Pope Innocent III, Christian Wet Nurses, and Jews: A Misunderstanding and Its Impact

The pontificate of Innocent III spanned the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth century (1198–1216), when, according to numerous historians, Innocent’s personality and policies helped bring the ecclesiastical establishment of medieval Christendom to the acme of its power and influence. His policies reflect a clerical ideology and a program for implementing an ideal order in Christian society. They testify to the successes of a reform papacy at the peak of its development, all as medieval Christendom stood at the height of a period of expansion and prosperity—a peak from which it was soon to give way to entrenchment, regimentation, fragmentation, and, ultimately, decline.¹

The years of Innocent’s pontificate also marked an important stage in the history of medieval Jewish-Christian relations. Over thirty of Innocent’s extant letters, and canons 67–70 of the Fourth Lateran Council—truly one of his crowning achievements—concern the Jews, most of them marked by a fervent, even zealous tone. They bespeak a determination to eliminate perceived abuses of the limited toleration for and harsh discrimination mandated against the Jews of Christendom in canon law and patristic theology—abuses whereby Jews enjoyed superiority over Christians in everyday life and, more infuriating still, flaunted their thankless contempt for Christianity and the Catholic Church to whom they owed their survival. Some historians have actually labeled Innocent’s bulls and canons concerning the Jews a turning point in the history of medieval European Jewry, although these judgments tend, at times, toward the excessive. In tone, Innocent’s correspondence and legislation surely display an uncompromising impatience that approaches the fanatical. In their substance, however, they reaffirm a commitment to the Augustinian doctrine of Jewish witness and the Gregorian legal principle of sicut Iudeis: Innocent seeks not to eliminate the presence of Jews and Judaism from Christendom but rather to enforce their inferior, subjugated, and enslaved status. Notably, while Innocent bemoans the damages and insults that Jews cause Christians, he refrains from meddling in the inner religious lives of European Jews, and he does not indict contemporary talmudic Judaism as a postbiblical heresy, as his successors Gregory IX and Innocent IV would do two to three decades later. Similarly, he does not call for organized, ecclesiastically sponsored efforts to convert the Jews to Christianity; this too would follow after the legitimacy of contemporary European Jewry had been undermined. Meticulously scrutinizing the realities of Jewish-Christian interaction, and displaying zero tolerance for divergence from patristic or canonical norms, Innocent nonetheless planted seeds for such developments that would soon ensue. Even if some recent historians have allowed his vitriolic tone to blur their understanding of his intent, he himself expressed a resolve to restore traditionally prescribed balances, not upset them.²

This essay will not offer a systematic review of the statements of Innocent III concerning European Jewry but will focus on an instructive example of his approach to the Jews and Judaism of his day—and its subsequent treatment by more recent investigators. The idea for this essay originated several years ago in Jerusalem, as I listened to a conference paper on the letters of Pope Innocent III protesting that the Jews fare too well in Christendom and offend Christian sensitivities, contrary to ecclesiastical norms. As the lecturer read to us from Solomon Grayzel’s translation of the bull Etsi Iudeos—the last of three such letters issued in 1205, and the first of three longer bulls bemoaning Jewish perfidy and its repercussions—dispatched by the pope to Peter of Corbeil, Archbishop of Sens, and Odo of Sully, Bishop of Paris, on July 15 of that year, my eyes wandered to the Latin original on the handout before us. I realized that Grayzel’s English did not convey an accurate sense of a frequently cited Latin passage, and that this error might well be responsible for misguided conclusions on the part of later historians of medieval Jewry.

Innocent begins his missive by proclaiming that Christians piously and mercifully accept the Jews—who are consigned to perpetual servitude...