Medieval
Jewish, Christian and Muslim Culture
Encounters
in Confluence and Dialogue
Medieval Encounters 17 (2011) 464-494
brill.nl/me
Walking in the Shadows of the Past: The Jewish
Experience of Rome in the Twelfth Century
Marie Thérèse Champagnea,* and Ra‘anan S. Boustanb
Department of History, Building 50, Room 144, University of West Florida,
11000 University Parkway, Pensacola, FL 32514, USA
b
Department of History, 6265 Bunche Hall, Box 951473, University of California,
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1473, USA
*Corresponding author, e-mail: mchampagne@uwf.edu
a
Abstract
The Jewish and Christian inhabitants of twelfth-century Rome viewed the urban landscape
of their city through the lens of its ancient past. Their perception of Rome was shaped by a
highly localized topography of cultural memory that was both shared and contested by Jews
and Christians. Our reconstruction of this distinctively Roman perspective emerges from a
careful juxtaposition of the report of Benjamin of Tudela’s visit to Rome preserved in his
Itinerary and various Christian liturgical and topographical texts, especially those produced
by the canons of the Lateran basilica. These sources demonstrate that long-standing local
claims regarding the presence in Rome of ancient artifacts from the Jerusalem Temple and
their subsequent conservation in the Lateran acquired particular potency in the twelfth
century. Jews and Christians participated in a common religious discourse that invested
remains from the biblical and Jewish past reportedly housed in Rome with symbolic capital
valued by the two communities and that thus fostered both contact and competition
between them. During this pivotal century and within the special microcosm of Rome,
Jews and Christians experienced unusually robust cultural and social interactions, especially as the Jews increasingly aligned themselves with the protective power of the papacy.
Keywords
Rome, Jewish community, twelfth century, Lateran basilica, papacy, Sicut Judaeis, Benjamin of Tudela, Jerusalem Temple, sacred vessels, spolia
The image of twelfth-century Rome evokes, for many, visions of bustling
marketplaces and tumultuous streets, of crowded churches, and frequent
conflicts between and among nobility and clergy, the mundane daily activities of its citizens unfolding in the imposing shadow of relics of past
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011
DOI : 10.1163/157006711X598811
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grandeur.1 But this popular picture is almost always of a purely Christian
Rome, extending beyond the abitato of the Tiber Bend and across to the
vast tracts of the disabitato.2 On closer inspection, however, a deeplyrooted, if distinct, Roman-Jewish community also flourished amid the
turmoil, strife, and conflict in the city.3 The Jewish inhabitants of Rome
participated in civic life in Rome as one of its seventeen scholae.4 The schola
of the Jews played a crucial part in various papal ceremonies, functioning
alongside the other scholae or associations of craftsmen whose specific task
it was to supply a variety of goods and services to the papacy. Thus, the
Jewish perspective on the city was typical of all of its inhabitants, while
also being distinctive to members of this minority community.
1
Richard Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City, 312 to 1308 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2000); Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, eds., Renaissance and
Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); Robert N. Swanson,
The Twelfth Century Renaissance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). On the
ubiquity of the ancient past within the medieval city, see Robert Brentano, Rome before
Avignon: A Social History of Thirteenth-Century Rome (London: Longman, 1974); Herbert
L. Kessler and Johanna Zacharias, Rome 1300: On the Path of the Pilgrim (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2000). Regarding the Roman nobility and Commune, see JeanClaude Maire Vigueur, “Il comune romano,” in Storia di Roma dall’antichità ad oggi, Roma
medievale, ed. André Vauchez (Bari: Laterza, 2001), 117-157; Laura Moscati, Alle origini
del comune romano: economia, società, istituzioni (Rome: B. Carucci, 1980).
2
About the inhabited and uninhabited spaces within the city of Rome during this
period, see Etienne Hubert, “L’organizzazione territoriale e l’urbanizzazione,” in Vauchez,
Roma medievale, 159-186; Hubert, Espace urbain et habitat à Rome du X e siècle à la fin du
XIII e siècle, Collection de l’École Française de Rome 135 (Rome: Istituto storico italiano
per il Medio Evo, École Française de Rome, 1990), esp. 74-96.
