeying between popes and kings. Who, as we have already noted, had potestas, power, and who auctoritas, authority – the greater of the two, which ordained who was the holder of the first.164 For the 1007, the one who possessed auctoritas was the pope, and the pope alone. It was he who exercised the memshalah, he, and no other. The point could not have been more accurately made.165 * * * I rest my case. The 1007 is a unique literary creation with a didactic motive. It is the construction of a genius, drawing on both Latin and Hebraic traditions, and revealing acculturation at the highest level and in the classical Jewish way, upon which I dwelled at length in Theater of Acculturation and Alienated Minority. Jews take in ideas, even objects, from the outside, which they then transform into something purely Jewish – “Israelitize,” as the late Nahum Sarna phrased it for the biblical period. This is exactly what the 1007 did,



163 . . . .‫ כי אם על פי האפיפיור של רומא‬,‫לא לכם הממשלה על ישראל להעבירם מתורתם ולעשות להם מאומה‬ ‫ כי קמו‬,‫ ​על כן באתי לזעוק אליך על ר\דעתי מן היהודים היושבים בממשלת רשותך‬. . . ‫ראש האומות אתה‬ . . . .‫עליהם אנשי בליעל בלי רשותך והרגו מהם הרבה ואנסו מקצתם‬ 164 For a recent discussion of ecclesiastical as opposed to lay authority, see Chris Jones, ed., John of Paris, Beyond Royal and Papal Power. Disputatio 23 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015). 165 Indeed, when Chazan and others used the term conflation to describe my reading and joining of these statements, they were thoroughly obscuring the 1007’s meaning and importance.

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incorporating papal thinking into a Jewish context in order to create a Jewish political theory that was apt for the thirteenth century. To make this point clearer yet, I will take a further step. I will, for argumentations’s sake, stipulate that the 1007 does date to sometime in the early eleventh century – indeed, even before the issue of Dispar nimirum est; for were the text post-­Dispar nimirum, some of this canon’s wording would have appeared in it. How, then, would the 1007 read with so-­called anachronisms removed? It would go as follows: In the year 1007, the king and his court of bishops (not lay officers as in the text) challenged the Jews to be “one people” [with the Christians]. The Jews refused, and the king started to massacre them. Some (later terms like hasidei ‘elyon would not be used) took their own lives. A man named Senior was killed for cursing an image (inexplicably, since real, rather than literary, accusations post-­date the eleventh century). Then the Duke of Normandy, Richard, was angered by Jacob ben Yequtiel, whom the Duke tried to kill with his (perfectly regular) sword. The Duke changed his mind. Jacob went to Rome and spoke to the pope. (How he got to the pope is not clear, nor can we say what he said. He might have complained about Duke Richard, although the pope was a bit confused about why Jacob would think he, the pope, could help. He may have wished Jacob well, if his patrons, the Tuscolani family, thought this might be good for relations with Jews in Rome, but we have no idea of what the pope either said or did.) The Jews of Rome treated Jacob well, who then decamped for some place in northern France, south of Brabant, and, eventually, Flanders, where there were no Jews, so that it is not clear why he decided to go there. Jacob died there, but no traces of his family have survived. This is the 1007 without the so-­called anachronisms. A disjointed story lacking purpose and reason, but especially coherence. Nothing holds together. It should be obvious that what has been removed are not anachronisms, but the story’s heart, its essence. The eleventh-­ century king of France would have been surrounded by bishops, not laymen. Motifs of martyrdom would not have been attached to the Jews who died. In the event, the question of rising to heaven as

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the sole, or at least indespensible, definer of whether a text reflects Crusade narratives, as Shepkaru posits, I leave as questionable. To me, this single standard is too narrow. We would have to guess why Senior curses or desecrates images, since actual accusations came after the eleventh century. Created in the thirteenth century, the character of Senior “scorning and cursing” is intended to introduce the central argument that the king is wicked, the pope just; however, in the end God will save, so that, in the meantime, Jews should not act precipitously. As in the midrash on Leviticus, it is the wicked kingdom that “scorns and curses,” while God protects the Jews, who, by implication, control their tempers.166 The Duke of Normandy in the early eleventh century would have favored Jews – the same Jews whom Richard’s descendant William, in the manner of other contemporary rulers, brought to England in 1066. He would not have massacred them over their failure to convert. Richard’s level of cooperation with Robert of France would be doubtful, not to mention that, as with the duke, the behavior of Robert the Pious in the 1007 is contrary to everything that anybody has said about the relationship between eleventh-­century rulers and Jews. The reason for not killing Jacob (in the pared down version) goes unsaid, nor is there any explanation why Jacob would want to go to Rome. The pope was weak and without influence in France; to say otherwise would raise the eyebrows of serious medievalists. The conversation between Jacob and the pope, were there one, would be a conversation without rhyme or reason. Were there a payment, we have no way of knowing how much or in what coin. Legates at this time dealt mostly in questions of monastic privilege, and French bishops had often opposed them. So what would the pope have had a legate say? There was as yet no Sicut Iudaeis non. From the time of Gregory the Great until Alexander II, the three or four surviving papal statements that mention Jews are extremely negative. The settlement in Flanders is a mystery. The critical motifs of 166 Vayiqra Rabbah 7:6.

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the petil hazahav and the Jews being under direct papal authority would be absent, as well as the titles of “Head of the Bishops” and “The King of the Nations.” It is doubtful Glaber’s writings would have spread far enough northward so swiftly in the early eleventh century as to be so strikingly paraphrased as the 1007 recreates them: “the people snarled, roared.” But finally, let us return to the fifteen days that the pope asked Jacob to allow him for consultations, which, until now, have gone not only unexplained, but unnoticed. The obvious question is, was there such a practice? There was, but, superfluo dictu, not in the eleventh century, rather the thirteenth, and not in the papal curia, but England, where, lest it be forgotten, the rulers were Norman and the records kept in Norman French, not to mention that the importation of Norman usage was common. The usage, accordingly, was called by the French quinza(e)ine, or the Latin, quindena, which translates “fortnight,” fifteen days. The principal context was to call a meeting, especially a Parliamentary one, within a fifteen-­day time, or to set a meeting for a specific date.167 The first use of the word according to French etymological dictionaries is 1175.168 167 I thank first Robert Somerville for assuring me that the practice of waiting fifteen days was not, according to his vast knowledge of these matters, papal. Robert Stacey then told me the practice was English, from the thirteenth century. He writes: “A quinza(e)ine was a fairly common length of time to use to set an appointment or a meeting: ‘The council will meet on the quinzaine of the Feast of St Bartholomew,’ or some such, meaning in our terms ‘two weeks after the Feast of St Bartholomew.’ The word is extremely common in 13th-­century English administrative records.” William Chester Jordan and Kenneth Pennington also assisted me in this search. 168 Trésor de la langue française informatisé, http://atilf.atilf.fr/, s.v. quinzaine. Charles du Fresne DuCange, Glossarium ad scritores mediae et infimae Latinitatis (Paris, 1734), the classic medieval dictionary, gives the first use in 1216. See also J. W. Fuchs, Olga Weijers, and Marijke Gumbert, Lexicon Latinitatis Nederlandicae Medii Aevi (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 7: s.v. “quindena”: . . . qua propter eorum reciperent ad quindenam deliberationis terminum . . . ​; also: data . . . ​potestate . . . ​con promissam ad quindenam extunc et non ultra progrogandi . . . ​Regardless of whether these two uses refer to a fifteen-­day period or a specific season, it is clear that the fifteen days are the deliberatory time. For the curious, I suggest a Google Scholar search of “quindena,” which, among other examples, brings up the Register of the Scottish Abbey of Cambuskenneth, 1147–1535, with almost no text predating 1201; in texts

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But if the practice is northern French or English, and parliamentary, not curial (the papal court), why does the 1007, with all his knowledge of the popes and canons, use it? Because most likely he had never been in Rome and was in the dark about curial customs. To enhance his story and its air of authenticity, he therefore turned to what he did know and had observed as actual practice in the North.169 Besides, knowledge of papal theory did not require a presence in Rome. It was discussed everywhere and often fiercely debated, in particular, at the University of Paris in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Thus the 1007 could easily take what he knew of papal theory and blend it with a description of the lay deliberative practices that were commonplace in his own daily experience. The imputed operation of these practices at Rome (in the context of properly understood papal theory) reinforces the 1007’s central claim that the pope obeys the law and observes (the medieval ideal of ) due judicial process. The pope, who, by thirteenth-­century criteria (think of the Magna Carta) takes decisions with the advice and consent of men of rank (here, the curial bishops) runs a “good government,” memshelet reshut. By contrast, the king in the 1007 had begun by responding to the unrestrained popular will, the people’s “snarling,” and only then did he take council. The arbitrariness and bowing to the will of the crowd produced mayhem, the act of an “evil kingdom [government],” malkhut harish‘a, as the king’s rule is named in the 1007’s opening lines. The same epithet would apply to the Duke of Normandy (one and the same person with the French king after from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, the quindenam becomes an almost normal set period for matters like making payments. In other words, the 1007 might expect readers to see the fifteen-­day period he introduces as being the “normal” procedure. For the Register, see http://bit.ly/2mQWcoW. See, too, S. B. Chrimes and A. L. Brown, Select Documents of English Constitutional History, 1307–1485, ( London: A & C Black, Ltd, 1961), 368, concerning a summons for “le jour de la quinzeine de Pasque,” meaning the first of the fifteen-­day period. 169 Above I suggested his direct knowledge of Roman Jews, to the very small extent he has some, may derive from Benjamin of Tudela. It could also have been from travelers. It is no great mystery.

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1204), who then admits – as Meir ben Shimon a bit later accused Louis IX of not recognizing – that certain things, like Jewish belief and practice, are under the aegis of the pope. If, as I believe, this opening of the 1007 story, whose Esther motif easily distracts, is constructed so that it balances the actions of the memshelet reshut of the pope, then the whole falls apart for those who insist the 1007 is the report of a real, early eleventh-­century event. The attack is fashioned as an integral element in a grand fiction, an intentional literary construction that climaxes in the critical interview with the pope. With its special motifs removed, the story is a truly simple one, so simple, in fact, that it makes no sense. Its advice, one-­ dimensional or complex, is inexistent. Restoring the segments that have incorrectly been called “anachronisms” – which we have now seen dominate the whole and are far, far more than “touch ups” that can be cavalierly wiped away – creates an entirely new content and context, the one about which the 1007, living two hundred years later, was actually writing. Analyzed as it has been here, therefore, the 1007 offers not a shred of substantiation for an attack in that early eleventh-­century year or any year close by. Let us turn, then, to the chronicles that are said to demonstrate the contrary. What have they to say on the subject?

Chapter Two

Deception Ademar, Glaber, and Other Chronicles

In 1984, I made the bold statement that comparing the 1007 with a group of three Christian chronicles does nothing to verify the 1007’s authenticity; these are the same chronicles Levi, too, examined and rejected as helpful for understanding the 1007. I then became more emboldened to say that rather than authenticating the 1007, these chronicles provide evidence that the events recorded in the 1007 are fictitious. “Heretical blasphemy,” perhaps, but also correct. With the apparent (but not actual) exception of one sentence in Raoul Glaber’s History, the stories these chronicles tell have nothing in common with the story of the 1007. Not a word in them indicates, even obliquely, that a major forced conversion took place in Normandy, whether in the year 1007, or at any other time.170 Even a literal reading shows that they have been credited with saying what they do not. Were one to interject and ask why we should trust the Crusade chronicles of 1096 and not the 1007, the answer is that in the former, the details jibe on both sides, Jewish and Christian, although here, too, there is need for reserve. The most articulated Crusade 170 Richard Landes has made an attempt to show there was such an event, but one I find wholly unpersuasive, as the continuation will make clear. Malkiel rightly questions Landes’s precision, wondering whether Landes is not the “lumper,” rather than “the sifter” he claims to be be, however one construes this metaphor. Malkiel, Reconstructing, 281, n.105.

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materials were composed or edited about five decades after the events and are wholly stylized, as scholars agree. Still, both Jewish and Christian chronicles say similar things about the same, or proximate events in the same places, and this permits a measure of corroboration; there are also the Memory Books listing martyrs by name and family. The early eleventh-­century chronicles at which we shall be looking, the Quedlingsberg Annals, the History and History of the Abbacy of Limoges by Ademar of Chabannes, and the History of Rodulfus Glaber, do not corroborate even each other. Writers who say otherwise have sought to buttress their opinions with materials from the 932 Council of Erfurt and a letter ascribed to Pope Leo VII from 937. These, too, we shall examine.

T he Medieval Chronicle Each of the chronicles just named records episodes in which Jews were endangered, or died, and all of them were written about the start of the eleventh century, close to the year 1007. Surely, this is corroborative. Yet when it comes to even broad lines, only Glaber and Ademar have something in common, which is the death of Jews after the destruction of the Holy Sepulcher Church in Jerusalem in 1009, an event that did occur and has abundant documentation, including from Muslim writers on the spot; there is record of Byzantine diplomatic actions as well.171 Indeed, of all the items in all the chronicles, the destruction of the Holy Sepulcher is the only happening of which we may be certain. This claim will be justified by analyzing the original texts. Brief mention should be made of the chronicle of Guillaume Godell from about 1170 or 1175. Richard Landes puts much stock in this text, which brings together themes found in each of the abovementioned chronicles. He particularly emphasizes Godell’s statement that in the wake of the events of 1009, many Jews converted out of fear. However, this statement is lifted straight out of Glaber, meaning that we have no assurance this is not a case of one 171 See, for one, Niall Christie, Muslims and Crusaders: Christianity’s Wars in the Middle East, 1095–1382 (London: Routledge, 2014), 125.

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legend affirming another. As Ernest Renan pointed out well over a century ago discussing the legends of St. Francis, even if we get to the original Life of Francis, we have no way of knowing whether what we are reading is anything more than the original legend, not Frances’s real life.172 Medieval chroniclers repeat each other freely, and uncritically, and they kept doing so into nearly modern times. Did not we observe the distinguished, later sixteenth-­century Caesar Baronius copy Ademar’s miracle stories almost verbatim without the slightest hesitation? Repetitions of the same story in more than one chronicle attest to repetition, period; it is always dangerous to insist that chronicled events took place exactly as portrayed. Even when two chronicles say, or seem to be saying, the same thing, there is always room for doubt. In Godell’s case, he could have read, and borrowed from, Ademar and Glaber, as well as from the Quedlingsberg Annals for good measure; and he also had the Crusades and their many chronicles to draw on. Godell is no source for gauging the happenings of the year 1007.173 We must begin, therefore, by returning to the theme raised at the start of the first chapter, the nature of the medieval chronicle and its perilousness as a tool for sifting fact from fiction. Medieval texts that purport to recount the past invariably have a literary quality that must be subjected to appropriate literary analysis. No medieval author wrote without the image in his (and rarely her) mind of a world of (Platonic) ideas to which the real one must (be pictured to) conform; and, consequently, authors took enormous leeway in describing events. For them, the world of ideas was the true one, not the world they observed in real life. Should it happen that a medieval chronicle actually tells us what really happened, it is virtually impossible to know. J. C. Schmitt, we observed, doubts that reality is ever recorded in texts like that of Hermann of Cologne, which he has studied in depth. Others like Spiegel and Morrison 172 Ernest Renan, Études d’histoire religieuse (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1857), chapter on Francis of Assisi. 173 On Godell, see Sylvain Gouguenheim, Les Fausses terreurs de l’an mil (Paris: Picard, 1999) 25.

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might be more reserved, but if asked to choose between Schmitt’s approach and that of scholars who insist chronicled accounts are true, they would unhesitatingly chose the former. Glaber, in particular, reveals the elasticity of fantasy, although Ademar is a close second. In his History, Glaber writes that: “In 1033, the savagery of famine became so great that adult sons consumed the [flesh of ] their mothers, and the mothers did the same to their infants, motherly piety cast aside.”174 Cannibalism is not unknown, but we must draw a breath at this description. Likewise, Glaber writes that about the year 1000, heretics were put to death in Italy for expounding Virgil, Juvenal, and Horace in order to fulfill the words of John that Satan must be paid back. We do well to listen to Brian Stock, who spent years examining Glaber and Ademar and cautions that Glaber’s constant typologies preclude reading anything in the chronicle as an accurate record; Ademar he calls even less sophisticated. Stock also finds Glaber inconsistent. Glaber links Duke Richard to King Robert the Pious in the case of the heresy at Orleans in 1017, but fails to mention Richard when speaking of attacks on Jews. This last is telling with respect to the 1007, whose massacre sequence Glaber would be expected to praise and thus to corroborate.175 Glaber is also tendentious. Speaking of the Montforte episode, where the heretics appear in the guise of Judaising, Stock writes: “There are some four episodes of heresy related in the Historiae, all four of which play a part in his [Glaber’s] overall scheme of sin, repentance, and millenarian renewal . . . ​The purpose is to reinforce lay piety.” Glaber manipulates his materials into patterns of good, bad, and social renewal, around which he models and remodels events, notably 174 History II , Migne, PL 142: 640, “Name eo usque devenerat huius saevitia famis ut iam adulti filii consumerent matres, ipsaeque in pavulos, remota pietate matrum idem excercerent”; 644 on heretics, Satanam solvendam (I have not found this text in exactly this form), and 656 on Rainard. 175 Stock, The Implications of Literacy, 465–72. On the slightly later Guibert of Nogent, Stock, Literacy, 503, writes: “He loathed heretics and Jews upon whose comparatively innocent heads he often brought down his pent-­up aggression.” A “rage . . . ​ that surfaced in his uncontrollable nightmares.”

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locating catastrophes one each in the reigns of the Ottos, even though there were none; likewise, the cannibalism of the 1033 famine. Association with Jews is the symbol of misbehavior. Glaber’s “interpretive models, moreover, which evolved from texts, whether disseminated by verbal or written means, were increasingly called upon to provide explanations for behavioral patterns.”176 Stock, whose insights about how analytically disastrous it is to read a text like Glaber’s at face value I take the liberty of citing at length, continues, speaking of “the harmonization [in Glaber] of types of change with a mind to their long-­term effects [that] helps to elucidate a number of otherwise puzzling aspects of his imagination . . . ​Perhaps the easiest to recognize is his over-­simplification of the significance of the millennium and of its symbolic associations. . . . his intermingling of the scientific, based on fact, and the superstitious, based on hearsay; his denomination of all spiritual troubles, whether heretical or orthodox, lay or ecclesiastical, peasant or noble, under the same rubric, and his reworking of collective ideas such as penance, pilgrimage, and the peace of God not merely as abstractions but as realities informing the otherwise meaningless lives of historical actors. . . . In general, the place of reflection is taken by movements of people, in particular, group movements and the ideas that accompany them. The masses become an amorphous intermediary between the individual and the forces of good and evil. . . . The message of the day is that the new has come to replace the old.”177 Specifically on Jews, “The story of Jewish influence in Sens [Count Rainard] opens the door to other issues that are interrelated in Glaber’s mind, namely, Islam, Jerusalem, and heresy. The Jews, whom he sees as the source of Rainard’s downfall, are associated with larger religious and political subversion. The way is thus paved for the destruction of the Holy Sepulcher in the following chapter, which is also a by-product of Jewish intransigence. . . . The story effectively links the idea of religious disorder at home with 176 Ibid., 141. 177 Ibid.

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lack of Christian control over Jerusalem. [And it is connected to a certain Hugh who is perverted by a woman heretic. . . . The presentation comes] to awaken group obligation in living Christians.” The famine is a time of testing, while the end of the rains a sign of renewal, which is how Glaber sees all history.178 To rephrase and repeat: fidelity to what actually transpired is outside Glaber’s interests. To treat his writings as though they respected real events in their own right is historiographically reckless. Our reconstruction toward the end of this essay of Glaber’s story of Jewish decimation in the wake of the attack on the Holy Sepulcher in 1009 confirms Stock’s analysis. Indeed, it will go beyond it. Stock judges Ademar even more harshly. “In Ademar,” he says, “we return to the world of popular culture, pagan cults, and superstition. In Glaber, popular and learned culture are openly contrasted, as he . . . ​weds a foreign theological apparatus of explanation to an oral account of the events. Heresy is one threat among others to universalism, for which he is an active propagandist.” For Ademar, magical and religious practices lead even educated clerics into heresy. “Nor can he [Ademar] resist adding lurid details of orgiastic practices, which were standard fare in many accounts of medieval sects. . . . Ademar not only feared and distrusted the heretics; he was also somewhat in awe of their rites. After their bodies were burnt, he notes, there were no ashes left. Were they taken back by the Devil to be redistributed anew? Glaber’s account of the same episode is a little more detailed, but no more substantial. . . . For Glaber, a particular heresy derived its importance from being part of a more widespread phenomenon. . . . like a disease spreading. . . . As in Ademar, its foreignness to established patterns of order is symbolized by its source, an outsider, a vagabond, and what is worse, a woman . . . ​[who] ‘seduced whomever she wished.’”179 Stock’s analysis is reinforced in the discussions of medieval narrative sources by Janos Bak and Ivan Jukovic, who demonstrate how early

178 Stock, 456–72. 179 Stock, 115–17.

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medieval chronicles are shaped by symbolism tied to political or pious goals.180 Additional authors may easily be cited in agreement. Yet positivists are not easily deterred, especially with regard to the 1007. In order to refute their claims about parallels with the 1007, as well as the existence of the events these so-­called parallels describe, their very reading of the texts must be challenged. In the process, I hope to expose what has been – unawares, I believe, to its practitioners – an historiographic sleight of hand. Rather than confirming the authenticity of the 1007, the three external chronicles of Glaber, Ademar, and the Annals have themselves been validated by contrasting them with a literally read 1007. For example, by imputing to Ademar things he may have never said, Landes, as we shall see, makes Ademar’s chronicle appear to replicate the essence of the forced conversion episode in the 1007. Long ago, Israel Levi understood that comparing the 1007 to other chronicles is fruitless.181 His claims were: First, one might think the 1007 to be authentic, because its king and duke are contemporaries. But, if so, why does no Christian chronicler mention the incident? Second, the suicides in Ademar’s chronicle, Jews taking their own lives, are the imagination of a twelfth-­century monk (after Ademar’s time); in other words, a disputed passage in Ademar that refers to Jewish suicides is a late addition. Third, the Holy Sepulcher story as it is told in Ademar and Glaber, the trigger for attacks, is a pilgrim’s fantasy. Yakim Biamrilahilah, the Muslim ruler in question, had both churches and synagogues destroyed. It makes no sense – if Ademar and Glaber were accurate reporters – to blame the Jews, as though Christians alone suffered as a result of Jewish machinations. What they, especially Glaber, report is an imaginary tale of vengeance by the entire Christian populace acting as one to expel the Jews from towns and provinces: tous les chrétiens décidèrent d’un commun accord quils expulseraient de leur territoire et de leurs villes tous les juifs. Fourth, the story of threatened conversion or 180 Janos Bak and Ivan Jurkovic, Chronicon: Medieval Narrative Sources (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013). 181 Israel Levi in Revue des études juives 52 (1906): 162–68.

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expulsion at Erfurt in 932, often brought in to strengthen claims, is a typical legend of the times. Nor does a Hebrew record support this account, which, for that matter, neither Ademar nor Glaber mention. Levi thus attributes independent origins to each of the stories and texts in play, origins that are principally, if not wholly, in the imagination. Levi’s thinking and mine are the same, but it is principally Levi’s pioneering perspicacity in understanding how to read medieval texts, whether Latin or Hebrew, that must be affirmed against detractors. It is for this reason that I have chosen to call this book: Levi’s Vindication. If nothing else, it will alert readers that the first knock on the gates of ingrained tradition was that of a most distinguished medievalist, teacher, and communal leader in France at the turn of the twentieth century.

T he Chronicles The Quedlingsberg Annals is the least complicated of the three chronicles we shall study. In 1012, we are told, the Emperor Henry II called a Council in Mainz to resolve issues with the Luxembourgians. But some did not bother to come; others from the Empire, and as was decreed, did. Whence many [seeing nothing would happen] returned home. An expulsion of the Jews was done [ordered] by the king in Mainz, and the wild beliefs [insanities] of certain heretics were refuted.182 182 “Quo quidem ex illis venire neglexerunt; alii regis imperio, ut decrevit, paruerunt; inde non integrae pauci gaudia reportantes sed firmandae adhuc suspendia expectantes reversi sunt in sua.” (In short, and the Latin is dense, many did not come and the deal was held up or suspended; then, sua is immediately followed by) Expulsio Judaeorum facta est a rege in Moguntiae (Mainz), sed et quorundum haereticorum refutata est insania. In truth, the Annalista Saxo, a rough contemporary, also reports the expulsion. However, its source is either the Quedlingsberg Annals directly or a common source; MGH SS 5, 37, 327: “Expulsio Iudaeorum a rege facta est Mogontie et quorundam hereticorum refutata est insania.” The wording is identical, except for a really superfluous sed and the use of the locative Mogontie rather than in Mogontiae. There is no confirmation here of either the one or the other source.

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Our focus is on the expulsion, not the failure of the council. Yet look at how the text places the expulsion right after the return of delegates home without even a breath of air to separate the two (in sua/Expulsio), and with the same sentence continuing to speak of heresy. Are we to take this “expulsion” seriously, described in a single sentence that comes out of nowhere, with no explanation or elaboration with respect to continuum, except the sole excuse that medieval chronicles sometimes just list events? It has no link to anything, with the context strictly that of a council that had nothing to do with Jews and whose failure reflects critically on imperial weakness. Heresy is mentioned, and Judaism in the early Middle Ages was often related to heresy, although, to be accurate, it was heresy that was related to Judaism and its supposed threats, not, as is usually said, the other way around.183 Regardless, note the disparity. Heretical opinions were refuted; Jews are expelled. There is no symmetry; and we know that severe actions against heretics, including the burning at Orleans, in 1017, were on the near horizon. This contextless text both literally, and literarily, wanders. Moreover, whatever happened, it is clear the supposed expulsion was local and non-­violent, and the Annals contains not a word on conversion, forced or otherwise. In addition, the texts found in Aronius’s late nineteenth-­century collection of sources show Henry II having reasonable relations with Jews, especially merchants.184 Nothing justifies sudden aggression. Attempts have been made to fill in the blanks. The Annals’ quixotic statement has been tied to the supposed conversion of the son of Rabbi Gershom of Mainz (Meor HaGolah), said to be by force, and about which Rabbenu Gershom left ten selihot. Students have linked phrases like “your flock has been exiled to every corner,” to 183 As put in the eighteenth century by the jurist Carlo Luti, “everybody knows Judaism is not a heresy.” Jews could commit acts judged heretical, for instance, by blasphemy, but even Nicholas Eymerich was careful to limit the scope and not accuse Judaism per se. The frequent remarks on Judaism as a heresy have no foundation when the documents are read carefully. On Eymerich, but especially Luti, see Kenneth Stow, Anna and Tranquillo. 184 Julius Aronius, Regesten, nos. 140–44.

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the Annals’ expulsion.185 Yet was not exile endemic to the Jewish condition? Endemic, too, is the idea of lishlol ulavuz, “to take our possessions and treat us as nothing.”186 To complicate the matter further, as Grossman has pointed out, the source describing the conversion is Shimshon of Sens, who was active in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, two hundred years after the event, an aeon.187 Other rabbis who discussed this event at the end of the thirteenth century, including Meir of Rothenberg, were debating the reasons for the supposedly two-­week shiv‘a Gershom is said to have observed, not the event itself, and for itself. In the same way, therefore, as questions have been asked whether legal innovations like the rule prescribing monogamy attributed to Rabbenu Gershom are really his, so the report of “his” son’s forced conversion may refer to events at another, and probably later, time, unrelated to Gershom himself, and his family;188 the taqqanah on monogamy is known first in a text from Rashi, nearly a century after Rabbenu Gershom’s day. Gershom’s responsum on compassion toward returning “converts” is also known from sometime after.189 These strictures have not prevented Richard Landes from interpreting the line in Gershom’s poetry saying gozrim, they decree that we not pray to our God, as reflecting the decree of expulsion in the Annals.190 Yet gozer has multiple meanings, the simplest being a 185 Haberman, Sefer Gezerot, 16–18, where one finds a large segment of these selihot. .‫מגורשת עדתך לכל רוח ופינה‬ 186 PL 141: 544; Haberman, Sefer Gezerot, 16–18. 187 Grossman, “Shorshav,” 112. 188 Grossman, Hakhame, 137–38. 189 Mordecai Breuer, Rabbanut Ashkenaz biyemei habeinayim, (Jerusalem: Mercaz Zalman Shazar, 1976), 11, seconds this, citing Yitzhaq Baer, “Hayesodot vehahathalot shel ’irgun hakehillah hayehudit viyemei habeinayim,” in his collected Studies in the History of the Jewish People (Jerusalem, 1985), 2: 60–100, original pages 30–31. Also see Grossman, Hakhame, 151–55; and Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Self-­Government in the Middle Ages (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary Press, 1924), 24, on the taqqanah about marriage. See, in English, Simha Goldin, “Jewish Self-­Definition Against Christianization,” in Religious Conversion, History, Experience, and Meaning, ed. Ira Katznelson and Miri Rubin (New York: Routledge, 2014), 226. 190 Expulsio Judaeorum facta est a rege, cited just above, n. 182. Facta est is not strictly

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new restrictive law within the Jewish community. Gershom may have intended new Christian laws making life harder for Jews, and, in Gershom’s day, such laws were beginning to increase and to be assembled, notably in Burchard of Worms’ influential canonical collection.191 We also recall that terms like compellat and cogo, which Landes matches with gozer, translated strictly mean “to put pressure”; they signify “to force” only secondarily, if at all. Landes’s firm conclusion that Henry II ordered a forced conversion is thus a shakey guess.192 Equivocal terminology like that of the Annals requires prudent interpretation. Already a century ago, H. Tycocinski chided Graetz, the first to point to the so-­called conversion of Gershom’s son, warning the great historian against accepting as true what was said in a dirge ascribed to Rabbi Gershom third hand. In any case, Gershom’s remark about gozrim is so generic that it is either fantasy or must refer to a large event, not an isolated one that has left no other trace, including in the Annals. Furthermore, real or not, it is usually said that the expulsion lasted a single month and was over by January 1013.193 The ready acceptance of the report of the conversion of Gershom’s son, which one finds in historians from the revered Heinrich Graetz and Julius Aronius in the nineteenth century to Baron and Landes in the twentieth, is that of people who seem to wish the report to be true. Yet however much historians speak of expulsion and a forced conversion in Mainz in speaking “to decree,” but more “to enact.” Regardless, Landes, “The Massacres of 1010,” has gone out on a very thin limb. 191 See John Gilchrist, “The Perception of Jews in the Canon Law in the Period of the First Two Crusades,” Jewish History 3.1 (1988): 9–25. 192 See Grossman, “Shorshav,” 112; and see above, n. 117, for the reference to the dictionary of Calonghi. 193 Germania Judaica 1: 176 (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1963), writes that the reason for the expulsion is not given and that it is hotly debated whether it took place, or was only partial; but it is sure that Jews were in Mainz in January of 1013. Aronius, Regesten, nos., 212, 214, and 215a, presents the pertinent texts. See H. Tykocinski, “Die Verfolgungen der Juden in Mainz im Jahr 1012,” in Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Juden: Festschrift zum siebzigsten Geburstage Martin Philippsons (Leipzig: Gustav Fock, 1916), 4, who casts doubts on the story.

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1012, none have adduced anything like contemporary evidence in support. To accept the authenticity of reports made hundreds of years later, which, in addition, are only tangentially interested in the event under scrutiny, is tantamount to accepting Baer’s concept of an ideal (in Platonic terms) Kenesset Yisrael, a relic of German Ideensgeschichte. This is not to say the expulsion did not occur, although I have grave doubts it did. Rather, we have no historically viable mode of proof. Responsible historical writing can say no more than that the Annals contains an oddly presented report of an otherwise unverifiable, and unknown, expulsion to which the report of the conversion of Rabbi Gershom’s son may be linked, but only conjecturally. Nothing essential connects the two purported events; alone, each speaks of something different. To get to a combined expulsion from Mainz and forced conversion of the city’s Jews, the historian must truly conflate two distinct items and, in doing so, change the meaning of each. One word by the Annals on conversion, and the evidence about Rabbenu Gershom might have had some weight. But that word is absent, and the evidence is chronologically disjointed. Nor may additional conjecture convert the already conjectural into the concrete.

Ademar of Chabannes Ademar’s History is the only one of the three chronicles that reports an intentional conversionary initiative,194 and, as such, it is the key to whether the three can be linked. Historians have given the impression that each of these chronicles discusses conversion, which is untrue, as we just saw with respect to the Annals. The History of Raoul Glaber does mention conversion, but as an after 194 Ademar lives at Chabannes, near Limoges, and then goes to Angouleme, 138 km from Chabannes, which are both in the Midi, or at least south of Bordeaux. Thus he is reporting something to which he could not (as Landes says) have been eyewitness. Or is that witness Glaber? But he is in Cluny and born in Burgundy, and Cluny is far from Normandy, and also in Aquitaine. Neither, therefore, could have been eyewitnesses to events in Normandy.

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thought. The violence it reports is to exact revenge for the role Jews are accused of playing in destroying the Jerusalem Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Glaber’s reference to Jews who convert out of fear of dying, coacti metu mortis, is subsequent to an episcopal order to have no contact (negotio) with Jews, and, as we shall see, it is integral to his desire to remove Jews and potential Jewish pollution from Christian hearts and lands. What of Ademar? In his History, he writes that: In the year 1010, Alduin, the bishop of Limoges compulit Jews to baptism; he had made an edict (lit., a law) that either they become Christians or leave the city. He then ordered doctors of divine teachings to dispute with the Jews for a four-­month period, so that they cogerent them to the faith. Three or four Jews converted. The multitude made haste to flee to other cities along with wives and children [and they killed themselves, slashing their throats with iron {knives} – (a phrase that is highly disputed as being in the original)]. In the same year, the Holy Sepulcher Church in Jerusalem was destroyed by pagans . . . ​For the Jews of the West . . . ​had sent letters to Saracens in the East, charging that western armies were on their way to the East.195 However, the Saracen Emir along with the other Saracens were truly sorry for what they did to the Christians, and 195 On PL 141: 60, Ademar writes in his History, 3:47, the following: Eo anno [1010] Hilduinus episcopus [of Limoges] Judaeos Lemonicase ad baptismum compulit, lege prolata, aut aut Christiani essent, aut de civitate recederent, et per unum mensem doctores divinos iussit disputare cum Judaeis ut eos ad fidem cogerent; et tres vel quatuor Judaei Christiani facti sunt. Cetera autem multidudo per alias civitates diffugere cum uxoribus, liberis, festinavit [Quidam etiam se ipsos ferro iugulaverunt, nolentes baptismum suscipere; the legitimacy of this critical line, found in only some editions is highly contested]. Ipso anno sepulchrum Domini Ierosolimis confractum est a paganis . . . ​Nam Judaeis occidentales . . . ​epistolas miserunt in orientem, accusantes Christianos mandantes exercitus occidentalium super sarracenas orientales . . . The standard modern edition of Ademar is Jules Chavanon, Ademar de Chabannes. Chronique (Paris: Picard, 1897), 169, who says the line about suicide is an addition.

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In his second work, the Commemoration of the Abbacy of Limoges, Ademar provides a different ending. He writes that a “virus” (or a great disturbance) sent by God brought all those who had violated the church to a terrible death – writhing in the entrails. Pestilence and hunger that continued for three years wiped out more than 900,000 Christians and Jews (after which, the basilica was rebuilt).197 We have here a morass, a report that implicitly challenges both the Holy Sepulcher story in the History, in which Jews are seen solely as treacherous, not as victims, and the story also told in the History about the alleged Jewish desecration of a cross in Rome in 1020, which we showed to be false. The History pursues this hard line, following the 1020 events by recounting the annual Eastertide slap given to a Jew in the south of France and of how it happened that one year the slap was so strong 196 History, PL 141: 61, Ademar writes that “ductus tam ipse [the Emir of Babylonia, as he is called] quam populous Sarracenus valde doluerunt de his quae contra christianos egissent et data praeceptione, iussit reaedificare basilicam. . . . ” Much about what happened is known, some of which agrees with Ademar, and Glaber, but a great deal does not. Most particularly, both Jews and Christians suffered, although a treaty forty years later allowed the Holy Sepulcher to be rebuilt, financed by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX. Ademar had died about fifteen years earlier. See on these matters, Mark R. Cohen, Crescent and Cross, 165. 197 PL 141: 183, Commem. Abatum Lemov. The story differs somewhat in Ademar’s Chronicle of the Limoges Abbey (we are dealing with two works by Ademar). There he says there was a limit to the destruction, which, it seems, there actually was. “Nam vitus dei iam defendi et Saracenos qui eam violare venerant, pessima morte omnes extinxit: crepuerunt mox ventribus omnes et ira dei secuta est super Saracenos. Et mortui sunt tam fame quam pestellentia per tres annos Saracenorum et Judaeorum plus quam nonegenties centum milla” [then the rebuilding was ordered]. Note, too, the addition of the Jews, whereas as in the History, only Christians die. Could it be a conflation of the two sources that led Baronius (see above) to say that during the 1020 storm both Jews and Christians died? We cannot know.

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that the poor Jew’s brains came rolling out. Ademar also notes a letter supposedly sent by the seventh-­century Byzantine Emperor Heraclius to the French Merovingian King Dagobert telling him to order all the Jews of his realm baptized.198 To recapitulate: Alduin, in 1010, orders Jews to submit to forced preaching. A few convert, most flee [then many slaughter themselves]. At just this time, the Holy Sepulcher is destroyed thanks to Jewish machinations, but it is eventually rebuilt. In the interim, as told in a separate chronicle, 900,000 Jews and Sarracens die. For good measure, we hear about Jews executed in Rome a decade later, charged with image desecration, and also about a seventh-­century order of conversionary pressure. A great deal requires unraveling, beginning with the literal reading of the texts and, then, the cast of characters. We recall that the cross desecration story of 1020 was proved a fantasy by showing that the pope was hundreds of miles away when the event supposedly occurred. Ademar’s report requires the pope to have been on the spot, in Rome. What about Alduin, who orders the preaching? And Ademar himself? What do we know about either? And what about the report of suicides that historians today dispute? If this last is true and a part of Ademar’s original text, it creates a story similar to the 1007: forced conversion and Jewish suicidal rejection. Indeed, were Alduin’s order one of true forced conversion, then the suicides might be believable. But it was not.199 By translating compulit and cogerent precisely, both words intentionally left untranslated in the full citation just above, the result is something else. Rather than force, we have seen that they mean goad, or push, or

198 About Dagobert we know little. It is, of course, no coincidence that this order by Heraclius was given at the height of the Visigothic Spanish campaign of forced conversion. Ademar, Hist. 3.52 (Migne PL 141: 61). See also Linder, The Jews in the Legal Sources, n. 183: Regino of Prum, 842–915, who reports the same. Chavanon, Ademar, p. 45, writes that Dagobert “munera misit et rogavit ut baptizare compelleret omnes iudaeos qui erant in omni regno eius; quod et factum est.” 199 Three times Blumenkranz in Juifs et chrétiens, 69, 73, 103, links Alduin to preaching, but never once, force.

