Of Milk and Blood: Innocent III and the Jews, Revisited

Abstract

Much of the past century of scholarship devoted to the history of medieval European Jewry has attempted to trace and explain the waning of Christian tolerance and the rise of anti-Jewish prejudice and violence, as measured by a number of macabre indices: increasing legal restrictions, host desecration and ritual murder accusations, massacres, and expulsions. Various key turning points have been suggested: the first crusade, for Bernhard Blumenkranz; the missionary preaching of the Franciscan and Dominican friars, for Jeremy Cohen; the anti-talmudic polemics of Latin authors in the twelfth century, for myself and others. But key among the culprits blamed for the rise of anti-Judaism has been one of the most powerful and charismatic popes of the Middle Ages: Innocent III. Nineteenth-century historian Heinrich Hirsch Graetz, in his monumental Geschichte der Juden, makes Innocent into the principal culprit for the ills of European Jews. Innocent represents “The Church at war against Jewry.” He was “an embittered enemy of Jews and Judaism, and dealt severer blows against them than had any of his predecessors.”¹ Although more recent historians have been more sanguine in their assessment, many have agreed on the central importance of Innocent’s anti-Jewish policies: Edward Synan devotes a full chapter of his The Popes and the Jews in the Middle Ages to Innocent: “For many reasons, the pontificate of Pope Innocent III has been taken as the central instance of the medieval confrontation of popes and Jews.