3
For the Jewish community of Rome in the Middle Ages, see most recently Alberto
Somekh, “Gli ebrei a Roma durante l’alto medieovo,” in Roma fra Oriente e Occidente,
Settimane di studio del centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo 49, 2 vols. (Spoleto:
CISAM, 2002), 1:209-135; Abraham Berliner, Storia degli Ebrei di Roma, dall’antichità allo
smantellamento del ghetto (Milan: Saggi Bompiani, 2000); Anna Esposito, Un’altra Roma:
Minoranze nazionali e comunità ebraiche tra Medioevo e Rinascimento (Rome: Il Calamo,
1995). On the Jewish community of Rome within its wider medieval European context,
see the important series of studies by Kenneth R. Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of
Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Stow, The ‘1007
Anonymous’ and Papal Sovereignty: Jewish Perception of the Papacy and Papal Policy in the
High Middle Ages (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College, 1984).
4
“A company, association [or] body; . . . a colony of aliens established at Rome and organized as a corporation” (Jan Frederik Niermeyer and Co van de Kieft, Mediae Latinitatis
Lexicon Minus [Leiden: Brill, 2002], 1232-1233).
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In this article, we argue that Jews and Christians alike—but especially
the elite leadership of both groups—cultivated and exploited long-standing discursive traditions regarding the enduring religious significance of
Rome. We set out to demonstrate that these frequently intersecting lines
of tradition were of particular importance for both communities within
the Roman context of the period. Jews and Christians participated in a
common religious discourse that invested remains from the biblical and
Jewish past housed in Rome with symbolic capital valued by the two communities and that, thus, fostered both contact and competition between
them. The power differential between Jews and Christians in the city of the
Popes heightened the intensity of their contestation over ownership of the
past, but also lent stability to their ongoing engagement with common and
highly local idioms of religious authority and authenticity. The extant
sources—Christian and Jewish, Latin and Hebrew—reveal a rich and
interlocking series of cultural assumptions that were operative across both
communities. Indeed, the traditions in these sources reflect and refract
events as far back as the Augustan age, and served as vehicles of memory
that made the presence of antiquity palpable within twelfth-century Rome
and its physical milieu.5 Moreover, eleventh- and twelfth-century Rome
saw an intensification of interest in spolia as well as in the ubiquitous
ancient remains within the built environment; these extant items from
Roman antiquity underwent a process of resignification, as they acquired
novel identifications and were imbued with new meanings that were often
recognized by Jewish and Christian Romans alike.6 While the background
of this article is the formation of this “Roman memory” over the course of
late antiquity, we focus here on how the Jews of twelfth-century Rome
James B. Ross, “A Study of Twelfth-Century Interest in the Antiquities of Rome,”
in Medieval and Historiographical Essays in Honor of James Westfall Thompson, eds. James
L. Cate and Eugene N. Anderson (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1938),
302-321; Herbert Bloch, “The New Fascination with Ancient Rome,” in Benson and
Constable, Renaissance, 615-636.
6
On the re-use of ancient spolia in twelfth-century building projects, see Dale Kinney,
“Spolia,” in St. Peter’s in the Vatican, ed. William Tronzo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 16-47; Kinney, “Spolia: Damnatio and Renovatio Memoriae,” Memoirs of
the American Academy in Rome 42 (1997): 117-148; and Kinney, “Rape or Restitution of
the Past? Interpreting Spolia,” in The Art of Interpreting, ed. Susan C. Scott, Papers in Art
History from the Pennsylvania State University 9 (University Park, PA: Department of Art
History, The Pennsylvania State University, 1995), 52-67. See also the studies in Richard
Brilliant and Dale Kinney, eds., Reuse Value: Spolia and Appropriation in Art and Architecture from Constantine to Sherrie Levine (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).
5
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467
incorporated these traditions into their ongoing interactions with the
Christian authorities of the city, and how this process of negotiation played
out alongside uncannily similar Christian claims to the city and its ancient
patrimony.