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urge; verification comes from the authoritative Calonghi.200 Hence, the correct interpretation of Ademar is that Alduin put pressure on the Jews either to convert or leave the city, and to this end he ordered sermons delivered that hopefully would herd them into the flock. Three or four converted. Most ran away. Hence: pressure, threat, a few converts, and the rest leave. In this context, suicide makes no sense; and, indeed, Levi, Blumenkranz, and Chavanon, the editor of Ademar’s writings, all say the mention of suicides is a late addition, a post-­Crusade concept. I agree.201 Landes, as already noted, disagrees, which is critical. If correct, he has demonstrated a parallel in time, if not in actual place, to the events the 1007 describes. On the other hand, if the line is a late addition, Ademar is telling no story of forced conversion at all, let

200 See note 117, to Calonghi, above. Calonghi gives many meanings: a prescription, or recommendation, but not a command. Force, then, is clearly not the meaning of choice. Cogo is used often in the sense of bringing into the flock. Which is why Jews are missionized, to bring them into the Christian community of faith – far more than for their personal salvation. R. E. Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word-­List from British and Irish Sources (British Academy) (London: Oxford, 1965), suggests “to give instruction.” Only Neyermeyer emphasizes precept as “pontifical order.” Colonghi, compello+stringere, and cogo, stresses definitively the idea of bringing together. Ademar uses compello and cogo. Harper gives “urge” and “drive together.” Compellit = accuse in Latham, and cogo could mean “urge” (to be verified). Jules Chavanon, Ademar de Chabannes, 169, has the word compulit with respect to the Merovingian Dagobert. This at first seems to contradict what I am saying, but only if one wants it to. Ademar himself may have been equivocating, intentionally. In the event, what was said earlier about “through violence” in discussing Sicut Iudaeis non closes the discussion. Compello, the drafters in the Roman chancellery knew, was not definitive and, by itself, equivocated. Hence, in Clement III’s 1188 version, per violentiam was added. 201 Chavanon, 169. Blumenkranz, Juifs et chrétiens, 251, n. 3, reports: “Ici une variante: ‘Certains s’égorgèrent eux mêmes, ne voulant accepter le baptême.’ Cette addition, en contradiction avec le choix offert, nous semble être de l’époque plus tardive (peut-­être du temps des Croisades?).” See also Michael Frassetto, ed., “Heretics and Jews in the Early Eleventh Century: The writings of Rodulfus Glaber and Ademar of Chabannes,” Christian Attitudes Toward the Jews in the Middle Ages: A Casebook (London: Routledge, 2006), 43–60, n. 42, p. 56, 3:47, 166, which takes a great deal, especially the 1007, on faith.

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alone suicide, but only one of conversion or exile, whose accuracy must be probed. Yet did not Bishop Alduin’s making the Jews of Limoges face the hard choice of conversion or exile correspond to a similar choice proposed in texts from the Council of Erfurt and a letter of Pope Leo VII?202 A good question, yet one nobody has preceded by asking about Alduin himself; and what is known about Alduin throws Ademar’s story off base. Stock’s observations come to mind: Ademar seems to be reconstructing reality to tell things as he wished they would have been. The reconstruction paints a picture of Alduin far different from that of the bellicose figure who was the real Alduin and who seems to have been about the last person to involve himself in converting Jews. Alduin was the brother of the Viscount of Limoges, as was also, and conveniently, Geoffrey the Abbot of St. Martial, the great Limoges abbey where Ademar arrived in 1010 when he was twenty-­ one years old. In this very year, Alduin took some of the abbey’s treasures to finance an expedition to Rome for Easter alongside Duke William of Aquitaine, who had appointed Alduin bishop;203 the pope was not yet the Head of the Bishops, as we saw this title and its meaning earlier on. This relationship raises the question why there is no mention of William in Alduin’s alleged conversionary initiative. If Duke Richard of Normandy is recorded in the 1007, then why is the lay ruler who appointed Alduin, William of Aquitaine, unmentioned in Ademar? Most likely because in real life, William (like the real Richard) was not involved in an episode of conversion, forced or otherwise, nor, for that matter, was Alduin. He had other distractions. It was said that in 1010, the year when Duke William was in Rome for Easter, as part and parcel of the contemporary peace movement that was generating the veneration of saints and mir 202 See the full discussion in the section concerning Erfurt and Leo VII, below. 203 Steven D. Sargent, “Religious Responses to Social Violence in Eleventh-­Century Aquitaine,” Historical Reflections / Réflexions historiques 12, no. 2 (1985): 219–40, esp. 219–24.

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acles of all kinds,204 Alduin discovered a box holding the head of John the Baptist, prompting kings and princes to flock to Limoges, especially its Abbey.205 More, just before the turn of the eleventh century, Alduin, aided by Duke William, built a castle at Beaujeu next to the monastery of St. Junien, whose purpose was to defend against a possible attack by Jordan of Chabbanes. Jordan may have been Ademar’s relative.206 Was not, then, Alduin putatively Ademar’s opponent, and was not Alduin’s taking of the abbey’s treasures intended to be understood as an act of corruption, for which there would be retribution? The real point of the conversion story, therefore, would not be to laud the initiative, but to single out Alduin’s failure: a month of preaching, and meagre results – the fruit of corruption. Only the pure could hope to convert the stiff-­necked Jews. The Jews themselves then added to the rebuff by picking up and leaving, snubbing Alduin, not moved by fear. In which case, why would they commit suicide? Even more, why would Ademar think they might do something so drastic and, in his day, unprecedented? Perhaps because the motif of Jews killing themselves rather than accept Christianity was not new in Christian literature. This motif, I would venture, is a reworking on a large scale of the story of the Jew of Bourges that we saw above. The idea of suicide would enter Jewish writings themselves only after the Crusades, while Christians likely saw the Jewish suicides of 1096 and afterward as verifying what they had believed for centuries; as indicated earlier,

204 Daniel F. Callahan, “The Peace of God and the Cult of the Saints in Aquitaine in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries,” Historical Reflections / Réflexions historiques 14 (1987): 445–66, saying Ademar, apart from his apocalypticism, directed all of his efforts to glorifying St. Martial. 205 J. Grier, The Musical World of a Medieval Monk: Adémar de Chabannes in Eleventh-­Century Aquitaine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 206 Sargent, Religious Responses, 237, writes that the prince was later knifed in the back, while Jordan eventually was made bishop. See also Anna Trumbore Jones, Noble Lord, Good Shepherd: Episcopal Power and Piety in Aquitaine, 877–1050 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 77–78.

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the tale of Bourges had spread everywhere.207 If, then, Ademar did mention Jewish suicide, it was as integral to the rest of his fantasy. Which is also to say that just as Ademar’s image desecration story of 1020 is mythical, so is the conversion tale of 1010. And in both cases, the fantasy has been exposed by a simple search for the “facts.” To all of this Richard Landes has a compellingly clever response. According to Landes, the debated line about suicides was added by Ademar himself; Landes argues from his direct reading of the manuscripts, although Ademar’s principal editor Chavanon argued otherwise. Without this line’s legitimacy, Landes’s theory that the 1007 and the other chronicles compose a verifiable unit unravels. Landes says, “in his initial account, Ademar had tried to gloss over the excesses of the actual incident, toning it down so that the Christians treated the Jews according to the rules,” the rules being, Landes continues, those of the “official Augustinian position explicitly endorsed by Pope Leo VII.”208 207 See Stow, “The Cruel Father,” and also Berceo, Cantigos; there is also the faint possibility Ademar saw the letter of Severus of Minorca reporting Jewish martyrdoms in 418, but of women and children only, while the men, especially the more important of them, converted. Regardless, both are literary sources, not reports of reality. Yuval, I believe, neglected the Bourges precedent, which, I also believe, became generalized through the martyrdoms of 1096. This is to say that Yisrael Yuval’s idea that Jewish actions stimulated Christian response omits the cardinal link – the prior Christian belief – which removes a strong plank from Yuval’s claim; Israel Jacob Yuval, “Vengeance and Damnation, Blood and Defamation: From Jewish Martyrdom to Blood Libel Accusations,” Zion 58 (1993): 33–90. 208 Richard Landes, “The Massacres of 1010,” 82–86, and n. 17, there. Even should we accept Landes’s contention that the disputed line is Ademar’s own, the real problem remains, that however one deals with an “Augustinian position,” Leo VII did not take it, or at least what it is supposed to be, namely, patient waiting. Leo’s letter says expel, which in Landes’s terms means espousing a “half-­Augustinian position.” This is less than convincing, and somewhat perplexing. On page 82, Landes writes that Ademar “depicts an unsuccessful effort by the Limousin church to convert the local Jewish community.” This is not force, as is correct with respect to what Ademar really says. But then, on page 86, we read: “news from Jerusalem, accusations against the Jews, some combination of official pressure to convert, massacres and suicides.” A great deal is, to borrow Landes’s own term, “lumped” together here without substantiation.

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However, Leo’s letter, composed in 937, does nothing of the sort.209 It says: “preach, but if preaching fails, expel.” This is an option Augustine never recommends. Rather than affirming so-­ called Augustinian teachings, Ademar’s tale of conversion or expulsion takes up where Leo’s letter leaves off. It violates the supposed “rules” from the very start. Ademar’s story also ignores the authoritative Gregory the Great, who, say Linder and Simonsohn, is Leo’s source, but who never suggests expulsion. Indeed, Pope Gregory recommends following Augustine’s advice in the last chapter of the latter’s Adversus Judaeos, which is to preach with “the sweetness of lips.” Further, what pope would have considered it legally permissible to expel his Jewish cives, whether from Rome itself or elsewhere?210 Landes has read his sources hastily.211 Indeed, contrary to Landes’s argument about “official” policy, Leo’s letter is believable only if continuity had broken down, which is what Jessie Sherwood argues in analyzing it. In the tenth century, she says, and rightly,

See also George Pon and Yves Chauvin, Ademar de Chabannes Chronique (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), a French translation that follows Landes to the letter, to the point of adding the addition about Jewish suicide without suggesting it is arguable. I mention it here to be complete. It translates compellit as “força,” which is too strong, nor is it clear what Landes did with cogo. A final issue is that Ademar’s tale is not of one cloth. The disputed line on suicide is part of the original section of Hist. 3:47, whereas the Rome 1020 story is from 3:52. The report of 900,000 dying is in The Annals of Limousin Abbacy, where he also repeats the report of the Holy Sepulcher attack. The report about Heraclius writing to Dagobert is elsewhere; this is all conventiently summarized in Blumenkranz, Juifs et chrétiens and brought together in his Les auteurs, 250–53. 209 See shortly below. 210 The popes were bound by Roman law, especially the Code of Justinian, book 1, title 9, laws 8 and 14, which declare Jews members of the Roman people and Judaism untouchable; see Vittore Colorni, Legge ebraica e leggi locali, and Colorni, Gli ebrei nel sistema del diritto comune fino alla prima emancipazione (Milan: Giuffrè, 1956) for a grand overview of the issue, and see Kirshner, cited above, n. 130. 211 Landes, “The Massacres of 1010,” 89, might have held back before accusing others of “arbitrary judgment” and opining that the “very accuracy of [their] details is suspicious.”

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there was no official position. Such a position, as I proposed in 1984, began to solidify only after Dispar nimirum est in 1063.212 If Landes is to prove himself correct about Ademar, he will have to make his case more substantially, beginning, importantly, by showing that Ademar’s Jews were real.213 Yet once Limoges has been ruled out in favor of Le Mans in identifying one of the coins Jacob ben Yequtiel offered the legate and as the place of Yosef Tov Elem’s residence, Ademar’s story is the sole reference we have to Jews living in Limoges at this time. And Ademar’s story has revealed itself to be sorely lacking when it comes to representing reality. There is every reason to believe that Ademar made his tale up out of whole cloth, in which case, and in the absence of additional, direct substantiation, Ademar’s tale, like the hollow story in the Quedlingsberg Annals about the expulsion from Mainz, offers no proof of “an initial crisis.” It adds or subtracts nothing with respect to the 1007’s authenticity. Ademar’s tale fits the pattern of the miracle stories ending in conversion that circulated in Merovingian and Carolingian times, in particular those of Avitus of Clermont, or the Jew Priscus, or the supposed forced conversion decreed by King Dagobert. There is the real model of forced conversions in seventh-­century Visigothic Spain, but this is exactly the point. What went on under the Visigoths is extremely well documented – the texts are detailed and diverse, which is the opposite of Ademar, but possibly an inspiration to him.214 Until Alexander II warned Prince Landulf of Benevento 212 Jessie Sherwood, “Interpretation, Negotiation, and Adaptation: Converting the Jews in Gerhard of Mainz’s Collectio,” in Jews in Early Christian Law: Byzantium and the Latin West, 6th–11th Centuries, ed. John Tolan and Nicholas de Lange (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 119–29. 213 I will not enter into the criticisms directed at Landes by people like Sylvain Gouguenheim, Les Fausses terreurs, and James T. Palmer, The Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). One may not, however, omit the distinguished Paul Freedman, who is not a participant in the sometimes sharp debate about the meaning of the Year One Thousand, who, reviewing online the recent festschrift for William Chester Jordan, says: “plaintively yet contemptuously Landes takes other historians to task for not agreeing with him [and whose details are not] convincingly identified.” 214 As a perusal of Blumenkranz makes clear, stories of conversion by force, direct or

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in 1065 not to use force, and until the hints in the 1090 Charter of Henry IV where the Jews seek assurance that there will be no kidnapping of their children, much as the ninth-­century Agobard of Lyons had attempted to do, we have nothing substantial to go on with respect to the use of force – except, of course, for Agobard himself, who, in great contrast to the 1007, was severely castigated for his actions, in fact, physically beaten, by Imperial order. What opened the floodgate in the matter of conversion and force was the First Crusade of 1096.215 Even the Visigothic clergy, at the Fourth Toledan Council of 638, (at least formally) disowned force, referring to King Sisebut’s edict of conversion in 613 as inspired by a “hazy zeal,” which the the clergy accepted only after the fact, since the Church holds baptism to be “indelible.” These words were not forgotten. The Toledan texts were incorporated into codified canon law and were still being cited in the 1790s. We might also recall the approach of J. C. Schmitt in his analysis of the life of Hermann of Cologne. The proper thing to ask, Schmitt has said, is not whether the story is true or false, but what is its nature, or genre – to which he answers that the “life” is a structure on which were hung Premonstratensian ideals and which tells us virtually nothing, nothing verifiable, anyway, about the real Hermann. Nor is it interested in doing so. The same goes for Ademar. It does not matter whether he himself or some later indirect, in the earlier Middle Ages are few, for instance, Avitus of Clermont in Gregory of Tours; Blumenkranz, Juifs et chrétiens, 50, 51, 58; also Priscus, no. 59, p. 71. Here, the king forces the conversion, but of an individual alone. These stories engage in fantasy, but then fantasy is still present in a story of hosts sticking to the roof of a Jew’s mouth, provoking his conversion, which features in a letter of none other than Innocent III; Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, 137, n. 29. In terms of baptism and expulsion, the only references are those mentioned with respect to Dagobert, whom we mentioned in n. 198, above, somehow linked to Heraclius. And then the cases of Leo VII, and the soon-­to-­be-­noted cases of the Venetian Doge and Frederick of Mainz. Actual force appears only in the case of Avitus in the late sixth century and also in the case of the Visigoths. 215 Whatever happened in Byzantium in the ninth and early tenth centuries is shrouded in opacity; see Stow, Alienated Minority, 65–66; also 33–36, on Agobard, and 101, for the Charter of Henry IV.

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writer wrote the line about suicides. It is nothing more than part of a larger fantasy.

Erfurt and Leo VII Yet do not texts from the years 932 and 937, from the Council of Erfurt and Pope Leo VII, respectively, have bearing on our case, in which, first, a bishop, together with a Venetian Doge, and, then, a pope are said to have recommended conversion or dismissal? In Pope Leo VII’s letter of 937, the following response is made into a question by Archbishop Frederick of Mainz: “You asked concerning the Jews for our authorization, whether it is better to subjugate them to the holy religion or to expel them from your cities . . . ​we say do not desist from preaching, . . . ​but if they do not wish to believe, then we command you with our precept . . . ​that by our authority you may expel them, [for what does light have to do with darkness; and the sacred should not be thrown to the dogs]; and be sure to hold onto the faith.”216 This text contrasts with both the past and the future: the past, as in the letters of Gregory the Great, and the future, as per Sicut Iudaeis

216 Regesta pontificum Romanorum: Germania Pontificia. Volume 4, Provincia Maguntinensis, ed. Theodore Schieffer (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978), 73, n. 58. I thank Robert Somerville for this reference to the sole archival source of the bull, in Mainz, not Rome. Germania Pontificia exists precisely to collect papal letters that were not catalogued in Rome, and one cannot cast its contents aside. At the same time, the lack of a Roman copy means it is chancey to speak with certitude about the entire letter as the original one sent from Rome, if there is a true original at all. This is to say that the line about expulsion may be a local addition, a notion of which I cannot disabuse myself. For the text, see Linder, The Jews in the Legal Sources, 728: “De iudaeis autem, unde vestra fraternitatas nostrum conquaesivit auctoritatem, utrum melius sit eos sacrae subiugare religioni an de civitatibus vestris expellere, hoc vobis praeceptum [our instruction] mandamus, ut fidem. . . . Illis praedicare non desistatis. . . . Si autem credere noluerint, de civitatibus vestris cum nostra auctoritate illos expellite; qui non debemus cum inimicis Dei societatem habere dicente apostolo” [for what has light to do with the dark, and why should the sacred be thrown to the dogs. . . . Hence, be sure to hold onto the faith just as] “apostolici eorumque successores nobis tradiderunt et sancta Romana aecclesia omnibus ubique gentibus praedicat.”

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non. A letter of Gregory IX issued in 1234 is exceedingly illustrative. Referring to acts against Cistercian monks, the pope says: “for these friars are cut off from communion with the faithful, from which even Jews are not shut out . . . ” Mature papal policy did not consider expelling Jews an option.217 Likewise, the collection of letters of Gregory the Great made by the monk Gerhard in 938 – letters which, until that time, had remained underground and which are said to have guided Frederick in formulating his question of a year earlier – never hints at expelling the pope’s Jewish Roman cives.218 Gregory’s letters should have discouraged Frederick from asking his question in the first place. What of Pope Leo himself? What is the source of his, I repeat, unique proposal? In addition, the principal subject of the letter is not Jews, who appear only in the closing paragraph, but the appointment of ecclesiastic officials. Perhaps, then, we are dealing with outside intervention in a true papal original? To explain this letter, historians have paired it with a missive sent by the Venetian Doge, together with the Archbishop of Venice, from the 932 Council of Erfurt. The letter petitions Emperor Henry I and Hildebert, the then Archbishop of Mainz, to expel Jews who would not convert consequent to a miracle and debate in Jerusalem, where large numbers of Jews had, it is said, embraced the faith. This letter is paralleled by another that refers to the miracle, goes on to note the apparent program of forcible conversion headed by the current Byzantine Emperor, and concludes by saying precipiatis, prescribe, the Jews’ conversion. This word appears in Leo’s letter, too, but, more interestingly, it is borrowed directly from the chronicle 217 Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, 211, n. 74 is exemplary in saying this almost verbatim. 218 The collection should have perplexed Frederick, since it makes it clear that Pope Gregory never would have contemplated expulsion, and Sherwood notes that the letter of Frederick is built on prooftexts, while the collection is built on what she calls canons, meaning what Gregory’s letters say. A possibility here is that the real subject was something else, the right source of ecclesiastical authority – scripture or received law. See Karl Morrison, Tradition and Authority in the Western Church, 300–1140 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). This question was central for centuries.

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of Fredegar, the likely origin of the report in Ademar that Emperor Heraclius wrote King Dagobert in seventh-­century France, telling Dagobert: precipiatis that the Jews convert.219 Despite the suspicion this repetition should arouse, and the use of a word that augurs force, but not quite force, the Erfurt letters have generally been accepted at face value.220 Nobody except Israel Levi has asked why Mainz, which is 800 kilometers from Venice, including a crossing of the Alps, was chosen as the addressee of the missive, even if Erfurt was an important council, and why the actor is the Doge of Venice.221 Neither has anyone questioned the Venetian letter’s strange final twist, which says: “Announce to the Jews these wonders of Our Lord Jesus Christ and precipatis (prescribe?) that they be baptized. If any Jew does not wish to be baptized, precipite that they have no contact by way of their polluted hands with the sign of the cross, whether it is a cross of metal or any other material or kind in your kingdom. And that Jew, if he does not wish to be a Christian, should, in his confusion and rejection depart from your kingdom.” What touching the cross “with polluted hands” has to do with conversion, however achieved, and expulsion is a question to which we shall return.222 219 Blumenkranz, Auteurs, 101: “Heraclius . . . ​legationem ad Dagobertum . . . ​dirigens, petens ut omnes Judaeus regni sui ad fidem catholicam baptizandum praeciperit. Quod protenus Dagobertus emplevit.” Fredegar, Chron. Fredegar, IV: 65, MGH Scriptores rerum merovingicarum II: 1153. This is the same as Ademar, as seen above, reported, but the words are different. 220 For instance, by Linder, The Jews in the Legal Sources, as cited. 221 Rosamond McKitterick, ed. The New Cambridge Medieval History. Volume 3: c. 900–1024 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995): Timothy Reuter, 153–54, writes that many people came to Erfurt, where Emperor Henry I was filling his Carolingian-­type role as a king taking care of the church. The texts discussed here are in Linder, The Jews in the Legal Sources, 98, 533. 222 Precipiatis is “give an order,” a “precept.” And in Ademar, it is “urge, press, bring them into the flock” “(cogo): ut haec mirabilia domini nostri Iesu Christi omnibus Hebreis nuntietis et baptizari eos precipiatis. Si qui vero Hebreus baptizari noluerit, precipite, ut signum crucis in nullos metallo nec in ullo drappo aut aliqua spetie in vestro regno suis pollutis manibus contigat, et ipse Hebreus, si noluerit esse christianus, confusus et repudiatus de vestro regno abscedat.” This text is similar to Linder, The Jews in the Legal Sources, 631, where eating with Jews

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Jessie Sherwood, as already intimated, has offered a reasoned justification for these letters, rooting her thoughts in contemporary developments in canon law and in her accurate perception that in the tenth century there was no fixed stance, let alone “official” policy, toward Jews.223 Individual popes and bishops were free to defiles, and there are many like this; Caesar of Arles also speaks of lowering one’s status by sharing a table. See also Linder, 1144, citing a letter of Gregory the Great. One notes, too, Gregory of Tours, the story of the priest who is partially cured of blindness but then approaches a Jew whose ministrations make the blindness return – an obvious motif, but which says consorting with the Jews is flirting with contagion. Hence, it was said that eating with Jews introduces poison into one’s body (Blumenkranz, Auteurs, n. 30, p. 50, Caesar of Arles; but this may be an eleventh-­century text). Even Augustine accuses Jews of corruption and magic. In each case, the point is that contact with Jews pollutes. Malkiel, Reconstructing, 54, asks, if I (KS) say this letter is at least partly a manipulation, why not have Leo endorse outright force. The simple answer is that while expulsion per se had never been a topic of papal discussion vis-­à-­vis Jews, force had, and bluntly, in Gregory the Great, who rejected it outright. Later on, even a manipulator would know there were limits. Besides, it is doctrine that the person baptized must somehow assent, and, indeed, though sometimes it appears not so, in fact, no pope ever endorsed anything else. Baron, too, observed, SRH, 4:236, n. 4, that popes consistently opposed force. And that the author of Leo’s letter, whether Leo himself or someone else, was a cleric is certain. So rooted was the principle of not using force, that Benedict XIV in 1747 did everything to show that while he accepted as legal the virtual kidnapping of Jewish children for purposes of baptism, he did not accept open force. There was also Innocent III’s distinction in the bull/ canon maiores of 1203, which distinguished “conditional” from “absolute” force, clearly a bit of a legal fiction, but one that was observed, including in a chorus of protests against the forced baptism of Jewish children by the King of Portugal in 1497 – protests raised by no less a figure than the Bolognese Professor of Canon Law and Cardinal Pier Paolo Pariseo, and his voice was raised to very high decibels. We noted above, p. 98, that even the clerics at the Fourth Toledan Council in the seventh century were horrified at Sisebut’s forcible conversions of 613. Not that any of these distinctions were made out of concern for Jews. The point, rather, was preventing offense to the sacrament of baptism through its being spurned and the consequent creation of apostates. 223 Jessie Sherwood, “Interpretation, Negotiation, and Adaptation,” 119–29. The article provides important information, including showing that Gregory’s letters were preserved in a Vita Gregorii, which explains largely why we do not hear of them from the time of Gregory’s death in 603 until 938; they were extremely rare and difficult to find.

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speak their minds, and Leo’s letter, in particular, should be judged on its own merits. But one must go beyond context to the particular. Thus while properly noting the letter’s unicity, Sherwood runs into some difficulty when, with respect to changes in canon law, she relies only on an excellent short essay in Jewish History (vol. 3) by the late John Gilchrist.224 Gilchrist scoured the texts of early canonical collections and argued that by the eleventh century the law was becoming more restrictive, noting, especially, how this tendency is reflected in the influential canonical collection of Burchard of Worms. It is this kind of research, as Sherwood recognizes, that should be informing studies of Jews in this period. However, it is necessary to go beyond Gilchrist’s lists and read the actual words of the canons and canonists, all of which Amnon Linder cites and which appear in full in the entries in his too-­regularly ignored compilation The Jews in the Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages.225 It turns out that Burchard, who labored in the early decades of the eleventh century, not the mid-­tenth, the time of Pope Leo and Erfurt, was not one-­sided. He says that to kill a Jew is to extinguish the image of God and the hope of future conversion, [and he who does this, especially] should fast for forty days on bread and water: quia imaginem Dei et spem futurae conversionis extinxerat, XL dies in pane et aqua poeniteat. This applies especially to one who out of premeditated hatred, odii meditatione . . . ​, kills, occiderit, the Jew.226 Burchard’s text is virtually a restatement of Gregory the Great, if not of Paul in Romans. We may restrict Jews, Burchard is saying, but we may neither hate nor plot to kill them. If to kill Jews is to attack the image 224 See again Gilchrist, “The Perception of Jews.” 225 Cited in the notes many times above. 226 Landes, to justify his arguments, tries to show that Jewish life was little valued, citing on his page 95 Burchard 6:33, for which see Linder, The Jews in the Legal Sources, 637, where he neatly elides Burchard’s statement that to kill a Jew is “quia imaginem Dei et spem futurae conversionis extinxerat, XL dies in pane et aqua poeniteat.” The penality is specifically for a person who odii meditatione . . . ​occiderit the Jew. For Burchard, hatred is a crime; Burchard also opposed violence. Whatever text of Burchard Landes is reading, it is surely not the one he cites.

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of God, their right to exist – as Jews – is axiological. Hence, those who would kill them, and especially “out of hatred,” must observe a severe fast, apart from (as the contemporary reader of the canon was assumed to understand) the civil penalty the Jews’ lay lord will assess, a matter that lies outside Burchard’s canonical interest. To kill the hope of conversion, as Burchard continues, also means conversion in the future, and, hence, by implication, expulsion or force are not permitted. No canonist of the day would have read Burchard differently. Burchard’s statement indicates how radical is Leo’s letter, as well as it is (I repeat) unique. No pope before or after sanctioned, or even threatened, expulsion. The subject never comes up in the three papal letters – that is all there are apart from the letter of Leo – that discuss Jews in the enormous five-­hundred-­year period (which we tend to treat like five days) between Gregory the Great and Alexander II. The first, by Nicholas I (858–867), is on the subject of rebaptism by Bulgarians, and pertains to Jews only indirectly. Stephen III/IV (720) was angry about reports that Jews in Narbonne were lording it over Christians, especially when the latter worked for Jews in fields and vineyards. He warns of excessive contact, citing the verse that one should have nothing to do with Belial, which is often cited in discussing the necessity of social distance and is also the subject of the letter of Hadrian I (770), who decries what he calls cases of Judaism.227 I cannot but be skeptical about Pope Leo’s sanctioning of expulsion for refusing to convert.228 Moreover, when reading papal letters 227 Linder, nos. 56, 57, 58 (443–47); the letters appear also in Simonsohn, The Apostolic See, 1: 27–33. 228 Partial – only – expulsions were edicted by Popes John XXII, Pius V, Clement VIII. The last two were out of the provinces of the papal state and into the city of Rome, hardly a classical expulsion. John XXII may have accused Jews of necromancy, and the expulsion, apparently only from the city of Avignon, was temporary at that. See Kenneth Stow, “Papal Mendicants or Mendicant Popes: Continuity and Change in Papal Policies Toward the Jews at the End of the Fifteenth Century,” in Friars and Jews in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. S. McMichael (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 255–73.

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we must look at the whole, not extract a single line or clause and read it for the entirety.229 Leo’s letter does not stop at saying expel the Jews. Rather, immediately it proceeds to justify expulsion by saying that Christians should not have society with their enemies; and you, Archbishop Frederick, must hold tight to the true faith that you preach. The letter thus returns to the theme of separation that is central to letters of earlier popes, as well as in various canons issued at this time; Leo’s novelty is expulsion, which, however, is only half the issue. The overarching goal is maintaining purity by preventing improper contact between the recalcitrant Jews and the “one people” (he does not use the term, but he also does not need to) of Christ. The same ideas stand out in the writings of Agobard of Lyons.230 Past research has glossed over how central were anxieties about contact, polluting contact, in Catholic teaching about Jews.231 We are reminded of the (otherwise inexplicable) order in the Erfurt letter not to touch the cross. Social interaction was so feared that steps to prevent it led eventually to the imposition of the infamous “badge”; historians often neglect that the badge was not a new vector of policy, but a new means toward achieving a long desired end.232 In the event, let us look at Leo himself. Original is the last word one would attach to him, except for his being the first of three mid-­ tenth-­century popes accused, whether in fact or, more likely, legend, of dying while having sex (the next two were reported killed by irate cuckholded husbands).233 Leo was no theological trendsetter;

229 See Kenneth Stow, “Review Essay: Shlomo Simonsohn, ‘The Apostolic See and the Jews, vols. 1–8,’” Jewish Quarterly Review 85 (1995): 397–412. 230 Stow, Alienated Minority, 33–36. 231 See Stow, Jewish Dogs, passim. 232 And, I believe, as also was the eventual need for ghettos in Italy, alongside their conversionary function. The ghetto in many ways culminates the always imperfect drive for separation for the sake of purification. The ghetto also came at a moment where this concept became generalized in all society, especially separating heretics and Lutherans/Calvinists; on which, in great depth, see Nicholas Terpstra, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 233 Imma Penn, Dogma Evolution & Papal Fallacies. AuthorHouse (Kindle, 2007), 259.

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his reform activity was limited to giving privileges to monasteries, which, notably, would have aroused the ire of local bishops. He was also no independent, but rather a creature of Alberic of Spoleto, the lay ruler of Rome to whom Leo owed his election; and as is easily deduced from the charters lay and clerical rulers alike were giving Jews at this time, no local lord in the early Middle Ages would have considered ridding himself of Jews.234 Did, then, Pope Leo VII, of all popes, set a precedent, one, moreover, that as time went by was never repeated? Anything is possible, but, for the moment, we lack a good explanation and solid confirmation that the letter’s permission to expel is real. In analyzing Leo, Sherwood makes an excellent case, but I am hesitant, in particular, about her conclusion that from Leo’s letter one may move to the outright force recalled in the addition to Ademar and, as we are about to see, openly in Glaber. Among other things, whatever its real intention, Leo’s letter strictly prohibits using force, saying “expel ( – not kill, or force – ) them if they do not wish it.”235 In the event, whether authentic or a later intervention, Leo’s condoning Jewish expulsion, like all of Leo’s activities, was a shot that fell to earth with a thud. It may have pushed earlier teachings beyond their limits, and it may have even broken an unstated taboo, but it did this amidst a medley of negative motives militating for separation between Jews and Christians that were already commonplace. Nor did it burst a flood wall with respect to conversion, or force.

234 Above we noted the same for kings in the following century. On Rome at this time, see Brezzi, Roma e l’Impero medioevale, 179–94: Alberic was himself either committed to reform, or more simply he understood that the rule of Rome required a single head combining ecclesiastical and lay power in one. But would a lay leader go to the extent of saying, or even allowing a pope to say, “expel,” as the Doge is credited with doing? If so, we have a policy wholly counter to everything we have ever said about lay leaders in these centuries, let alone to theories of Jews in power. We must also ask whether Jews were living in Venice at this time, something far, far from certain. See, too, Petrus Browe, “Die Judenbekämpfung im Mittelalter,” Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 62, no. 2 (1938): 197–231. 235 Sine illorum voluntate . . . ​nolite eos baptizare.

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Even on the thinnest of probabilities that a copy of the letter (again regardless of authenticity), or even word of it, reached and inspired Ademar, as one may infer from Sherwood, what it would have inspired him to do was to create a legend. Which is to say that there is no way to see Leo’s letter, let alone the Venetian missive to the Council of Erfurt, as a prelude to the massacre of the 1007. And one final, and perhaps decisive, point. Blumenkranz notes the obviously false claim in the 1074 Dialogus cum Christiano quodam ceco that Pope Boniface IV (608–615, nearly immediately after Gregory the Great) ordered the Jews of Rome to convert or depart.236 May we not then see the Erfurt and Venetian letters, alongside that of Leo VII – regardless of their origins and authenticity – as part of a chain of wishful thinking, which, like so many other “historical” writings in this period, express the imaginative – that which is desired – but have no relation to the real? What about the writings of Raoul Glaber?

Glaber In Glaber’s case, force is a major agent, but that force, as Glaber himself reports it, has nothing to do with conversion. He writes: The word [of the attack on the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem] spread through the whole world. And by the common consent of all Christians, it was decreed that Jews should be chased out of the lands and cities where they dwelled; and thus, out of universal hatred, they were slaughtered by the sword, killed in rivers, and died in many ways, some even taking their own lives, so that just vengeance was taken on them, and scarcely was a Jew to be found in the Roman world. Then [Glaber’s text itself opens a new paragraph at this point], the bishops decreed an interdict, forbidding all Christians to have relations with Jews unless a Jew wished to convert. [At this point, and this point only, Glaber writes],

236 Blumenkranz, Juifs et chrétiens, 104.

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Conversion has been detached from attack and suicide. The division between the two is emphasized by the opening of a new paragraph. Further separation is achieved by placing the reference to Jewish fear and conversion after reporting the episcopal interdict. Had Glaber wished to link attack and conversion, to say that as a result of the attacks many Jews, afraid for their lives, converted, surely he would have, placing this line right after the words “Roman world,” which he did not. The sequence as Glaber presents it, therefore, has nothing in common with either the 1007 or the chronicles of the Crusades, which both stress the choice of conversion or death, followed by slaughter and self-­immolation. In Glaber, the goal is vengeance. Conversion is voluntary, out of fear, and, importantly, as we shall now see, not out of belief, while, in Glaber’s opening segment, suicide is committed to avoid a cruel death, not baptism. One may also infer that the phrase “love of this life” alludes to the sin of avarice to which Glaber soon returns as the motive that led Jews to convert when they realized they could no longer have contact, in other words, business dealings, with Christians. In any case, Glaber has another interest, which we can deduce from what comes after his opening statement. And it is this inter 237 I repeat here for the reader’s ease the text already cited above: Migne, PL 142: 658 Utque divulgatum est per orbem universum, comuni omnium Christianorum consensu decretum est ut omnes Judaei ab illorum terris vel civitatibus funditus pellerentur. Sicque universi odio habiti, expulsi de civitatibus, alii gladiis trucidati, alii fluminibus necati, diversisque mortium generibus interempti; nonnulli etiam sese diversa caede interemerunt, ita scilicet ut digna de eis ultione peracta, vix pauci illorum in orbe reperirentur Romano. Tunc quoque decretum est ab episcopis atque interdictum ut nullus christianorum illis in quocumque sociaret negotio. Si qui tamen de illis ad baptismi gratiam converti voluissent omnemque Judaicam respuere consuetudinem vel morem, illos tantum suscipere decreverunt. quod et fecerint plurimi illorum magis amore presentis vitae coacti metu mortis quam vitae sempiternae gaudiis.

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est that is prime. Many of those who converted, he says, returned to Judaism as apostates, and, as such, they came into fatal contact with Christians – to wit, the story Glaber introduces of a pilgrim who was corrupted by the Jews and publicly burned at the stake for his crimes, in conspectus totius plebis extra civitatem igni est traditus. False conversion in the absence of belief, followed by apostasy and the corruption brought about by consorting with that essence of darkness, the Jews – the very social familiarity against which Paul, earlier popes, and, for that matter, Augustine, not to mention the letter of Leo VII, and so many canons warn – is Glaber’s real subject, preceded by the theme of vengeance for Jewish treachery in Jerusalem. Here was Jewish faithlessness in all its colors, added to which is its constant companion, the disease of avarice. It was this disease, Glaber writes, that smote Rainard of Sens, a disease that was often linked, especially as the Middle Ages progressed – but whose first growths were already present in Glaber’s day – to the supposed Jewish avidity to consume Christian money or, worse, Christian blood, to which money, the blood of a city that Jewish lenders consistently sucked up, was frequently assimilated.238 Glaber is bent on warning Christians to stay away. One hears, too, his anxiety about the fickleness of those who convert out of fear; Glaber’s model is not the Paul of Romans, who makes way for Jews, but the Paul of Corinthians and Galatians, who warns against improper contact and subsequent Judaizing (it does not matter that Paul himself was speaking of contact between believing Christians and those he accused of Judaizing, not the proximity of Christians with actual Jews).239 It was best, therefore, to remove Jews from Christian society or, in lieu of that, to minimize relations with them. Read this way, Glaber’s report forms a neat whole. The Holy Sepulcher was destroyed because of a Jewish plot, which led to chastisement, but not complete eradication, bringing 238 See again Stock, The Implications of Literacy, as cited above, whose judgment is the same as mine. 239 Stow, Jewish Dogs, 6–11.

