The Papal Bull That Protected Medieval Jews and Was Reissued by Every Pope for Three Hundred Years

The Catholic Church’s medieval doctrinal position on Jewish communities living within Christian Europe rested on a single theological-legal formula, derived ultimately from Augustine of Hippo and crystallized into formal papal teaching across the 12th and 13th centuries: Jews should be permitted to exist in Christian society as living witnesses to the truth of the Old Testament prophecies; they should not be killed, forcibly converted, or have their religious practices interfered with; but they should be socially and economically restricted so that their condition would demonstrate to Christians the consequences of failing to recognize the New Testament. The doctrine was substantially ambivalent: it provided real legal protection against the most extreme forms of medieval anti-Jewish violence, and it institutionalized the everyday legal and social restrictions that would constrain medieval European Jewish communities for nearly seven centuries.

The papal document that articulated the protective half of the doctrine was a bull called Sicut Judaeis non — “Just as it is forbidden for the Jews…” — first issued in approximately 1120 by Pope Calixtus II in direct response to the Rhineland Massacres of 1096. It was reissued, with limited modifications, by approximately twenty subsequent popes through 1447.

What the bull said

The Calixtine text of 1120 (preserved in several later copies but not in the original) established what would become the standard medieval Catholic legal position on Jews within Latin Europe — the constitutional-religious framework anchored on the papacy at Rome:

• Christians may not compel Jews to convert by force, threat, or trickery.
• Christians may not harm the persons of Jews — kill them, wound them, beat them, or unjustly deprive them of their property.
• Christians may not interfere with Jewish religious festivals or worship.
• Christians may not desecrate Jewish cemeteries or disturb buried Jewish bodies.
• Christians may not extort money from Jews under threat of physical harm.

The bull was the institutional response to the 1096 violence specifically. Several thousand Jews had been killed by crusading armies at Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Cologne, and several smaller Rhineland cities in spring and summer 1096 — substantially the largest single anti-Jewish massacre in Western European history before the 14th century. The papal response was institutionally tardy (twenty-four years late) but legally substantial.

The medieval reissues

The bull was reissued, often with minor modifications, by almost every subsequent medieval pope through the late 15th century. The major reissues were:

Innocent III (1199) — the first systematic reissue, in the bull Constitutio pro Judaeis of September 1199. Innocent’s text added explicit excommunication for Christian rulers who violated the bull’s provisions.

Honorius III (1216), Gregory IX (1235), Innocent IV (1246), Alexander IV (1255) — successive reissues at intervals of approximately ten to fifteen years, each adapting the language slightly to current local circumstances.

Gregory X (1272) — a particularly substantial reissue, in response to the spread of the blood libel (the false accusation that Jews ritually murdered Christian children to use their blood in religious ceremonies). Gregory’s text explicitly denounced the blood libel as false and threatened excommunication for anyone who used it as a pretext for anti-Jewish violence.

Nicholas IV (1288), Boniface IX (1389), Martin V (1422), Nicholas V (1447) — successive later reissues, each in response to specific contemporary outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence in different European jurisdictions.

The bull’s most consequential reissue in the documented medieval record was Pope Clement VI’s two-part response to the 1348 Black Death pogroms — the standard Sicut Judaeis of September 1348 plus the additional Quamvis Perfidiam of October 1348, which explicitly denounced the well-poisoning accusation that was driving the contemporary anti-Jewish violence and threatened excommunication for clergy who participated in or encouraged it. The two bulls had limited practical effect on the Rhineland pogroms of 1348-1349, including the Basel massacre, the Strasbourg massacre, and the Cologne massacre. They did, however, provide the legal framework on which surviving Jewish communities could appeal for papal protection and could obtain (in some cases) the prosecution of perpetrators.

What the bull did not do

The bull’s effectiveness was limited by the medieval political-administrative reality that papal teachings on Jewish protection were enforceable only through local political-ecclesiastical authority. In jurisdictions where the local secular ruler chose not to enforce the bull (most of the German Holy Roman territories during the major anti-Jewish violence of 1096, 1147, 1182, 1287, 1298, 1336, 1348-49, 1391, 1421, and 1496), the bull’s protective provisions were substantially dead letter.

The bull also did not address the substantial body of medieval Catholic ecclesiastical legislation that imposed restrictions on Jewish economic and social position — the requirement of distinctive dress (introduced by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215), the prohibition of Jews holding public office, the restrictions on Jewish-Christian commercial dealings, the prohibition of Jews appearing in public during Holy Week, and the various local restrictions on Jewish residence (the ghetto system that would crystallize in the 16th century). The Catholic doctrinal position was that Jews should not be physically harmed but should be substantially socially restricted; the bull governed the first half and was institutionally indifferent to the second.

After 1447

The bull was not formally reissued after the Nicholas V text of 1447, partly because the question had become politically subordinate to other doctrinal questions (the rise of the Spanish Inquisition in 1478 substantially shifted Catholic anti-Jewish policy toward the converted Jewish-Christian population — the conversos — rather than the practicing Jewish community), and partly because the institutional papal authority over secular jurisdictions had substantially weakened during the 15th-century conciliarist crises.

The substantive Catholic doctrinal position on Jews continued substantially unchanged through the 16th and 17th centuries — modified mostly by the increasingly severe institutional restrictions of the Counter-Reformation period. The formal papal denunciation of the blood libel was not reissued in significant form between Gregory X’s 1272 text and the 19th century. The Catholic Church’s full institutional repudiation of the medieval doctrinal restrictions on Jews — the document Nostra Aetate of October 1965, at the Second Vatican Council — came 845 years after the Calixtine bull.

The medieval Catholic protection of Jewish communities was institutionally real but substantively limited. It saved some lives. It did not save very many. The papal bulls of the 1096-1447 period are an important source of evidence about the medieval Catholic doctrinal-legal framework on inter-religious coexistence; they are not a reliable indicator of how that framework was enforced on the ground.