Several significant texts produced in Rome and describing the city—its
topography, institutions, and processions—permit us a glimpse of interactions between the Jewish community and Roman-Christian clergy and
laity in daily and ceremonial situations. Among these texts are the Historia
Imaginis Salvatoris (ca. 1145) of Nicholas Maniacutius;7 the anonymous
Descriptio Lateranensis Ecclesiae (ca. 1073-1085) and its first revision by
John the Deacon (ca. 1159-1181);8 Cardinal Boso’s entries in the Liber
Pontificalis (ca. 1154-1178);9 the Liber Censuum of Cencius Camerarius
(ca. 1192);10 and the Mirabilia urbis Romae (ca. 1143) of Canon Benedict,
an early and enormously influential description of medieval Rome.11
The canons shed light on the history of Christian rituals that incorporated
Nicholas Maniacutius, Historia Imaginis Salvatoris (ca. 1145), Fondo SMM 2,
fols. 237-244, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City, printed in Gerhard Wolf,
Salus Populi Romani: Studien zur Geschichte des römischen Kultbildes im Mittelalter (Weinheim: VCH Acta Humaniora, 1990), 321-325, at 323. A brief excerpt from the Historia is
also printed in Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of
Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 500. For
further discussion of the Historia and the other works by Nicolaus, see Gerhard Wolf,
“ ‘Laetare filia Sion. Ecce ego venio et habitabo in medio tui’: Images of Christ transferred to
Rome from Jerusalem,” Jewish Art 23-24 (1997-1998): 418-429; Vittorio Peri, “Nicola
Maniacutia, autore ecclesiastico romano del XII secolo,” Aevum 36 (1962): 534-588; Peri,
“Nicola Maniacutia, un testimone della filogia romana del XII secolo,” Aevum 42 (1967):
67-90; and Peri, “Nicola Maniacutia, ‘Correctores immo corruptores’: Un saggio di critica
testuale nella Roma del XII secolo,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 20 (1977): 119-125.
8
Printed in Roberto Valentini and Giuseppe Zucchetti, eds., Codice topografico della
città di Roma, 4 vols. (Rome: Tipografica del Senato, 1940-1953), 3:319-373.
9
Le Liber Pontificalis: Texte, introduction et commentaire, ed. Louis Duchesne, 3 vols.
(2nd series; Paris: Bibliothèque des Écoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome, 1955-1957),
2:388-446; Boso, Life of Adrian IV, in Adrian IV, the English Pope (1154-1159): Studies and
Texts, ed. and trans. Brenda Bolton and Anne Duggan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 214-233;
G.M. Ellis, trans., Boso’s Life of Alexander III, intro. Peter Munz (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1973); Fritz Geisthardt, Der Kämmerer Boso, Historische Studien 293 (Berlin: Verlag dr.
Emil Ebering, 1936).
10
Cencius, Le liber censuum de l’église romaine, eds. Paul Fabre and Louis Duchesne,
3 vols. (Paris: Fontemoing, Thorin, 1889-1952). On the early history of the Liber
Censuum, see Teresa Montecchi Palazzi, “Cencius Camerarius et la formation du Liber
censuum de 1192,” Mélanges de l’école française de Rome 96 (1984): 49-93.
11
Benedictus Canonicus, Mirabilia urbis Romae, in Valentini and Zucchetti, Codice
7
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the pre-Christian “Jewish past” as their own. For its part, the Mirabilia,
as a kind of descriptive “guide” to Rome, catalogs historical sites in the city
that were symbolically significant for Roman Christians and, in specific
cases, Roman Jews as well.12 These ecclesiastical texts situate Rome’s urban
topography within a distinctively Christian framework vital to the power
and authority of the papacy.
And yet the city was of almost equal interest to contemporary Jewry.
Indeed, many of the same sites, monuments, and artifacts made Rome
as dense a landscape of memory for its Jewish inhabitants as it was for
their Christian counterparts. Central to our argument is the text known as
The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, which complements the thematic
emphasis and content of documents from the Lateran in several significant
ways.13 In this well-known travel narrative of the mid-twelfth century,
Benjamin, a Jew from the kingdom of Navarre, describes Rome during his
visit there around the year 1161.14 Though problematic as a source for
topografico, 3:3-65; Benedict, The Marvels of Rome: Mirabilia urbis Romae, ed. Eileen
Gardiner, 2nd edn. (New York, NY: Italica Press, 1986).