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the bishops, the guardians of propriety, to order that there be no contact with the (by implication) few Jews who remained.240 In their Jewish duplicity, fearful for their lives (or just their ability to survive physically in this climate of hostility), not to mention in their avarice, “many” of this Jewish remnant converted. Their false pretenses were the atrium to apostasy, which became a vehicle for mortally corrupting Christians. Not all, however, converted, only “many.” Had it been all, the End of Days, of which Glaber may have dreamed, and which Paul augured in Romans 11, would have been upon him, which, Glaber knew, they were not. Glaber’s reaction to the destruction of the Holy Sepulcher was thus a story that melds together the most traditional of themes regarding Jews as they appear and reappear in the canonical texts like those assembled by Amnon Linder on separating Jews from Christians. In addition, we recall, Giovanni Miccoli has observed that Glaber was anticipating Peter Damian, who wrote that the Jews have been removed (delete sunt) from society, with Damian, in turn, borrowing from Jerome.241 This was Glaber’s great desire, but although in his home in the monastery at Cluny he may have come across few real Jews, he knew that the “removal” of the Jews in 1009 had not been total. Accordingly, he ends the account by saying 240 The episcopal, not the papal role, must be stressed. It is bishops, as in the letter of the Doge, or Archbishop Frederick, who take the lead at this time in calling for action against Jews. On the importance of this, in the light of the 1007’s reliance on the popes, which would have been wholly exceptional at this time, see above, at n. 125, on Gerbert, confirming what is said here, as well as the discussion of episcopal power at this time, below. Richard Landes, “The Massacres of 1010,” 86, says that the episcopal intervention is to mitigate the effects of the attack. However, it is, rather, to complement and complete the task of removal or, if not that, isolation, by non-­violent means. The text is transparent. 241 Giovanni Miccoli, Due note sulla tradizione manoscritta di Pier Damiani: antilogus contra iudaeos ad Honestum (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1959), 10: Damian tells Onestus it is better to devote himself to his real tasks than to the Jews, “qui iam pene de terra delete sunt,” which, says Miccoli, echoes Glaber (142:658, with Migne’s punctuation); Antilogus contra iudaeos ad Honestum, PL 145: 0041A. The real origin is Jerome, PL 24: 90 (as in the general index): “Judaei delete sunt propter abjectam legem Evangelii.”

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that five years later Jews began to trickle in, while he justifies their continued presence among Christians by saying it is permitted, so that their guilt be confirmed and as testimony to the spilled blood of Christ. Guided by providence, Christian animosity had, for the moment, been tempered. These words replicate neither Gregory the Great, nor Augustine, nor do they exude the so-­called Augustinian theory of witness, where the witness is to Christian truth, not Christ’s death. Augustine’s Jews are principally capsarii, the older slaves who carry the young master’s books, a theme in Augustine’s writings that Jeremy Cohen has shown is ubiquitous.242 In Glaber the capsarius is absent. Nor do his words approximate what is known as the Augustinian theory as John Tolan has recently summarized it, whose neat synthesis allows for wide interpretation. Tolan writes: “Jews should be allowed to live in peace among Christians. They preserve in error the ancient covenant; and, through their error and their subservient place in Christian society, [they] serve as unwitting witnesses to the superior truth of Christianity (Cohen 1999). Moreover, the Jews will, of their own will, massively convert to Christianity at the end of time: this, indeed, will be one of the signs that the end is near.”243 This is not Glaber. Glaber’s heuristic world of fantasy, in which the Jews, the arch-­realization of perversion, almost completely disappear to herald eventual perfection, was very much his own. To this, we must add the bombastic quality of Glaber’s prose and his penchant for invention, which Stock calls a hallmark of his work. To say that Glaber’s tale of destruction, slaughter, and treachery is polemical wish fulfillment is to state the obvious. How different is his portrait from the simple statement of expulsion in the Quedlingsberg Annals! It outstrips even Ademar’s plague with the 900,000 deaths (of Jews and Saracens, not of Jews 242 Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 41, presents a table in which capsarius appears in all Augustine’s forms of reference to Jews; it is his predominant theme; and see Stow, Jewish Dogs, 228, n. 118. 243 John Tolan, “Jews and Muslims in Christian Law and History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Abrahamic Religions, ed. Adam Silverstein and Guy Stroumsa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 168–88, esp. 170–71.

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alone) as a result of natural, not violent, causes. Glaber’s account is expansive, embracing “the common consent of all Christians,” and featuring attacks that drive Jews from the “entire Roman world.” Ademar and the Annals describe specific situations in specific places. It is perplexing that the three chronicles are regularly housed under one interpretative roof.

Glaber and t he 1007 The justification for this melding is paradoxically obvious: namely, the 1007, whose story is brought to the rescue. It is, as I suggested above, not Glaber who validates the 1007. It is the 1007 that is adduced to validate Glaber. Those who perform this operation surely believe they are doing the opposite, fully unaware, I venture, of the trick they are playing on themselves. Self-­deceptively, they have convinced themselves that Glaber’s indiscriminate, “world-­ wide” attacks for the sake of vengeance, not conversion, are the same as those in the 1007, which, we have just seen, they are not at all. Yet have we not also said, in apparent contradiction, that the 1007 intentionally copies and echoes Glaber? Up to a point. With his hindsight of what had happened in 1096, when a huge uprising by both nobility and members of lower social strata had attacked and forcibly converted Jews, the 1007 must have read Glaber not for his motifs of separation, but at his word. Glaber’s reference to conversion “out of the love of this life (that is, in fear of death)” the 1007 read through the eyes of writers like Shlomo bar Shimshon, blurring Glaber’s distinction between conversion and murderous attack. And in the process, the 1007 led modern historians astray – except Israel Levi. Where the 1007 remained faithful to Glaber was in the idea of “the nations snarled [rose up].”244 Nonetheless, the 1007 and Glaber also part company. For Glaber, the “common consensus” of the peoples who rose up was an act of piety, however vengeful. For the 1007, the peoples rose up “and snarled”; they acted out of evil, canine motivation. Once again, the

244 ‫ויהמו גויי הארצות‬

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1007 has turned a Christian source on it head, another “inversion story” that riffs on a Christian model. Moreover, although the opening segment of the 1007 that speaks of “the peoples of the land” has universalist overtones, as does Glaber throughout, ultimately, in the 1007, the specific initiative to begin the forced conversion is that of King Robert the Pious of France, his wife, and officialdom. The 1007 also speaks only of the lands ruled by Robert with his ministers. Glaber speaks expansively of the orbe Romano, and the actor(s) are the people, with the Emperor nowhere present. If one wishes to investigate Glaber as a positivist, as an accurate reporter of events and detail, one cannot be selective. Parallels must be precise and complete, and between Glaber and the 1007, they are not. The parallel is incomplete on another level, too, which reveals another facet of the 1007’s sophistication. He had to know – it was unavoidable for a Jew living in the thirteenth century not to know – the emphasis of the Church on Jewish-­Christian separation. He had, in his thirteenth-­century reality, no doubt heard the imprecations of people like Peter the Venerable and Robert Courson, just as he most likely was aware of the canon law tradition, certainly as embodied in the decrees of the Third and Fourth Lateran Councils that emphasize distance, whether through prohibiting, actually for the umpteenth time, Christian service to Jews and dining at the same table or by decreeing the wearing of special clothing (the “badge”) to prevent “excessive familiarity.” But he also knew Sicut Iudaeis non, which means that he understood that the popes had managed to achieve an equilibrium when it came to living with Jews, if only to preserve the Pauline teachings first restated in legal terms by Gregory the Great. Christians were to live peacefully with Jews until their conversion at the End of Days. The threat came when the popes were not in control and arbitrary kings and lay rulers dominated. To recall what may be the 1007’s most brilliant inversion, the Duke says to Jacob ben Yekutiel: you must go to the pope, for once the evil decree has been set in motion, it cannot be voided without the word of the pope.245 These 245 ‫אבל מאחר שהתחילה הגזרה לא יכולתי לבטלה כי אם על פי ראש הגוים‬

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are the words of Ahashuerus in Esther (8:8), whose meaning in that setting is that the Jews’ permission to pursue their enemies will not be revoked. Translated and transposed to the world of the thirteenth century, the meaning is no less clear: kings and the nobility are the Jews’ implacable enemies. Nothing will stop them – except the pope. However, not just any pope, but one who is recognized as “the head of the nations.” He alone “can annul” the decree. More than telling the Jews the pope is a safe refuge, the 1007 was explaining the necessary conditions for papal help to be effective. Only through a sophisticated understanding and exploitation of papal claims and theories, recognizing the pope as the Vicar of God to his face, will Jewish survival be somehow assured. By lauding the pope, the 1007 also differs radically from Glaber on a further issue, I suspect intentionally. In Glaber, as also in Ademar and other earlier texts, the ones who take the lead are not the popes, but the bishops (decretum est ab episcopis), which was appropriate for the early Middle Ages,246 when bishops enjoyed enormous independence, including often from temporal rulers.247 By the time the 1007 was writing, the pope in both name and fact had become the “Head of the Bishops.” It was the pope who set 246 On the powers of bishops in the tenth and into the eleventh century, see Ludger Körntgen and Dominik Wassenhoven, eds., Patterns of Episcopal Power: Bishops in Tenth and Eleventh Century Western Europe (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011) and the literature cited there. Bishops, this recent scholarship argues, practically set themselves up as feudal lords, meaning that their relations with even the popes would not have been subservient, which was so even if they may have supported a papalist theory that really allowed them, especially north of the Alps, to do as they pleased. Here, then, we really have another proof of the 1007’s late composition. 247 Of course, independence means bishops could go two ways with respect to Jews. Ademar and Glaber’s picture of hostility is countered by that of Rudiger of Speyer, who, in 1084, brought Jews to settle in his city for the town’s benefit. Glaber’s picture of bishops, like all his work, is tinged with fantasy. As is Ademar’s, and here we must recall the great acrimony between bishops and monasteries at this time in response to the latter receiving special papal charters. Indeed, monasteries were the one sphere where contemporary popes dared to interfere, an interference, however, that set the bishops even more against the popes, which would not have augured well for a (possible) legate despatched to plead in favor of the Jews; see the sources cited in n. 246.

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limits and initiated ecclesiastical policy. In the tenth century, bishops like Frederick of Mainz may have sought papal sanction, but only (regardless of whether the papal response was real) as formal approbation for something they themselves had already decided upon. The popes did not begin to take the bishops’ place with regard to regulating the Jews until Dispar nimirum est of Alexander II,248 culminating in Sicut Iudaeis non and its absorption into the Decretales of 1234, alongside its many other canons on Jews.249 The “official policy” that did not exist in the early eleventh century, now did. This transformation in its fullness was something only a thirteenth-­century author could see.250 Richard Landes would challenge these last paragraphs. He would line up his reading of Ademar with his interpretation of Glaber to reach a different conclusion. Admittedly, he is intent on affirming his highly debated perception of millenarian patterns about the year 1000, but the main question, as with Ademar, is whether he is reading Glaber correctly.251 According to Landes, Glaber’s statement that the pursuit of the Jews communi omnium christianorum decretum est has been mistranslated, pitting his (Landes’s) translation against that of Israel Levi, John France (editor of a recent edition

248 For Jews as barometers of major church issues, see again Stow, Anna and Tranquillo. 249 In the Decretales, X. 5, 6, 9. 250 Dispar nimirum est actually proves the point. The letter went to Spain, where the pope was nominal feudal overlord, giving him some reason to intervene. However, later, when Emperor Henry IV allowed forcibly converted Jews to revert to Judaism, the protests of his own appointee, Antipope Clement III, were disregarded. If Calixtus II actually issued a text of Sicut iudaeis non, it was in all likelihood, as I have elsewhere suggested, a tuitio charter, a writ of protection bestowed directly on Roman Jews. Only later did the text become generalized. 251 Landes is completely taken with the idea of the End of Days. (Landes, Heaven on Earth [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011]), which has embroiled him with others, including with mutual insult. He is supported by Johannes Fried, “Awaiting the End of Time Around the Turn of the Year 1000,” in The Apocalyptic Year 1000: Religious Expectation and Social Change, ed. Richard Landes, Andrew Gow, and David C. Van Meter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and opposed by Gouguenheim, Les Fausses terreurs, and Palmer, The Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages.

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and translation of Glaber), Bernhard Blumenkranz, and, now, me.252 He effectively also challenges the text as it appears in the Patrologia Latina of Migne. This is courageous. When writing history, majority opinion should never be decisive; rather, the correct one. Landes, as we know, also ascribes to the full legitimacy of the 1007.253 In order to show that the 1007 and Glaber jibe, but even more to demonstrate that the French King and Norman Duke initiated persecutions, Landes makes a very slight change. He moves a comma, and the results are striking. In the phrase Utque divulgatum est, Migne’s text puts a comma after universum. Utque divulgatum est per orbem universum, comuni omnium Christianorum consensu decretum est ut omnes Judaei . . . Landes moves the comma to after (the first) est, and he adds another, not found elsewhere, after consensu.254 He arrives at the following: “(Glaber writes) it was decreed (emphasis Landes) with the communal consent of all Christians throughout the world.” The implication of decretum est, “used subsequently,” says Landes, “to refer to acts of bishops in lessening the severity, . . . ​suggests an official act, not, as John France’s translation proposes, a spontaneous

252 John France, Rodulfi Glabri opera (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 135; Blumenkranz, Auteurs, n. 220, on 256–59, citing Histories, 3, 7; PL 642, 657–59: It was seen that Jews had instigated the destruction of the Holy Sepulcher church, and St. Georges in Rama, so communi omnium christianorum decretum est to expel the Jews, etc., with the result that afterward, few Jews remained in “le monde romain.” 253 Landes redates the text to 1009, based on an interesting reasoning about the novelty, as he puts it, of counting by anno mundi, from creation. The latter year would make the 1007 reflect the Holy Sepulcher destruction. One can neither agree nor disagree here. The new date is a possibility, and it may be a better explanation than mine that points to the heretics at Orleans. However, as far as Landes is concerned, this redating confirms the 1007. To me – and if 1009 is correct, that is, correct as the date the author intends, not, to be most certain, the year of composition – it emphasizes how much the 1007 is contrived, how much, as I have said, it is riffing off of Glaber. 254 Landes punctuates: “Utque divulgatum est, per orbem universum communi omnium Christianorum consensu, decretum est ut omnes Iudaei ab illorum terris vel civitatibus funditus pellerentur” (History, 3,7,24 which is Migne, 142, 658).

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uprising.”255 France translates: “all the Christians throughout the whole world decided unanimously to drive the Jews . . . ” 256 With this deft move, Landes has made the 1007 and Glaber (at least as he, Landes, reads Glaber) consonant.257 The emperor, or king, decrees, and the others approve.258 Why he then says the bishops lessen the attack, I cannot follow. As my earlier interpretation of the bishops’ order makes clear, the text at most can be made to read: the bishops said that those (very few) who survive the attacks should have no contact with Christians, hence, completing virtually the Jews’ physical elimination by the sword; delete sunt. However, the deciding issue is the placement of the commas.259 Who decreed? The emperor or king, as Landes says, or, as others have always rendered the phrase, the common will. Thanks to traditional philology and, I admit, Google Scholar, where the phrase can be plugged into a browser and searched, we can answer with certainty. The expression “decreed by communal consent” was not Glaber’s. It was stock and basic, for instance, in Bruno of Wurtzberg, “communi etiam fratrum acclamatio praeposuimus,” the common acclamation of the brothers (PL 142: 451), and in Pope John XIX’s absolution to Bishop Hugo in 1032, “et communi consensu omnium 255 “Tunc quoque decretum est ab episcopis atque interdictum ut nullus Christianorum illis in quocumque sociearet negotio.” Where this lessens severity, I cannot fathom. It is also boilerplate canon law, as I have stressed repeatedly. 256 France, Rodulfi Glabri opera, 135. 257 My reading earlier suggests a bit of equivocation in the 1007 about who makes the decision, whether the king, with approval, or, is the snarling of the people decisive? In Glaber, it is strictly the people. 258 Landes, “The Massacres of 1010,” 92, goes on to speak of “leaders of Christendom.” However, the text mentions only Robert and his lay court. 259 It should by now be clear that something is out of order in Landes’s remarks, pp. 92 and 89, that Stow uses “arbitrary judgment,” and that the “very accuracy of details is suspicious.” It is equally imprescise, 95, to say that “Stow attributes changes on a popular level to the thirteenth century.” Neither in 1984 or now have I, or am I, dealing with popular attitudes. It is not that I am saying that the “populace” rose up in the thirteenth century or, for that matter, that it did not rise up in the eleventh (who really rose up in 1096 is very complex). I am saying that Glaber says it did and that the 1007 is riffing off him with “the people snarled.” My point is purely a literary one.

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ad quos attinebat,” the common consent of all (Epistolae et diplomata, p. 1154).260 Glaber’s image is that of a united societas fidei purifying itself by eliminating its Jews.261 The only way to read this expression as a royal decree is to complete the otherwise inexistent parallel by reading into Glaber the wording of the 1007, where ultimately the decision is the king’s, echoing his people. France’s translation, not Landes’s, is the correct one. * * * Historians have thought that through (what we now know to be forced) comparisons, they were validating the 1007, but it was the other way around. One fiction in the service of validating three others, which is to say that a fiction by any other name remains just that, a fruit of the imagination. In turn, it is the job of the historian to pierce through that imagination, to understand what is motivating it, and not to fall prey to the literal word. The historian must accept the medieval chronicle, the works of medieval history written by medievals, for what they are, which is never “what really happened.” Every word, as I began by saying, counts. The structure of a medieval document is often more telling than its surface content. One may also never write in a vacuum of knowledge, but must be intimate with the period and the movements of its prime 260 Bruno of Wurtzberg (PL 142: 451); Pope John XIX’s absolution to Bishop Hugo in 1032 (Epistolae et diplomata, 1154), and Robert Kingdon, Geneva and the Consolidation of the French Protestant Movement, 1564–1572 (Geneva: Droz, 1967), 214, where Protestant statutes are described as communi consenu decretum est. This is a fixed expression and cannot be toyed with. 261 See Rachel L. Stocking, Bishops, Councils, and Consensus in the Visigothic Kingdom, 589–633 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 11–14, on consensus as something which at this time implies a degree of coercion. I see here the concept of quod omnes tanget ab omnibus approbetur – what applies to all must be debated (in the presence of ) all – a phrase borrowed from Roman law, which, as we noted earlier (note 27), was made famous at the British parliament of 1295, but in fact used in imperial and other cites from the eleventh century, if not earlier, to ratify decisions; see John of Viterbo cited in John H. Mundy and Peter Riesenberg, The Medieval Town (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1958), 125. This is to say, the idea of popular ratification is anything but unique in Glaber and cannot easily be explained away.

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actors, at least as much as one can. Above all, the historian must be equipped to read technical terms correctly. Readers of the 1007 have been tripped up time and again by what for them has been the impenetrable forest of canon law. More even than that, historians of the Jews must free themselves from the myths of the past, the quasi-­sacred treasures that our distinguished forebears and teachers have bequeathed us. The late John Boswell gave a talk in 1981 about his own historical method. Sardonically and characteristically, he quipped: “I ask a question, and that leads to another question, and that leads to a third, and so forth.” This has been the method followed here. Each time one sequence of words in the 1007 was explained, it became clear that there was another still enveloped in opacity. It took decades, literally, before I realized that petil hazahav needed explaining; and only toward the very end of this revision did I realize the “fifteen days” had not been addressed; and only with that done did I see that the opening paragraph with its Esther motif was really a set-­up painting a willful, arbitrary king as opposed to a deliberative, law-­abiding pope: the malkhut harish‘a facing the memshelet reshut. The chronicles, too, yielded their secrets. My eyes have been opened, and I hope those of the readers as well. * * * In this essay, we have travelled a long way. I turn now to the direct background and the essential meaning of the 1007 text itself as I first presented it and offer it again, sharpened in the light of what has just been said, as well as in its manner of expression.

Part Two The “1007 Anonymous” and Papal Sovereignty: Jewish Perceptions of the Papacy and Papal Policy in the High Middle Ages

Foreword A GOOD DEAL has been said about papal attitudes toward the Jews in the Middle Ages. Almost nothing has been said about Jewish perceptions of the popes, the subject of this present study, even in large studies like Simonsohn’s on papal documents and attitudes. I makes no pretense to being exhaustive, but I am persuaded that future research will sustain the validity and representativeness of my findings, which have taken shape over many years. The long opening essay, composed for this reissue, is now followed by the original text of 1984, with emendations to reflect what I have learned since that time. Many friends kindly read the original and offered criticisms. Some are no longer with us; the contributions of Frank Talmage and John Boswell were crucial. Others, too, were instrumental, whom I still have the pleasure of thanking in person: David Ruderman, Maurice Kriegel, Esther Cohen, Menahem Kellner, and Ivan Marcus. I am indebted to the members of my graduate seminar at the University of Haifa, who spent a full semester agonizing with me over the identification of the “1007 Anonymous” text. The 1984 text has been modified for style but also updated, especially with regard to coinage. New modes of research and information retrieval have allowed me to go so much further, as have studies produced in recent years. I have chosen to maintain the original essentially intact for a number of reasons, principally because the new introductory essay is devoted to responding to interpretative problems and observations that the 1984 study raised. That essay is not intended to address the author of the 1007 as a member of 123

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a small chorus of Jewish writers whose thinking mirrored his own. Nor does it discuss the 1007’s background. Trying to blend the two texts, the new and the old, would have been distracting. I ask the reader’s patience with my choice, even if this has meant an inevitable measure of repetition, which I hope to have kept to a minimum.

Chapter One

Old and New Views: An Introduction

Popes, Jews, and Histor ians There are three basic opinions on papal-­Jewish relations in the Middle Ages. The first views the popes as the Jews’ foremost protectors. The second considers the popes as a force for repression, even expulsion. The third believes the popes were originally sincere about protection, but eventually, under pressure, tilted toward repression. However, all three judge the Jewry policy of both individual popes and the papacy itself solely on the question of protection – or, as it is sometimes expressed, the popes’ favorable or unfavorable attitude. The source of this unanimity has been a misreading of the prooftexts and stock formulae found in the prefatory clauses (arenge) of papal letters. In place of repeating at length the fundamentals of policy in each one of their letters, the popes (through the medium of the Apostolic Chancery) supplied brief and perhaps intentionally mnemonic references to leading theological ideas, for instance, “Christian Charity,” meaning justice, or to psalms commonly understood as forbidding harm to the Jews (mostly Ps. 59:12). Modern scholars have commonly mistaken these references, which were intended as signposts, for the totality of the arenga, or even for papal policy as a whole, which, in turn, has led to interpretations couched solely in terms of “protection” or “justifications,” when, in fact, protection was an effect, not an end unto itself. 125

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The real scope of papal Jewry policy was to define the place and role of Jews within the framework of a pure Christian society. That place was complex and elaborate, whose reconstruction requires examining not only papal pronouncements, but also those passages dealing with Jews in the basic works of medieval Christian teaching and doctrine. These include the Summa Theologica (II, II, 10–12) of Thomas Aquinas, which must be interpreted in the light of Paul (Romans 9–11), and the scores of canons concerning Jews and Jewishly related issues in Gratian’s Decretum and preceding canonical collections, as well as in the pertinent chapters in the various decretal collections of the thirteenth century. I have omitted mention of St. Augustine, whose teachings were at best received indirectly and cited verbatim first by Innocent III; if there was an Augustinian theory, it was created in the thirteenth century, not in Augustine’s own day. These writings reveal that papal policy rested on a delicate weave of checks and balances. On the one hand, it was designed to ensure that, in their daily lives, Jews fulfilled the emblematic and subservient role first ordained for them by Paul in his never transparent discussions in the Epistle to the Romans. On the other, it insisted that Christian society protect the rightful privileges of the Jews it was obligated to harbor in its midst. Papal policy thus aimed at creating an equilibrium between function and presence, making it possible to integrate the Jews into a society structured, in theory, if rarely in practice, according to the tenets of an ideal Christian world order. The maintenance of this equilibrium became the hallmark of papal actions involving Jews.262 262 On modern attitudes toward the popes, see the works cited in K. R. Stow, “The Church and the Jews, From St. Paul to Paul IV,” Bibliographical Essays in Medieval Jewish Studies (New York: KTAV, 1976), 107–65, and esp. 124–28, and Stow, “The Church and Neutral History,” [Hebrew] Studies in Historiography, ed. Moshe Zimmerman (Mercaz Shazar: Jerusalem, 1987). See also, Shlomo Simonsohn, “Prolegomena to a History of the Relations between the Papacy and the Jews in the Middle Ages,” [Hebrew] I. F. Baer Memorial Volume, Zion 44 (1979): 66–93; and Solomon Grayzel, “Popes, Jews, and Inquisition – from ‘Sicut’ to ‘Turbato.’” Essays on the Occasion of the Seventieth Anniversary of the Dropsie University (Philadelphia: Dropsie University,

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Moreover, papal policy was neither static, rigidly defined, nor immune to change. Nor, too, was it synonymous with a universal mode of thought. On the subject of the Jews, there was no unified opinion. Even Paul contradicted himself, especially in Galatians and Corinthians. In distinction to the soteriological role he assigned the Jews in Romans, he implied in Galatians and Corinthians (Gal. 4:21–5:14 and 1 Cor. 5:5–6:20) that the Jews (actually Christians practicing Jewish rites) were primarily a source of social infection whose presence must be shunned at all costs. Paul’s anxiety later was transferred to apply to Jews themselves, and it was melded into the articulated policy of the high medieval popes that called for avoiding excessive contact, yet never rejected a Jewish presence. In its pure form, Paul’s anxiety was brought to full flower in the East by the late fourth-­century John Chrysostom in his Eight Orations, in which he called Jews polluting dogs. In a slightly moderated form it reached Latin Christendom in the works of ecclesiastics like the ninth-­century Agobard of Lyons. Agobard’s writings and the canonical collections they inspired were instrumental in the eventual creation of multiple restrictions to prevent Jews and Christians from mingling with each other, thus to guarantee an unblemished societas fidei, “the society of the faithful.” One hears Agobardian ripples in the very few papal letters devoted to Jews between the time of Gregory the Great at the end of the sixth century and the reign of Alexander II in the 1060s, but by the early twelfth century the basic flow of papal policy steadied, sometimes to the point of exerting a counter pressure that tempered the extremists. Thus the Dominican Ramon Martí railed against a demonic Judaism, as Robert Bonfil has argued, but he concluded his Pugio Fidei of 1278 with the reminder that the present moment was not opportune for approaching the Jews. Reaffirming tradition, Martí asserted that it was presently impossible (minime 1979), 151–88. For a fuller discussion of the theological underpinnings of papal policy, see K. R. Stow, “Hatred of the Jews or Love of the Church: Papal Policy Toward the Jews” [Hebrew], in Antisemitism Through the Ages, ed. S. Almog (New York: Pergammon; Jerusalem: Shazar Center, 1988), 91–111.

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possumus) to convert the Jews; their conversion would occur only at the End of Days.263 In this thought, Martí was joined by his contemporary and one-­time Dominican General, Humbert of Romans. Addressing a Chapter of the Order, Humbert wrote in some detail of the Dominican program for teaching Eastern languages instituted to facilitate conversionary activity. However, his references to Hebrew and missions specifically to the Jews were perfunctory. His main point was that contemporary Jews non sciunt nec possunt contra Christianos.264 That is, Jews normally behaved in a peaceful and docile manner (as Christian theology dictated), and, consequently, it was incumbent upon the Church to guarantee the right of the Jews to live in peace and observe their rituals. Despite the existence of contrasting opinions, it may be said that the basic principles of papal Jewry policy were implanted in firm soil. Yet the identification and description of that policy – the positing by the popes of an integral role for Jews in Christian society and the attempt to regulate that role by means of an equilibrium involving both restrictions and privileges – have eluded modern scholarship. It did not elude medieval Jews. Some even discussed its political liabilities and advantages, as we are now about to see. The focus will fall on two texts in particular: that of Meir ben Simeon of Narbonne in his later thirteenth-­century Milḥemet Mitzvah and that of the anonymous author of the brief, yet intriguing narrative known simply as “The Terrible Event of 1007,” or, more usually, “The 1007 Anonymous.” It is a text of unexpected richness. However, to interpret texts like “The 1007 Anonymous” in the light of current notions of papal Jewry policy would obscure their authors’ intentions. We begin, therefore, by examining the formation of papal policy and its basic principles, as well as parallel developments in the lay domain. Jewish views of the popes were constructed in no 263 Pugio Fidei (Leipzig, 1687), part III, chap. 21, par. 22, and chap. 23, pars. 1–6; and see R. Bonfil, “The Nature of Judaism in Raymundus Martini’s Pugio Fidei,” [Hebrew] Tarbiz 40 (1971): 360–75. 264 Cited in J. D. Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Collectio, Venice, 1779–1782, 59 vols., 24:115 (Reprint, Graz, 1960–1961); and the 1254 Chapter General cited in E. Martene and U. Durand, Thesaurus novus anecdotorum (Paris, 1717), 4: 1706–1708.

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small measure in reaction to negative perceptions of royal behavior. With this examination in hand, the reader will be armed with the same perspective enjoyed by medieval Jews. And yet, it seems unfair to make the reader wait until this examination of policy-­origins is completed. We begin, therefore, by looking at three brief, but pointed illustrations of Jewish attitudes that reveal how well Jews comprehended papal policy. Their vividness unmasks a central mode of medieval Jewish political thought.

T hr ee Jew ish Per spect i v es An early recognition of papal Jewry policy was that of the late twelfth-­century Ephraim of Bonn, who sought to explain why the same Jewish communities of the Rhineland that had suffered so devastatingly in the First Crusade had escaped with relatively little damage in the Second. He spoke out unambiguously: And God heard our pleas. He sent a responsible priest, a great man and teacher of all priests, one who knew and understood their religion: His name was Bernard of Clairvaux. He too spoke as the Crusaders, (summoning men) to go to the land of the Ishmaelites. But to touch a Jew and take his life, that (he said) would be no less than to assault Jesus himself. . . . And Bernard’s words were effective; nor have we heard that he took a bribe!265 This is unexpected praise. In 1146 and 1147, Jews had sought refuge and defended themselves successfully from fortified towers, as chronicles of the pillage of 1096–1097 had urged.266 Nevertheless, without Bernard, his letters and his preaching, Ephraim was saying, the results might have been catastrophic. It mattered little that Ephraim believed God himself was ultimately responsible for Bernard’s actions. Bernard’s own motivations had to be taken into account. For, as Ephraim stressed, Bernard was the leading 265 A. M. Haberman, Sefer Gezerot Tzarfat ve’Ashkenaz ( Jerusalem: Ofir, 1971), 116. 266 H. H. Ben Sasson, “Lamegamah hakronografiah haYehudit shel yemei habeinayim,” Hahistoryon ve’Askolot hahistoriah ( Jerusalem: Mercaz Shazar, 1963), 29–49.

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theologian of the day, “the teacher of all priests,” and, as such, he saw himself obligated to uphold the cardinal principle of Christian theology, just then in the process of legal formulation in the text known as Sicut Iudaeis non, forbidding attacks on Jews under any guise. As Ephraim no doubt also knew, Bernard’s protégé, pope Eugenius III (1145–1159), had recently issued a bull, possibly at Bernard’s urging and likely bearing this name, that prohibited assaults against Jews and recognized their right to profess Judaism freely.267 Yet sometime before Ephraim, Shlomo bar Shimshon had referred to “Satan, the Pope of Rome, the wicked one,” who had preached the First Crusade.268 This same Shlomo had also gone out of his way to note the efforts made by the local bishops in the Rhineland to save the Jews, implying thereby that the pope, who is never mentioned again in the chronicle, was indeed the Devil. He had observed the slaughter yet done nothing to stop it. Nor is there any papal text touching on the Rhenish massacres to argue differently, despite the universal disapproval or even condemnation heaped by Christian chroniclers upon the wandering bands that had carried out the rapine.269 The only major figure who extended himself to protect the Jews, albeit not effectively, says Shlomo, was the Emperor, Henry IV, who dispatched letters of protest from Italy where he had been detained militarily for some years.270 Ephraim of Bonn, too, grants royalty a part in the rescues of the Second Crusade, especially in England and France. But his remarks are brief, and, more than praise the kings, they emphasize the centrality and efficacy of Bernard, which they do even though 267 On the bull, Sicut Iudaeis, and on its origins, see chapter 2, below. The text published by Eugenius III was first issued by Calixtus II ca. 1120. Eugenius’s bull, although with no text, is registered in Shlomo Simonsohn, “The Apostolic See and the Jews, vols. 1–8,” Jewish Quarterly Review 85 (1995): 397–412, 1: 47, no. 46. 268 Haberman, Sefer Gezerot, 24–60. See S. W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 17 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1952–1980), 4:288, n. 9 and nn. 17 and 18, for the debate on the date of this text. Henceforth, SRH. 269 See, for example, Albert of Aix in Martin Bouquet, Recueil des historiens des croisades. Historiens occidentaux (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1879), 4:292. 270 See below on Henry IV and Wibert of Ravenna.

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Ephraim knew he was at least partially dissimulating. He charged Louis VII alone with cancelling the oaths Crusaders had taken to repay monies they owed to Jews, which was true. Yet, he had to have known that it was Bernard who had implored Louis VII to take this step in the concluding paragraph of his, Bernard’s, pastoral letter decrying attacks.271 Ephraim’s chronicle, therefore, is a deliberately constructed “position paper,” counseling Jews to look to the Church, especially to its highest officials, in moments of need. Whatever else these churchmen felt about Jews, or did, their doctrine insisted they use their full leverage in Jewish defense when Jewish life and limb were endangered. Yet, for all his conviction, Ephraim did not explain why he devalued royal protection and, by contrast, promoted the popes and other high ecclesiastics from the rank of Devil to that of agents of rescue. Others, however, were not so reserved, nor were they particularly cautious in estimating how ready the popes were to help. Compared to Ephraim, they were unabashed optimists. A rabbinic responsum (Consilium), probably of northern French – although possibly also Italian – origin, composed toward the close of the twelfth century, narrates how a local ruler instructs two Jewish creditors to turn to the pope, the “Head of the Bishops,” so they may collect from a debtor.272 The debtor lived in another city, under episcopal rule; and the bishop of the city had refused to aid the creditors. When approached, the pope orders the bishop to decide without delay. Most of the debt is then paid.273 This is the same 271 Haberman, Sefer Gezerot, 121. Bernard’s remarks on usury are found in J. P. Migne, Patrologia Latina, (PL) 182:568A, letter no. 363. 272 In J. Muller, Teshuvot hakhame Tzarfat veLotair (Vienna, 1881), no. 34, p. 206, who argues for later twelfth-­century France. Irving Agus in Jewish Quarterly Review 48 (1957): 95, and Samuel Kraus in Revue des études juives 34 (1897): 238, argue for the eleventh century, which is doubtful because of the use of the term “Head of the Bishops,” on which see the continuation here. Agus’s claim of an Italian locus for the events is interesting and might allow a date ca. 1100. 273 The unpaid remainder of the debt then becomes the subject of the responsum itself, which handles principally questions of partnerships and oaths. It should be noted that the text does not specify the bishop’s reaction and that the local ruler supervises the repayment. But it is obvious from the events that either the

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responsum discussed in the introductory essay, where we noted that the title “Head of the Bishops” reveals a Jewish author up-­to-­date regarding papal claims to direct jurisdiction over prelates. But when? The popes had asserted their religious headship of the Church for centuries, and from the time of the Pseudo-­Isidorian Decretals in the ninth century there had been additional claims, originating from both within papal precincts and without, that the popes possessed ecclesiastical juridical primacy. Yet, only from the time of the Gregorian Reform in the late eleventh century had the papacy claimed this primacy unambiguously, and only from that moment did it labor to realize that claim in fact. In the famous dispute over the episcopal see at Rheims between Gerbert and Arnulf of Orleans, which took place in the last decade of the tenth century, the latter queried whether Rome could be appealed to and if it had juridical competence in disputes involving extra-­Roman episcopal sees. Gerbert himself, the future Silvester II (999–1003), had serious doubts about such an appeal.274 The scenario depicted in the responsum is thus an accurate and detailed reconstruction of an ideal, post-­Gregorian reality. Beyond that, the secular ruler admits he is powerless to intervene, because he does not want the bishop to “hate me,” a phrase that suggests a sensitivity to the problem of “ecclesiastical liberties,” perhaps the central issue of the Gregorian Reform. Yet, the responsum deals with papal power over bishops as a fait accompli. Hence, as said in the introduction, the time of its composition had to be no earlier than the late twelfth century, when the goal of episcopal control had largely been achieved. Whether the scenario in the responsum is real is, of course, moot. Searching for a factual model is fruitless. In 1173, Alexander III ordered some churchmen in Poitou to pay an overdue debt to a group of Jews. However, the delay was caused not by the bishop’s bishop accepted the papal ruling or else that there is a break in the logic of the story. 274 K. F. Morrison, Tradition and Authority in the Western Church, 300–1140 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 259–66 and 281–91; and H. E. J. Cowdrey, “Pope Gregory VII and the Anglo-­Norman Church and Kingdom,” Studi Gregoriani 9 (1972): 83 and 96 on Gregory’s claims to the headship of all bishops.

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unwillingness to enforce a loan contract, as in the responsum, but by the temporary sequestration by the Count of Anjou and Poitou, namely, the English King Henry II, of a prebend whose income was intended to pay off the debt.275 A mid-­thirteenth-­century letter of Innocent IV to Thibaud of Champagne resembles the responsum more closely. In reply to Jewish complaints, the pope instructed the count to change his policies and stop preventing the repayment of legitimate Jewish loans.276 Yet, here too, the issue was not papal jurisdiction over bishops, but the more delicate one of direct Church jurisdiction over both lending and the Jews themselves. To be sure, the responsum does not depend on unearthing specific evidence to corroborate its authenticity, and, in the event, the manner of their retelling is far more important than the events themselves. The responsum’s author was preoccupied with theory: the Jews are directed to turn to the pope, because he is the “Head of the Bishops.” For their part, the Jews take the advice of the ruler and petition the pope, since they know he can force the bishop to act. These pointed justifications reveal an author who knew papal theory and also wished to stress its exploitability. The optimistic tone of the responsum seems to imply that it was sufficient to ask and the pope would order the protection of Jewish rights and property without fail. The author’s confidence is even greater than that expressed by Ephraim of Bonn speaking of Bernard of Clairvaux. Yet his confidence seems restrained compared to that in a late thirteenth-­century letter sent to David Maimuni, the grandson of Maimonides, who was then fighting the attacks levelled against the Guide for the Perplexed by Solomon Petit.277 Shortly after being excommunicated for his actions in 1288, Solomon visited Rome 275 Solomon Grayzel, “Pope Alexander III and the Jews,” Salo W. Baron Jubilee Volume (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 561–62, and Walter Holtzmann, “Zur päpstlichen Gesetzgebung über die Juden in 12ten Jahrhundert,” Festschrift Guido Kisch (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1955), 229, for the text. 276 Solomon Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the Thirteenth Century (New York: Hermon Press, 1966), 1: 268, no. 115. 277 The letter was published by Abraham Harkavy in HaKedem 3 (1912): 111–14, and see the comments, with selections from the text, in Jacob Mann, Texts and Studies in

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in search of ecclesiastical support, hoping to renew the precedent set in 1233 when Church authorities in Montpellier had ordered Maimonidean writings burned. However, contrary to Solomon’s expectations, the pope is said to have issued a breve praising the Guide – “whose wisdom was boundless (at least when it did not contradict Christian truth).” Those who dissented from this opinion and prevented the study of Maimonides, the breve continued, would be fined the sum of one hundred pounds. Notwithstanding the regular use of Maimonides’ writings by scholastic philosophers, accepting the legitimacy of this breve requires straining the imagination.278 If for no other reason, its author could have only been Nicholas IV (1288–1292), whose reissue of the bull, Turbato corde, implicitly licensed the Inquisition to reexamine Jewish texts and determine anew if they insulted Christianity. Belief in the efficacy and reliability of the pope, it appears, had reached the level of fantasy. But such fantasies were not representative. On the contrary, by the thirteenth century certain Jews had acquired a good deal of perspective, and some of them were producing sober analyses of papal-­Jewish relations whose source was their ability to see the continuities linking the principles underlying papal theory as a whole to the principles governing papal policy specifically as it applied to Jews. In particular, they had identified a series of concepts that had coalesced sometime in the twelfth century and from then on had served as the basis of a formalized policy. They had also perceived that, unlike the kings, who had shown themselves increasingly arbitrary, the popes were proving themselves consistent with respect to Jewish privileges, as well as the limitations their policy established. Papal consistency and predictability were the major revelations of these Jewish think-

Jewish History and Literature (New York: KTAV, 1972, reprint of 1931–1935), 1: 422–23; Mann dates the letter 1288–1292, p. 423. 278 Obviously, one must distinguish between use by Christians, and even exploitation, on the one hand, and praise, together with threats to the Guide’s detractors, on the other; see here, J. I. Dienstag, “St. Thomas Aquinas in Maimonidian Scholarship,” in Studies in Maimonides and St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: KTAV, 1975): 192–206.

