The Pope Whose 1120 Protective Bull for the Jews Was Reissued by Every Pope for the Following Three Centuries

Pope Calixtus II (Guido of Burgundy, reigned 1119–1124) had been Archbishop of Vienne in southern France before his 1119 election to the papacy. He was the substantial papal author of the Concordat of Worms (1122) that ended the long Investiture Controversy with the Holy Roman Empire — substantively the substantial defining accomplishment of his short pontificate. His other substantially lasting institutional contribution was the 1120 protective bull Sicut Judaeis (‘As to the Jews’), substantively the first systematic papal protective decree for European Jewish communities.

The 1096 background

The bull was issued in direct response to the 1096 First Crusade Rhineland massacres that had been substantively conducted by the unofficial ‘German Crusade’ army under Count Emicho of Flonheim. Approximately 3,000–5,000 Rhineland Jews substantively died in the Mainz, Worms, and Cologne massacres of spring 1096; the papal authority had substantively played no role in either authorising or attempting to prevent the violence. The Catholic ecclesiastical-political response had been confused and substantively largely passive through the subsequent two decades.

The 1120 Sicut Judaeis substantively was the belated systematic papal response. The bull’s specific provisions established the foundational European medieval Catholic protective framework for Jewish communities:

• Christians were prohibited from forcing Jewish baptism on pain of excommunication.
• Christians were prohibited from physical violence against Jewish persons.
• Christians were prohibited from disturbing Jewish religious observance.
• Christians were prohibited from interfering with Jewish funerary practices or grave-sites.
• Christians who violated any of these prohibitions were subject to ecclesiastical penalties up to and including substantive excommunication.

The framework substantively borrowed from the earlier 6th-century Constitutio pro Iudaeis of Pope Gregory I, but substantively codified the protective provisions in a substantively new comprehensive form that was substantively designed for the post-1096 European political-religious environment.

The reissues

The 1120 Sicut Judaeis substantively established the precedent that every subsequent medieval pope would substantively reissue the bull at the start of his pontificate as a standard papal-administrative gesture of substantive continuity with the Calixtine protective framework. The reissue tradition substantively continued through approximately twenty-five popes over the subsequent three centuries — substantively including Pope Innocent III in 1199 (substantively the most widely cited medieval reissue), Pope Honorius III in 1217, Pope Clement VI’s reissues during the 1348 Black Death pogroms, and Pope Nicholas V in the 15th century.

The limits

The Sicut Judaeis protective framework was the canonical-doctrinal Catholic position on Jewish communities through the medieval period; it was often ignored in practice. The recurring Catholic-European anti-Jewish massacres of the medieval period — the 1096 Rhineland pogroms, the 1190 York massacre, the 1290 English expulsion, the 1349 Black Death pogroms, the 1391 Castilian pogroms, the 1492 Spanish expulsion — all occurred in explicit violation of the Sicut Judaeis framework. In many cases the local Catholic ecclesiastical authorities were passively or actively involved.

The bull established the canonical principle without producing the institutional-disciplinary enforcement that would have made the principle effective.