12
On the Mirabilia as belonging to the genre of a descriptio urbis and the revival of
this genre in twelfth-century Rome, see especially Dale Kinney, “Fact and Fiction in
the Mirabilia urbis Romae,” in Roma Felix: Formation and Reflections of Medieval Rome,
eds. Éamonn Ò. Carragain and Carol Neumann de Vegvar (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007),
235-252, and the scholarly literature cited there. On the Mirabilia more specifically as a
commentary on the papal liturgy, see the article in this issue by Louis Hamilton.
13
The most up-to-date critical edition of the text is still Marcus Nathan Adler, ed. and
trans., The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela: Travels in the Middle Ages (London: H. Frowde,
1907). Adler’s edition uses as its base-text what appears to be the earliest extant manuscript,
MS British Museum Add. 27089 (ca. fourteenth century), supplemented by two other
complete copies (MS Casanatense 3097; MS Epstein) as well as fragments from two additional manuscripts (MS Oxford Oppenheim Add. 8° 36 [= Neubauer 2425]; MS Oxford
Oppenheim Add. 8° 58 [= Neubauer 2580]). For discussion of these manuscripts as well as
of the numerous earlier printed editions, going back to the editio princeps (Constantinople,
1543) and the Ferrara edition of 1556, see Adler, Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, xiv-xv. All
translations of the text in this chapter are based on Adler’s edition and are our own. Adler’s
translation is also reprinted in Michael A. Signer, ed., The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela:
Travels in the Middle Ages (Malibu, CA: Joseph Simon/Pangloss Press, 1983), which, in
addition to a new introduction by Signer, also reprints Adler’s introduction as well as the
introduction from the earlier edition of Abraham Asher, ed. and trans., The Itinerary of
Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, 2 vols. (London and Berlin: A. Asher & Co., 1840).
14
Adler, Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, 1 n. 2, suggests that Benjamin’s visit to Rome
occurred between late 1165 and 1167. David Jacoby, “Benjamin of Tudela and his ‘Book
of Travels,’ ” in Venezia incrocio di culture, ed. Klaus Herbers and Felicitas Schmieder (Rome:
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469
strictly positivist history, the Itinerary nevertheless reveals a distinctly Jewish perspective on the urban landscape of the city. Joseph Shatzmiller has
argued that Benjamin intended to provide more than a mere narration of
his travels and instead was writing in order “to draw attention to monuments, in Rome and Constantinople . . . that a traveler should not miss.”15
Whether Benjamin derived his knowledge from local Jewish guides to the
city or from information gleaned from other texts is not always certain.
The prologue to the Itinerary, indicating that the guides in each of the
communities through which he passed were local Jews, was added to the
original text by a late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century editor.16 In addition, both the prologue and the incompleteness of the narrative suggest
that the original text was edited twice. Finally, the manuscript trail extends
no further back than a fourteenth-century copy and, hence, the original
text of the Itinerary, as it was composed by Benjamin, cannot be fully
reconstructed.17
While Benjamin of Tudela’s text has been found to contain inconsistencies and even some errors of fact, it nevertheless carries significant historical value for assessing the institutions, practices, and traditions of specific
Jewish communities of which he had personal knowledge.18 The Christian
texts and the Itinerary, when carefully juxtaposed and correlated, disclose
facets of Rome’s Jewish community that have gone unappreciated in modern historiography. Not only do these texts illuminate the status of Jews
Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2008), 135-164, at 145, considers a post-June 1161 dating
of the visit to be more likely.
15
Joseph Shatzmiller, “Jews, Pilgrimage, and the Christian Cult of Saints: Benjamin of
Tudela and his Contemporaries,” in After Rome’s Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 337-347, at 347. See also
Giulio Busi, “Binyamin da Tudela: nuove avventure bibliografiche,” Materia giudaica 3
(1997): 39-42.
16
For the most lucid review of the compositional history of the text, see Jacoby, “Benjamin of Tudela and his ‘Book of Travels,’ ” 135-140.