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ers, and it was thanks to these qualities that they advocated relying on papal support, as each of the three texts just reviewed reveals. Yet, can this notion of the predictability of papal Jewry policy be substantiated? It certainly varies with the commonly accepted opinion depicting that policy primarily in terms of alternations between periods of relative calm and even privilege and periods of draconian restriction. Restrictions have also been called the norm, especially from the thirteenth century, and, to support this assertion, scholars have pointed to the edicts of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, the assault on post-­biblical literature and contemporary Jewish practices in the 1240s, and the all-­encompassing and oft-­times papally supported offensive of the Dominicans, which began in the mid-­thirteenth century and included censorship, occasional missionary Hebraism, and the attempted manipulation of the Papal Inquisition.279 Nevertheless, these outbursts of repressive energy did not sidetrack medieval Jewish thinkers as they have many moderns. Always keeping in mind the complex foundations of papal policy toward the Jews and the necessary connection between that policy and policy for the Church as a whole, medieval Jews thought in terms of modulations within a basic continuity. Why they thought this way will now be investigated.

279 The most thorough discussion remains Petrus Browe, Die Judenmission im Mittelalter und die Päpste (Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University, 1942). More recently, see the extreme theory of Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982) and the indirect response of Kenneth Stow, “Papal Mendicants or Mendicant Popes: Continuity and Change in Papal Policies Toward the Jews at the End of the Fifteenth Century,” in Friars and Jews in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. S. McMichael and S. E. Myers (Leiden: Brill, 2004).

Chapter Two

The Growth of Papal Policy Fundamental Pr inciples of Papal and Royal Policies The foundations of a papal Jewry policy were laid in the late sixth century by Gregory the Great. Borrowing his phraseology and ideas from the Theodosian Code of 438, he stipulated that Jews who agreed to live by the limitations of the law (and in particular the law of the Church) would be guaranteed their peaceful existence and the free practice of Judaism.280 By sometime in the twelfth century, this stipulation had come to form the heart of the bull, Sicut Iudaeis non, or, as it is also known, the Constitutio pro Iudaeis. The bull’s fundamental clauses state that law-­abiding Jews have been taken under papal protection and are entitled to the benefits of Christian caritas, or justice: they are not to be molested, attacked, falsely accused, baptized, or have their property seized without due 280 For a translation of Gregory’s letter, see Edward Synan, The Popes and the Jews in the Middle Ages (New York; London: Macmillan; Collier-­Macmillan, 1965), 46, citing Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH, Epist.) Epistolarum, VIII, 25, vol. 2, p. 27. The clause of particular interest states: “Sicut iudaeis non debet esse licentia quicquam in synagogis suis ultra quam permissum est lege praesumere, ita in his quae eis concessa sunt nullum debent praeiudicio sustinere . . . ” For other letters of Gregory concerning Jews, see Bernhard Blumenkranz, Les auteurs chrétiens latins du moyen âge sur les juifs et le judaïsme (Paris: Peeters, 1963), 73–86.

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legal process. Reissued a score of times between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, at both papal initiative and Jewish request, this bull became the primary text of papal Jewry policy. In the thirteenth century, Sicut Iudaeis non was edited and absorbed into the Decretals of Gregory IX, thereby achieving canonical status and permanent validity.281 However, between the sixth and twelfth centuries, no pope renewed Gregory the Great’s teachings. In their place came the threatening language of Stephen III (772), warning Christians to stay away from Jews – lest the sons of light be endangered by the sons of darkness – 282 and the theories of Agobard of Lyons and his school, grudgingly conceding the Jews a place in Christian society.283 In Agobard’s view, the Jews were the impedimentum blocking the way to perfection of the Populus dei Christianus, the arch-­symbol of evil. In the same vein, continuing the tradition established during the patristic period, heresy in the early medieval period was considered, as well as named, Judaizing.284 There was little reason for Jews to 281 Decretals of Gregory IX: X.5, 6, 9, based on the text issued by Clement III (1187–1191), which was mostly identical to its predecessors; and see Solomon Grayzel, “The Papal Bull ‘Sicut Judaeis,’” in Studies and Essays in Honor of Abraham A. Neuman (Leiden: Brill, 1962), 243–80, for a complete history of the bull, as well as for changes introduced by Innocent III, yet not included in the Decretals text. 282 For Stephen III, see J. P. Migne, PL 129: 857. Cf. Hadrian I, comparing iconclasts to Jews, PL 96: 1232, and Leo VII, obliquely calling Judaizing, specifically, feasting on the Sabbath, a heresy, PL 98: 335 (and see Blumenkranz, Auteurs, 142 and 219–20); and Gregory IV, citing the Fourth Toledan Council on the subject of forcing Jews to remain Christians, even if, illegally, they had been forcibly baptized in the first place, in Gratian, Decretum, D. 45, c. 5 (cited in Synan, The Popes, 218). 283 Agobard’s letters on the Jews appear in MGH, Epist. Karolini Aevi, III, E. Deummler, 164–66 and 179–201. See here Manfred Kneiwasser, “Bischof Agobard von Lyon und der Platz der Juden in einer sakral verfaßten Einheitsgesellschaft,” Kairos 19 (1979): 203–27. For Agobard’s school, Bernhard Blumenkranz, “Deux compilations canoniques de Florus de Lyon et l’action antijuive d’Agobard,” Revue historique de droit français et étranger 33 (1955): 227–54 and 560–62. 284 See Blumenkranz, Auteurs, 177 ff., 228 ff., 237 ff., 264 and 265 ff.; and J. F. Benton, ed., Self and Society in Medieval France (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 134–37 and 209–11, for the twelfth-­century developments on this theme, of a pornographic nature, in the writings of Guibert of Nogent.

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trust the popes and none whatsoever to advocate approaching the popes for help. There certainly existed no articulated program for dealing with the Jews. As noted in the introductory essay, in the long five centuries between Gregory the Great and the mid-­eleventh century, there were only three, at most four, highly scattered papal letters touching on Jews. By contrast, early medieval secular rulers regularly granted Jews writs known as tuitio charters that created a series of direct and mutual obligations, including that of special protection between sovereign and subject.285 In addition, these rulers, kings in particular, rejected the ideas of radical bishops like Agobard. Emperor Louis the Pious accepted the episcopal premise that Jews must be regulated by Church canons, but just as he refused to subordinate royal to episcopal interests in general, so he also overruled the extremes proposed by Agobard and his successors.286 Surely as cognizant of these developments as they were of those within the Church, Jews – from the ninth century through at least the time of Shlomo bar Shimshon – must have concluded that it was politic to trust the king. Confidently to reconstruct Jewish legal history between the ninth and eleventh centuries is beyond our reach, but it is clear that significant changes had occurred by the time of the First Crusade. The tuitio charters, once granted as additional protection for those 285 For a discussion of such charters, Vittore Colorni, Legge ebraica e leggi locali (Milan: Giuffrè, 1945), 11–99, and esp. 23–30. 286 Agobard’s differences with Louis the Pious are self-­evident from Agobard’s letters. On the continuing clash between royal and clerical interests over Jews after Agobard, most sharply at the Diet of Epernay, see Blumenkranz, Juifs et chrétiens dans le monde occidental (Paris: Peeters, 1960), 300–306, and idem, Auteurs, 208. Yet, see Walter Ullmann, “Public Welfare and Social Legislation in the Early Medieval Councils,” Studies in Church History 7 (1971): 23, on early medieval royal legislation preventing Jews from holding public offices. The thorny problem of Visigothic Spain, universally conceded to be unique, here has been omitted from consideration. For general problems between kings and clergy, see K. F. Morrison, The Two Kingdoms: Ecclesiology in Carolingian Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), and Walter Ullmann, The Carolingian Renaissance and the Idea of Kingship (London: Methuen, 1969).

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who already were deemed permanent residents and fully integrated into the fabric of society, had now become the sole written legal basis for a Jewish presence in a given territory.287 While various kinds of written law with a territorial basis were developing throughout western Europe, the Jews had begun a slide into legal and constitutional isolation. This slide reached bottom in the thirteenth century with the growth of Chamber Serfdom and other similar statuses prescribing the total dependence of the Jews on the kings and dukes whose quasi-­catallum they had become.288 Even when, for example, it was understood that on an ongoing basis Jewish complaints would be aired in local courts under normal rules of legal procedure, it was no less understood that this arrangement existed only as long as it suited royal or ducal pleasure. Jews became vulnerable to the manipulations of their rulers and especially of rulers who hoped thereby to extend the scope of their prerogatives. These manipulations sometimes failed. Fearful that royal tactics would cause them real and perhaps illegal loss, the nobility sometimes reacted sharply, most notably in the clauses in the Magna Carta in 1215 that block the English king from indirectly controlling the transfer of estates and inheritances by exploiting his powers over Jewish lenders and lending. Additional royal 287 See, for example, the 1084 Charter of Rudiger of Spire in J. Aronius, Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden in frankischen and deutschen Reiche bis zum Jahre 1273 (Berlin: Simion, 1902), 69, and of Henry IV, ibid., 71–77. 288 For the use of this term (and others like it: e.g., tanquam servi and servi regis), see the texts published in Latin with Hebrew translation and references to original editions by Haim Beinart, Kitve zekhuyot klalliyot shel Yehudei Eiropah (Jerusalem: Akadmon, 1972), 20–23. On the legal aspects of Chamber Serfdom, see Guido Kisch, The Jews in Medieval Germany, 2nd edit. (New York: KTAV, 1970), 119–28, and 139–53; and cf. Gavin Langmuir, “‘Judei Nostri’” and the Beginnings of Capetian Legislation,” Traditio 16 (1963): 203–69, and also “Tanquam Servi: The Change in Jewish Status in French Law About 1200,” in Les juifs dans l’histoire de France, ed. Myriam Yardeni (Leiden: Brill, 1980): 24–54. Langmuir argues that the legal status of the Jew was so special that Chamber Serfdom, or any other kind of serfdom recalling actual serfdom, is not an applicable term or category, at least not in England or France. Rather, Jews were legally Judaei, and nothing more, fully dependent on the king or important barons.

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concessions in matters concerning Jews were the equivalent of a Confirmatio Cartarum, a reconfirmation of the Magna Carta forced upon resentful English kings more than once during the thirteenth century.289 Numerous other examples of the Jews being treated as objects in dealings between kings and barons can be brought from France and Germany. But the point is clear: caught between the king and his barons, or between any two groups in friction, the Jew quickly came to be portrayed as fulfilling exclusively negative functions. This negative portrayal of the Jews did not respect social or class boundaries. On all levels of society, Jews were viewed as the disrupter of laws and feudal obligations, the agent of economic exploitation and moral destruction, and the dissident, opposed to universally shared beliefs and opinions. High medieval lay society had created an image of the Jew not dissimilar to that held by certain members of the clergy in the Carolingian age. The wave of exhilarated lay piety that peaked in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and to which kings were no less susceptible than the barons, or any other of their subjects, then made this image all-­pervasive.290 It would take only

289 See J. C. Holt, Magna Carta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), passim; and Wm. Stubbs, Select Charters (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 339, 344, 353, 365, 416 and 487 for thirteenth-­century charter confirmations. An informative, if not complete, parallel appears in Shlomo ibn Verga’s Shebet Yehudah. See chap. 10, p. 54 of Azriel Shohat’s edition ( Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1956), where Cardinal Gil Albornoz counsels Gonzalo Martinez de Oviedo against urging Alfonso XI to expel the Jews. Since, says Albornoz, the Jews belong to the King and are a treasure to him, “You are not an enemy of the Jews but of the King [if you counsel expulsion].” See the discussion of this passage in Y. H. Yerushalmi, The Lisbon Massacre of 1506 and the Royal Image in the Shebet Yehudah (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1976), 41. 290 See Robert Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 100 ff. on St. Louis; and Gavin Langmuir “The Jews and the Archives of Angevin England,” Traditio 19 (1963): 183–244, on the problems of piety on all levels of society and the attitudes taken toward Jews; and see the works cited in note 400 below for additional bibliography.

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the occasional service of Jews in such tasks as royal executioner to turn the metaphor of Jewish destructiveness into actual fact.291 The stewards and members of what was consciously on the way to becoming the nascent political, mystical, and religious body, known otherwise as the incipient modern state, thus joined together in the belief that they must shield themselves and the patria from the danger to social harmony and overall unity posed and symbolized by the presence within their midst of the Jewish stumbling block.292 Urged on by clerical purists, who added to the list of lay grievances their own anxiety that the “society of the faithful” might be polluted through close contact with Jews or participation in their practices, secular society voted unanimously to rid itself of the Jews.293 There was no constitutional or legal roadblock. The royal “owner” had only to assent, which he sooner or later did. Conflict between the demands of piety and the “commonweal” as opposed to any inherent Jewish right were repeatedly decided in favor of the former. The decision was invariably accompanied by renewed baronial and, sometimes, clerical support, or the diminution of baronial opposition, and almost always benefited the royal prerogative.294 Jews took note. Some, like many Sephardim after 1492, seem never to have relinquished what has been termed the myth of the

291 Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1949), 102. 292 On this term and its association with the growing self-­consciousness and spiritual aura of the later medieval kingdom, see Gaines Post, “Two Notes on Nationalism in the Middle Ages,” Traditio 9 (1953): 281–320, esp. 290. 293 On the legal problems connected with expulsion in the Middle Ages, and also for contemporary opinions on this issue, see Marquardus de Susannis, De Iudaeis et Aliis Infidelibus (Venice, 1558), part I, chap. 7, par. 1. For a further discussion of the Jew in the emerging medieval state, see below. 294 See S. A. Singer, “The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290,” Jewish Quarterly Review 55 (1964): 117–35, which reviews fully the multiplicity of motifs possibly responsible for expulsions of the Jews. For specifically political aspects of expulsions, as well as problems involving kings and nobility, see M. Kriegel, “Mobilisation politique et modernisation organique,” Archives de sciences sociales 46 (1978): 5–20.

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royal alliance, or so it has been said.295 Others, reflecting on their civil status, realized they must not place their hopes on the crown. But on whom then? Medieval society would not allow anyone, let alone the Jews, to function in a civil vacuum. In the long run, the alternative to the crown was found in the Church. In distinction from the kings, the Church was ultimately bound by its theology, by the teachings of Paul (in Romans), and the dormant precedents of Gregory the Great.296 Certain churchmen, of course, had rejected these teachings, like Chrysostom, who had called for the elimination of the Jews.297 But Chrysostom’s writings were not directly known in medieval Europe, and even his followers in the spirit, like Agobard, had recognized that the law and teachings of the Church made room for and insisted upon a Jewish presence in Christian society until the End of Days.298 At some point the Church would have no alternative. It would have to draw the implications of its theology and establish a clear-­cut policy regarding the Jews, with whom it was destined, indeed obligated, to live. Such a policy emerged during the second half of the eleventh century, and not accidentally, for this was the moment when the Church began to gain control of itself and its administra-

295 See Yerushalmi, Lisbon Massacre, passim. 296 Paul in Romans 9–11; Augustine in Adversus Iudaeos, J. P. Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 42. Paris: Garnier, 1844–1905, passim, and see Bernhard Blumenkranz, Die Judenpredigt Augustins (Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1946). 297 See his Eight Orations against the Jews in Migne, Patrologia Graeca 48: 843–947; see too, R. L. Wilkens and W. A. Meeks, Jews and Christians in Antioch in the First Four Centuries of the Common Era (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1978). On those who thought like Chrysostom, and on the clerical desire to expel Jews or use force in converting them, see Petrus Browe, Judenmission, 13–45, 71–85, and 215–52; on the use of force in conversion, in particular, see Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1966), vol. 2, 95–98; and see especially Renata Segre, “Bernardino da Feltre; i Monti di Pieta e i banchi ebraici,” Rivista storica italiana 90 (1978): 818–33, for a vivid fifteenth-­century example. 298 See Romans, 11: 15–26; Augustine, The City of God, bk. 20, chap. 30; and The Catechism of the Council of Trent, trans. J. Donovan (New York: Christian Books Today, 2009, reprint of 1905), 64; and cf. Agobard’s citation of Romans 11 in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae Karolini Aevi III, 198, and see too 184.

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tive structures. It had also become capable of identifying its real enemies rather than feeling threatened by fantasies.299 So armed, the Church could now define with precision the role of its various members and also of those qui foris sunt. However, the basic difficulty the Church faced in defining the relationship between Jews and Christians was not, as is often thought, one of finding a balance between the two competing tendencies of toleration in opposition to the will to repress or even eliminate the Jews from Christian society. It was, rather, in arriving at a formula justifying the retention of Jews within Christian society while simultaneously exploiting the Jewish presence to advance Christian teachings and interests, including those that advanced papal theory. Moreover, just as the popes claimed primacy over all matters of Christian spirituality, so they would appoint themselves guardians in matters that impinged on relations between Christians and Jews, a sphere they eventually extended to embrace what they called improper Jewish religious behavior.300 More than anything else, it was this assertion of guardianship and its broader implications that Jews would come to ponder most.

Sicut Iudaeis and t he Matur ing of Papal Jewry Policy An articulated papal Jewry policy was inaugurated by Alexander II in 1063. In three letters, the most well known of which entered Gratian’s legal compendium, the Decretum, as Dispar nimirum est, the pope first recalled the normative Pauline theology of Jewish rejection and then praised the efforts of the Viscount and Archbishop 299 This point is seen especially well (to be sure, it must appear in any discussion of the Gregorian Reform) in Gerhard Ladner, “The Concepts of ‘Ecclesia’ and ‘Christianitas’ and Their Relation to the Idea of Papal ‘Plenitudo Potestatis’ from Gregory VII to Boniface VIII,” Sacerdozio e regno da Gregorio VII a Bonifacio VIII (Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University, 1954), passim, and esp. 56 for his apt term, “inverted Carolingianism.” 300 The reference here is to S. W. Baron’s “‘Plenitude of Apostolic Powers’ and Medieval ‘Jewish Serfdom,’” in Ancient and Medieval Jewish History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1972), 284–307.

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of Narbonne, as well as the body of Spanish bishops. In response to an earlier papal request, these churchmen had restrained the warriors under their command and prevented a Jewish slaughter during recent military operations in Spain. Exceeding the simple recognition of service, however, and with the apparent intention of turning a precedent into a rule, the letters also specified that the protection of Jews was proper. For the matter of the Jews was entirely different from that of the Saracens: the latter actively engaged in war against Christians; the former were everywhere ready to be subservient.301 By subservient, Alexander II did not mean as true servants, much less slaves. He meant willing to accept Christian domination and canonical discipline. Like Gregory the Great before him, Alexander was repeating the threat of the Theodosian Code demanding that Jews refrain from contempt for the Christian law lest they lose their legal privileges.302 He was also implying that in the same way 301 The text of the main letter is found in PL 146: 1386–1387: “Dispar nimirum est Judaeorum et Sarracenorum causa. In illos enim qui Christianos persequuntur et ex urbibus et propriis sedibus pellunt, iuste pugnatur; hi, vero, ubique parati sunt servire.” The edited canon is Gratian, Decretum, C. 23, q. 8, c. 11; and see the unedited letter in Synan, The Popes, 218; Alexander II also issued a letter to the Prince of Benevento in 1065 admonishing him for his lack of restraint and use of force in converting Jews. The circumstances which produced this letter were probably akin to those about to be described below for the letters of 1063. For this 1065 text, see Samuel Loewenfeld, Epistolae pontificum romanorum ineditae (Leipzig, 1885), 52, n. 105. On the legal history of the notion of Jewish passivity and toleration through the sixteenth century, see K. R. Stow, Catholic Thought and Papal Jewry Policy (New York: Jewish Theological Society, 1977), 104 and 118. 302 Stow, Catholic Thought, 16, 8, 18 and 22; The Theodosian Code and Novels and the Sirmondian Constitutions, trans. Clyde Pharr, Theresa Sherrer Davidson, and Mary Brown Pharr (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952). Cf. with the “Pact of Omar,” a generic name for numerous stipulations, dating from no later than the ninth century, for regulating Jewish life in the Islamic world; see, e.g., the text in J. R. Marcus, The Jew in The Medieval World (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 13–15: “If we violate any of the conditions of this agreement, then we forfeit your protection, and you are at liberty to treat us as enemies and rebels.” See, too, Synan, The Popes, 53–54, who first pointed to the parallel between The Pact and The Code. The reliance of Islam on Roman Law and the later borrowings

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the Church waged a Just War against the Saracens, Christianity’s active enemies, so would it declare forfeit the otherwise unassailable right of the Jews to reside in Christian lands – and wage war against them – if, like the Saracens, they, too, began to oppose Christian rule. At the same time, the pope was stressing the need to uphold the teachings of Paul and Gregory the Great. The Jews had a rightful claim to Christian Charity. Was not their role in Christian soteriology a necessary one? Alexander was refining earlier ideas, insisting that the protection of the Jews required balancing both Jewish and Christian obligations, with which neither Jews nor Christians could take liberties. Christian protection of the Jews was to hinge, as if contractually, on the implementation of the precepts of Christian theology matched by the acquiescence of the Jews to Christian sovereignty. This concisely expressed insistence on mutuality, although masked at times in the letters of Alexander’s successors by a rhetoric of frustration sometimes bordering on exasperation and even rage, was to become the permanent basis of papal dealings with the Jews. But a Jewry policy could not rest on Dispar nimirum alone. A more lucid, detailed, and mature expression of that policy was needed, if only to focus the scores of canons dealing with Jews and the particulars of Jewry policy that had been and would continue to be formed over time. This expression came sixty years after Dispar nimirum est in the bull Sicut Iudaeis non. Yet despite the latter’s greater sophistication, the two bulls are united in their common purpose and underlying conceptions. This commonality was achieved, moreover, despite the fact that both texts were products of the unstable political climate of late eleventh-­and early twelfth-­ century Rome. An investigation into the circumstances leading to their promulgation will thus reveal much: first, whether an intenfrom Islamic Jewry Law by the Fourth Lateran Council has, in distinction, long been known. These legal parallels between Islamic and Christian law concerning tolerated non-­believers run quite deep. Similarly, the use by Mohammed of such theological terms, common to Christian texts, as deaf, blind, and stiffnecked (see, e.g., The Quran, Sura II), to describe recalcitrants emphasizes these parallels all the more. Their origins deserve more scrutiny.

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tionally well-­wrought papal Jewry policy indeed emerged in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries; second, whether this policy rested on fundamental theological principles; and, third, whether a consensus had grown within contemporary Church circles that this policy was just and unassailable. * * * In approximately 1041, one Baruch of Rome converted to Christianity, married a Frangipani, and founded the house of Pierleoni, which numbered among its direct descendants the Antipope Anacletus II (1131–1139) and among its relatives popes Gregory VI and Gregory VII.303 By Jewish law and canon law, too, the Pierleoni were Christians. But for the popular mind and for contemporary political opponents, they were something else. In the 1060s, one Benzo of Alba spoke condescendingly of Leo, the son of Baruch (Benedictus), saying: Iudaeus erat, Iudaice loquebatur (He was a Jew and talked like one as well);304 and bishops Arnulf and Manfred wrote of Peter II (Anacletus): Iam nec Iudaeus quidem, sed Iudaeo deterior (No longer a Jew in fact, but worse than one). Even St. Bernard, who was one of the prime movers in the party of Innocent II in opposition to Anacletus, could not refrain from questioning Anacletus’s suitability for the papal office, because of his supposedly impure ancestry.305 This whole episode did not pass the Jews unnoticed, as is likely

303 On this family, see D. B. Zema “The Houses of Tuscany and of Pierleone in the Crisis of Rome in the Eleventh Century,” Traditio 2 (1944): 155–75; and Stanley Chodorow, Christian Political Theory and Church Politics in the Mid-­Twelfth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 31 ff.; and see my essay in Studies in the History of the Jewish People and the Land of Israel 5 (1980): 75–90, for a detailed discussion of the Pierleoni and the Jews. There the origin of the Sicut Iudaeis bull is discussed at length. 304 For Benzo, MGH, Scriptores XI, 616; and cf. the modern echo of this in, for example, Walter Ullmann, A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1977), 175. 305 See the texts of Arnulf, Manfred, and Bernard cited in David Berger, “The Attitude of St. Bernard of Clairvaux Toward the Jews,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 40 (1972): 89–108; and see Chodorow, Political Theory, 27–47 for a general summary of the struggle in the 1130s.

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attested to by the legends of Elhanan, the Jewish pope.306 More pertinent, this episode may have affected the Pierleoni themselves. Sensing the unwillingness of those around them to forget their Jewish ancestry, first after twenty and then after ninety years (and probably many more times in between), the Pierleoni may have become responsive to a Jewish call of distress, notwithstanding their undisputed zeal for the Church and its reform, unlike some later converts who were to turn into the Jews’ principal antagonists.307 The Pierleoni may also have had no choice. The Roman territory controlled by the family embraced the traditional zone of Jewish residence near the Teatro di Marcello. Following normal medieval civic patterns, in which clans, clientage, and areas of residence were often interlocked, the Jews of Rome were more likely than not Pierleoni dependents, whose protection, regardless of any sense of shared identity, they had a right to expect.308 This was true even if, as Jews and second class citizens, their clientage, too, was of a second class nature. In the event, protecting Jews was a matter capable of producing a positive response in contemporary papal circles.309 The papally sponsored Spanish military campaign of the 1060s had stimulated the growth of the papal claim to feudal sovereignty in Iberia, as well as the idea of The Just War.310 The distinction Alexander II’s 306 Adolf Jellinek, Bet HaMidrash ( Jerusalem: Bamberger & Wahrman, 1938), 6: 137–39 and Moses Gaster, The Ma‘aseh Book (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1934), 188, 412–14. 307 On Pierleoni politics see Chodorow, Political Theory, 30–31. 308 On families, clients, and patronage in general in the Middle Ages, see Jacques Heers, Le clan familial au moyen âge (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1974), passim; on families in Rome, Robert Brentano, Rome Before Avignon (New York: Basic Books, 1974), esp. chap. 5; and, with reference to the Pierleoni, see Tilman Schmidt, Alexander II und die römische Reformgruppe seiner Zeit (Stuttgart: Hiersemann,1977), 64; cf. Hermann Vogelstein and Paul Rieger, Geschichte der Juden in Rom (Berlin: Mayer & Müller, 1895), 1: 218–19. 309 See Baron, SRH, 4: 93–4 and 5: 199, and 284 n. 4; Ullmann, Short History, 142, and Gabriel Jackson, The Making of Medieval Spain (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 56. 310 Bernardino Llorca, “Derechos de la Santa Sede sobre Espana. El pensamiento de

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letters draws between Saracens and Jews made it clear that it was legitimate to attack “active enemies” like the former, but not passive ones like the Jews.311 The implication that by not harming the Jews the Christian warriors were accepting the pope as their legitimate military commander reinforced the claim to sovereignty. The crucial element bringing together the matters of blood, clientage, Just War, and pretensions to sovereignty was the degree of papal dependency on the Pierleoni. Alexander II owed his position to Pierleoni support in an election dispute that had dragged on for years, often violently.312 Aside from any other considerations, this last would have made a Pierleoni request on behalf of the Jews hard to refuse. An approach by the Jews of Rome to their Pierleoni patrons in 1063, possibly at the behest of their Spanish counterparts, could have led directly to Pope Alexander’s issuing the letter containing the text of (what would become) the future canon, Dispar nimirum est.313 The story repeated about 1120 under Calixtus II, when the Pierleoni were again “pope-­makers,” although this time, it was their own local protection that Roman Jews were seeking, which they achieved when Calixtus issued Sicut Iudaeis non in an already recognizable, if not the final, formulation that I believe was achieved only some decades later. Perspective, however, must not be lost. The intervention of the Pierleoni was a catalyst, no more. The texts of both Dispar nimirum est and Sicut Iudaeis non reflect accurately the traditions of Christian law and theology; they are not the tendentious product of bribery or favoritism. The format of Sicut Iudaeis non was also not innovative. The wording of its grant of privileges taking the Jews under papal protection is predicated on that found in the tuitio charters Gregorio VII,” Sacerdozio e regno, 79–106. 311 Frederick Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 110 ff. 312 On these disputes, see P. Duchesne, The Beginnings of the Temporal Authority of the Popes, trans. A. M. Matthew (London: Keagan Paul, 1908), 268, and Benzo of Alba, MGH, Scriptores (SS) XI, 616; also Zema, “The Houses of Pierleone,” 174. 313 A previous contact of this sort, in 952, is discussed in Jacob Mann, Texts and Studies, 14–15.

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King Louis the Pious had issued to Jews in the ninth century that were subsequently incorporated into Carolingian formulary books. However, an immediate paradigm also existed, which was the tuitio charters the papacy itself had frequently dispensed to monasteries far from Rome, in places like northern France.314 Protection, of course, did not cancel the traditional demand for Jewish limitation and restriction. About this, Dispar nimirum est leaves no doubt, and the point may be seen again by noting that Hildebrand (the future Gregory VII) almost certainly had a say in drafting Alexander II’s letters of protection. This was the same Hildebrand, who, as pope, in 1081, issued a letter forbidding Spanish Jews to possess public office.315 The balance between privilege and restriction in the dealings of the popes with the Jews is even more evident in Sicut Iudaeis non itself. The bull’s entire thrust is to guarantee the rights of those who have asked for protection, as is always said in a tuitio charter. But it is also understood that these petitioners accept the dominion of the Church, submitting themselves unquestioningly to its laws and controls. The compatibility of Dispar nimirum est and Sicut Iudaeis non with Christian teachings ensured the permanence of the policies they enunciated. What the two texts announced was far greater than a flimsy statement of protection supported by little more than a biblical text saying “do not kill them” (like Psalm 59:12) and possessing only transient value. Rather, they proposed a well-­defined framework for Jewish existence within Christian society that was going to prove itself firm, consistent, and unyielding to the vagaries of individual papal whim. This consistency has been doubted. Historians point to the absence of papal intervention during the First Crusade. Familiar only with the maledictions of Shlomo bar Shimshon, most historians have claimed there were no such efforts, interpreting Sicut 314 See, for one, Johannes Ramackers, Papsturkunden in Frankreich. Abhandlungen der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (Berlin: Weidmann, 1932–1933), vol. 2, no. 6, p. 30; vol. 3, no. 3, p. 34, and esp. no. 4, p. 36, and vol. 4, no. 8, p. 72. 315 Cited in Philip Jaffe, Monumenta Gregoriana (Berlin, 1865), 472.

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Iudaeis non as a belated response to earlier papal failings.316 A close look at Sicut Iudaeis non reveals something else: that originally, and as proposed here, it must have been intended to apply strictly to the Jews of Rome. Its prominent tuitio clause, indicating a Jewish request and a papal response, would have appeared nowhere except in a charter of protection given by an overlord to his immediate subjects. No early twelfth-­century pope would have so audaciously used a tuitio clause with reference to the subjects of another ruler, whoever he may have been. And this was true, even if by the twelfth century such clauses had lost much of their earlier importance and were no longer the true regulators of legal status between governor and governed. The only extra-­territorial recipients of papal charters containing tuitio formulae in the early twelfth century were the already mentioned monasteries that by common consent enjoyed a special relationship with the papacy. All other recipients were residents of territories under direct papal rule. The local applicability of the original Sicut Iudaeis, first, in fact, suggested by Baron, may again be inferred from the clauses threatening desecrators of Jewish cemeteries. Most illustrative, however, is the clause insisting that Jews be tried and punished according to strict legal procedures, what today would be called a guarantee of “due process.” For the Jews themselves, this clause was probably the most important, ensuring the legal foundations and stability of their existence, prohibiting arbitrariness, and assuring them that privileges would be honored. In the earlier twelfth century, no pope had the jurisdictional power to confer such fundamental privilege upon Jews living beyond his immediate control. Calixtus II’s admonitions were about as far as an early twelfth-­century pope could go. In pointed contrast, in the thirteenth century, when the papacy began to claim a measure of direct rule over all infidels,

316 See Browe, Judenmission, 235; Grayzel in “The Bull, Sicut,” 244; and Georg Caro, Sozial-­und Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Juden in Mittelalter und der Neuzeit (1908–1918), 1: 288 and 496. Baron SRH, 4: 7 and 236, n. 4 opposes this view, and sees the text as a response to a petition of Roman Jews fearful of the results expected from the 1123 Lateran Council.

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including Jews, a matter on which more will be said further on, it also began employing the Sicut Iudaeis non bull, with its tuitio clause intact, universally. With reference to the 1007, this means that no pope before the thirteenth century ever could, nor would, have authorized a text like that which is present in its Hebrew, offering protection to Jews everywhere. This last point may explain the actions of Urban II in 1096. By the time of the First Crusade, the three letters of Alexander II, together with an additional text of Gregory the Great on the subject of protection (that does not contain the Sicut Iudaeis clause), had been absorbed into the Decretum, the canonical collection prepared in 1095 by the French ecclesiastic, Ivo of Chartres.317 So placed, the letters would exercise considerable influence. Their directives would be accepted by the French bishops responsible for the official crusading army. And with the possible exception of a single outburst in Rouen, these bishops did succeed in preventing attacks on the Jews of France. But these bishops were also allied to their countryman, Urban II, so that, even in the absence of hard evidence, it seems fair to judge his intentions on the basis of theirs. Urban, that is, must have accepted the principles of Alexander II as set forth in Dispar nimirum est.318 Moreover, if the evidence provided by an anonymous chronicle composed no earlier than two hundred years 317 PL 161: 820, Decretum of Ivo, Part XIII, paragraphs 101 and 105, letters of Gregory 1, and paragraphs 114 and 115, letters of Alexander II. Cf. too the citation of Gregory in Burchard of Worms, PL 140: 742, Decretorum Libri XX , 4, par. 91 and in Gratian Decretum, esp. D. 45, c. 3, and, there, C. 23, q. 8, c. 11, for the text of Alexander II. See again, Baron cited in n. 55, above. 318 Norman Golb, “New Light on the Persecution of French Jews at the Time of the First Crusade,” [Hebrew] Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 34 (1966): 1–64, and History and Culture of the Jews of Rouen in the Middle Ages (Tel Aviv, 1976), chap. 3, argues vigorously that the Rouen attack took place. But see Hans Liebeschutz, “The Crusading Movement and Its Bearing on the Christian Attitudes Towards Jewry,” Journal of Jewish Studies 10 (1959): 97–111, pointing to the impact of the episcopally directed peace movement on preventing assaults, and esp. 107, asserting that the French were indeed following the lead of Alexander II. On Urban II and the peace movement see Jules Gay, Les papes du XI e siècle et la chrétienté (New York: Harper and Row, 1972, reprint of 1926), 374–82, and esp. 374–75.

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after the time of the First Crusade is at all reliable, there is no need for speculation, and Urban’s motives may be positively determined. For, says the chronicle: “In the same year (1096), R. Yosi b. Levi went (from Ashkenaz) to Rome (to the pope – who could have only been Urban II) and returned with a bull (hotam) annulling the forced conversion.”319 Nonetheless, the spirit of this text, leaving aside the question of its authenticity, is that of Alexander II, far from the articulated program of Calixtus II. In any case, all of this contrasts sharply with the situation in the Rhineland. There, the recognized head of the Church was not Urban II. It was the Imperial designate, Wibert of Ravenna (Clement III), whose position vis-­à-­vis the Jews was the opposite of that just attributed to Urban II. Despite the opposition of Emperor Henry IV, Wibert denounced the return to Judaism of those Jews who had been forcibly converted during the attacks.320 When Shlomo bar Shimshon spoke of the pope, therefore, he was referring to Wibert, whom he had confounded with Urban II.321 And, in this light, it is not surprising that he also confounded Wibert with the Devil. The Jews of Rome were better informed. They had understood the position of Alexander II, Ivo of Chartres, and (probably) Urban II, and they had no question about the constancy of papal protection. Accordingly, in 1120, although Rome was still in turmoil at the end of a three-­year struggle over the possession of the papal crown, the Jews of the city, surely by way of the Pierleoni, turned 319 See Ms. Oxford-­Bodleian 847, fol. 36, a copy of which is available in The Microfilm Institute of the Hebrew University and National Library, Jerusalem, no. 21608. I wish to thank Dr. Abraham David for sharing his knowledge of this chronicle with me. 320 Wibert’s Letter in Aronius, Regesten, 94. On Wibert as the recognized pope in Germany, Albert Hauck, in Real Encyklopaedie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche (Graz, 1971, reprint of 1923), 21: 218. For the problems of Henry IV, fighting in Italy, see Zema, “The Houses of Pierleone,” 170, and for his maneuvering with the German bishops, see Sara Schiffmann, “Heinrichs IV Verhalten zu den Juden zur Zeit des ersten Kreuzzuges,” and “Die Deutschen Bischöfe und die Juden zur Zeit des ersten Kreuzzuges”, Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 3 (1931): 39 and 233. 321 As did Cecil Roth in the Encyclopaedia Judaica ( Jerusalem: Keter, 1971), s.v. “Popes.”

