Popes, Church, and Jews in the Middle Ages: Confrontation and Response (review)

This is a collection of previously published articles. The first, a sprawling essay, on “The Church and the Jews,” begins with St. Paul and ends with Pius IX. Although throughout Stow corrects many long-standing but mistaken generalizations, he sometimes replaces these with perspectives that need further consideration. Thus, although he knows that worries about purity were shared by all the Abrahamic religions, he sees the Jews as compartmentalizing these concerns whereas “the Christian fear of being polluted by Jews was ubiquitous” (p. vii). He tells us (I, p. 1) that “what never wavered . . . was the idea that Jewish acts . . . must benefit Christianity.” Stow views especially the highmedieval papacy as generally consistent toward the Jews, balancing privilege against restriction, but argues that the conversionary strategy of the earlymodern period altered the Jewish situation. Many things, such as why Jews tended to fear kings more than popes, are explained very well. Stow says sensible things about the temptation to contrast an early-medieval “Augustinian” tolerance of Jews with a later growth in persecution.

The second article is on the views of Agobard of Lyons and the third on “Papal and Royal Attitudes toward Jewish Lending in the Thirteenth Century.” There follows a long piece on medieval Jewish views of papal policy. The basic argument is that from the twelfth into the sixteenth centuries, the standing papal policy was, granted Jewish subservience, to protect and secure a place for the Jews in the Christian world order. Here we get an especially sharp form of an observation running throughout the book, that the soteriologically necessary role of the Jews according to Romans contradicts the idea of Galatians 4:21–5:14 and I Cor. 5:5–6:20 “that the Jews were primarily a source of social infection whose presence must be shunned at all costs” (IV, p. 2). This seems to be a comparison of incommensurate things, and it is not clear how the commitment on all sides to purity categories and boundaries contradicts the idea that the Jews have a necessary place in the history of salvation.

The fifth and sixth articles treat papal-Jewish relations during the Avignonese Papacy and at the end of the fifteenth century. With the seventh article, we return to Christian fear of Jews in the twelfth century. The next two articles turn to new topics, “The Jewish Family in the Rhineland in the High Middle Ages,” an important study, and the absence of Jewish life in thirteenthcentury Venice. The tenth article returns to earlier themes, especially the appropriation by the state of expressions such as Corpus mysticum, in effect constructing a sacral politics in which the position of the Jew was precarious. There are many telling comparisons between the Jewish and Christian communities in this piece, but some of them seem to need qualification. To say that Jewish holiness was created through individual acts, while Christian holiness existed through amalgamation of the individual into the social body, hardly explains those whom the Christians often considered most holy, who engaged in some form of fuga mundi. In general, having noted that its subject is the corpus mysticum language appropriated by the state, this piece tends to speak as if this were the language of all. The last article is about how Jews traveled to the Rhineland in the tenth century. Although this book is quite repetitive in places, as is the case for many collections of this type, it usefully collects a wide sampling of the work of an important scholar.