17
Jacoby, “Benjamin of Tudela and his ‘Book of Travels,’ ” 136, referring to MS British
Museum Add. 27089.
18
Jacoby, “Benjamin of Tudela and his ‘Book of Travels,’ ” 163-164, describes the Itinerary as “a rich and multifaceted source of the twelfth century.” On the historical reliability
of the text, see also David Jacoby, “Benjamin of Tudela in Byzantium,” Palaeoslavica 10
(2002): 180-185; Yosef Levanon, “The Holy Place in Jewish Piety: Evidence of Two TwelfthCentury Itineraries,” The Annual of Rabbinic Judaism 1 (1998): 103-118; Rolf Schmitz,
“Benjamin von Tudela ‘Das Buch der Reisen’: Realität oder Fiktion,” Henoch 16 (1994):
295-314.
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within Rome and the particular roles that they played in the life of the
city, but they also reveal the “landscape of Jewish cultural memory”
that had developed there over the eleven centuries since the destruction
of the Temple.19
In particular, both the Christian and Jewish texts discussed here express
a continued fascination with the fate of the treasures taken from Jerusalem
and the divine authority attributed to those sacred artifacts. Titus’s destruction of the Temple, the transfer to Rome of its sacred vessels, and their
subsequent display as spoils of war in the imperial triumph, established
both for Jews and for Christians an enduring association between the city
and the Jerusalem Temple and its sancta.20 The belief that the Temple
treasures had remained in Rome persisted well into the twelfth century,
especially within the local context.21 We argue that Jewish and Christian
sources from this period not only attest to and participate in a common
discourse regarding the fate of the vessels but that Roman Jews and Christians alike shared a distinctive set of traditions reflecting a common perception of the city’s architectural sites. These local cultural memories,
whether pressed into service for one religious community or the other,
were always in a very real sense Roman.
The Jewish Community of Rome
The removal from Jerusalem of the Temple treasures by the victorious
Roman army occurred more than a century after the establishment of the
The phrase “landscape of Jewish cultural memory” comes from Ra‘anan S. Boustan,
“The Spoils of the Jerusalem Temple at Rome and Constantinople: Jewish CounterGeography in a Christianizing Empire, in Antiquity in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Pasts
in the Greco-Roman World, eds. Gregg Gardner and Kevin L. Osterloh (Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2008), 327-372, at 341.
20
Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (New York,
NY: Knopf, 2007), 428.
21
Marie Thérèse Champagne, “ ‘Treasures of the Temple’ and Claims to Authority in
Twelfth-Century Rome,” in Aspects of Power and Authority in the Middle Ages, eds. Brenda
Bolton and Christine Meek, International Medieval Research 14 (Turnhout: Brepols,
2007), 107-118, at 109. Also see Sible de Blaauw, “The Solitary Celebration of the
Supreme Pontiff: The Lateran Basilica as the New Temple in the Medieval Liturgy of
Maundy Thursday,” in Omnes Circumadstantes: Contributions towards a History of the People
in the Liturgy Presented to Hermann Wegman on his Retirement, eds. Charles Caspers
and Marc Schneiders (Kampen: Kok, 1990), 120-143, at 132-136.