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to the pope and petitioned his help. The result was the bull, Sicut Iudaeis non. Non-­Jews too had come to appreciate the newly announced papal teachings. Christian chroniclers of the First Crusade widely condemned the slaughter of Rhenish Jewry, although after the fact and with a question mark about the obscure ways of divine justice. With the preaching of the Second Crusade in 1146, responsible Churchmen sought to prevent a repeat of the slaughter, most notably Bernard of Clairvaux. Despite his belief that the Jews were personae non gratae and possessed of a bovine mentality, he felt obliged to denounce the sermons of his pupil, the monk Rudolph, whose crusading zeal and call to the body of Christians in Rhineland to reenact the events of 1096 had made a mockery of the aims and principles of his teacher.322 It was for specifically this denunciation that Bernard earned Ephraim of Bonn’s encomiums. However, Bernard was not alone. With or without his intervention, Bernard’s other pupil, Eugenius III, issued what was likely Sicut Iudaeis non in 1147. Whether Eugenius was responding to a limited request of Roman Jewry or whether he felt himself powerful enough outside of Rome to honor a wider appeal cannot be said.323 Yet what is important is the decision to respond to such a request by going beyond Dispar nimirum est and reissue specifically Sicut Iudaeis non. This decision marks the beginning of a consensus. The protection of the Jews and the limits of that protection, it would soon be widely held, could be defined only within the framework of a much broader definition stipulating the basic conditions Jews and Christians must accept if a Jewish presence in Christendom was to continue. Sicut Iudaeis non provided just such a definition, and, accordingly, it was this bull that was reissued. Nevertheless, this is somewhat paradoxical. For Bernard and Eugenius III, the men who were now actively protecting the Jews and constructing a framework enabling them to remain within Christian society, were among the most 322 D. Berger, “Bernard,” 90–92. 323 See Baron, SRH, 4: 7, and Grayzel, “The Bull, Sicut,” 245.

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active members of the party that had opposed the Pierleoni, the Jews’ erstwhile patrons, in the great struggle between Anacletus II and Innocent II in the 1130s.324 Patronage, it thus seems, was no longer necessary if protection was to be had, nor was party affiliation. On the need to affirm the protection of the Jews and their privileges, the leadership of the Church, soon to be followed by the majority of the hierarchy, was in agreement. At the same time, as the text of Sicut Iudaeis non further shows, these Church leaders were also in agreement that Jewish protection and privileges were not to be granted unconditionally. In any articulated papal Jewry policy, protection and privilege had to be balanced by Jewish subservience. Consequently, in his summons to crusading arms with its warning against attacking Jews, Bernard recalled the principles of Dispar nimirum est. And despite Ephraim of Bonn’s attempt at concealing the facts, in real life Bernard did call for a limitation on Jewish lending activities. Likewise, over one hundred years later, in his outline of goals for the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, in which he discounted the possibility of a Jewish danger to Christian society, the former Dominican General, Humbert of Romans, made a point of specifying in the terms of Dispar nimirum est that the Jews were a “subjected people” (subiectos) and to be treated as such.325 Churchmen like Bernard and Eugenius, as well as those to come after them, like Humbert of Romans, were thus not determined to establish whether a Jewish presence in Christendom was to be tolerated. Since Paul, that had been a given. Rather, they were out to define the correct place – the assets and liabilities – of the Jews in the Christian world order, for they understood that in this order, the Jews, who symbolized at once the absence of belief and the hope for ultimate universal salvation, possessed an integral role. That role’s most complete definition may be seen in the hundred 324 See Chodorow, Political Theory, 27–47. 325 Bernard’s statement is in PL 182: 567; Humbert’s in J. D. Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Collectio, 24: 115. On Bernard and Jewish lending, K. R. Stow, “The Church and Neutral History.”

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or so canons concerning Jews found in Gratian’s 1140 Decretum and the equal number of laws found in the various decretal collections of the thirteenth century and afterward. A synthesis of these canons and laws is also available in the comprehensive and retrospective De Iudaeis et Aliis Infidelibus of Marquardus de Susannis, composed in 1558; its late date should not obscure the intrinsically medieval viewpoint of its expositions of pure law. Alternately, a lengthy theological discursus appears in the discussion of Judaism as the absence of faith in the Summa Theologica (II, II, 10–12) of Thomas Aquinas. Summary definitions, too, were produced. Perhaps the pithiest was the maxim of the doctors of Roman law, like Baldus de Ubaldis, who asserted that Jews (living peacefully) were fideles of the Roman Church Militant.326 Nowhere, however, is the definition of the Jewish role in Christian society more apparent and nowhere is it more succinctly or elegantly set forth than in the text of Sicut Iudaeis non. If, therefore, Sicut Iudaeis non was originally a product of the turbulent political realities of its day, its importance – like that of its predecessor and companion piece Dispar nimirum est – far transcended those immediate circumstances. Notwithstanding the severe shocks it was to receive from events like the condemnation of the Talmud in the 1240s and the initiation, shortly after, of inquisitorial proceedings against alleged Jewish fautors of heresy, both the bull and its teachings were going to enjoy unexceptional papal support and that of the bulk of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Its doctrines would remain in force, fundamentally unmodified, until 1569 if not afterward.327 Certain perspicacious Jews understood these facts perfectly.

326 Baldus (d. 1400), Consilia (Lyons: Servanius, 1575), 5: no. 428. For the canons, see Emil Friedberg, ed., Corpus Iuris Canonicis (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1879–1881), 2 vols; Marquardus de Susannis, De Iudaeis. See also the briefer, yet rounded, theological discussions in Raymond Peñaforte, Summa de Poenitentia et Matrimonio (Rome, 1603), and Alexander of Hales, Summa Theologica (Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1924–1928), 4 vols. 327 In this year, Pius V expelled Jews from the Papal State, specifically for violating the terms of Sicut Iudaeis irreparably; see Stow, Catholic Thought, 34–37.

Chapter Three

Jewish Perceptions of Papal Jewry Policy Basic Tr ends We cannot know how long it took Jews fully to appreciate Sicut Iudaeis non. It is not clear whether Ephraim of Bonn knew of the bull directly, while Shlomo bar Shimshon (writing around the middle of the twelfth century) gives no hint to it at all. But then Gratian’s near contemporary Decretum does not mention Sicut Iudaeis either, which is why I think the formulation we have or the bull’s applicability outside Rome dates from a later time. Jewish opinions, like Shlomo’s, were likely influenced by the inability of Churchmen in the Rhineland to afford protection in 1096, irrespective of their intentions. Wibert of Ravenna’s decision about the fate of the forcibly baptized must have removed any remaining doubts. The long tradition of legislation in local ecclesiastical councils insisting on Jewish social segregation, which was sometimes issued in mordently vilifying terms, would not have encouraged Shlomo to reverse his thinking.328 For Shlomo and surely most of his contemporaries the Church was only a source of danger. 328 See James Parkes, The Conflict of The Church and The Synagogue (Philadelphia: World Publishing Company, 1961, reprint of 1934), Appendix One; and Blumenkranz, Juifs et chrétiens, 291–372 for synopses and surveys of such legislation in the years 300–1100.

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The unprecedented forcefulness of Bernard of Clairvaux in demanding protection of the Jews during the Second Crusade brought Ephraim of Bonn to reflect on his position. Others did, too, as they started to assess the complexities and usefulness of ecclesiastic doctrines. A complete remolding of Jewish attitudes occurred only at the end of the twelfth century as Jews became aware of the expanded role the popes were playing in Christian society and the degree to which the popes had established their hegemony in the realm of “spiritualities” and “ecclesiastical liberties.” From this time forward, Jewish discussions of the Church, the popes, and papal Jewry policy display an ever increasing awareness of not only papal realities, but also of the minutiae and recent developments in papal theory. Jewish opinions on the papacy are diverse, ranging from simplistic naiveté to intimate awareness. The popes appear as the supreme rulers of Christendom, or as its joint rulers alongside the emperors. They are the source of ultimate legal authority in matters pertaining to Christianity, and they symbolize the Christian religion and its meaning, at times with eschatological overtones. The popes, most-­importantly, are the single firm source of Jewish protection and the place of final appeal in times of royal or, sometimes, episcopal capriciousness. These opinions represent Jewish political theory, not allegiance to the papacy or its programs. It was politic to build up the papal image, and, had anyone cared to seek their support, many Jews would have enlisted in the extreme papalist camp. What mattered was not whether the popes claimed certain powers; was not the papacy, like all of Christianity, a chimera? What counted was knowledge, first of the intricacies of papal theory and then its applicability. Did Christian society accept papal political theory, and was it willing to permit the implementation of that theory even if this led to Jewish advantage? Yet most Jewish opinions on the papacy have come down to us elusively, as fragmentary interjections or as elucidations of single facets of papal activity. The twelfth-­century responsum discussed in chapter one, for example, was interested solely in the question of the papal headship of the Church and the episcopacy, an interest

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that returns in a twelfth-­or thirteenth-­century interpolation in the Sefer Yossipon, which, like the responsum, calls the pope the “Head of the Bishops.”329 Eventually, texts like the excoriation of the apostate Paul Christian written by Jacob b. Elie elevated the pope, just as Christian theorists were doing at this time, to the rank of “Head of the Nations,”330 a status of especial resonance in the thirteenth century with the growth of papal claims to authority over all, since the term had originally been applied to Christ and was found in the lexicon of the Anglo-­Saxon Kings of England, among others. The term also went into common use, as, for instance, in a 1354 petition to the King of Aragon and in the sixteenth-­century chronicle of Eliyahu Capsali.331 Capsali used the term repeatedly, and, provocatively, he applied it to the emperor, as well as the pope.332 Capsali had been preceded by the mid-­thirteenth-­century Meir b. Simeon, who had gone even further by calling the emperor the “Head of the Nations” in pointed contrast to the King of France.333 The term was also used prominently, as we shall see, by the 1007. Jews created parables about papal powers and functions. In his Commentary on Talmudic aggadot (legends), Isaac b. Yedaiah assigned the pope a role in the apocalyptic activities surrounding 329 Composed originally around 953, ed. “Hominer” ( Jerusalem, 1968), chap. 77, p. 291: “The head of all the bishops in the world in governance (jurisdiction) – the bishop of Rome . . . ”; and see David Flusser, ed., Sefer Yossipon, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Bialik, 1978–79), 2: 33–34. 330 “Vikuah R. Ya‘acov Mivinisya,” in Ginze Nistarot, ed. J. Kabak (Bamberg, 1868), 1: 29–30 and J. B. Eisenstein, Osar Vikuhim (New York, 1929), 192: “The King above all the kings . . . ” Although not always up to high standards of textual editing, Eisenstein is, nonetheless, accessible; and see Joseph Shatzmiller “Did Nicholas Donin Promulgate the Blood Libel?,” [Hebrew] Studies in the History of the Jewish People and the Land of Israel 4 (1978): 181–82 . On the identity of Jacob b. Elie, see K. R. Stow, “Jacob b. Elie and Jewish Settlement in Venice,” [Hebrew] Italia 4 (1985). 331 L. Finkelstein, Jewish Self-­Government in the Middle Ages (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary Press, 1964, reprint of 1924), 328 and 337, par. 1. 332 Seder Eliyahu Zuta, ed. Shlomo Simonsohn and Meir Benayahu (Jerusalem: Makhon Shalem, 1977), 2: 259 and 260. 333 Milḥemet Mitzvah, ms. Parma, 2749, fols. 42v and 125r–v; and see also fol. 228v where Meir says, “You say the pope has as much power as that man in the heavens,” i.e., the pope is Vicarius Christi. See too n. 357 below.

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the advent of the messiah.334 Similarly, Nachmanides described the pope as Pharaoh, vaguely linking him to the angel Michael, who is to set the Jews free at the time of the Fourth Kingdom.335 This figure suggests knowledge of Joachimist-­like teachings, especially those of Peter John Olivi, or what in the present context may be best compared to the teachings of an alternative pope, the Angel Pope, and an alternative papacy.336 Simeon b. Zemah Duran had the pope announce the arrival of Antichrist.337 Duran probably saw in the egregious policies of his contemporary, Benedict XIII, the work of Antichrist himself.338 Jews were taken aback by papal claims to stand above divine law, and they disparaged the intentional modesty of the title servus servorum dei, servant of the servants of the Lord.339 The thirteenth-­ century Sefer Yosef HaMeqane doubted the claimed apostolic power of binding and loosing,340 doubts that recurred in the Sefer Nisahon Yashan of the same period341 and were especially prominent in the writing of Profiat Duran,342 who was followed by Hasdai Crescas343 334 See this in detail in Marc Saperstein, Decoding the Rabbis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 103–6. 335 Eisenstein, Osar, “Vikuah haRamban,” 88 and 90, and H. D. Chavel, ed., Kitve haRamban ( Jerusalem: Mossad haRav Kook, 1963), vol. 1, 306 and 312. 336 Ernst Benz, Ecclesia Spiritualis (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1934), Part III, chaps. 3 and esp. 4, part 3, and cf. Yitzhak Baer, “The Historical Background of the Raya Mehamna,”[Hebrew] Zion 5 (1940): 1–44. 337 Simeon b. Semah Duran, in Eisenstein, Osar, “Vikuah haRashbas,” 126. 338 On Benedict XIII, see Stow, Catholic Thought, 278–89. 339 On this title and its meaning, see most recently Stephan Kuttner, “Universal Pope or Servant of God’s Servants: The Canonists, Papal Titles and Innocent III,” Revue de droit canonique 32 (1981): 109–49. 340 Composed by Josef b. Natan Official, ed. Judah Rosenthal ( Jerusalem: Mekize Nirdamim, 1970), 86 and 105. 341 Ed. J. Ch. Wagenseil in Tela Ignea Satanae (Frankfurt a.m., 1861), col. 250. 342 “Sefer Klimat haGoyim,” Eisenstein, Osar, 279–80, and ed. N. Posnanski in HaSofeh Me’eres Hagar 3 (1913), 99–100, 143–44. and 4 (1914): 37, 81, 115 and esp. 41–42. See also Frank Talmage, ed., The Polemical Writings of Profiat Duran [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1981), 30, 35, 44, 45, 81, as well as the introductory comments on 16–21 (Hebrew pagination). 343 Bitul ‘Iqarei Dat haNotzrim, Eisenstein, Osar, 307–30, and ed. E. Deinard (Kearny,

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and then Yosef Albo during the Conciliar epoch,344 when Christian scholars were calling into question the right of the pope to dispense from the Gospels345 and his prerogative of being “judged by none.”346 Crescas and Duran also cast aspersions on the legitimacy of the Petrine succession of the popes from Jesus.347 This fairly accurate knowledge of the papacy and papal monarchism allows us to presume that a well-­rounded theoretical construction underlies the references to papal protection found in such diverse texts as the Disputation of Rabbi Yehiel of Paris,348 its contemporary, the Letter of Jacob b. Elie, the thirteenth-­century polemic ‘Edut Adonai Ne’emana,349 and the early sixteenth-­century Shebet Yehudah of Shlomo ibn Verga.350 The author of the Nisahon Yashan even knew that the Talmud was condemned at Paris in the 1240s for the specific crime of being a Nova lex, a corruption, and

NJ: Deinard 1904), 62–63. 344 Sefer ha‘Iqqarim, Book of Principles, Ma’amar 3, chap. 25, ed. I. Husik (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1946), 3: 241, Eisenstein, Osar, “Vikuah R. Yosef Albo, “ 114–15. 345 De Susannis, De Iudaeis, part 1, chap. 11, par. 13; Michael Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 316 and 467; and S. Hendrix, “In Quest of the Vera Ecclesia: The Crises of Late Medieval Ecclesiology,” Viator 7 (1976): 362. 346 “Klimat haGoyim,” Eisenstein, Osar, 280, and Posnanski, 100; and Bitul ‘Iqarei Dat haNotzrim, Eisenstein, 307, and Deinard, 62. 347 Vikuah Rabbi Yehiel miParis, ed. Shemuel Greenbaum (Thorn, 1873), 2 and 12; and Eisenstein, Osar, 82 and 86. 348 “Vikuah R. Ya‘acov,” Eisenstein, Osar, 192, and Kabak, 29; and see Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, 340, for the debate on the identity of the king in this tract. Shatzmiller, however, “Nicolas Donin,” 181, is correct in seeing the reference is to the pope. 349 Mehqarim uMeqorot, 2 vols., ed. J. Rosenthal ( Jerusalem: Reuben Mass, 1967), 1: 420, where the author writes of a letter sent to the King of France by the pope defending the right of French Jews to protection. 350 Ed. A. Shohat ( Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1956), chaps. 14 and 41. There the pope is called Hasid and ’Ohev Yehudim. Ibn Verga normally reserved these terms for favored kings who saved the Jews, or at least made serious efforts to do so. On this see Yerushalmi, Lisbon Massacre, 42 and 49.

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not the unfalsified Mosaic Law, whose observance alone the Church said it permitted in witness to Christian truth.351 From the mid-­thirteenth century onward, any Jewish theory about papal Jewry policy could be verified by citing numerous examples from practice. The popes had denounced pogroms and blood libels, sanctioned the collection by Jews of moderate rates of interest, responded to petitions to reexamine the Talmud in order to determine whether parts of it were not blasphemous and, hence, permissible, and placed limits on inflammatory sermons and inquisitional excesses.352 True, the popes had allowed the original confiscation and burning of the Talmud and, alternately, its censorship. They had remained silent about forced preaching, and they had extended inquisitorial power to include Jews who had purportedly aided converts returning to Judaism.353 Nevertheless, the popes had stipulated that these activities be carried on without arbitrariness and, especially, “without infringing the privileges conceded the Jews by the Apostolic See.”354 Consequently, if the 351 Ed. Wagenseil, col. 259: “The heretics (converts) say: The Talmud twists and perverts all of our Torah and keeps us from understanding the essence and the truth”; cf. Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, 240, no. 96 where Gregory IX (June 9, 1239) states: “lege veteri . . . non contenti affirmant legem aliam . . . ​Talmut . . . Cum igitur hec dicitur esse causa precipua, que Judeos in sua tenet perfidia obstinatos, . . . ” The “dicitur” refers, of course, to Nicholas Donin, as Gregory himself indicates (Grayzel, no. 95). 352 Grayzel, ibid., notably 226 (pogroms), 262–66 (blood libels), 268 (interest), 274 (Talmud). For an explicit, although later, response to a Jewish request on sermons, see the letter of Martin V (20 Feb. 1422), in Moritz Stern, Urkundliche Beiträge über die Stellung der Päpste zu den Juden, no. 21 (Kiel, 1893); for the 13th century, see Stow, Catholic Thought, 20, no. 59, and J. M. Vidal, Bullaire de l’inquisition française au XIV e siècle (Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ané, 1913), nn. 269–70, for a bull of restraint by Boniface VIII. 353 For papal agreement to forced preaching, see Browe, Judenmission, 13–55; on the Talmud, Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, nn. 95–98 and Browe, Judenmission, 75; on the Inquisition, the bull Turbato Corde, in Bullarium . . . ​Romanum (Turin, 1858), 3: 796, Browe, 252–66 and, Joseph Shatzmiller, “L’inquisition et les juifs de Provence au XIIIe siècle,” Provence historique 23 (1973): 327–38, where it is seen that individuals were occasionally acquitted by inquisitional courts. 354 Browe, ibid., 76, n. 69.

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popes failed on occasion to gain the cooperation of lay leaders in enforcing these stipulations, as well as of certain members of the Church hierarchy, this fact must be interpreted carefully and not equated with the lack of a well-­defined Jewry policy or a commitment to preserve the Jews’ legitimate rights and privileges.355 Why else, it must be asked, did the Jews constantly petition the popes for redress and intervention on their behalf with secular rulers?356

T he Milhִ emet Mitzvah By contrast to these diffuse images, the mid-­thirteenth-­century Milḥemet Mitzvah of the Narbonnese scholar Meir b. Simeon contains the germ of a coherent picture with a well-­defined context,357 albeit a wishful one, as Meir b. Simeon himself readily admitted in the section of his work entitled: “The Letter I would have Liked to Send to King Louis.”358 In addition, Meir recreated a number of exchanges about lending he claims he had with the Archbishops of Narbonne, Guillaume de la Brou, and Gui Fucois, the future Pope Clement IV.359 On the one hand, he attacked the policies of St. Louis, which, from the 1250s, prohibited recouping even the principal of loans. On the other, he cited both conciliar decrees and the pronouncements of papal legates specifically allowing the collection of a moderate rate of interest. The archbishops should accept these precedents, Meir argued, while rejecting the policies 355 For the censure by Innocent III of the anti-­usury activities of Robert Courson, see J. W. Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 297; and see below on the resistance of Odo of Chateauroux to Innocent IV about condemning the Talmud. 356 See the references, cited in n. 352 above, to Grayzel, Vidal, and Stern; and see also Finkelstein, Jewish Self-­Government, 281 and 337. 357 Ms. Parma 2749, for which no edition exists. See Siegfried Stein, Jewish-­Christian Disputations in Thirteenth-­Century Narbonne (London: Lewis, 1969) and R. Chazan’s articles on aspects of the Milḥemet Mitzvah along with copious translations from the text, in Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 41–42 (1973–74): 45–67; Hebrew Union College Annual 45 (1974): 287–305; and Harvard Theological Review 67 (1974): 437–57. 358 Milḥemet Mitzvah (hence M.M.), fols. 64r–83r. 359 M.M. 17r–37v; esp. 32r; 60v–61r; and 214r–218v.

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of the king that pervert justice. In the end, he says, they took a cautious midway position, sanctioning the collection of the principal, but not the interest on loans already made.360 The contrast between papal protection and royal despoliations is strongest in the “Letter to the King.” The pope, Meir says, conducts himself on the basis of fixed legal standards, but not the kings. The very oaths and covenants that the pope, “The Vicar of Christ,” upholds, kings arbitrarily annul, a conclusion Meir may have reached by observing actual practice.361 But he may have also been influenced by his knowledge of theoretical principles. A 1233 letter of Gregory IX, for example, insisted that legitimate loan contracts with their oaths of observance not be voided.362 Meir’s adamant declaration that if the king did not observe the divine law concerning oaths, the pope did, is not to be treated lightly. Nor should we doubt that he told Archbishop de la Brou, or he would have told him, had he been able, not to go on acting as though the king knew more of canon law and theology than the pope.363 Meir’s efforts to applaud the pope and criticize the king return in his lengthy discussions of forced preaching and the burning of the Talmud in which the papal role is glossed over, although Meir was well informed about what had taken place.364 He knew the pope was culpable to some degree; if the pope had not initiated the events, he had acquiesced to them and given his consent. However, what moved Meir primarily was his desire to pit royal arbitrariness against papal compliance with the rules, establishing the pope as the paragon, the true exemplar of those who would ensure the right of the Jews to profess Judaism unhindered. In an obvious 360 M.M. 32r, 70v and 214v; on Louis IX on usury, see Chazan, Medieval Jewry, 110–21; and on the whole problem of popes, kings, and usury, see K. R. Stow, “Papal and Royal Attitudes Toward Jewish Lending in the Thirteenth Century,” AJS Review 6 (1981): 161–84. 361 M.M. 71r. 362 Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, 200 (n. 70) and cf. 268 (n. 15), the text of Innocent IV. 363 M.M. 33v and 228v. 364 M.M. 1r–v and 214r–220v.

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allusion to the clause of Sicut Iudaeis non that guarantees the Jews the observance of their “good customs,” Meir wrote: “The pope does not forbid us to lend at interest, for that would be to forbid us our religion, which permits us to lend to non-­Jews.”365 It was better not to lessen this declaration and its impact by reminding readers too strongly of papal negativity. Nonetheless, Meir was a realist when it came to the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which he knew was not immune from royal influence. It had vacillated on the issue of lending, and not merely out of fidelity to the literal wording of the canons. And it had assented to arbitrary royal actions taken on the grounds that the Jews were the king’s direct dependents. The clergy, and the hierarchy in particular, had their limits, which Jews must learn.366 The pope too could be perilous. Not only was his control over the bishops and prelates incomplete, but certain Christians openly rejected his leadership, especially the heretics who fought him in bloody battles. Accordingly, besides lauding the pope, Meir did not hesitate to point to the emperor. In his Code, which Meir cites St. Louis for violating, the taking of reasonable interest was openly sanctioned.367 Meir’s reliance on the pope, therefore, was tempered. And he noted tellingly that if the pope was the Head of the Nations, the same had also been said of the emperor. Nor, he went on, was there a lack of kings ready to challenge the imperial monopoly on world rule.368 This was high theory, not just political fact: Did the pope possess one sword, or two, and if two, were kings and emperors obligated to accede to papal commands at all times?369 Was there, moreover, 365 M.M. 71v and cf. 65r, 68r, 70v, and 226v. 366 M.M. 32, 33v, and 214v. 367 M.M. 71r, cf. Chazan in Hebrew Union College Annual 45 (1974): 300. 368 M.M. 42v; cf. 33v and 1258. 369 R.W. and A. J. Carlyle, A History of Medieval Political Theory in the West (New York: Arden Library, 1936), 3rd impression, is still an excellent introduction to these questions. More technical, and valuable for its critique of W. Ullmann’s Medieval Papalism (New York: Routledge, 2010, reprint of 1949) is A. M. Stickler’s “Concerning the Political Theories of The Medieval Canonists,” Traditio 7 (1949–51): 450–63.

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a unified empire and a single emperor, or were kings in their kingdoms not the equals of the emperor and, hence, independent of him? These were the pivotal questions that formed the subject of tenacious debates by lay and clerical Christian theorists in Meir’s day. Yet was not one of the claims in the arsenal of the legist protagonists of these debates the assertion that a measure of the emperor’s all-­embracing rule was that the Jews are “under him”: Etiam Iudaei sub eo sunt? 370 Meir b. Simeon very likely knew this claim verbatim. A mature, highly sophisticated approach to the world of the thirteenth century and its leaders thus emerges from the Milḥemet Mitzvah. The papacy is a force that can work to Jewish advantage, yet it is neither sufficiently powerful nor secure to guarantee its constant reliability. Nor is any individual pope a friend. The popes grant and protect what the canons permit, but no more. If advantage is to be had from them, they must be approached knowingly and with a full awareness of their limits.

The Limits of Papal Action T he “1007 Anon ymous” and t he T ime of Its W r it ing What were the limits of papal power? Meir b. Simeon, who was perhaps more taken up with denigrating the king than with lauding the pope, failed to offer a precise definition, scattering his thoughts throughout the Milḥemet Mitzvah rather than gathering them into a cohesive unit. It was left for another author, whose subject is specifically the pope and the Jews, to spell out the limits of papal protection.371 His narrative is far from transparent. Even his name remains hidden, so well concealed, in fact, that his narrative has misled more than one modern reader, especially regarding the time of its composition. 370 See especially the references to the canonists Johannes Teutonicus (298) and Huguccio (301) in Gaines Post, “Two Notes on Nationalism.” 371 Ms. Parma, de Rossi 563, in Haberman, Sefer Gezerot, 19–21 and most recently by Norman Golb, The Jews of Rouen, 71–73 (see the facsimile of the MS in the Appendix below); and cf. Robert Chazan, “1007–1012, Initial Crisis for Northern European Jewry,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 39 (1972): 101–18.

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The story (as we saw at the start of the new introduction, and which I reiterate here in its original location) is one of an attack and forced conversion in the year 1007, whose cause was the refusal of the Jews of France to make of themselves “one people” through apostasy. The initiator was King Robert the Pious, urged on by his lay counsellors following an inquisition into the nature of Jewish “knowledge” (probably referring to the Talmud and other rabbinic works). The attackers came from all levels of the populace, some of whom are called simply “enemies.” The principal antagonist is Richard Duke of Normandy. A miracle, however, makes him halt the attack and accede to the request of one Jacob ben Yequtiel of Rouen that he be allowed to go to Rome, where Jacob petitions the pope to decide on the legitimacy of the persecution. The pope, who remains unnamed, declares the persecution illegal. In the meantime, Jacob has told both the pope and Richard that the authority to allow or prohibit the Jews from observing their Torah lies exclusively in papal hands; the Jews live under papal jurisdiction (memshalah, as we recall from the new introductory essay). Then, after reiterating the clauses of Sicut Iudaeis non and winning the assent of his bishops, the pope dispatches a legate to demand the immediate cessation of all violence. Jacob’s mission completed, he returns home as a hero to “Lotharingia,” bearing with him a papal blessing to send word to Rome if ever again the Jews are threatened. Shortly afterward, Jacob again departs, this time to settle in Flanders, where, a brief time later, his soul (by implication) flies heavenward in holiness and purity. This story has long been considered authentic. Its Christian characters (who are all named except for the pope) correspond to early eleventh-­century figures, and the time of its original writing has been judged contemporary to the events it describes.372 Compar-

372 See Blumenkranz, Juifs et chrétiens, 136, and Golb, Rouen, 13–14, who gives a full identification of characters; Chazan, “Initial Crisis,” passim; S. Schwarzfuchs, “Jacob bar Yekoutiel chez le Pape” (essentially a French trans. of the original), Evidences 6, no. 41 (1954): 36–37; Vogelstein-­Rieger, Juden in Rom, 1: 212 and Baron, SRH, 4:57 and 265, n. 74, who does, however, call the incident “obscure” and “alleged.”

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isons have also been made, as we have already seen in great depth, to reveal apparent parallels between the 1007 and three, actually four, eleventh-­century Christian writings, the Quedlinberg Annals and the Histories of Raoul Glaber and Ademar of Chabannes. Long ago, Israel Levi objected; he questioned both the veracity of the sources and the accuracy of the parallels,373 and, in the introductory essay, we saw that Levi was correct. The Annals say only there was a local expulsion, no other persecution;374 and supposedly corroborative Jewish materials turned out to be anything but that.375 Raoul Glaber links widespread attacks on the Jews (which he says took place about forty years before the time of his chronicle, ca. 1045–1049) with a Jewish plot leading to the destruction of the Jerusalem Church of the Holy Sepulcher by Muslims in 1009.376 The 1007 contains not even a hint to this supposed plot and lists the refusal of the Jews to convert and become “one people” as the persecution’s single cause. The instigator is the king. Glaber credits “the common will of all Christians” and speaks of “episcopal support.”377 In the 1007, and as we have thoroughly analyzed it, bishops advise the pope to stop the violence. In the event, Glaber clearly writes about what he wished would have befallen the Jews rather than what really

373 Israel Levi, “Les juifs de France du milieu du IXe siècle au croisades,” Revue des études juives 52 (1906): 162–68. 374 MGH, SS., III, 81 (and see Blumenkranz, Auteurs, 250). 375 On this, see Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, 11 vols. Leipzig, 1853–1876, 5: 387 and 545, and cf. n. 386 below. 376 PL 142: 657 (and see Blumenkranz, Auteurs, 256). 377 Baron, SRH, 4:57, followed by Chazan, “Initial Crisis,” tries to weave the 1009 destruction ordered by the Fatimid Caliph Al-­Hakim, the reports of the Christian chronicles, and the 1007 together. With respect to Glaber’s claim about “the common will,” 1007 does speak of the “Peoples of the World” plotting against the Jews. Nevertheless, the 1007 continues straight off by discussing those whom it identifies as the real movers of the attack, the king and the barons. Whence, the reference to the “Peoples . . . ” should probably be read together with 1007’s general references to “enemies” (unspecified) who carry out the attack; i.e., mob violence following that of the king. So too, this reference should be linked to those concerning Jewish suicide, a subject 1007 discusses in terms reminiscent of the language of the twelfth-­century Jewish Crusade chronicles.

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did,378 and Ademar of Chabannes’ references to attack and suicides, as well as his tale of a Jew executed in Rome, in 1020,379 have been shown to correspond to nothing in early eleventh-­century Roman and papal reality.380 An indirect comparison has been made between the 1007 and Robert the Pious’s well-­documented offensive against the heretics of Orleans in 1022.381 The two stories have fascinating parallels: royal initiative, an active role played by the Duke of Normandy, as well as by the Queen, and, most important, the errors of the heretics themselves. Christ, they taught, was not born of a virgin, did not suffer for men, nor was he truly laid in the tomb, and did not rise from the dead; and the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, as well as the invocation of saints, were sheer folly. All of these were errors that could easily have been labeled Judaizing, a term early medieval churchmen had used freely regardless of any

378 MGH, SS., IV, 136 (and see Blumenkranz, Auteurs, 250). Glaber also reports the tale of Raynaud of Sens, the allegedly Judaizing count whom Robert the Pious unquestionably did attack (PL 142: 657). Hence, it seems strange that Glaber neither reported the persecution of 1007 outright, nor linked it in some way to the Rainard episode, assuming, of course, that there actually was a persecution in 1007 for Glaber to report. On Glaber’s untrustworthiness in general, see David Herlihy, “The Agrarian Revolution in France and Italy, 801–1150,” in The Social History of Italy and Western Europe, 700–1500 (London: Variorum Reprints, 1978), 31. 379 MGH, SS., IV, 139, and see too ibid., 136, for the incident in Limoges in 1010. Bishop Audouin forced the Jews to convert or leave Limoges. Three or four Jews converted; the rest left the city. (Blumenkranz, Auteurs, 250). Here again, no king is involved. 380 The popes of the period were: John XVIII (1004–1009); Sergius IV (1009–1012); and Benedict VIII (1012–1024). Jacob spent at least four full years in Rome with no apparent change in pope. Clearly, this creates either a chronological problem, or a problem with Ademar’s credibility. Cf. Chazan, “Initial Crisis,” 107, n. 16, and Blumenkranz, Juifs et chrétiens, 136. 381 See the texts in translation, along with comments and bibliography in Walter Wakefield and Austin Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 79–91; and the important notes of Ch. Pfister, Études sur le règne de Robert le Pieux (996–1031), (Paris: Slatkine, 1885), 331–38, especially with relation to the Jews and burning as a punishment, applied here for the first time against heretics.

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link between Jews, Judaism, and the heterodoxy in question382 The term eventually became so common that Edward I of England once instructed his judges to proceed against Christian usurers for Judaizing, namely, lending at interest.383 In this light, it might be fair to presume that the events of 1007 and 1022 were somehow interrelated and that Robert the Pious attacked the Jews in the year 1007 for Judaizing and proselytizing among Christian heretics. But if so, as we have seen, why did both Ademar and Glaber, who were otherwise anxious to report Jewish plots and crimes, not even hint in this direction? And why did they not see the events at Orleans as a direct continuation of the royal offensive that had commenced in 1007? In fact, neither Ademar nor Glaber mention the events reported in the 1007, let alone link them with Robert the Pious.384 Israel Levi was correct. A comparison of the 1007 narrative with potentially relevant eleventh-­century Christian chronicles – whether direct, indirect, or by inference – does not substantiate a persecution. To the contrary, such a comparison leads to the conclusion that there was no persecution, and certainly not one launched by King Robert the Pious. A link, nevertheless, may exist between the 1007 narrative and the events of 1022, although one that is purely literary. The specific date of 1007 may derive from an error in a manuscript of Glaber’s chronicle that places the Orleans episode in 1017. This date could easily have become 1007 when expressed, as is the norm, by an abbreviation that substitutes Hebrew letters for Arabic numerals. However, this possibility is not corroborated by the unique, albeit 382 See, e.g., Blumenkranz, Auteurs, 73–74, 142–44 and 174; and cf. Luther’s charge of Judaizing (through observing the Sabbath), which he linked to direct Jewish influence, in “Against the Sabbatarians,” in Luther’s Works, ed. and trans. M. Bertram (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971), 47: 59–98. 383 Edward I, cited in Thomas Rymer, Foedera (London, 1816), I, I, 539, text of Dec. 13, 1276, also cited in Emil Friedberg, De finium inter ecclesiam et civitatem regundorum judicio (Aalen: Scientia, 1965, reprint of 1861), 103. 384 Most notably, Helgaud de Fleury in Vie de Robert le Pieux, ed. and trans. R. H. Bautier and G. Labory (Paris: Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes, 1965), who stresses Robert’s piety and pious works.

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very late, extant Hebrew manuscript of the 1007, which writes out the number in words.385 As for the overall literary connection, the knowledgeable author of 1007 may have been attracted to the Orleans story precisely because of the Judaizing content of the heresy. With Jews substituted for the heretics and the pope introduced into the plot, this story now provided him with the vehicle he otherwise lacked. It allowed him to describe so very vividly the delicate status of the original Judaizers, the Jews themselves, in their encounter with the complex array of medieval governmental forces claiming sovereignty over them in one respect or another. It is not that the 1007 thought his audience would remember the events of Orleans or, for the most part, even know of them, if, indeed, he himself had this episode in mind. But there were events of the past, or pseudo-­events, that people did know: for instance, the problematic story of the conversion of the son of Rabbi Gershom that had entered rabbinical discourse in the early thirteenth century (and, as we saw in the introductory essay, distracted modern researchers).386 In the thirteenth-­century context of increasing royal activism and the constant stream of conversions to Christianity, forced or otherwise, that had occurred since 1096 during the First Crusade, stories like this easily amalgamated with others, enabling

385 Pfister, Robert le Pieux, 31–32, records that despite the existence of a diploma of Robert The Pious dated 1022, Glaber, in his history, wrote, “tertio de vicesimo . . . ​anno,” i.e., 1017 (easily rectified to 1022 – depending on the calendar in use – by amending “et” for “de”). Thus 1017 became the accepted date for the Orleans heresy, even in Caesar Baronius’s Annales Ecclesiastici (Lucca, 1744), 16:507–8, where perhaps by sheer coincidence the story of Benedict VIII’s beheading of Jews immediately follows the Orleans story. Compounding the error, 1017 in Hebrew letters, ‫תשע״ז‬, could easily have been miscopied into 1007, ‫תשס״ז‬. And thus it occurred even written out fully in words in the unique extant ms. There is, in fact, no reason to accept or justify the date 1007, apart from the ms.; and cf. Chazan and Blumenkranz in n. 380, above, who both reject 1007 as a precise date. 386 Graetz, Geschichte, 5:544, points to problems in Germany. His evidence is properly doubted by H. Tykocinski in Festschrift M. Philippsons (Leipzig: Gustav Fock, 1916), 1–5, especially that furnished by a dirge ascribed third-­hand to R. Gershon of Mainz (ed. Haberman, Sefer Gezerot, 16–18), and see the introduction.

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an author like the 1007 to tell his own tale about an “imagined” distant past, much as in Romances and Chansons de geste. The 1007 author may have also drawn inspiration from memories of episodes of chiliastic ferment, popular or otherwise. As late as the sixteenth century, the legend predicting the onset of the apocalypse for precisely the year 1000 was still circulating. Twelfth-­ and thirteenth-­century Jews were also reminded by Hebrew records that similar ferment had been partly responsible for the tragedies of the First Crusade, disposing them to accept as true – or at least as paradigmatic – the story of a royal persecution that took place at a time of well-­known popular excitement, that is, about the year 1007, although, admittedly, why precisely this year, remains a mystery. Richard Landes’s interesting suggestion that the seven should be a nine we have said is attractive, but then one would have expected the 1007 to note the destruction of the Holy Sepulcher in the year 1009, which it does not. A modern audience, however, should be more judicious. Present-­ day research has shown that leading eleventh-­century churchmen, nobles, and even the Emperor, Otto III, acted vigorously to suppress contemporary chiliastic ferment.387 However, these actions did not include unprecedented persecutions, chief among them a royal attempt forcibly to convert the Jews of France. Persecutions of this sort would have aroused popular furies and fantasies, not calmed them. The actual events surrounding the chiliastic ferment of the early eleventh century serve only to reinforce the impression that the 1007 story is a pure and deliberate fiction. In the event, the 1007 gives away its real time of composition. Bits and pieces of the story, on the whole the very morsels presenting its theory of papal Jewish relations, correspond not to eleventh-­ century realities, but to those of a much later time. For one thing, the descriptions of martyrdom by suicide in the narrative strikingly resemble those found in the mid-­twelfth-century crusade chronicle of Shlomo bar Shimshon, including the common use of identical phraseology: to wit, “they stretched forth their necks to the sword,” 387 George Duby ed., L’an mil (Paris: Juillard: 1967), 33–36.

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and, more revealing, Hasidei ‘Elyon (the Righteous of the Heavens), referring to the martyrs themselves.388 There is more. Had 1007 been written in the eleventh century, its hero Jacob ben Yequtiel could not have returned from Rome, as the text states, to his “family in Lotharingia.” Until 1106, Lotharingia (Lower Lorraine) was a distinct geographical and political unit located southeast of Brabant. In the eleventh century, Jacob ben Yequtiel “from the city of Rouen” (in Normandy) could not have returned to Lotharingia. Later, this would have been entirely possible. Lotharingia merged with Louvain and eventually (1190) became part of the Duchy of Brabant. Upper Lorraine, too, bordering Champagne on the northeast, and named Lorraine after the eleventh century, although it was never a distinct political unit like Lower Lorraine, slowly dissolved and, in 1218, was absorbed by the County of Champagne.389 This geographical fluidity is reflected in medieval Hebrew texts. An early twelfth-­century letter from the Jewish community of Paris to that of Rome speaks imprecisely of Lothair as one of the four main regions of France: Tzarfat, Lothair, Burgundy, and Normandy.390 Similarly, in texts of Jewish legislation produced by councils meeting in Champagne in the late twelfth century, the term, Lothair, refers to territories stretching from Normandy to the edge of the Rhineland.391 Both political realities and the frequent disregard of Jewish sources for geographic precision solve the problem of Jacob ben Yequtiel’s return to “Lotharingia.” His journey could have ended almost anywhere in northern France, assuming, of course, that the 388 Haberman, Sefer Gezerot, 19 and 25–26; the term “Yirat haShem,” particularly associated with the twelfth-­and thirteenth-­century Hasidei Ashkenaz, also appears. 389 See Paul Bonenfant, “Du duché de Basse-­Lotharingie au duché de Brabant,” Revue Belge de philologie et d’histoire 46 (1968): 1129–65, esp. 1130 and 1164–65; and L. Genicot, Études sur les principautés Lotharingiennes (Louvain: Université de Louvain, 1965), 1–11 and esp. p. 1, and The Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edit., s.v. “Lorraine.” 390 The letter appears in S. D. Luzzatto, Bet HaOsar (Lvov, 1881), 104–8. 391 See Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Self-­Government, 53, where Lothair is synonymous with Champagne, at the least, and 159, especially, where Jewish settlement is divided between Tzarfat, Lothair, and Ashkenaz, making Lothair almost a catch-­all term.

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time – at least the literary time – of his return was no earlier than the later twelfth century and, more possibly, even later. Jacob ben Yequtiel’s eventual settlement in Flanders raises a further geographical difficulty. The careful researches of Jean Stengers have concluded that although Jews had settled in Brabant by the eleventh century, they did not arrive in Flanders until the thirteenth. This conclusion has been summarily dismissed by Salo Baron, but the basis for his dismissal is the “1007 Anonymous,” which Stengers, for his part, quite rightly finds untrustworthy.392 Apart from that, to assume that people as reputedly important as Jacob ben Yequtiel and his family settled in Flanders in the eleventh century, as Baron claims, while no further evidence of Jewish life in that province is to be had for another two hundred years, places too great a demand on the imagination. This silence, which is to say a total lack of evidence, if not the presence of evidence to the contrary in the form of the minuscule settlement in Flanders in the thirteenth century, shouts out that no such early eleventh-­century settlement ever took place. Jacob ben Yequtiel’s settlement in Flanders would have been apposite, however, in a tendentious context, if, for instance, the author of 1007 wanted to make all traces of his hero disappear. The absence of these traces, and the absence of any record of Jacob ben Yequtiel’s descendants, the 1007 may have believed, might discourage readers from questioning the authenticity of the narrative and the correctness of its all-­important theories. Nevertheless, to argue this point requires assuming that 1007 was written no earlier than the thirteenth century, when, as just said, Flanders did have a small Jewish community, and readers might not have wondered about the discontinuity between the assertion of Jacob ben Yequtiel’s

392 Jean Stengers, Les juifs dans les Pays Bas au moyen âge (Brussels: Palais des académies, 1950), 85–86, and cf. the similar opinion of J. Aronius in his Regesten no. 699, where he voices his suspicions about the claim made by an early chronicle that an expulsion of Jews from Flanders occurred ca. 1120; but cf. Baron, SRH, 4: 265, n. 4, for his out-­of-­hand dismissal of Stengers.

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settlement in Flanders and any additional attestations of a Jewish presence there. Readers in an earlier period would have been wiser. However, speculation is not necessary. Irrespective of matters like the Orleans heresy, chiliastic ferment, or even geography, none of which can be argued as definitive proofs, other issues in the text that represent ideas and simple facts that could never have existed before the thirteenth century are incontrovertible. I begin with the payment Jacob ben Yequtiel offers the pope. The author of 1007 clearly placed little faith in venality, and, indeed, the amount offered was small. The purpose of this sequence is for emphasis. It is what Jacob tells the pope, not the offered payment, that leads to the decision to honor Jacob’s petition. Jacob offered a paltry 200 pounds. By way of comparison, the 280 pounds the Jews of Blois had offered Count Thibaut in 1171 in order to save thirty-­one members of their immediate community from execution was a gross underestimation. Jacob’s two hundred pounds barely exceeded the document fee sometimes required by the papal Chancery in return for issuing a text of importance to any petitioner (whether he be Jew or Christian).393 The triviality is obvious from the 1007 itself. Immediately after offering the 200 pounds, Jacob ben Yequtiel promises a sum far greater to cover the expenses of the bishop-­legate who was to journey from place to place bearing the papal letter ordering the persecution halted.394 At which point, the author made an anachronistic 393 On papal chancery income, see W. E. Lunt, Papal Revenues in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), 1:125–29, and 2:499, where a fee as high as 128 pounds is listed for a single bull. 394 On Blois, see Haberman, Sefer Gezerot, 124–25; note, too, the 60,000 pounds paid in the Bristol tallage of 1210 to King John of England, and see R. W. Emery, The Jews of Perpignan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 18, 30, and 130 for Jewish loans and prices in the thirteenth century. Two hundred pounds would have purchased eight horses of average to respectable quality and, thus, was certainly insufficient to redeem the bulk of northern French Jewry. On papal income in the hundreds of thousands, by way of contrast, see J. H. Mundy, Europe in the High Middle Ages (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 324–25, 335–37, and 351–52. As for the fee offered the bishop, see the thirteenth-­century monetary conversion table in Eshtori HaParhi, Kaftor vaFerah (Jerusalem, 1899), 411–15.

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blunder. Perhaps he wanted only to add detail, but he may also have wanted, as explained in the introductory essay, to introduce a coinage that was known, or remembered, yet no longer in circulation in order to make his tale seem more authentic. These would have been the coins of Angers/Anjou and Le Mans (not Limoges), the ones that had been most current in Normandy in the later twelfth century, but were proscribed in the early thirteenth. The 1007, of course, did not know that these coins were not the coin of the realm in Normandy before the twelfth century. Yet he also neglected – more likely, he was unaware – that the two coins were of unequal value. A payment expressed as “half and half ” made no sense, not, that is, until a time when the coins were remembered, but vaguely. And that, as I suggested, would have been sometime close to their revival in the 1240s. We have now pinned the time of composition down.395 The introductory essay discussed the 1007’s direct borrowing from The Quest of the Grail that was composed in 1220, giving us an absolutely firm terminus ante quem, the time before which the narrative could not have been written. One final point: were the 1007 a product of the eleventh century, the sharp division “found” in the story between clerical and lay characters, and especially the absence of clerics in the royal entourage, would have been improbable or impossible. The work of J. F. Lemarignier on early Capetian government has revealed the decisive and preponderant role played by bishops in eleventh-­century royal assemblies and programs, who, for the most part, were appointed and served at the pleasure of kings and dukes.396 Conversely, from 395 See Leopold Delisle, “Des revenues publics en Normandie au douzième siècle,” Bibliotheque de l’École des chartres 10 (1848–1849): 178–210, especially 183; P. Guilhiermoz, “Note sur les poids du moyen-­âge,” ibid., 67 (1906): 200; and Etienne Fournial, Histoire monétaire de l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Fernand Nathan, 1970), 78–96, 161–82, and esp. 174. 396 J. F. Lemarignier, Le gouvernment royal aux premiers temps capétiens (987–1108), (Paris: Editions A. et J. Picard, 1965), 59; and Lemarignier, “Les institutions ecclésiastiques en France de la fin du Xe siècle au millieu du XIIe siècle,” in Ferdinand Lot and Robert Fawtier, eds., Histoire des institutions francaises au moyen âge, vol. 3 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), 42–49.

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the very late twelfth century, clerics were being replaced by the laity to form a royal privy council, precisely as the 1007 depicted it.397

T he Meaning of t he “1007 Anon ymous” What then is to be made of this story? Why does it evolve as it does, beginning with a Haman-­like conspiracy on the part of the royal lay advisors and nobility to arouse the king against the Jews, and continuing with the king charging the Jews by saying: “I have weighed the matter with my ministers and officials, and my desire is to have one people,”398 a “oneness” he believes so necessary that he is willing to use force to achieve it? Why, too, should all these plans and actions ultimately be checked at the command of the pope? Once the time of 1007’s composition is known, the answer becomes clear. The actions and demands attributed to the king and his barons reflect a Jewish recognition that, from sometime in the thirteenth century, a transvaluation of meanings had begun to take place in certain spiritual concepts and identities once belonging exclusively to the Church, a transvaluation that was the product of those fundamental changes in thirteenth-­century society that Ernst Kantorowicz defined as the “spiritualization and sanctification of the secular.” Most illustrative of this process is the term corpus mysticum (the Church itself ), which was coming to be used

397 C. W. Hollister and J. W. Baldwin, “The Rise of Administrative Kingship: Henry I and Philip Augustus,” American Historical Review, 83 (1978): 902–4. See further, Joseph Strayer, “The Laicization of French and English Society in the Thirteenth Century,” Speculum 15 (1940): 76–86. The argument here is not that prelates were never close royal advisors after the twelfth century. Rather, from this time, the emphasis was placed increasingly on lay councilors. The terminology of 1007 is, moreover, that normally used for laymen. 398 Haberman, Sefer Gezerot, 19. The Hebrew sarai va-avadai, means officials and ministers, not ecclesiastics. The Esther theme is pervasive. Jacob ben Yequtiel is in many ways a latter day Mordechai, and the papal emissary who goes from place to place armed with a bull ordering an end to the persecution recalls the letter of Ahashuerus foiling Haman’s plot (without, of course, the vengeance of the real Purim).

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with reference to the incipient nation-­states, while the inhabitants of those states were beginning to see themselves as the populus dei (formerly exclusively the body of believers in Christ).399 Eventually, usages such as the Holy or Chosen Nation endowed with a divine mission became regular,400 just as the patria of the kingdom was on its way to replacing the onetime patria communis of the Church.401 Jews felt the effects of this transvaluation directly and indirectly. Directly, the exchange of meanings led to an exchange of functions, so that kings soon began interfering in matters once thought purely spiritual and ecclesiastical. For example, Louis IX stopped Jewish lending at interest, and Philip IV, fearing violations of his sovereignty, but also believing it was his proper religious duty, demanded the right to oversee the workings of the Papal Inquisition in his realm, especially should the defendants be Jews.402 Indirectly, just 399 See Yves Congar, L’ecclésiologie du haut moyen âge (Paris: Cerf, 1968), 64, on the concept of Populus Dei in the Carolingian Period; and W. Ullmann, The Carolingian Renaissance, passim, for the overall social and political ramifications of this concept in the ninth century. 400 See Joseph Strayer, “France: The Holy Land, The Chosen People, and The Most Christian King,” in Medieval Statecraft and the Perspectives of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 300–315. On the “spiritual” aspects of early nation-­ states see Gabriel Le Bras, Institutions ecclésiastiques de la chrétienté médiévale (Paris: Bloud and Gay, 1964), 565–96; Georges de Lagarde, La naissance de l’esprit laïque au déclin du moyen âge, 5 vols., 3rd edit. (Paris: Éditions Béatrice, 1956), 1: 183–88; and E. H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), chap. 5, passim. Kantorowicz, on another occasion, “Kingship under the Impact of Scientific Jurisprudence,” in Twelfth-­Century Europe and the Foundations of Modern Society, ed. Marshal Clagett et al. (Madison: University of Wisconson Press, 1961), 101, summed up the processes referred to here most pointedly: “What happened then was not a secularization of the spiritual, but rather a spiritualization and sanctification of the secular.” It should be stressed here that this process is to be distinguished from the claim kings had made before the Gregorian Reform to be the heads of the Church(es) in their domains. Nor is it to be confused with the concept of sacral kingship. See Morrison, The Two Kingdoms and the earlier literature cited there on those problems, and G. Ladner as cited in n. 299 above. 401 Gaines Post in “Two Notes on Nationalism,” 290–95. 402 It has been argued that the permission to act given the Inquisition by Philip IV, or its revocation, stood in direct correlation with the state of Philip’s relations with the papacy, and Boniface VIII in particular; see, e.g., Solomon Grayzel, “Popes,

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as churchmen had once labeled dissidence Judaizing, so, now, secular authorities began stigmatizing Christian deviants with this term. Edward I’s use of “Judaizers” to condemn Christian lenders was borrowed directly from a letter of Bernard of Clairvaux; and, in Bruges, Christian lenders were socially segregated from other Christians in much the same way that Jews were segregated from Christian society as a whole.403 Such terminology and its underlying attitudes could not but create anxiety about the actions of the Jews themselves. And, on the basis of specific laws in the Theodosian and Justinianic Codes that were now being studied in the universities, kings began to interject themselves into internal Jewish affairs of a purely Jewish religious nature.404 Jews, and Inquisition – from ‘Sicut’ to ‘Turbato,’” 151–88. However, the problem was really jurisdictional. Philip IV did not dispute the correctness of prosecuting Jews for the charges leveled by the Inquisition; see Gustave Saige, Les juifs du Languedoc antérieurement au XIV e siècle (Paris: Libraire de Archives Nationales, 1971, reprint of 1881), 232–34. However, he did question whether the Inquisition should act against Jews without explicit royal sanction. The notion of direct Church jurisdiction over Jews was novel in Philip’s day, see here below, and no king could have been expected to relinquish his exclusive powers over “Judaei nostri” without some well-­defined and formal procedure; moreover, there was a definite movement of kings to usurp the powers of the Church outright. This went hand-­in-­hand with the drive of the kingdoms to become independent of the Church and to assume some of its spiritual authority and aura. On this, see Malcolm Barber, “The World Picture of Philip The Fair,” Journal of Medieval History 8 (1982): 13–27. 403 See PL 182: 567 for Bernard: “Peius iudaizare dolemus Christianos feneratores, si tamen Christianos, et non magis baptizatos Judaeos.” On Bruges, Raymond de Roover, Money, Banking and Credit in Mediaeval Bruges (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1948), 152. 404 On the problem of royalty and the Talmud, see here below, and also the comments of Grayzel in “Popes, Jews, and Inquisition,” passim. Roman Law, basically an academic concern (outside Italy), was nevertheless cited as precedent in court. Three texts may have influenced kings in particular: Codex Theodosian, 16, 8, 18, the prototype of Sicut Iudaeis, (see here above); Codex Justinianus, Nov. 146, where Justinian asserted the right of the state to control Jewish literature in specifically religious matters; but, most of all, C. J. 1, 9, 8, which insists on state jurisdiction over Jews in questions “both civil and religious.” In addition, the Justinianic Code restricts Jews in much the same way as do the canons (whence, it was cited by canonists freely and frequently). In the increasingly spiritualized politics of the thirteenth

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This royal interference took place within a new and threatening framework, it, too, an effect of the transvaluation. The refusal of the Jew, the enemy of the Gospels, to nullify his distinct identity and make of himself “one people” with the others had come to be confused with an opposition to lay society itself and to the emerging body politic of the kingdom.405 Consequently, large groups of laymen began viewing the stubborn resistance of the Jews to assimilation and amalgamation (through conversion) as synonymous with those forces in the body politic operating against unity, harmony, and religious discipline. This was so especially in the thirteenth century, when those forces, like the undefined relationship between the royal prerogative and the obligation of the king to respect the law, were still not fully defined, much less comprehended. Lay society was coming to see the Jews as subversives and in the same symbolic terms once used by extremist Carolingian clergy. If Jews had once been labelled by Agobard of Lyons as an impedimentum to realizing the reformed and perfected ideal Christian society,406 now, they were designated as an impedimentum diminishing the good of the patria and its collective and individual membership. In the 1007, this is precisely what the lay counsellors tell the king, which also pushes him to act. “The Jews,” these advisors say, “are an obstacle (moqesh) – an impedimentum, a snare, and a lure – in our way (to becoming one

century, these legal texts likely assumed a real and contemporary meaning. Indeed, this last text was that specifically cited by Johannes Teutonicus to indicate Jews were under Imperial rule; see G. Post, “Two Notes on Nationalism,” 298, and cf. note 370 above. 405 Romans 11:28. 406 MGH, Epist. Karol Aevi III, epist. 6, p. 181, 1.42 for impedimentum; on the idea of a pure society, see Gerhard Ladner, The Idea of Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959). For further descriptions of a society that had fully integrated Christian ideals into its consciousness and structures, see Marvin Becker, Medieval Italy: Constraints and Creativity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1981), 19–58; and on medieval spirituality in general, see Andre Vauchez, La spiritualité du moyen âge occidental VIII e–XI e siècles (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975), 75–145.

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people)”; we must destroy them completely.407 Accordingly, in the 1007 narrative, as in the Milḥemet Mitzvah of Meir b. Simeon, it is the king and his lay advisors who take the lead in “matters of religion.” However, the ideas in the 1007 go beyond those in the Milḥemet Mitzvah. By invoking the idea of the Jews as an impediment to the formation of a unified people, in both spirit and fact, the 1007 was explaining why the king had become extremely dangerous and why Jews needed to abandon their trust in lay support. It was not piety alone that motivated the king, nor the unembellished Christian theology of the Jewish enemy. Rather, pro defensione patriae et coronae, the king had harnessed both piety and theology to the imperfect aspirations and the unfathomed mysteries of the emerging territorial states and, with respect to the motives of certain magnates, to the needs of Realpolitik as well.408 The resulting fusion, in which politics and piety became mutually indistinguishable, was disastrous. It made the king and his followers a greater threat to the Jews than the Church had ever been.409 This does not mean that the author of 1007 was urging Jews 407 Haberman, Sefer Gezerot, 19. This same sentiment clearly lurks behind the sixteenth-­ century comment of Yosef HaCohen in his ’Emeq haBakha, ed. M. Letteris (Cracow: Verlag v. Faust’s Buchhandlung, 1895), 71. Philip IV is credited by Joseph HaCohen with the following declaration when he expelled the Jews from France: “Every Jew must leave my land, taking none of his possessions with him; or, let him choose a new God for himself, and we will become One People.” The accuracy of this attribution is a matter of some interest. 408 See Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 251, on this phrase; and see also Gabrielle M. Speigel, “‘Defence of the Realm’: Evolution of a Capetian Propaganda Slogan,” in Journal of Medieval History 3 (1977): 115–33, on the use of this concept in the chronicle tradition of St. Denis. The concept, evolving from the older idea of tuitio, was to be taken at face value, but also could be used as a tool of practical politics. On further propaganda efforts in chronicles, see Sophia Menache, “Vers une conscience nationale: Mythe et symbolisme au début de la Guerre de Cent Ans,” Le moyen âge 89 (1983): 85–97. 409 On royal piety and its role in the establishment of Jewry policy, see Gavin Langmuir, “The Jews and the Archives,” 183–244, “Judaei Nostri,” Traditio 16 (1960): 203–69, and his review of B. Bachrach’s Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Speculum 54 (1979): 104; see too Wm. C. Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 105, on the “intertwining” of the

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to turn unhesitatingly to the Church for protection and to the members of the hierarchy or the pope in particular. Their powers were not unlimited, and this was certainly true of the hierarchy, whose unpredictability and frequent differences of opinion with the papacy the author of 1007 chose to pass over in his concern to counterpoise popes to kings. As for the popes, in the view of the 1007, their actions were governed by two determinants: the law and the limits of papal jurisdiction. With regard to the first, the 1007 considered the popes to be scrupulously consistent, in which vein he had the pope in the narrative restate the clauses of Sicut Iudaeis non and stress the right of the Jews to enjoy due process. For this reason, too, he had the pope ignore a superfluous offer of money. More pressing for the 1007 were the limits of papal jurisdiction. Were the popes to exercise the direct jurisdiction over the Jews that the Duke of Normandy (in the narrative) eventually conceded them, the enforcement of the safeguards and protections found in Church law would have been guaranteed. However, the exercise of this power would have also ensured the rigid application of the body of canons severely defining and limiting Jewish behavior. Direct papal jurisdiction over the Jews could be as disadvantageous as beneficial, which the author of the 1007 understood well, despite his advocacy of it. Thus, addressing the pope, whom he calls the ’Apifior (as the pope is commonly referred to in Hebrew after the beginning of the thirteenth century),410 Jacob ben Yequtiel says: I have found none, save God, who stands above you as a ruler in the lands of the Nations; for you are the Head of the Nations and the ruler over them.  . . . ​So I came to cry out about my ills from the Jews who live under your jurisdiction. For evil men have arisen without your sanction, and they have attacked the Jews [using force to make them convert to Christianity]. “emotional, the practical, and the spiritual” in the attitudes of Louis IX, and 210–13 on Louis’s use of the motto: “Christus Vincit, Christus Regnat, Christus Imperat.” 410 See Samuel Krauss, “Apiphior, nom hebreu du pape,” Revue des études juives 34 (1897): 235–38, together with the stricture of Carmoly in Osar Nehmad 3 (1860): 110.

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A few lines above in the narrative, in a mirror image of what he was about to say to the pope himself, the 1007 addressed the Duke of Normandy, saying: you do not have the governance over the Jews to make them leave their Torah . . . ​That belongs only to the pope of Rome.411

411 Haberman, Sefer Gezerot, 20. As discussed in note 162 of the Introduction, some have said that when I presented these two statements joined together I was conflating the text and its meaning. To eliminate even a wisp of suspicion that this has happened, here I have separated the two. But whether they are presented singly or combined, it makes no difference with respect to meaning. There is also no distortion, which is the arch-­element of conflation. Nor have two disparate ideas been combined into one. Moreover, in both statements – and, indeed, regardless of whether they are fact or fiction – the speaker is the same, Jacob, as is the subject, papal jurisdiction over Jews. In the first, Jacob tells the pope the duke is trying to usurp his jurisdiction. In the second, he tells the duke jurisdiction belongs to the pope alone. The two statements thus are virtually identical. Regrettably, in the original of 1984, in order to join the two statements, the pronoun “you” (in addressing the duke) changed to “they,” and was left outside the parenthesis that indicated the two were being put together. This was a typographical error that left meanings unchanged, and attention should have been called to it as such, not, inappropriately (and in disregard of the word’s normal meaning), as a conflation. The unity of the passages is emphasized once more in the central phrase, memshelet reshut. The Jews are said to live be-­memshelet reshutkhah, lit.: under the jurisdiction, governance of (under) your (papal) authority. This figure exists nowhere, to my knowledge, in Hebrew literature and probably corresponds to the Latin ius iudicandi, potestas iudicandi, or potestas iurisdictionis, with memshalah [governance] = jurisdiction/power/right and reshut [sanction] = court sanction (authority). It should be noted that despite the absence of a textual reference for memshelet reshut, the 1007 may have been playing on the oft-­repeated memshelet zadon (the evil government). Jews prayed – as Christians complained, thinking (correctly?) the reference was to them – for an end to memshelet zadon (e.g., Additional Service, New Year; and see too J. Rosenthal in Jewish Quarterly Review 47 [1951]: 62, par. 34). Hence, the 1007 was comparing, tacitly, the memshelet reshut (good, proper government) of the pope to the memshelet zadon of the king and duke; I thank the late Rabbi Arthur Chiel of Woodbridge, Conn., for this idea. Yet, this pairing of lawful and illegitimate rule, without which, as I showed at the end of the Introduction, the whole story would fall apart, can reflect only an environment in which they could make sense. And that was in the middle decades of the thirteenth century.

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The jurisdiction Jacob ben Yequtiel grants the pope thus is complete. Not only does the pope exercise jurisdictional authority over Jews, he also has the (potential) power to make them “abandon their teachings.” By contrast, the duke must cede to the pope always. Direct papal jurisdiction over the Jews is the key to understanding 1007’s purposes. At first glance, it seems to derive from Sicut Iudaeis non and its clause of conditional protection. But neither this, nor any other clause in the bull, invests the pope with the right to proscribe Judaism. Moreover, not even the canonists had claimed a papal right to exercise direct jurisdiction over non-­Christians before the thirteenth century, when the question of such a right was taken up by Alanus, Hostiensis and, later, Augustinus Triumphus,412 who, furthermore, were speaking of infidels generically. An explicit assertion of papal jurisdiction over Jews did not appear until Innocent IV’s Apparatus to the Decretals close to mid-­century. The pope [Innocent wrote] has jurisdiction and power over all. [Whence], he may judge Jews. [He may do so] if they act contrary to their law in issues of morality, and their own prelates do not punish them, and, equally, if they fall into heresy with respect to their own law. [It was] for this reason that popes Gregory IX and [speaking reflexively of himself

412 The best discussion of these issues appears in the writings of A. M. Stickler in Traditio 7 (1951) and Sacerdozio e regno, noted above, in n. 299, esp. in their evaluation of the work of W. Ullmann. See too G. Catalano, Impero, regno e sacerdozio nel pensiero di Uguccio da Pisa (Milano: Giuffrè, 1959), esp. 43, for Huguccio on the right of the pope to judge the emperor and kings; and Michael Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty, passim, for maximalist theories of Papal Monarchism. Earlier statements, as those of Regino of Prum (915), Gregory VII, Anselm of Lucca (1083), and Manengold of Lautenbach (1103) tend toward monarchism (see Giovanni Pilati, Chiesa e stato nei primi quindici secoli (Rome: Desclée, 1961): 115, 125, 157, 160–61, 162 and 165), occasionally using bombastic rhetoric, but they do not give the pope direct jurisdiction in all matters, as does Alanus (Pilati, 213) and, to be sure, the 1007, who does not distinguish between spiritual and secular spheres of jurisdiction. The Jews are simply under the governance and jurisdiction of the pope; and 1007 obviously knew how to distinguish fact from theory. He needed no one to tell him that the Jews were in reality subjects of the kings.

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as pope] Innocent IV ordered their books burned. For they contained many heresies.413 Assertions like this and other similar expressions of papal monarchism – of a papal king of kings who rules Christians and infidels alike – are the foundations on which the author of the 1007 built his case, and, I suspect, firsthand. His formulae and those of Innocent IV resemble each other strikingly. Even more indicative is the gap separating the claims of the papal monarchists from concrete medieval reality. The popes of the thirteenth century, as the author of 1007 had to have known, rarely exercised real and direct power over kings. Popes hesitated to interfere in royal affairs, the theorizing of papal monarchists apart,414 while kings were loathe to concede jurisdictional rights to ecclesiastical courts, irrespective of the identity, religion, or status of the litigants. Nor had things ever been different, especially – one feels compelled to add in view of the supposed origins of 1007 – in the early eleventh century. The researches of Pfister, Lemarignier, and Foreville have shown that the popes of that period controlled neither the King of France nor the Duke of Normandy. Bishops, in particular, and as was stressed in the introductory essay, were not in their power. French bishops had rejected decrees imported into France by papal legates on more than

413 See W. Pakter, De His Qui Foris Sunt: The Teachings of the Medieval Canon and Civil Lawyers Concerning the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), chap. 1, for a study of ecclesiastical claims to direct jurisdiction over Jews and their development; eventually published as Medieval Canon Law and the Jews (Ebelsbach: R. Gremer, 1988). It was only with Innocent IV and Hostiensis that the claim of direct jurisdiction was made; and see ibid., 343, n. 85 for the commentary of Innocent IV on X, 3, 34, 8: Quod super his. But see now the full correct text and interpretation of B. Z. Kedar in “Canon Law and the Burning of the Talmud,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 9 (1979): 79–82. The pope, says Kedar, was insisting on the right to supervise the purity of Judaism when he claimed direct jurisdiction over certain Jewish matters. See also Joel Rembaum, “The Talmud and the Popes: Reflections on the Talmud Trials of the 1240s,” Viator 13 (1982): 203–23. 414 See especially Michele Maccarrone, “‘Potestas directa’ e ‘potestas indirecta’ nei teologi del XII e XIII secolo,” Sacerdozio e regno, 27–49.

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one occasion. Popes and bishops were also perpetually embroiled in disputes over privileges the former conceded to monasteries.415 Regardless of actual papal power, prior to the thirteenth century and the commentaries of Hostiensis and Innocent IV, papal claims to direct jurisdiction over Jews for any reason and in any sphere were simply non-­existent.416 As late as 1208, Innocent III turned to Philip Augustus and asked his help: “Since compulsion by temporal power may accomplish more among those in the case of whom spiritual compulsion is not admissible.”417 The closest thing to direct jurisdiction, the so-­called “punishment of the Jews,” or “indirect excommunication” – threatening Christians with anathema for maintaining contacts with Jews who had violated the canons – was a late innovation that had appeared first in the letters of Innocent III, or possibly Alexander III.418 Thomas Aquinas still thought of it as the unique method for directly interfering in Jewish affairs and conduct.419 The author of the 1007 was writing from the perspective of the most advanced, as well as the most assertive, in mid-­thirteenth-­ 415 See Lemarignier, in Lot and Fawtier, Histoire des institutions, 3: 47, for the decree of the 991 Council of Chelles, and ibid., 42–47 and 55–62, for the king as a quasi-­ bishop, with episcopal support, and the episcopal uproar over papally granted monastic exemptions; on this see also Lemarignier, Gouvernement royal, 59 and 76, for further detail. Richard II of Normandy (Institutions 3: 60–62) was strong enough to insist that papal exemptions for monasteries pass directly through his hands. He obviously could have stopped a legate sent on a matter concerning Jews. Cf. Blumenkranz, Juifs et chrétiens, 136, n. 252, who notes that John XVIII sent a legate to France; but there is no indication that his mission dealt with Jews. Pfister, Robert le Pieux, 51–60, concludes that Robert the Pious repudiated his wife Bertha because she was childless, not in defeat after five years of papal pressure. Finally, Raymonde Foreville, “The Synods of the Province of Rouen in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries” in Essays Presented to C. R. Cheney, ed. C. N. L. Brooke, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 23–24, comments that the dukes of the eleventh century used legates for their own purposes, especially to elect or depose bishops; and the legates always deferred to ducal wishes. 416 Pakter, De His, 7–8. 417 Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, 132–33. 418 Pakter, ibid., 16–23. 419 Summa Theologica, II , II, 10, 9, reply to Obj. 2.

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century papal thought. Nonetheless, his advocacy of extreme papalist theory is puzzling. That theory potentially threatened Jewish existence, as the attack on the Talmud and the permission eventually given the Papal Inquisition to deal with Jewish fautors of heresy amply illustrate. Yet there was little choice, as Jacob ben Yequtiel’s petition illustrates: “Lawless [evil] men,” he said, “have arisen, without your legal sanction, and they have attacked the Jews under your jurisdiction.”420 These “lawless men” were the king and his advisors who had usurped papal rights, first, unlawfully demanding that the Jews “reveal to them their knowledge, hiding or obfuscating nothing,” and then, compounding the temerity by decreeing a persecution – urged on by the common will – with the aim of creating “one people,” since fault had been found with Jewish books and beliefs. At which point the pope correctly, as the 1007 saw it, intervened, for following the reasoning of Innocent IV, not to mention the 1007 itself, it was the pope alone who had the authority to make the Jews “abandon their Torah.” Thus, the pope halted the illegal persecution and cited none other than Sicut Iudaeis non as the grounds for his action. Jacob ben Yequtiel’s petition had made hierocratic theory operate to Jewish advantage. But of what virtue was this ideal scenario, unless it corresponded to reality? In fact, the reality and the 1007 story had much in common. Leaving aside the issue of papal monarchist theories and their acceptance, and looking at the individual elements of the 1007 narrative, its story turns out to follow closely the thrust of thirteenth-­century royal and papal behavior toward the Jews, especially in England and France. In 1236, Louis IX failed to halt a massacre in Aquitaine, and he did no more at the time of the blood libel at Valreas in 1247.421 His usury legislation considerably exceeded the limits set down by the canons and papal policy, and it was motivated by true animus, as Meir b. Simeon was quick to

420 See n. 411 above. 421 On Valreas, see Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, nos. 113 and 114, pp. 262–67, and Jordan, Louis IX , 86.

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point out.422 On one occasion, Louis IX even demanded that the Jews either cease their lending forthwith or leave his territories. The clergy, he insisted, might attend to Christian lenders, but it was his royal and moral obligation to stop Jews from taking interest on loans. Under no circumstances would he allow Jews “to infect (his) land with their poison.”423 To ensure the execution of his demands, Louis sent out royal officials who successfully forced Jews to remit interest already paid.424 In the face of such pressures, Meir b. Simeon’s assertion that by prohibiting the Jews from lending at interest Louis IX was preventing them from observing their faith is quite understandable. Indeed, it may also conceal an awful admission. Economic strangulation with the cession of lending may have brought some, or many, to convert, as happened on other occasions, for instance, in Rome, after all Jewish lending was halted, this time by the pope, in 1682. Meir’s assertion that “the king has unlawfully tried to make us forsake our faith for his,”425 was most probably as right as right could be. The activities of Louis IX were not exceptional. Philip IV followed Louis’s lending-­policies, as did Henry III and Edward I, on the other side of the channel.426 Philip III and Philip IV, ad promotionem et defensionem fidei and presumably the “common good,” adopted the demands of the bull Turbato corde of 1267 and allowed the Papal Inquisition to operate against apostate converts and their abet 422 M.M. 33v. 423 Wm. Cornot (Cornotensis), O.P., and royal chaplain, relates this in Bouquet, Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France (Paris: V. Palmé, 1738–1865): 20:34, “De vita et Miraculis Sancti Ludovici.” 424 Ibid., and see the discussion of Gérard Nahon, “Le crédit et les juifs dans la France du XIIIe siècle,” Annales 24 (1969): 1137–38, especially on the matter of the restitution of interest already collected. On the expulsion of usurers see Jordan, Louis IX , 85, 86, 154–55. 425 M.M., 71r. 426 See Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews, pp. 65–69; and the texts in Saige, Les juifs du Languedoc, 227–28; E. J. de Lauriere, Ordonnances des rois de France de la troisième race, 22 vols. (Paris, 1723–1849), 1: 545; and cf. Chazan, Medieval Jewry, 228–29; and S. Luce, “Catalogue des documents du trésor des Chartres relatifs aux juifs sous le règne de Phillipe le Bel,” Revue des études juives 2 (1881): 31; so, too, Baron, SRH 12: 138–69.