19
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471
first Jewish community in Rome.22 By the twelfth century, that community, which stood apart from the rest of Italian Jewry, had long since
enjoyed a vigorous and distinctive history of which it was both intensely
aware and enormously proud.23 Indeed, in his Itinerary, Benjamin proclaims triumphantly of Rome and its Jews:
There are also great scholars there, at whose head are R. Daniel and R. Yeḥiel, a minister of the Pope. He is a handsome young man, intelligent and wise, and has access to
(lit. enters and exits) the residence of the Pope, serving as the steward of his household
and all of his property. He is a grandson of R. Nathan, who composed the Sefer
ha-ʿarukh and its commentaries. (Other scholars are) R. Yoav, son of the chief rabbi
(ha-rav) R. Shlomo, and R. Menaḥem, the head of the rabbinical academy ( yeshivah),
and R. Yeḥiel, who lives in Trastevere, and R. Benjamin, son of R. Shabbetai of blessed
memory.24
The Roman-Jewish community thus came to occupy a position of prominence within the western Mediterranean and European diaspora between
the tenth and twelfth centuries, in no small measure because of its
immensely rich past. One of the most prominent scholars among the rabbinic leaders of the community—to whom Benjamin alludes—was Nathan
ben Yeḥiel, composer of the ʿArukh (ca. 1101), a compendium of Talmudic study.25 On a number of occasions, Jewish communities in both
Ashkenaz (Germany and France) and Sepharad (the Iberian Peninsula)
22
Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 368; E. Mary Smallwood, The Jews under Roman Rule
(Leiden: Brill, 2001), 128-129. For the most recent comprehensive surveys of the evidence
for the Roman-Jewish community from its beginnings to Late Antiquity, see Silvia Cappelletti,
The Jewish Community in Rome: From the Second Century B.C. to the Third Century C.E.,
Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 113 (Leiden: Brill, 2006); Leonard
V. Rutgers, The Jews in Late Ancient Rome: Evidence of Cultural Interaction in the Roman
Diaspora, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 126 (Leiden: Brill, 1995); also the individual contributions in Joan Goodnick Westenholz, ed., The Jewish Presence in Rome
( Jerusalem: Bible Lands Museum, 1995).
23
See especially Stow, Alienated Minority, 23-24, 65-88; also Levanon, “Holy Place in
Jewish Piety,” 104; Hermann Vogelstein, Rome (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication
Society of America, 1940), 130-136.
24
Adler, Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, *6-*7 (page numbers with an asterisk refer to
the page numbers in Adler’s printed edition of the Hebrew text).
25
For an invaluable discussion of this seminal text, see Luisa Ferretti Cuomo, “Le Glosse
Volgari nell’Arukh di R. Natan ben Yehi’el da Roma,” Medioevo Romanzo 22 (1998): 232283; also Stow, Alienated Minority, 69-70.
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turned to the leaders of the Roman-Jewish community not only for legal
guidance but also, as we shall see, for diplomatic assistance. Sources preserved by members of the prominent Qalonymos family who settled in the
Rhineland proudly claim that, during the tenth century, Roman Jews had
served as the principle conduit to other communities to the north for both
Jewish religious thought and ritual, at first in Lucca and eventually in such
trans-alpine cities as Mainz.26 Despite the growth of these new intellectual
centers, the schools of Mainz nevertheless continued to acknowledge the
precedence of Roman rabbinic decisions.27
The Jews of Rome enjoyed a high degree of cultural and intellectual
prominence within the Jewish world, acting as intermediaries between
their fellow Jews who lived under Christian rule outside of the city and the
non-Jewish ecclesiastical and secular powers. In particular, the RomanJewish community enjoyed direct lines of communication with the papacy
and, by 598, had already formed a sufficiently influential group to enable
it to mount a decisive intervention with Pope Gregory the Great.28 Apparently, Jews in Sicily had bitterly complained of unfair treatment—caused
by the expropriation of some land or building for the establishment of a
church; in response, the Pope issued a detailed letter demanding that
Victor, bishop of Palermo, treat the Jews in a just manner.29
Much later, in the eleventh century, the Roman Jews, under the patronage of the noble Pierleoni family, interceded once more with the papacy,
this time on behalf of the Jews in Spain.30 Kenneth Stow has argued
26
For a useful summary of this process of population and cultural migration, see Stow,
Alienated Minority, 68-88, building on foundations laid by Avraham Grossman, “The
Migration of the Kalonymos Family from Italy to Germany” (Hebrew), Zion 40 (1975):
154-184; Grossman, The Early Sages of Ashkenaz (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Magnes Press,
1981), 27-105.
27
Stow, Alienated Minority, 93.
28
See Shlomo Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the Jews, Documents: 492-1404, Studies
and Texts 94 (Toronto, ON: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1991), nos. 19-20;
Pope Gregory I, The Letters of Gregory the Great, trans. and intro. J.C. Martyn, Medieval
Sources in Translation 40, 3 vols. (Toronto, ON: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies,
2004), 2: 521 [8.25].
29
Dag Norberg, ed., S. Gregorii Magni registrum epistularum, Corpus Christianorum:
Series Latina 140-140A, 2 vols. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1982), 1:ix and 38; Robert A. Markus,
Gregory the Great and his World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 76-80.