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tors.427 Philip III went beyond the demands of the bull when he prohibited Jews from living in small towns, where they might pervert simplices and seduce them into adopting Judaism. Philip IV went beyond his father and vowed to stop the horrifying practice of Jews acquiring consecrated wafers, whence they criminally presumed to mistreat the Most Holy Body of Christ, presumpserunt nequiter pertractare Sanctissimum Corpus Christi.428 More extreme, Henry III and Edward I executed Jewish victims of blood libels in 1255 and 1276.429 Magnates too, for reasons that were often as self-­serving as pious, came to legislative understandings with kings that restrained Jews – however much they otherwise resented royal manipulations that exploited Jews at their baronial expense.430 The actions of the popes differed. Even the expanded version of Turbato corde in 1274 that charges Jews with open proselytizing among born Christians neither calls for Jewish segregation, nor does it imply, as did Philip III, that Jews posed a collectively subversive threat to society.431 To the contrary, the record of papal opposition to blood libels and charges of host and cross desecration, as well as violence of any kind against Jews, is unblemished. The full measure of the divergence of royal from papal dealings stands out in the events surrounding the burning of the Talmud at Paris in the 1240s. When all the claims and counterclaims concerning the responsibility for the burning are stripped away, the Bishop of Paris, William of Auvergne, and the University Chancellor and papal legate, Odo of Chateauroux, emerge as the Talmud’s major clerical antagonists. However, their purposes were eventually checked by Innocent IV, even though both he and Gregory IX had initially sanctioned the burnings.432 Weighing the totality of his 427 Saige, Les juifs du Languedoc, 224. 428 Saige, ibid., 212–13 and 235–36. 429 Roth, A History of the Jews, 56 and 78. 430 See Langmuir, “Judaei Nostri,” and “The Jews and the Archives,” passim. 431 For the expanded Turbato Corde text, see Saige, Les juifs du Languedoc, 232–33, and for the original, see Browe, Judenmission, 258, also with notes on the reissues of the bull and the location of additional printed versions. And see Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, 262, 268, and 274, for papal rejection of blood libels. 432 The problem is that after the fact, everyone took credit for the burnings; before,

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obligations, Innocent IV instructed Odo in 1247 to “harm no one unjustly” and to “tolerate such [books] as he will find may be tolerated, in accordance with the divine command and without injury to the Christian faith.”433 Instructively, the Talmud had originally been condemned for allegedly causing such injury through its supposed mocking of Christianity and its falsifying the true law of Moses.434 Not a result of yielding under pressures, and certainly not the outstanding points are that (1) all the papal correspondence, including the papal letters to be forwarded to kings in other countries, was sent to Wm. of Auvergne and Odo of Chateauroux in Paris; (2) that the inquisitorial process and examination of books and rabbis took place only at Paris; and (3) that it was only at Paris that the Talmud was burned. The language of the letters, furthermore, shows that the popes neither initiated nor quite understood what was happening. The condemnation engineered by Odo in 1248 reveals his central role in the entire episode. The papal letters and other pertinent literature are to be found, along with discussion, in Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, 29–33, 238–45, 250–53 and 274–81; and in Ch. M. Merchavia, The Church versus Talmudic and Midrashic Literature [Hebrew] ( Jerusalem: Bialik, 1970), 227–45, and see 248 for the actual date of the burning. 433 Cited in Grayzel, 274, in a letter to Louis IX, which, in turn, cites the no longer extant letter to Odo. It may have been that Innocent had come to share the position espoused by contemporary Spanish Dominicans who favored censorship, perhaps for the conversionary exploitation of rabbinic texts; on which see Grayzel, 33, n. 66; Baer, Christian Spain 2: 229; and Browe, Judenmission, 75–79. A further bull of this nature was issued in 1258 by Alexander IV and sent to the rulers of Burgundy and Anjou (as well as to the king, although in the letter to him no mention was made of books, but only of the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council, a subject also raised in the letters to Burgundy and Anjou). In these letters, Alexander IV specified only the confiscation and not the burning of Hebrew texts, apparently anticipating either expurgation or a selective procedure condemning only blasphemous material; see the text in I. Loeb, “Bulles inèdites des papes,” Revues des études juives 1 (1880): 116–17. Subsequently, Clement IV explicitly indicated censorship in his letters of the 1260s to James I of Aragon, for which see Heinrich Denifle, “Quellen zur Disputation Pablos Christiani mit Mose Nachmani zu Barcelona, 1263,” Historisches Jahrbuch der Görres-­Gesellschaft 8 (1887): 225–44. 434 See Amos Funkenstein, “Changes in the Patterns of Anti-­Jewish Polemics in the 12th Century,” [Hebrew] Zion 33 (1968): 137–42. But note that from the time of the letters of Alexander IV (n. 433) and on, the Talmud was attacked only for its blasphemies. Cf. esp. the inquisitional texts cited by Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, App. B, 341–43 (now correctly dated by Yerushalmi in Harvard Theological Review 63 (1970): 351, as fourteenth-­century writs). Perhaps the popes feared an attack

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a payment, it was principle that caused Pope Innocent to modify his stance: Jews could not be treated “unjustly”; and this stance was firm. Even the signatures of forty-­four leading Parisian masters and clergy gathered by Odo in 1248 could not reverse it.435 The principles that underlie Innocent’s decision to tolerate (specified) Jewish books reappear in others of his letters concerning Jews.436 By contrast, Louis IX proved himself the Talmud’s true enemy, who not only took an active role in the first round of examinations and burnings, but, in 1254, overrode Innocent IV’s 1247 decision and prohibited the Talmud’s use and study entirely.437 Had the author of the 1007 been writing later than 1246 or 1247, as I argued in the introductory essay was its terminus ad quem, the latest time the narrative was composed, this royal action of 1254 would have only confirmed him in his thinking. But even by 1246 or 1247, the 1007 had seen enough. And it was likely with royal aggression against the Talmud in mind (regardless of the doings of the local clergy, especially the Masters at the University of Paris) that he wrote that in the council of his barons and at the urging of his queen the king questioned the legitimacy of the practice of Judaism and demanded of the Jews that they reveal to him their knowledge, “hiding or obfuscating nothing.” Actions like these brought 1007 into full agreement with the opinion of Meir b. Simeon: the king indeed did think he knew more of religion than the pope himself.438

435

436 437 438

on the extra-­scriptural nature of Talmudic law might lead to a similar attack on extra-­scriptural papal legislation (i.e., the body of the Decretals). Indeed, motives of this kind may already have been active in Paris in 1239, pitting the scripturally oriented theologians of the University against the curially slanted canonists and eventually the popes themselves. For reasons that are self-­evident, however, no written mention of these motives was made. In Merchavia, The Church versus Talmudic and Midrashic Literature [Hebrew] 451–52, including the signatures; and see I. Loeb, “Bulles inèdites des papes,” Revues des études juives 1 (1880): 294–95, who argues that Odo’s condemnation produced no new confiscation or burning. See these letters in Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, nos. 113, 114, 115, 116 and 117. For Louis IX’s order, also accusing the Jews of magic and blasphemy, see Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, 337, and Baron, SRH, 9: 67 and 271, n. 15. M.M. 33v. See here, Jordan, Louis IX , 23, 128–29, 182 and 205.

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In the policies of kings and popes, the author of 1007 had seen a pattern. The popes were seeking, mostly by understatement and implication, to put into practice elements of extreme hierocratic theory, one of which had become the claim to jurisdiction over the Jews, specifically, the right to supervise the purity of Judaism by deciding what was correct or heretical in Jewish practice.439 They, the popes, would dictate which parts of Talmudic learning and knowledge the Jews must put aside. Nevertheless, the popes tempered this claim and others like it by assiduously observing the law and due legal process; just as in all of papal thought, the matters of jurisdiction, legal rigor, and due process were inextricably linked.440 Kings, who often were unwilling to acknowledge the limitations of (any kind of ) law, knew of no such theories. As a source of protection, the pope, who did, was clearly preferable. But this protection would be even more efficient if papal monarchist and jurisdictional claims concerning the Jews were consistently accepted, not only when they suited royal interests. If reality as a whole, not alone its isolated and individual elements, were to correspond to the 1007 narrative, the Jews would benefit inestimably. Yet, how could such a thing come about? The author of the 1007 knew that reality would never match his narrative perfectly. For one thing, although royal opposition to papal monarchism was constantly increasing, opposition to papal monarchism was not synonymous with opposition to the papacy as an institution or to its generally acknowledged rights in spiritual affairs, in which kings would always hesitate to meddle. Thus, Philip IV, together with his royal propagandists, may have claimed it was part of the royal prerogative to initiate judicial proceedings against heretics. Yet preferring not to interfere with tradition, Philip pressed the pope, Clement V, to take the initiative in prosecuting the Templars.441 Against this background, the author of 1007 had reason 439 See the reference to B. Z. Kedar in n. 413 above. 440 On the consciousness of due process (of course, without the name), see J. A. Watt, “The Term ‘Plenitudo Potestatis’ in Hostiensis,” Proceedings of the Second International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, ed. S. Kuttner (Vatican City, 1965), 161–87, esp. 174. 441 See here Malcolm Barber, “The World Picture of Philip The Fair,” 13–20.

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to be optimistic. Should Jews come to understand papal doctrines, along with the thirteenth-­century world’s overall theoretical underpinnings, then perhaps they might persuade the popes to insist on the practical implementation of those jurisdictional prerogatives over the Jews and Judaism that the papacy had heretofore claimed only in theory, including the safeguarding of privileges. The 1007 was composed to instill this understanding, and Jews had to be taught a number of lessons: first, that the canons defining their role in the Christian world order were equivocal and complex; second, that in principle, the pope – although not every member of the clergy – was committed to observing the entire body of canon law punctiliously, irrespective of whom a particular canon favored or limited, be he Christian or Jew; and third, and most important, that the popes had enunciated in theory that as the legatees of Peter, they had every right to supervise the implementation of the canons pertaining to the Jews. The popes also had the right to assume that royalty would follow their lead, not dictate it. It was not that the Jews should think they might control the pope. Nor were they to admit the legitimacy of the potentially destructive power claimed by the pope to judge their religion and literature. The question of papal monarchism and its theory was significant for Jews only insofar as it affected their lives; in their hearts, the pope was none other than the supreme representative of an idolatrous faith.442 But the Jews could learn which powers the pope claimed over them, as well as how the pope intended to use these powers in the light of the canons regulating the Jewish-­ Christian encounter. Only through this knowledge, not venality or other such traditional, but ineffective “personal” approaches, could the Jews hope to convince the pope to republish the texts and demand the implementation of their canonically guaranteed rights, even in the face of royal opposition. Without this sophistication, the Jews would be unable to defend themselves, which was especially so as they faced acute challenges 442 See Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance (New York: Behrman House, 1962), 13–63, and esp. 23 on Christianity and idolatry.

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like the concern over relapse following baptism that persuaded later thirteenth-­century popes to invoke their theories of direct jurisdiction.443 Had not Turbato corde empowered the Papal Inquisition to try Jews charged with aiding and abetting heretics or with helping once-­converted Jews return to their original faith?444 Contacts between the Inquisition and the Jews did not necessarily end in a judicial lynching. Jews and accused Judaizers were sometimes acquitted.445 The famous transcript of the trial of Baruch (ca. 1322) shows the Inquisitor-­Bishop Jacques Fournier (later, Benedict XII) repeatedly seeking to prove that Baruch had expressed a will to convert; whence, both the conversion, as well as Fournier’s current inquisitorial proceedings, would be vindicated.446 Nonetheless, extremist Inquisitors could exploit Judaizing activities, such as violations of the contractual terms of Sicut Iudaeis non and Dispar nimirum est that demanded subservience, as a pretext for actions like a confiscation of the Hebrew books Jews had saved from the flames at Paris.447 The only way to avoid this catastrophe, not to mention the encroachment of the Inquisition into all spheres of Jewish life, was to know the law intimately. Jews had to know not only where to turn for legal redress, but also how to do so.

443 A canon decree on this issue, although with certain minor circumlocutions, was issued by Boniface VIII in the sixth book of Decretals (Sext. 5, 2, 13). It made official what had been accepted practice. Cf. Decretals (X, 3, 42, 3) for a text of Innocent III on this subject, which does not discuss Jews directly; for a text that does, see Gratian Decretum, D. 45, c. 5, incorporating the famous decree of the 633 Fourth Toledan Council (Mansi, 10: 633) against backsliding. However, it seems that a consensus was achieved only in the twelfth century, with Gratian. In 1096, it appears that Antipope Clement III sought to enforce the Toledan decree, while Pope Urban II did not, following the practice of Gregory the Great. Cf. note 58, above. 444 On the problems of the Jews with the Inquisition, see M. Kriegel, “Prémarranisme et inquisition dans la Provence des XIIIe et XIVe siècles,” Provence Historique 29 (1978): 313–23; and Y. H. Yerushalmi, “The Inquisition and the Jews of France in the Time of Bernard Gui,” Harvard Theological Review 63 (1970): 317–76. 445 See, for instance, Shatzmiller, “L’inquisition,” 332. 446 Translated by S. Grayzel, “The Confessions of a Medieval Convert,” Historia Judaica 17 (1955): 89–120. 447 See, on this, Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, Appendix B, 341–43.

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This assessment was not arrived at easily. Some Jews were perplexed. To them, papal acts did not appear to fit into a consistent scheme or pattern. Natan Official, the author of the Disputation of Rabbi Yehiel of Paris (concerning the “errors” of the Talmud), was so unsure that he left his readers wondering. At one point, the queen tells the rabbi that the pope has ordered the Talmud put on trial. Near the end of the tract, the pope is proclaimed a safe and sure protector.448 What Natan Official missed, although the author of 1007 did not, was that all of papal policy toward the Jews moved simultaneously in two directions: one offering protection, the other threatening violators of the canons with the loss of their privileges. Within this dualistic framework, the papal claim to judge the orthodoxy of Jewish texts, including Innocent IV’s bifurcated approach to the Talmud, are comprehensible. Innocent IV had no permissible alternative. The grasp of papal ways demonstrated by the author of 1007 soon became widespread. At the request of the Spanish Dominicans, Clement IV wrote to James I of Aragon in 1266, asking the king to punish Nachmanides for circulating a blasphemous work following his disputation with Paul Christian at Barcelona in 1263. At the same time, the heart of Clement’s letter reiterates the terms of Sicut Iudaeis non.449 James I is told to protect Christianity and repress Jewish malice; yet he must not violate the privileges the Apostolic See has bestowed upon the Jews. This admonition was certainly not drafted in response to a Dominican request. More probably, it was the product of a carefully worded petition to the pope made by a Jewish delegation seeking to limit the effects of the Dominican threat. Jews became adept petitioners. Petitions led, for example, to the rebuke of Inquisitors who had sidestepped legal propriety and dragged defendants to stand trial in front of distant legal venues. The former General of the Franciscan Order Nicholas IV (Girolamo

448 Eisenstein, Osar, 86 and ed. Greenbaum, 12. 449 In Browe, Judenmission, 76, n. 69.

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Masci) issued three of them.450 Another petition may have been responsible for the assurances given to the Jews of Pamiers in 1298 by the Dominican Inquisitor Arnold Dejean (who was also the feudal lord of the town) that customary privileges would be respected and no threatening innovations introduced.451 The 1007 did not stand alone. Others, too, came to understand the truths of papal theory and power, and they labored to make this knowledge work to Jewish advantage.452 Perhaps the best illustration is found in the petition drawn up by a Jewish assembly at Barcelona in 1354, which says that preferably the petition was to be transmitted through the agency of Pere IV of Aragon.453 But, if necessary, the king was to be bypassed and representatives sent directly to Clement VI, at Avignon, requesting a decretal letter denouncing host libels, accusations of well-­poisoning, and all legislation that exceeded the demands of the canons limiting Jewish behavior during Holy Week. The pope would also be urged to insist that the Inquisition abide by the edict of Boniface VIII requiring Inquisitors not to treat Jews as “powerful persons”: the identity of those who brought accusations and gave witness against them could not be kept a secret.454 Finally, the pope was to be confronted with the 450 In E. Langlois, Les registres de Nicolas IV (Paris, 1905) nos. 3573–75, p. 552; and cf. J. Vidal, Bullaire. 451 In Saige, Les juifs du Languedoc, 238–39; and cf. Bat Sheva Albert on Jean Fournier in The Case of Baruch [Hebrew] (Ramat Gan: Bar-­Ilan University Press, 1974), 46. 452 Thus Ibn Verga in “Shmad 41” near the end (Shebet Yehudah, ed. Shohat, 114), tells of the pope, Marco Florentine [sic], who suddenly ceased protecting the Jews, ordered a synagogue destroyed, and demanded the restitution of interest already collected when the Jews went beyond canonical limits and asked to retain a synagogue standing alongside a church. The implication about the need to learn limits is self-­evident. 453 In Finkelstein, Jewish Self-­Government, 330–31, and trans., 338: “in a matter disputed by the religions, even if a Jew (by believing it) should strengthen the convictions of a Christian heretic, he should not be plagued by the scourge of heresy (and be brought before the Inquisition) . . . Rather, he should be punished for this by the (secular) ruler. . . .” This last remark, primarily tactical, was probably intended to indicate more a distrust of the Inquisition than faith in the king. 454 See J. Vidal, Bullaire, nos. 269–70, giving Gregory XI’s 1372 reissue of Boniface’s letter, Exhibita Nobis ( June 13, 1299).

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following: in an explicit echo of the Apparatus of Innocent IV, on the one hand, and with the implication that Turbato corde ought to be modified, on the other, the assembly instructed its representatives to admit the right of the Inquisition to judge Jews erring in beliefs common to all. But these representatives were also to argue the illegality of inquisitional proceedings against Jews expressing opinions true to Judaism, even should these opinions be suspect of stimulating Christian heresy. The pope, the petition concludes, is obligated to agree to these requests, for he is bound to uphold Christianity’s laws and doctrines, including those that teach the preservation of the Jews. The declaration made at the 1274 Council of Lyons by the Imperial publicist, Alexander of Roes, may thus have been intended as more than hyperbole: Not only [he wrote] did the Christian people and ecclesiastical prelates assemble at the feet of the Roman pontiff, but even the kings of the world, together with the Jews, Greeks and Tartars, confessed that the monarchy of the world [belonged] to the Roman Priest.455 (Emphasis added.) It was in this same spirit, although considerably later, in the sixteenth century, that Solomon Modena, half fawningly, yet still earnestly, declared: Behold . . . ​from him (the pope) a law (literally, Torah) will go out and a religion to the entire world. . . . 456

T he Esot er ic Approach of t he “1007 Anon ymous” Yet why did the author of 1007 state his case esoterically: in Hebrew, through hints, and in a tale? Yes, there was reason to fear the wrath of the king, St. Louis, who was credited by his contempo 455 Cited in J. H. Mundy, Europe in the High Middle Ages, 323, citing Notitia seculi in MGH, Staatschriften 1, i, 154. Interestingly, Mundy refers here to a Jewish reference to the pope as “King of the Nations.” 456 Cited and trans. by David Ruderman, “A Jewish Apologetic Treatise from Sixteenth-­ Century Bologna,” Hebrew Union College Annual 50 (1979): 265.

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rary biographer with saying: “The best way to argue with a Jew is with a sword in the belly.”457 However, direct criticism of the king could not be hidden. By the mid-­thirteenth century, knowledge of Hebrew among Christians, one or more of whom might inform on him, was not rare. Hence, if the 1007 resorted to esoterism it was an esoterism directed inward, addressing the Jews themselves. The 1007 could not hope that a formal lecture on canonical procedure and theory would yield positive results. He could not delude himself into thinking he could convince his fellow Jews by saying: Go before the pope as did Jacob ben Yequtiel, flatter him by spouting papal monarchism, tell him that you accept his claim to jurisdiction over non-­believers, that you concede unequivocally his right to review and expurgate your sacred texts and traditions, and that you see the canons with their whole panoply of restrictions as establishing valid norms for Jewish life, literature, and religious practices. Nor could he persuade the Jews to pretend that doing this was not demeaning. How could he tell the Jews that if they wanted papal help they must be ready to acquiesce, trusting that in return for acquiescence the pope will honor his canonically attested pledge to ensure due legal process? To say this outright would be calling into question divine providence and God’s promise to His People. The prescription was too extreme. It had to be masked to make it palatable. Yet it also had to be communicated, for the dilemma the Jews faced was not a simple one of choosing between kings and popes. Nor was crafty maneuvering an option. The Jews had to learn why kings were dangerous. Even more, they had to be taught the prerequisites for receiving papal support. There was room for neither despair nor euphoria. Only the level-­headed appraisal of reality and theory would do. This approach was terrifying to contemplate. It also left problems unresolved. As the author of 1007 knew, papal decrees were effective only when secular authorities like the Duke of Normandy cooperated. However, in the long run, the normative ecclesiastical sources – the 457 In Jean de Joinville, Histoire de Saint Louis, ed. N. de Wailly (Paris, 1874), 31; noted in Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, 26, n. 23.

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popes, and the clergy who adhered fully to the canons – did not receive this cooperation. For reasons of politics and piety, kings and nobles could, and would, be more rigid than the canons and more ruthless than even an Agobard of Lyons had dreamed. In the face of such opposition, the popes had to act accordingly. Despite theoretical claims, they rarely, if ever, insisted on exercising jurisdiction over Jews in practice. Thus, rather than interfering directly in Jewish religious affairs, in 1248, Innocent IV still preferred to halt violations of Jewish clothing regulations by resorting to “indirect excommunication.”458 Here, as with the Talmud, the pope felt it politic to turn to the “community of Christians” and to the secular powers for enforcement. He could not cavalierly give orders as though no intermediary stood between him and the Jews. There was also the nagging, and closely related, question of how forcefully any given pope was committed to speaking out in behalf of Jewish defense, chancing a blow to the prestige of his own pontificate, as well as to that of the papal office as a whole. The papal commitment in principle to law and due legal process was vulnerable to harsh realities. If the King of England expelled his Jews, to the accompaniment of much popular acclaim, the pope could not afford to call openly for the revocation of the expulsion decree. It would have fallen on deaf ears, embarrassing to the papacy in the extreme. The pope might have tried to mollify his personal sense of justice by claiming that the permission given Jews to dwell in Christian lands did not imply a right to dwell in those lands universally. But his primary decision to remain silent would have been self-­serving and political. In the wake of the expulsion from England in 1290, Nicholas IV did not speak out. Papal Jewry policy also suffered from a serious internal flaw. Regardless of its pretense to consistency, it was plagued by inherent contradictions. Some were obvious and controllable. When the demands of Turbato corde jeopardized the protection offered by Sicut Iudaeis non, Nicholas III warned Inquisitors not to employ excessive zeal. Real problems arose when the contradictions were spawned 458 Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, 280.

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by legal over-­definition and refinement, most notably, in the bull Vineam sorec (1278) that permits friars to deliver effectively obligatory missionary sermons. But this was to flirt with illegal forced conversion, which the bull papers over by ending on a surprisingly weak note. Instead of excommunicating Christians who violate its prescriptions and threatening recalcitrant Jews with “indirect excommunication,” as the “penalty clauses” of papal letters do as standard procedure, Vineam sorec merely requests a report be made to the pope, (Nicholas III), who will then consider taking “appropriate (disciplinary) measures.”459 These were not empty words. A Latin transcript of Jewish origin that describes a reissue of Sicut Iudaeis non to the Jews of Pamplona around 1280 explains that the bull was dispatched to deal with the problem of Franciscans interrupting Jewish prayers to deliver (missionary) sermons, which were ordered to cease. For while the sermons were beneficial, the prayers, like Judaism itself, were protected by the canons.460 The inherent ambivalence of this Pamplona episode must have left both Franciscans and Jews wondering. The popes were dealing with reality by creating overly subtle distinctions that could, and sometimes did, lead to untenable situations. In approximately 1266, Clement IV wrote about the plight of a seven-­year-­old Jewish girl baptized under dubious circumstances. Clement ordered the girl returned to her father, “tormented as he (the father) was by fatherly emotions.” However, the sacrament of baptism could not be invalidated, and, therefore, the father had agreed ultimately to restore his daughter to the Church. This preposterous compromise, through which the father was clearly to rear his daughter as a Christian, had as little chance of being realized as the twelfth-­century Caesarius

459 Issued on Aug. 4, 1278; see J. Sbaralea, Bullarium Franciscanum (Rome, 1759–1904) 3: 331, no. 50; for a discussion of forced preaching, see K. Stow, Catholic Thought, 20, n. 59. It is important for perspective to compare Vineam sorec to Sancta mater ecclesia of Gregory XIII (1584); the latter orders attendance. However, by 1584, the papacy had abandoned its medieval Jewry policy and turned to one of near-­forced conversion; see ibid. 460 For this text, see I. Loeb in Revue des études juives 1 (1880): 115–16.

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of Heisterbach’s story of the young baptized Jewess who refused to return to her father may unreservedly be considered authentic.461 Scrupulous adherence to the law on the part of the popes was not, therefore, always a sure prescription for safety and security. Accordingly, Meir b. Simeon, aware as he was of papal limitations, cautioned against relying on the popes exclusively. The author of the 1007 was no less aware. It was he, after all, who had spoken of the papal right to force the Jews from their teachings. Yet, he saw no viable alternative. For if Meir b. Simeon had referred to the Code of the Emperor as a possible source of security, the author of 1007 knew that Meir’s was wishful thinking. For all his vulnerability, for all the legal over-­definition, and for all the limitations he placed on his protection, the pope was time and again more reliable than his weak and vacillating imperial counterpart. The Jews had no choice but to call on the pope actively. However, the source of the 1007’s confidence was more than careful reasoning and calculation. It was his belief that papal-­Jewish relations were determined according to a divinely ordained pattern. Jacob ben Yequtiel, therefore, appears as a latter-­day Mordechai, whose boldness and cunning save the Jews from a ministerial plot. Yet the prototype of Jacob ben Yequtiel was not Mordechai. It was, as first reviewed in the introductory essay, but now set out in more detail, Ehud ben Gerah. The crucial private interview the pope grants Jacob perfectly reproduces the events leading to Ehud’s seclusion with Eglon, the King of Moab, in Eglon’s attic – except that the ending is turned upside down. In both cases, the excuse for the privacy is the enticement: “I have a secret to tell you” ( Judges 3:19). But in that of Ehud, that secret is the “two-­edged sword” with which Ehud slays Eglon and brings about the flight of the Jews’ Moabite persecutors. In the case of Jacob ben Yequtiel, it is the message to the pope that he is the Vicar of Christ, empowered to rule over the Jews, that prompts the order halting the royally instigated pogrom. 461 Caesar of Heisterbach’s tale is translated by Jacob Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1938), 142–44; the bull Cum de tam was published by S. Grayzel in Jewish Quarterly Review 46 (1955): 61–63.

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By implication, the kingdom of Eglon was evil (memshelet zadon – indeed, in the story, the domain of Robert of France is referred to as malkhut harish‘a), the kingdom of the pope, the “King of the Nations,” is just (memshelet reshut). The heavy yoke of this kingdom, including the subjection to the canons, which Innocent III defined by calling it “perpetual servitude,” could be tolerated.462 Medieval Jewish readers would not have missed the parallelism between these two stories, nor would they have missed the message the 1007 hoped it would convey. They may have also known that in the letters appended (at least in the surviving manuscript) to the story of the massacre at Blois in 1171, the king refuses the bait when he is told “I have a secret to reveal.” However, in this instance, that king, probably Louis VII or Philip Augustus, was the embodiment of “the evil kingdom,” Eglon reincarnate, who anticipates his violent end. The pope, ruling a just kingdom, has no fear and secludes himself with Jacob b. Yequtiel, to be told he is the “King of the Nations.” The Blois letters, in my opinion, preceded the 1007 by some decades. Whether the 1007 was using them to his literary advantage, in a case of sophisticated literary borrowing, I can only speculate. The 1007’s readers may have sensed a second literary maneuver, one that was even more important than the first, yet which was so dangerous to say out loud that it had to be hidden from all except well-­schooled Jews. If, at God’s behest, the slavery to Eglon had ended, then, at the time of God’s choosing, that to the pope, too, would cease, regardless of how worthy the pope was in the meantime. Hence, as we saw in the introductory essay, Jacob did not bow down to the pope. He remained on his feet, reminding the knowledgeable of Psalms 20:9: “They bent over and fell down; we arose and are heartened,” which Rashi interpreted as, “we shall overcome,” and which itself continues in verse 10, to say: “The Lord will save us in the day we call out.” Yet that God would save 462 The term was introduced by Innocent III as a motto indicating the restrictive side of canon Jewry law; see Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, 114–15; Stow, “Hatred,” 106; and Langmuir, “Tanquam Servi,” 50–51.

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him, Jacob already knew. Had not a miracle prevented his murder and convinced Duke Richard to send him to Rome? Of course, he refused to bow before the pope, and, of course, he felt in his heart that, indeed, “God would save.” Without the faith that all of this – the miracle, the papal intervention, Sicut Iudaeis non, and even the body of canons regulating Jewish behavior – was of divine making, then perhaps Jacob would have given up all hope and become a Christian. So, too, may have the author of the 1007, realist and tactician though he may have been – as did a not inconsiderable number of his fellows.463

In Conclusion The positive attitude revealed by Ephraim of Bonn toward the popes and the Church hierarchy was thus justified. But to make it usable, this attitude had to mature and be converted into an operative strategy. That maturational process was completed in the “1007 Anonymous.” Its author accurately perceived that, in the century between 1150 and 1250, the papacy and the canonists had elaborated on the fundamentals set forth in Dispar nimirum est and Sicut Iudaeis non. In bulls, councils, and canonical collections, rules governing papal-­Jewish relations had been elaborated, on whose scrupulous enforcement the Church would insist, to the Jews’ advantage and disadvantage alike.464 The Jews had to know precisely where they stood. Through knowledge and deliberate action, the basic privileges of life and the right to practice Judaism freely could be asserted; and these privileges would be guaranteed by the pope himself, in line with canonical propriety.465 463 See Jordan, Louis IX , 156–57. 464 Special note must be made of the Fourth Lateran Decrees (1215), which are usually portrayed as a hardening of the Church’s position. However, a perusal of the literature cited in nn. 317 and 326 above, as well as of the pertinent passages in Gratian and the Decretals, reveals, on the contrary, the development over the centuries of a coherent and consistent legal doctrine into which the legislation of 1215 quite logically fits; see Stow, Catholic Thought, 80–111 and Appendix II, part I. 465 It would be amiss not to mention Grayzel’s contention that by the later thirteenth century, the popes were stressing restriction out of proportion to their calls for

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This strategy was meaningless, however, if the canons delineating papal policy were not functional and their authority continually challenged. But challenged it was, and the papal Jewry policy mandating a specific and necessary role for the Jews in Christian society ultimately failed. One by one, and against everything the popes and churchmen like Gregory the Great, Bernard of Clairvaux, and even Innocent III had written or said, the Jews were partially or totally expelled from every western European state. For reasons of economics, politics, constitutional weakness, social conflict, or piety, whether singly or in fusion and perhaps verbalized as the desire, so perceptively sensed by 1007, to be “one people,” it was decided to ignore the teachings of the popes and to disregard the determinations of the canons. Challenged by such a coordinated will, even the popes themselves had no choice, on occasion, but to bend the ideal of due legal process and bow to political realism. In the matter of the Jews and their place in the Christian world order, therefore, one of the central difficulties of the medieval world, the establishment of a fully functioning body of canon law and the subsequent division of jurisdictions between lay and ecclesiastical competences, is revealed in the fullness of its complexity and irresolution.466 So too, the depths of lay piety and its independence from ecclesiastical controls may be fairly assessed.

protection and that by so doing they were not only undercutting the importance and effectiveness of Sicut Iudaeis, but indirectly encouraging extremism too; see The Church and the Jews, 81–82 and “Popes, Jews, and Inquisition,” passim. In contrast, and as argued here, I believe the Jews of the 13th century correctly understood the papal stress on restriction and protection to be both equal and constant. The Jewish task was to insure that this equilibrium remained in place. 466 See here Friedberg, De finium, passim, and Jean Gaudemet in Lot and Fawtier, Histoire des institutions 3: 273–79, for a discussion of the overall problem. With reference to the Jews, their servi, or quasi-­servi, kings were always hesitant about sharing their powers; cf. the references above, esp. n. 141. The following point is pertinent here: while kings might concede that Jews should be punished for certain “spiritual” transgressions, still they insisted: “Cum non sint de fide seu lege catholica et si aliquo excesserint contra legem, (canonicam), sunt per nos puniendi,” (James I of Aragon [20 June 1292], in Baer, Die Juden 1: 148, no. 1338).

Appendix

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Index Abbey of Cambuskenneth (Scotland), 73n168 Abu Aaron in Megillat Ahimaaz, 12, 60–61 acculturation: heavenly rewards and, 11n23; Israelitization of ideas, 70; literary acculturation, 12–13, 36; of thirteenth-­century Jews, xiii, 10, 70 Ademar of Chabannes, xiv, xv, xvi, 93–97; The Annals of Limousin Abbacy, 96n208; Baronius citing, 28; bishops’ role in, 114; Commemoration of the Abbacy of Limoges, 90–98, 90n197; confirming of “1007” by reference to, 38, 83, 168–69, 170; on death of Jews after destruction of Holy Sepulcher Church, 78, 84, 90–91, 111–12, 168–69; forced conversion and, 48, 88–89, 95, 106; glorification of St. Martial by, 94n204; History, 24, 78, 88–90, 96n208; History of the Abbacy of Limoges, 29n66, 78; on Jewish self-­sacrifice, 6, 12, 96n208; Landes on, 63, 97, 115; life of, 88n194; Malkiel on, 8; mirror-­tales and, 24–26; reliability of dates/events in, 6, 24–27, 29, 29n68, 30, 30n70,

97, 98; sources of, 101, 101n219, 107; Stock on, 10, 80–84 Agobard of Lyons, 18, 18n38, 98, 105, 127, 138–39, 138n283, 139n286, 143, 143n298, 180 Agus, Irving, 55, 56–57, 56– 57nn133–134, 60, 60n142, 61, 68, 131n272 Agus, Jacob, 25–26n57 Ahimaaz, 11, 23, 60, 61 Alanus, 184, 184n412 Alberic of Spoleto, 106, 106n234 Albo, Yosef, 161 Albornoz, Cardinal Gil, 141n289 Alduin (Bishop of Limoges), 89, 91–94, 91n199 Alexander II (Pope): Dispar nimirum est, 16, 16n34, 46, 115, 144–46, 152–53; forced conversion and, 46, 48, 97–98; letters of protection from, 148–50; letter to Prince of Benevento (1065), 145n301; papal jurisdiction over Jews and, 59, 145; possibility of papal letter on Jews by, 64, 64n150; yoke of canons, applicable to Jews, 39. See also Dispar nimirum est Alexander III (Pope), 46, 47, 132, 186 Alexander IV (Pope), 190n433 Alexander of Roes, 197

233

234

Index

Alfonso XI (Spanish king), 141n289 Al-­Hakim (Fatimid Caliph), 168n377 Amnon of Mainz, 11 anachronisms, use of, xii, xiii–xiv, 5n10, 37, 71, 75; Shepkaru on, 10–11n21 Anacletus II (Antipope), 147, 155 Anjou, coins of, 41–42, 176 Annalista Saxo, 84n182 Anselm of Lucca, 184n412 Antichrist, 160 apocalypticism, 94n204. See also End of Days apostates, 102n222, 109, 159, 188, 194. See also Sehoq ben Esther Apostolic Chancery, 125 Aquitaine massacre (1236), 187 Arefast, 65 Arnulf of Orleans, 53n125, 132, 147 Aronius, Julius, 85, 87n193, 174n392 Augustine, Saint: Adversus Judaeos, 96; on Jewish conversion or expulsion, 95–96, 95n208; so-­called Augustinian theory that Jews were permitted to live among Christians, 6, 20, 111, 126; on social familiarity with Jews, 109 Augustinus Triumphus, 184 avarice, 109, 110 Avignon, expulsion from, 104n228 Avitus of Clermont, 97, 98n214 Avodah Zara 11a, 58, 58n135 Baer, Yitzhaq, 11, 46, 46n109, 47, 86n189, 88 Bak, Janos, 82–83 Baldus de Ubaldis, 156 Baldwin (Duke), 66, 65n155

Barcelona: Disputation between Nachmanides and Paul Christian (1263), 195; Jews in, 196 Baron, S. W., 25n55, 65–66, 65n155, 87, 144n300, 151, 167n372, 168n377, 174 Baronius, Caesar, 28n63, 29n66, 79; Annales Ecclesiastici, 27n61, 27–28, 29, 171n385; Benedict VIII’s beheading of Jews in, 171n385; reliability of dates/ events in, 29n68, 90n197 Baruch of Rome (1041), 147 Baruch’s trial (ca. 1322), 194 Baumgarten, Elisheva, 13n27 Beaujeu castle built by Alduin, 94 Becker, Marvin, 180n406 Beller, Katherine, 26n59 Benedict VIII (Pope), 25–31, 30n71, 53, 54, 54n127, 63n146, 171n385 Benedict XII (Pope, formerly Jacques Fournier), 194 Benedict XIII (Pope), 160 Benedict XIV (Pope), 102n222 Benjamin of Tudela, 47n113, 55, 55n129, 56n132, 61, 74n169 Benzo of Alba, 147 Bernard of Clairvaux (Saint), 129–30, 131, 133, 147, 154–55, 158, 179 Bertha (second wife of Robert the Pious), 186n415 biblical citations. See scriptural citations bishops. See episcopal role in early Middle Ages; legate’s role Blois letters (late twelfth century), xvn4, 16–17, 17n35, 51, 59, 60n141, 202 Blois mass burnings (1171), xv, 11,

Index 12, 17n35; offer of money to Count Thibaut to save Jews, 175, 175n394 Blumenkranz, Bernard, 24n54, 27n61, 62, 91n199, 92, 96n208, 97–98n214, 107, 116, 167n372, 171n385, 186n415 Blurton, Heather: The Life and Miracles of William of Norwich, 10 Bollandists, 28, 28n64 Bonfil, Robert, 127 Boniface IV (Pope), 107 Boniface VIII (Pope), 178n402, 194n443, 196 Book of Esther. See Esther motif; scriptural citations Boswell, John, 119 Bourges, Jews of, 94–95, 95n207 Breuer, Mordecai, 86n189 Brezzi, Paolo, 30n71, 53 bribes, 129, 175, 175n394, 182 Browe, Petrus, 135n279 Bruges, 179 Bruno of Wurtzberg, 117 Burchard of Worms, 87, 103–4, 103n226 Burgundy, 173 Caesarius of Heisterbach, 200–201, 201n461 Caesar of Arles, 102n222 Calixtus II (Pope), 46, 115n250, 130n267, 149, 151, 153 Calonghi dictionary, 48, 87n192, 92, 92n200 cannibalism, 80, 81 canon law. See papal theory and canon law Capetian government, 176 Capsali, Eliyahu, 159 caritas, 137

235

Carolingian age, 38, 97, 101n221, 141, 150, 180 Celestine III, 48n115 censorship, 190n433. See also Talmud Chamber Serfdom, 140, 140n288 Chanson de Roland, 38 Chansons de geste, 10, 12, 38, 68, 172 Charlemagne, 53 Charles (Flemish Count), 66 charters of protection granted to Jews, 47, 106, 115n250, 139–40, 139n285 Chavanon, Jules, 27n61, 91n198, 92, 92nn200–201, 95 Chazan, Robert, xvn3, 7, 10n20, 12, 25, 25n55, 41–42, 42n101, 54, 59–60, 67n159, 69n162, 70n165, 171n385 Chiel, Rabbi Arthur, 183n411 Chrétien de Troyes, 33n80, 35n82 Christian, Paul, 159, 195 Christian Charity, Jewish claim to, 125, 146 Christianity: Jewish knowledge of, 17–20, 22; Jewish place within, 126. See also Jewish persecution; papal jurisdiction of Jews; papal theory and canon law; papal titles chronicles. See medieval chronicles Church of the Holy Sepulcher (Jerusalem), 18, 63, 78, 81–82, 83, 89–90, 90n196, 96n208, 107, 109–10, 116nn252–53, 168, 172 Cistercian monks, 100 civil servitude, 59n136 Clement III (Antipope), 47, 49, 92n200, 115n250, 138n281, 153, 194n443

236

Index

Clement IV (Pope), 163, 190n433, 195, 200 Clement V (Pope), 192 Clement VI (Avignon Pope), 196 clientage, 148 clothing to distinguish Jews from Christians, 39, 105, 199 Code of Justinian. See Justinianic Code Code of Theodosius. See Theodosian Code Cohen, Jeremy, xvn3, 18n38, 111, 111n242, 135n279 Cohen, Mark, 8 coins, date of circulation of, xiv, xv, xvii, 39–45, 123, 175–76; angiovis, 41–42; barbarins, 41 common will, 117, 168, 168n377, 187 Confirmatio Cartarum (reconfirmation of Magna Carta), 141 Congar, Yves, 178n399 Connorton, Paul, 9 Constance (third wife of Robert the Pious), 64n152, 113 Constantine IX (Byzantine Emperor), 90n196 Constitutio pro Iudaeis. See Sicut Iudaeis non conversion of Jews. See forced conversion Cornot, Wm. (Cornotensis), 188n423 Corpus Christi, 32 corruption, 94, 102n222, 109 Councils: Chelles (991), 186n415; Erfurt (932), 78, 84, 93, 99–101, 101n221, 105, 107; Fourth Lateran (1215), 113, 135, 146n302, 190n433, 203n464; Fourth Toledan (638), 98, 102n222, 138n282, 194n443, 203n464;