See also Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 73-94.
30
The relevant letters from Alexander II are found in Simonsohn, Documents, nos. 36-38.
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473
persuasively that the highly localized circumstances prevailing in Rome
made the city an excellent laboratory for renegotiating the relationship
between the Jews and the papacy.31 Most likely, it was the Pierleoni
family—descended from a Jewish convert to Christianity and still residing
in close proximity to the Jewish quarter—that fostered this relationship.32
From 1059 onwards, the Pierleoni allied themselves with the papacy; and,
at several crucial junctures, members of this family played an instrumental
role in helping to bring a series of reforming popes to office, including
Gregory VII (1073-1085) and Urban II (1088-1099).33 Members of the
Roman-Jewish community—well-situated in the capital of Western Christendom and enjoying the patronage of a powerful family to whom one or
other pope was beholden—were pioneers in obtaining grants of papal protection. Indeed, over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as
the vulnerability and protection of Jewish interests came to rest increasingly with ecclesiastical rather than with secular powers, this Roman innovation was to have lasting implications for the rest of the Jewish world.34
See also Robert Chazan, Church, State, and Jew in the Middle Ages (New York, NY:
Behrman House, 1980), 99-100.
31
Kenneth R. Stow, “The Approach of the Jews to the Papacy and the Papal Doctrine of
the Protection of the Jews, 1063-1147” (Hebrew), Studies in the History of the Jewish People
and the Land of Israel 5 (1980): 175-190, usefully summarized in Stow, Alienated Minority,
39-40.
32
Hubert, Espace urbain, 291, confirms the Pierleoni dominance of the Ripa district, in
close proximity to Jewish settlement within Rome. See also Moscati, Alle origini del comune
romano, 45-47.
33
On the relationship of the Pierleoni family to the papacy, see especially Pietro Fedele,
“Le famiglie di Anacleto II e di Gelasio II,” Archivio della Regia società Romana di Storia
Patria 27 (1904): 399-433; Demetrius B. Zema, “The Houses of Tuscany and of Pierleone
in the Crisis of Rome in the Eleventh Century,” Traditio 2 (1944): 171-172. For further
background to the Pierleoni family in twelfth-century Rome, see Krautheimer, Rome, Profile of a City, 150, 157, and 274; Mary Stroll, The Jewish Pope: Ideology and Politics in the
Papal Schism of 1130 (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 140-145 and 180; Stow, Alienated Minority, 40;
Ian S. Robinson, The Papacy: 1073-1198 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
8-14. For a comparative discussion of the behavior of noble families such as the Pierleoni
in urban areas in the twelfth century, see also Jacques Heers, Family Clans in the Middle
Ages: A Study of Political and Social Structures in Urban Areas (Amsterdam: North-Holland
Pub. Co., 1977), esp. 249.
34
Stow, “Approach of the Jews to the Papacy,” esp. 188-190. The status and safety of
Jews tended to vary from the special situation in Rome according to locale. See Marie
Thérèse Champagne, “Celestine III and the Jews,” in Pope Celestine III (1191-98):
Diplomat and Pastor, eds. John Doran and Damian Smith (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008),
474
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The spiritual and civic value of Rome for its Jewish community lay
in the particular practice there of an Italo-Ashkenazi rite of synagogue
worship. This “Palestinian” branch of the synagogue liturgy was believed
to bear the influence of religious poetry that had originated in Jerusalem,
possibly even being brought to Rome by the earliest Jewish settlers who
had migrated to the city.35
Moreover, the Jews of Rome also valued the city for its stability and
relative safety. Sicut Judaeis, the charter of protection for the Jewish community in Rome, first promulgated by Calixtus II in around 1122-1123,
was issued by subsequent popes on five further occasions between 1145
and 1198.36 This document appears to have been effective as a local mantle
of protection, for no evidence exists to indicate that either violence or persecution directed at Jews was carried out in Rome at any point during the
twelfth century. In fact, it would appear that the Roman-Jewish community suffered no major disturbance throughout the entire Middle Ages.37
Living within the special microcosm of the capital of Christendom, Roman
271-285, which argues that the situation in both Orléans and Rouen to which Celestine III
responded demonstrates the differing status and safety of Jews in communities far beyond
Rome (281-283). While the Pope’s response to the local seizure of synagogues and the
persecution of Jews in those cities, within the domains of the Capetian king and the
Angevin Duke of Normandy respectively, did reinforce the superior rights of Christians
over Jews, he also protected the Jews of Rome by re-issuing the decree Sicut Judaeis at some
point during his pontificate. The political realities in Orléans and Rouen in 1193 differed
greatly from those in Rome.