Lyons (1274), 197; Mainz (1012), 84; Second Lyons (1274), 155 Courson, Robert, 113, 163n355 Crescas, Hasdai, 160–61 Crescentii family, 54 cross desecration, 26–27, 26nn57– 58, 28n66, 90, 91, 189 Crusades: First Crusade (1096), 8, 8n16, 77, 98, 129, 139, 171, 172; Second Crusade (1147– 1149), 129, 130, 158; Gregory IX criticizing Crusaders on forced conversions, 49; historical relationship to “1007,” 12, 38; Jewish suicides and, 94, 168n377; medieval chronicles drawing on, 79, 108; restraining crusaders from engaging in Jewish slaughter, 145; terminology and ideas, in “1007,” 11, 13 cultural borrowing. See acculturation Dagobert (Merovingian king), 91, 91n198, 92n200, 96n208, 97, 98n214, 101 Damian, Peter, 20, 21, 110, 110n241 Daniel 7, 30 dating of “1007” composition, issues of, xi, xii–xiii, 4, 7, 31–75, 172–77; Benjamin of Tudela and, 55; circumspection as purpose of setting story in an earlier time, 39; coins in circulation and, 39–45, 175–76; esoterism and, 67–68, 67n159; Flanders, Jacob’s resettlement in, 65–67, 71; grail legends, elements incorporated into “1007,” 31–37, 176; historical and literary inconsistencies,

Index

237

37–39, 172–77; Jewish books, Jews using to obtain special, attacks on, 49–51; Jewish level additional rights, 56; Urban’s of sophistication and, 31–32, acceptance of, 152 193; Jewish life in Rome and, Disputation of Rabbi Yehiel of Paris, 55–56; Landes on, 116n253, 172; 161 Lotharingia as improbable Doge of Venice, 100–101, 106n234, location in year 1007, 107, 110n240 173–74, 173n391; memshalah Dominicans, 128, 135, 190n433, (jurisdiction) and, 68–70, 167; 195 miscopying of 1017 as 1007 in Duby, Georges, 54 Hebrew letters, 171n385; papal Duke of Normandy. See Richard legate’s role and, 62–64, 72, Dumas, Francoise, 41n95 175; papal theory and, 51–52; Duran, Profiat, 160–61 papal weakness and, 53–54; Duran, Simeon b. Zemah, 160 royal court and, 64–65, 176–77, 177n397; self-­help and, 56–59; earthquakes, 25–29, 29n69 Sicut Iudaeis non (papal bull Eberhard, Bishop of Trier, 23–24 of protection) and, 45–49, 167, ecclesiastical canons, 39, 87, 182, 187; subtlety of text and, 100n218 61–62 ‘Edut Adonai Ne’emana, 161 d’Avant, F. Poey, 41n95 Edward I (English king), 170, 179, debt collection, papal aid in, 188, 189 131–33 Edwards of England, 9 Dejean, Arnold, 196 Eglon (King of Moab), 16, 17, de la Brou, Archbishop 201–2 Guillaume, 163, 164 Ehud ben Gerah (Judge Ehud), de Rossi manuscript, 7, 17n35 16, 201 Dialogus cum Christiano quodam Einbinder, Susan, xvn3, 12–13, ceco (1074), 107 13n26 Eisenstein, Judah, 58n135, didactic purpose of “1007,” 70, 159n330 193 El Cid, 37–38, 38n89 Diet of Epernay, 139n286 Dispar nimirum est (1063), 144–46; Elhanan, legends of, 148 End of Days, 110, 113, 115n251, 128, Alexander II issuing, 46, 149; 143 dating related to, 71; first real papal guarantee of Jewish life, England: Jews in, 4, 37, 37n88; Norman French used for 16, 97; Gratian and, 47; Jewish records in Norman England, subservience as requirement 73; Parliament of 1295, 19n41, of, 155, 194; papal vs. bishops’ 118n261 power and, 115, 115n250; Ephraim of Bonn, 129–31, 133, 154, Pierleoni family and, 56; 155, 157, 158, 203 relationship with Sicut Iudaeis non, 146, 150, 156, 203; Roman episcopal role in early middle

238

Index

ages, 53, 64, 71, 102–3, 110, 110n240, 114–15, 114nn246–47, 132, 185, 186n415 Escorial codex, 26n59 esoterism, 67–68, 67n159, 197–203 Esther motif, 17, 36, 75, 114, 119, 177n398 Eucharist, 21, 22, 32, 169 Eugenius III (Pope), 130, 130n267, 154–55 expulsion of Jews: Avignon, 104n228; England, 199; Gregory IX on policy against, 100; Holy Sepulcher Church destruction, expulsion in response to, 78, 83, 84, 107; legal problems associated with, 142n293; Leo’s letter as unique in regard to, 104, 105–6; Mainz, 84–85, 87n193, 87–88, 99–101; papal failure to protect Jews from, 204; Philip IV’s expulsion of Jews from France, 181n407; political aspects associated with, 142n294; preferred to forced conversion, 95–96, 95n208, 99; Roman Jews and, 100; Spanish Jews and, 141n289 Eymerich, Nicholas, 85n183 factual recounting vs. fiction, xii–xiv; compromise in how to interpret between fact and authorial intentions, 7–10; considered to relate authentic events, 167–68, 169n380; exegetical acumen in interpreting, 13–16; fictional nature, examples of, xv, 3, 5n10, 69n162, 75, 77, 118, 170; historical accuracy, difficulty of capturing, 7, 37–39, 119;

imagined memory and, 9, 172; Jewish level of sophistication and, 17–20, 113, 193; Levi on “1007” as fiction, xi, 7, 84, 168; literary inversion and, 16–17, 19–20, 36, 113, 201–2; in a long tradition, 23–25, 172; no Christian chronicler mentioning incident, 83; polished narrative, xi, 3–7, 61–62; rabbis not present in, 60, 60n142; repetition not true indication of factuality, 79; Romance literature and, 12–13, 75, 172; thirteenth-­ century culture and Jews, xiii, 10, 70, 113, 183n411; using other early eleventh-­ century Latin materials to prove truthfulness, xvi, 7, 26n57, 27n62, 29n68, 75, 83, 118, 168. See also Ademar of Chabannes; Glaber, Raoul; Quedlingsberg Annals famine, 80–82, 90 fictional narrative. See factual recounting vs. fiction Finkelstein, Louis, 173n391, 196n453 Flanders, 65–67, 71, 72, 167, 174–75, 174n392 folk wisdom (alleged), 17 forced conversion, 46–49, 77, 83, 85, 87–89, 91, 91n198, 92n200, 95–98, 95nn207–8, 97–98n214, 172; in the “1007,” xi–xii, 167; in 1096, 112; in 1584, 200n459; Alexander II on, 145n301; annulment of, by Urban II bull, 153; Baron noting papal aversion to, 102n222; Byzantine Emperor’s program of, 100; economic reasons for,

Index

239

Gesta Treverorum, 24 188; Fourth Toledan Council (638) and, 138n282; Glaber on, ghettos in Italy, 105n232 107–12, 169n378; kidnapping Gilchrist, John, 103 of Jewish children, 98, 102n222, Glaber, Raoul, xiv; accuracy 200; out of fear, 78, 89, 108–10, of reporting, lack of, 5–6, 112; reversion to Judaism, 80–82, 113, 169n378, 170–71; 115n250, 162; in Visigothic Baronius’s reliance on, 28n66; Spain, 91n198, 97–98, 102n222. confirming of “1007” by See also apostates; Sicut Iudaeis reference to, 38, 83, 108, 112–18, non 116; on death and expulsion forced preaching, 39, 91, 96, 99, of Jews after destruction of 162, 162n353, 164, 200n459 Holy Sepulcher Church, 78, Foreville, Raymonde, 185 83, 84, 107, 168; distribution Fournial, Etienne, 41n95, 44 of writings of, 73; elimination Fournier, Jacques (later Benedict of Jews from Latin (Roman) XII), 194 world as Christian desire France: limits on papal power in, and, 21, 22, 107, 168; on forced 72, 185–86. See also specific towns, conversion, 89, 106, 107–12; regions, and rulers History (Historiae), 77, 78, France, John, 115–17, 118 80–82, 88, 168–69; Jewish Francis, Saint, 79 self-­sacrifice in, 5–6; Jewish Franciscans, 200 sophistication in, 18–20, Fredegar, chronicle of, 101 19nn40–41, 23, 113; Landes Frederick of Mainz (Archbishop), on, 63, 115, 117n259; life of, 98n214, 99–100, 100n218, 105, 88n194; Malkiel on, 8; papal 110n240, 115 vs. episcopal power in, 114; Freedman, Paul, 97n213 on Rainard’s Judaizing, 64–65, 169n378; scheme of sin, Galahad, 34n80, 35n84 repentance, and millenarian Geoffrey the Abbot of St. renewal in, 80–81; Stock on, 10, Martial, 93 80–81, 111 Gerbert, 132 Godell, Guillaume, 78–79 Gerbert of Aurillac (later Golb, Norman, 7, 7n14, 34–35, Sylvester II), 53n125 34–35nn81–82, 41, 55, 56, Gerhard (monk), 100 56n132, 62–63, 63n146, 65–66 Germania Judaica, 87n193 “golden thread,” 8, 33nn78–79 Germania Pontificia, 99n216 Gonzalo de Berceo: Los Milagros Germany, Pope Benedict VIII’s de Nuestra Señora, 21n45 presence in, xvi, 30, 30n71, 53, Gouguenheim, Sylvain, 97n213, 91 115n251 Gershom, Rabbi of Mainz, Graetz, Heinrich, 87, 171n386 (supposed) conversion of son Grail Romances, 32n76, 32–37, of, 85–87, 171, 171n386

240

Index

176. See also The Quest for the Holy Grail Gratian: Decretum, 16n33, 47, 126, 138n282, 144, 156, 157, 194n443, 203n464 Grayzel, Solomon, 138n281, 179n404, 190n434, 203n465 Gregorian Reform, 58, 132, 144n299, 178n400 Gregory the Great (Pope Gregory I): expulsion and, 96, 99, 100, 100n218; forced conversion and, 48, 102n222; foundations of papal Jewry policy and, 113, 137–38, 143, 145, 146, 194n443; on Jewish protection, 152; killing of Jews and, 103; Pauline teachings and, 111; Sicut Iudaeis non and, 46; Vita Gregorii preserving letters of, 102n223 Gregory VI (Pope), 147 Gregory VII (Pope), 53, 147, 150 Gregory IX (Pope), 49–50, 162n351, 184; bull (1236), 69; Decretales, 50, 52, 115, 138, 191n434, 194n443, 203n464; letter (1233), 164; letter (1234), 100; sanctioning burning of Jewish religious books, 189 Gregory of Tours, 22, 98n214, 102n222 Gregory VII (Pope), 184n412 Grisoffi, Giacomo, 13–14, 14n30 Gross, Henri, 41, 65n155 Grossman, Avraham, xvn3, 7–8, 8n15, 11, 11n23, 42, 86 Guibert of Nogent, 80n175, 138n284 Haberman, A. M., 34, 34n81 Hadrian I, 104

Haman, 26n58, 177, 177n398. See also Esther motif Hananel’s defeat of bishop of Oria, 23 Hanokh, Rabbi, in Sefer HaKabbalah (Ibn Daud), 12, 60 Harkavy, Abraham, 133n277 Haverkamp, Eva, 22 heavenly rewards, concept of, 11, 11n21, 11n23, 66, 71 Heikkilä, Tuomas, 24 Henri of Troyes (Count), 60n141 Henry I (Emperor), 100, 101n221 Henry II (Emperor), 30, 30n71, 53, 84–85, 87 Henry II (English king), 133 Henry III (English king) 188, 189 Henry IV (Emperor), 53, 60, 61n143, 115n250, 130, 153; Charter (1090), 98 Heraclius (Byzantine Emperor), 91, 91n198, 96n208, 98n214, 101 heretics/heresy: burning (Orleans 1017), 28, 28n66, 80, 85, 116n253, 169, 169n381, 170– 71, 171n385; Jews equated with, 85, 85n183, 185, 194, 196n453, 197; Judaizing as, 138, 138n282, 171; killing of, for expounding classical Roman authors (Italy 1000), 80; medieval chronicles on, 81–82; Philip IV instituting prosecution of, 192; rejection of pope as leader, 165; separation from Christians, 105n232 Hermann of Cologne, 10, 79, 98 Hildebert (Archbishop of Mainz), 100 Hildebrand. See Gregory VII Holy Sepulcher. See Church of the Holy Sepulcher (Jerusalem)

Index Holy Week, 196 Horowitz, Elliott, 13n28, 26–27, 26n60, 27n62, 29, 29n68 hostages, 67 Hostiensis, 184, 185n413, 186 Hugo (Bishop), 117, 118n260 Huguccio, 166n370, 184n412 Humbert of Romans, 128, 155

241

Talmud and Jewish books, 50, 50n121, 185, 189–91, 195 Inquisition, 13, 14, 49, 134, 135, 156, 162, 162n353, 178, 178–79n402, 187, 188, 194; petitions to pope or church officials during, 195–96 interest rates. See loans and interest “inversion story.” See literary Iberia: expulsion of Spanish Jews, inversion 141n289; feudal sovereignty irony, 16, 59, 59n138 to pope in, 148. See also Isaac b. Yedaiah, 159 Visigothic Spain Islam and Islamic world, 81, Ibn Daud: Sefer HaKabbalah, 12, 89–90, 90n196, 145n302. See 60 also Church of the Holy Ibn Gabirol, 61 Sepulcher ibn Verga, Shlomo: Shebet Ivo of Chartres, 152 Yehudah, 161, 161n350, 196n452 indirect excommunication, 186, Jacob b. Elie, 159, 159n330; Letter 199–200 of Jacob b. Elie, 161 Innocent II (Pope), 147, 155 Jacob ben Yequtiel, story of, xii, Innocent III (Pope): on anti-­ xv, 59–61, 167, 168n377; appeal usury activities, 163n355; letter, to the pope, behavior and 98n214; Philip Augustus’s language of, xii, xv, 15–16, help sought in administering 51–52, 182, 187, 198, 202; fifteen to Jews, 186; Sicut Iudaeis days pope tells Jacob he non and, 49; on so-­called needs to consider his options, Augustinian theory that xii, 47, 47n114, 62, 73–74, Jews were permitted to live 73–74nn167–168, 119; Flanders, among Christians, 6, 20, 126; resettlement in, xii, 65–67, 71, title Vicar of God used by, 15, 72, 167, 174–75; Judah (his son) 15n32; warnings against Jewish as hostage, 67; as mythical machinations, 50 Jewish hero, 60–61; name Innocent IV (Pope): Apparatus to of, 12n25; offer of money to the Decretals, 184–85, 197; as the pope, 175, 182; purpose canonist Sinabaldo Fieschi, of “1007” to glorify, 12, 59–60, 51; letter (to Thibaud), 133; 60n140; return from Rome on papal jurisdiction over to family in Lotharingia, 167, infidels (including Jews), 4, 52, 173–74; soul flying heavenward, 185, 185n413, 186, 187; seeking xii, 11, 11n21, 11n23, 66, 71, 167; secular enforcement of statements made to Duke rulings against Jews, 199; on of Normandy concerning

242

Index

jurisdiction over the Jews vs. statements to the pope, 69–70, 69n162, 182–83, 183n411; sword of Duke and miracle, 33–34, 33nn78–79, 35n82, 36, 68; travel to Rome to petition the pope, 86, 167; wealth of, 60 James I of Aragon, 190n433, 195, 204n466 Jameses of Aragon, 9 Jastrow, Marcus, 58, 58n135 Jerome, Saint, 20–21, 110, 110n241 Jerusalem, 81–82, 100. See also Church of the Holy Sepulcher “Jewish Boy of Bourges” story, 21–22 Jewish persecution: association with Jews, symbolism of, 81; blood libels and, 28, 162, 189, 189n431, 196; Christian laws making life harder for Jews, 87, 89, 103; chronicles recording, 78; clothing to distinguish Jews from Christians, 39, 105, 199; contemporary thought of Jews being allowed to live in peace, 128; in eleventh century, 25, 103, 143; elimination of Jews from Latin (Roman) world as Christian desire, 20–21, 107, 168; France, Jews prohibited from living in small towns in, 189; God’s protection of Jews, 36, 72, 129, 203; hope of overcoming, 61, 192–93; indirect excommunication, 186, 199–200; Italy, ghettos in, 105n232; Jewish books, attacks on, 49–51, 189–91; Jews’ response to, 16, 16n34, 195–96; kidnapping of Jewish children, 98, 102n222, 200;

lay society’s view of Jews and, 180–81; public office, Jews banned from holding, 139n286; Rashi on, 54n128; restrictions on Jews to counter their feared threat to society, 49, 135, 189, 195; social distance and separation of Jews from Christians, 101–2n222, 104, 105, 105n232, 109–10, 113, 127, 138, 142, 157, 186; social interaction with Jews viewed as negative, 141–42; subservience and acquiescence of Jews in return for Christian legal toleration, 145n301, 146, 155, 196n452, 198, 202; tanquam servi, created to give Jews legal status, 58, 58n136; tense relations with Christians culminating in violence, 25n55; in thirteenth century, 9, 189. See also Blois mass burnings; expulsion of Jews; forced conversion; heretics/heresy; massacres of Jews; papal jurisdiction of Jews; Talmud Joachimism, 160 Johannes Teutonicus, 166n370, 180n404 John the Baptist, 94 John XVIII (Pope), 54, 62, 63n146, 169n380, 186n415 John XIX (Pope), 54, 54n127, 117, 118n260 John XXII (Pope), 104n228 John Chrysostom, 143; Eight Orations, 127, 143n297 John Lackland (English king), 64 Jordan, William Chester, 42, 65, 65n154, 66, 66n157, 97n213 Jordan of Chabbanes, 94, 94n206

Index Joseph motif, 67 Judaizing, 64–65, 138, 138n282, 169–71, 170n382, 179, 186, 194 Jukovic, Ivan, 82–83 jurisdiction of king. See royal power jurisdiction of pope. See papal jurisdiction of Jews Justinianic Code (527), 26n58, 96n210, 179, 179n404 Just War, 148 Kalonymos family, 61 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 177, 178n400 Kedar, Benjamin, 52, 185n413 Kiddush haShem, xii “Kiddush haShem,” xii Kingdon, Robert, 118n260 Kraus, Samuel, 131n272 Kuttner, Stephan, 160n339 Ladner, Gerhard, 144n299 Lampert, Lisa, 32 Landes, Richard, 19n40, 30n72, 62–63, 77n170, 78, 83, 86–87, 87n190, 92, 95–97, 95–96n208, 96n211, 97n213, 103n226, 110n240, 115–18, 115n251, 172 Landulf of Benevento (Prince), 97 Langmuir, Gavin: Tanquam Servi, 58, 140n288 Le Bas, Philippe, 41n95 legate’s role, 62–64, 72, 175, 186n415 Le Mans: coins of, 42, 97, 176; Limoges mistaken for, 21, 24, 25, 97, 176 Lemarignier, J. F., 177, 185, 186n415 Leo VII (Pope), 63, 95–97, 98n214, 99–101, 103–7; letter (937), 78,

243

93, 96, 99–100, 102n222, 104–7, 109 Levi, Israel: on “1007 anonymous” as fiction, xi, 7, 84, 168; on Jewish suicides as late addition to Ademar’s writing, 92; Landes’s translation of communi omnium christianorum decretum est compared to Levi’s, 115; on erroneous comparison of other chronicles to the “1007,” xiv, xvi, 66n157, 77, 83, 168, 170; questioning Mainz as venue where Doge of Venice calls for expulsion of non-­converting Jews, 101; resisting Glaber’s words, 112; title of book Levi’s Vindication chosen to affirm work of, 84 Leviticus (Vayiqra) Rabbah (midrash), 30–31, 72 Limoges: Alduin’s brother as Viscount of, 93; coins of, 41; forced conversion or expulsion in, 169n378; head of John the Baptist at, 94; mistaken for Le Mans, 21, 24, 25, 42–43, 97, 176 Linder, Amnon, 96, 101–2n222, 110; The Jews in the Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages, 103 Lipton, Sara, 26n59 literalism, xiv–xv literary inversion, 16–17, 19–20, 36, 113, 201–2 literary style: of Direct Discourse, 38, 38n91; of medieval chronicles, 79; verse vs. prose, 39 loans and interest: Bernard on usury, 131n271; Christian usurers condemned for

244

Index

Judaizing, 170, 179; collection of moderate amount of interest, 162, 163; expulsion of usurers, 188n424; Louis IX’s usury legislation, 178, 187–88; protection of loan contracts, 164; Sicut Iudaeis non and, 165 Lothair, 173, 173n391 Lotter, Friedrich, 47 Louis the Pious (Emperor), 38, 139, 139n286, 150 Louis VII (French king), 131, 202 Louis IX, Saint (French king), 44, 68, 75, 163, 164n360, 165, 178, 182n409, 187–88, 191, 191n437, 197–98. Louises of France (Saints), 9 Luther, Martin, 170n382 Luti, Carlo, 85n183 Luxembourgians, 84 magic, accusations of, 23–24, 24n54, 82, 102n222, 104n228, 191n437 Magna Carta (1215), 74, 140–41 Maimonides: Guide for the Perplexed, 133–34, 134n278 Maimuni, David, 133 Mainz: conjectured conversion of son of Rabbi Gershom in and Jewish expulsion from, 84–88, 171, 171n386; expulsion of Jews, 97, 99, 100 Maiores (bull 1203), 48, 102n222 Malkiel, David, xvn3, 8, 8n16, 24n53, 30n70, 35, 35n82, 40, 67n159, 69n162, 77n170, 102n222 Manengold of Lautenbach, 184n412 Manfred, Bishop, 147 Mann, Jacob, 6 Marcus, Ivan, xvn3

Marquardus de Susannis: De Iudaeis et Aliis Infidelibus, 156 Martí, Ramon: Pugio Fidei, 127–28 Martinez de Oviedo, Gonzalo, 141n289 martyrs: in 418, 95n207; in “1007,” 11–12n25, 12, 30–31, 36, 71, 72, 172–73; listed in Memory Books, 78 Mary images, 26n59 Masci, Girolamo (later Nicholas IV), 195–96 massacres of Jews, xv, 5, 47, 71, 103n226, 103–4; killing of Jews, 129. See also Blois mass burnings; Jewish persecution medieval chronicles, 78–84; fictitious writing throughout, 78–81, 118; imagined memory as typical of, 9; on Jews, 81–82; miracle stories, 79, 97; as mirror-­tales, 23–25; propaganda efforts in, 181n408; repeating each other, 79; Shepkaru’s reliance on, 54n128; symbolism tied to political or pious goals in, 83; wishes becoming fact in, 21n45; world of ideas as true world for, 79. See also Ademar of Chabannes; Crusades; Quedlingsberg Annals Megillat Ahimaaz, 12, 23 Meir, Rabbi of Rothenberg, 86 Meir ben Shimon, 68, 74–75, 159, 187–88, 191, 201; Milḥemet Mitzvah, 9, 128, 159n333, 163–66, 181 memory: imagined memory as typical of medieval chronicles, 9; Jewish mode of preserving, 8–9; so-­called autobiography

Index of Hermann of Cologne and, 10; types of, 9 Memory Books, 78 messiah, 160 messianism, 61 Miccoli, Giovanni, 20, 110 millennium, significance of, 81, 172 Minty, Mary, xvn3, 11n23 missionary sermons, 200 Modena, Solomon, 197 Mohammed’s use of theological terms similar to Christian ones, 146n302 monasteries, 114n247, 186, 186n415 money lending. See loans and interest moquesh, meaning of related to impedimentum, 17–18 Morrison, Karl, 9, 79–80 Mortara, Edgardo, 49 Moses, 61, 67, 190 Mueller, Yoel, 56n133, 57 Muller, J., 131n272 Muslims. See Islam and Islamic world Nachmanides, 160, 195 Nahon, Gérard, 188n424 Narbonne, Jews in, 104, 145 nation-­states, emergence of, 142, 177–78, 178n400, 181 Neyermeyer, 92n200 Nicholas I (Pope), 104 Nicholas III (Pope), 199–200 Nicholas IV (Pope), 195–96, 199 Nisahon Yashan, 161–62 Normandy, 173; coins circulating in, 40–42; Duke not present in Glaber’s persecution stories, 64–65; forced conversion in,

245 77. See also Richard, Duke of Normandy

Odo of Chateauroux, 163n355, 189–90, 190n432, 191, 191n435 Official, Natan: Disputation of Rabbi Yehiel of Paris, 195 Olivi, Peter John, 160 “one people,” use of phrase, 17, 18n37, 19–20, 71, 105, 167, 177, 180–81, 187, 204 oral legends, 37–38 Orleans, burning of heretics at (1017), 28, 28n66, 80, 85, 116n253, 169, 169n381, 170–71, 171n385 Otto the Great (Otto I, Emperor), 53 Otto III (Emperor), 172 Pact of Omar, 49, 145n302 Pakter, Walter, 52, 185n413 Pamplona, Jews in, 200 Papal Inquisition. See Inquisition papal jurisdiction of Jews, xii, xiv, 125–29; Christian Charity, Jewish claim to, 125, 146; confusion among Jews over, 195; dating of, xv, 68–70; Ephraim of Bonn advocating Jews seek papal assistance, 131; factual flaws in statements of, xv–xvi; failure to protect Jews from expulsion in Christian lands, 204; France, lack of papal power and, 72, 185–86; Innocent IV on, 4, 133, 185; Jewish acknowledgment and knowledge of, 15, 17, 17n36, 31, 36, 50, 51, 59, 75, 158, 182, 192, 203; limits of papal protection, 166–77, 182, 198–99; loss

246

Index

response to, 70, 204; juridical (potential) of prestige for primacy of popes, 132; pope in taking side of Jews, knowledge of, 74, 128, 129–35; 199; memshalah and, 68–70, 167, need to understand, 4n6, 183n411; papal monarchism 119; papal letters referring to and, 184–85, 193; parables Jews, history of, 104, 125, 127, about papal powers in Jewish 139; supremacy of the pope, literature, 159–60; petitions 158; tenth century lacking to pope seeking his help for official policy toward Jews, Jews, 195–96, 201; Philip IV 102; Toledan texts, 98. See also and, 178–79n402; protection Jewish persecution; papal to Jews, 16, 113–14, 158, 161n349, jurisdiction of Jews 162, 182, 192–95; responsum and, 56n133, 56–57; to papal titles: ‘apifior, 52, 56n132, supervise purity of Judaism, 58, 182; Head of the Bishops, 144, 185n413, 192; thirteenth 26n57, 57, 58, 73, 93, 114, 131–33, century as first references 131n272, 159; King (Head) of to, 184, 184n412; yielding to the Nations, xv, 73, 114, 159, political realities, 163, 204. See 165, 202; nifiorah, 57–58; papa, also Sicut Iudaeis non 56n132; Pharaoh, 160; servant of the servants of the Lord, papal procedure: bishops’ 160; Vicar of Christ, 164, 201; relationship with pope, Vicar of God, 15, 15n32, 52, 114 114nn246–47; bulls, Pariseo, Cardinal Pier Paolo, 15, misreading language of, 4n6; 15n32, 49, 102n222 catalogue of papal letters, 63, Parisian Masters, 50, 191 63n149, 99n216; due judicial Patrologia Latina, 116 process, 74, 182, 192n440, patronage, 56, 71, 148n308, 149, 204; fees for papal bulls and 155 legates, 175nn393–94; fifteen days pope tells Jacob he needs “patterning” (alleged) in medieval writing, 10n20 to consider his options, xii, 47, 47n114, 62, 73–74, 73–74nn167– Paul, teachings of, 17–18, 103, 109, 110, 126, 127, 143, 146, 155, 159. 68, 119; papal succession, See also scriptural citations legitimacy of, 161. See also Paul III (Pope), 48–49 legate’s role Pere IV of Aragon, 196 papal theory and canon law, 51– 52, 137–44; canons concerning persecution. See Jewish persecution Jews, 156, 193; capable of changing and lack of unity in, Pertz, Georg Heinrich, 27n61 127, 199–200; eleventh century Peter, Saint, 193 Peter the Venerable, 113 as more restrictive, 103, Peter II. See Anacletus 143–44; incorporating into Petit, Solomon, 133–34 Jewish context and creating Pfister, Charles, 54, 185, 186n415 Jewish political theory in

Index Philip III (French king), 188–89 Philip IV (French king), 178, 178–79n402, 181n407, 188–89, 192 Philip Augustus (French king), 44, 51, 64, 186, 202 Pierleoni family, 56, 147–49, 147n303, 153, 155 Pierre d’Oudegherst, 66 Pietro (Bishop of Piperno/ Priverno), 62, 62n145 Pius V (Pope), 156n327 Pius IX (Pope), 49 Portugal, Jews in, 49, 102n222 Post, Gaines, 19n41, 142n292 prayers, standing vs. kneeling in, 14–15 Premonstratensian ideals, 98 Priscus, 97 proskynesis, 13–14, 15n31, 23 Psalms: 59, 18n39; 73, 30 Quedlingsberg Annals, xiv, 78, 79, 83, 84–88, 97, 111–12, 168; Annalista Saxo and, 84n182 The Quest for the Holy Grail, 32–37, 33n77, 33–34n80, 35n82, 35–36n84, 40, 44, 176 Ragner Lothbrok, 38 Rainard of Sens (Count), 64, 81, 109, 169n378 Rashi, 14, 14n30, 15–16, 16n34, 54n128, 86, 202 reading of medieval Hebrew texts, xiv, 5n10, 6 Regino of Prum, 184n412 Renan, Ernest, 79 responsum: in the “1007,” 56n133, 56–58, 59, 62, 132–33; in late twelfth-­century debt collection case, 131n273, 131–32, 158–59

247

Reuter, Timothy, 101n221 Rheims, 53n125, 132 Rhineland, Jews in, 130, 157 Richard (Duke of Normandy), xii, xiii, xvi, 4–5, 33, 35, 35n82, 35n84, 36, 37, 71, 72, 80, 93, 167, 169, 182, 183, 186n415 Richard (King of England), 67 Richard II. See Richard (Duke of Normandy) Rieger, Paul, 26–29, 54, 54n127 ritual murder tales, 21n45, 22 Robert the Pious (Robert II, King of France), xii, 4–5, 35n82, 51, 54, 54n128, 62, 64, 64n152, 72, 80, 113, 167, 169, 170, 170n384, 186n415, 202 Rokeah, 60–61 Romance literature, 12–13, 38, 68, 75, 172. See also Grail Romances Roman law, 179n404; quod omnes tanget ab omnibus approbetur, 19n41, 118n261 Rome: execution of Jews (1020), found to be fictitious, 25, 169; false claim of Boniface IV ordering Jewish conversion or expulsion in, 107; forced conversions for economic reasons in, 188; Jacob ben Yequtiel, treatment in, 71; Jewish life in, 55–56; Jewish population in, 55n129; Jews considered as cives in, 55–56, 96n210, 100; Jews relying on Dispar into 1790s, 46; papal power vs. noble familial power in, 53; Pierleoni’s role in, 148 Rouen, 34, 40 royal power: bishops vs. lay officials in royal court, 64, 71,

248

Index

176–77, 177n397; blend of royal piety with royal politics, effect on Jews, 181, 181–82n409; in emerging nation-­states, 178– 81; evolving relations between church and state, 177–80, 185; Jews’ dependence on, 25, 139, 140, 165; papal power vs., 4, 59, 67–68; tanquam servi and, 58, 58n136; as threat to Jews, 67–68, 74, 113, 181 Rudiger of Speyer (Bishop), 37, 114n247, 140n287 Rudolph (monk), 154 Sancta Mater ecclesia (1584), 200n459 Saracens, 89–90, 111, 145–46, 149 Sargent, Steven D., 94n206 Sarna, Nahum, 70 Schmitt, J. C., 9–10, 79–80, 98 Schwartz, Yosef, 50n121 scriptural citations: I Corinthians 5:5–6:20, 127; Deuteronomy 4:32, 33n79; Esther 8:8, 36, 114; Galatians 4:21–5:14, 127; Genesis 34, 18n37; Isaiah 53:9, 54n128; Jeremiah 31:35, 18n39; Judges 3:19, 16, 201; Psalm 20:9, 14, 202; Psalm 20:10, 14, 202; Psalm 59, 21; Psalm 59:6–7, 14–15, 18; Psalm 59:12, 6, 20, 125, 150; Psalm 83, 21; Psalm 83:3–5, 18; Psalm 83:3–6, 19n39; Romans, 103, 109, 143; Romans 8:32, 11n24, 22; Romans 9–11, 126, 143n296; Romans 11, 110; Romans 11:15–26, 143n298; Romans 11:28, 180n405 Scroll of Ahimaaz, 61. See also Ahimaaz

secularization and role of rulers, 177–78, 178n400 Sefer Nisahon Yashan, 160 Sefer Yosef HaMeqane, 160 Sefer Yossipon, 159 Sehoq ben Esther, 23–24, 24n52, 30, 41 self-­help, 56–59 self-­sacrifice of Jews. See suicide of Jews Sens, Jews of, 25n57. See also Rainard of Sens; Shimshon of Sens Sephardim and myth of royal alliance, 142 Sergius IV (Pope), 54, 63n146 Severus of Minorca, 6n12, 95n207 Shechem and the rape of Dinah, 18n37 Shepkaru, Shmuel, xvn3, 5n10, 10–11n21, 11, 11n24, 54, 54n128, 60, 60n140, 64n152, 72 Sherwood, Jessie, 96–97, 100n218, 102–3, 102n223, 106–7 Shimshon of Sens, 86 Shlomo bar Shimshon: borrowing from Christian culture of his day, 10; on Eberhard of Trier, 24; l’o ‘amad ‘al nefesh expression in, 11, 11n24; medieval chronicle attributed to, 22, 23, 112; papal dealings with Wibert, not Urban II, 153; papal terminology used by, 52; on pope as Satan, 130, 150; Sicut Iudaeis non, knowledge of, 157; suicide, descriptions of “1007” resembling mid-­twelfth-­ century writing on, 172 Shneor/Senior as martyr in “1007,” 11–12n25, 30–31, 36, 71, 72

Index Sicut Iudaeis non (papal bull of protection), 149–55; “1007” relying on, xii, 45–49, 72, 167, 182, 187; Bernard of Clairvaux and, 130; Calixtus II issuing text of, 115n250; Clement IV and, 195; date of issuance, 45– 49, 52; forced conversion and, 92n200; Glaber’s knowledge of, 113; Gregory IX reissuing, 49, 115; Jewish appreciation of, 157; Jews punished for violating, 156n327, 194; maturing of papal Jewry policy and, 146–47, 184, 203, 204n465; money lending and, 165; payment to spread message of, 39; peaceful existence and free practice of Judaism allowed under, 137; Pierleoni family and, 56; pope ordering cessation of hostilities after issuing, xii; as primary text of papal Jewry policy, 137; relationship to Dispar nimirum est, 146, 150; Roman Jews using to obtain special, additional rights, 55–56; Turbato corde (bull 1267) and, 199; Vineam sorec and, 200 Silvester II (Pope, formerly Gerbert), 132 Simonsohn, Shlomo, 64n150, 96, 123 Sisebut (Visigoth king), 98, 102n222 Somerville, Robert, 73n167, 99n216 sophistication of Jewish arguments, 17–20, 19nn40–41, 23, 31–32, 113, 193 Spanish Dominicans. See Dominicans

249

Spiegel, Gabrielle, 79–80; Romancing the Past, 9–10 Stacey, Robert, 66n156, 73n167 statue desecration by Jews, 25–26, 25–26n57 Stefaniani family, 54 Stengers, Jean, 65–66, 65n155, 66n157, 174, 175, 174n392 Stephen III (772), 138 Stephen III/IV (720), 104 Stickler, A. M., 184n412 Stock, Brian, 9, 10, 21, 35n82, 64, 80–82, 93, 109n238, 111 Stow, Kenneth, xvn3; “Agobard of Lyons and the Medieval Concept of the Jew,” 18n38; Alienated Minority, 18n38, 25, 37n88, 70, 98n215; Anna and Tranquillo, 17n36, 85n183, 115n248; contrary to Landes, 116, 117n259; “The Cruel Jewish Father,” 22, 22n48, 95n207; Jewish Dogs, xvn4, 16, 17n35, 28n64, 35n82, 50n121; “Papal and Royal Attitudes Toward Jewish Lending in the Thirteenth Century,” 164n360; “Papal Mendicants or Mendicant Popes,” 135n279; Theater of Acculturation, 70; title choice for Levi’s Vindication, 84 Strayer, Joseph R., 64n151 suicides of Jews to avoid forced conversion, xii, xv, 6, 71, 83, 89, 89n195, 92–95, 96n208, 108, 168n377, 172–73 superstition, 82 Sylvester II (999–1003), 53n125 Talmud: in “1007,” 167; attacks on in 1230s and 1240s, 50, 50n121, 156, 161–62, 162n351,

250

Index

163n355, 187; burning in Paris (1240s), 189, 190n432, 191, 194; Louis IX’s ban on use and study of, 191, 191n437; papal direction on study of, 192; papal sanctioning confiscation and burning of, 162, 164, 190–91; reasons for condemnation of, 190, 190–91n434; state jurisdiction over, 179n404. See also Jewish books Tam, Rabbenu, 19n41, 42, 57 Templars, 50n121, 192 Thegan, 38 Theodosian Code (438), 137, 145, 179, 179n404 Theophilo the martyr, 23, 23n49, 24 Thibaud of Champagne, 133 Thibaut, Count, 175 Thomas Aquinas, 59n136, 186; Summa Theologica, 126, 156 Tolan, John, 111 Toledo, 21n45 Torah, 17 Tov Elem, Yosef, 42–43, 97 Trier Crusade story, 21n45, 22 Tucker, Richard, 13n28 tuitio. See charters of protection granted to Jews Turbato corde (bull 1267), 134, 162n353, 188–89, 189n431, 194, 197, 199 Tuscolani family, 71 Tycocinski, H., 87, 87n193 Tzarfat, 173

Yakim Biamrilahilah (Muslim ruler), 83 Yalkut shimoni, 61 Yerushalmi, Yosef, 8, 9, 190n434 Yosef HaCohen, 181n407 Yosi b. Levi, Rabbi, 153 Yossipon, 16 Yuval, Yisrael, xvn3, 95n207

Ullman, Walter, xv–xvin5, 4n8, 178n399, 184n412

Zachariah 2, 31 Zink, Michel, 39

University Masters, 50n121 University of Paris, 74 Urban II (Pope), 152–53, 194n443 usury. See loans and interest Valreas blood libel (1247), 187 Vauchez, Andre, 180n406 Venice, Jews in, 106n234 Vineam sorec (bull 1278), 200, 200n459 Visigothic Spain, 91n198, 97, 98, 98n214, 139n286 Vogelstein, Hermann, 26–29, 54, 54n127 Wazo of Liege, 23 Wibert of Ravenna (later Clement III), 153, 157 Wikham, Chris, 56 Wilks, Michael, 184n412 William (Duke of Aquitaine), 93–94 William of Auvergne (Bishop of Paris), 189, 190n432 William of Normandy, 4, 37, 37n88, 72 William of Norwich, 10, 22n46 Williams, Andrea M. L., 35–36n84