35
Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 368; Stow, Alienated Minority, 24, 69. On the migration of the Jews to Rome, see Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 12, 415-419.
36
See Simonsohn, Documents, nos. 44, 46 and 49; Simonsohn, The Apostolic See and the
Jews: History, Studies and Texts 109 (Toronto, ON: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1991), 16-17, nn. 61-62; Solomon Grayzel, “The Papal Bull ‘Sicut Judeis,’ ” in Studies
and Essays in Honor of Abraham A. Neuman, eds. Meir Ben-Horin, Bernard D. Weinryb
and Solomon Zeitlin (Leiden: Brill, 1962), 243-280; Grayzel, “Popes, Jews, and Inquisition, from ‘Sicut’ to ‘Turbato,’ ” in Essays on the Occasion of the Seventieth Anniversary of the
Dropsie University, 1909-1979, eds. Abraham Isaac Katsh and Leon Nemoy (Philadelphia,
PA: Dropsie University, 1979), 151-188; Kenneth R. Stow, “Hatred of the Jews or Love of
the Church: Papal Policy toward the Jews in the Middle Ages,” in Anti-Semitism through the
Ages, ed. Shmuel Almog, trans. Nathan H. Reisner (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988), 71-89;
Stow, “The Fruit of Ambivalence: Papal Jewry Policies over the Centuries,” in The Roman
Inquisition, the Index, and the Jews: Contexts, Sources and Perspectives, ed. Stephan Wendehorst (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 3-17.
37
Stow, Alienated Minority, 24; Stow, The Jews in Rome, Studia Post-Biblica 48 (Leiden:
Brill, 1995), xi-xii.
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475
Jews and Christians experienced unusually robust cultural and social interactions, especially as the Jews increasingly aligned themselves with the
protective power of the papacy.
Jewish and Christian Cultural Memories of Rome
By the twelfth century, the memory of first-century Imperial Rome had
long carried a wide range of symbolic meanings for those Jews who called
the city their home. The disaster that brought a dramatic end to the Temple cult in Jerusalem shaped the attitude toward Rome among Roman
Jews as well as in other diaspora communities throughout the Mediterranean. Martin Goodman has observed that the transfer of the cultic vessels
from Jerusalem to Rome almost certainly exerted a powerful impact at the
local level, as the Jews of the imperial capital found themselves front-line
witnesses to the consequences of Roman power for their ancestral homeland and its religious institutions: “The Jews of the city of Rome must have
felt their dual loyalties under intolerable strain as the sacred relics of the
Temple they revered were carried in mocking triumph through the streets
of their adopted city, their pride at being Roman in direct conflict with the
propaganda of the new imperial regime.”38
The events of the epic conquest of Judaea and the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, as recorded by Josephus Flavius, have been recounted
and explored in numerous studies.39 Significantly, however, besides a few
38
Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 439; and, in more detail, idem, “Diaspora Reactions
to the Destruction of the Temple,” in Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways A.D. 70
to 135, ed. James D.G. Dunn (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 27-38. Cappelletti,
Jewish Community in Rome, 91-92, strikes a more cautious note, stressing the absence of
evidence for the local Jewish reaction in Rome. But on the pronounced and pervasive ideological uses to which the Flavian dynasty put the destruction and despoiling of Jerusalem,
see Fergus Millar, “Last Year in Jerusalem: Monuments of the Jewish War in Rome,” in
Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome, eds. Jonathan Edmondson, Steve Mason, and James
Rives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 101-128.
39
The bibliography here is vast. For recent assessments of the reliability of Josephus’
account of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, compare the conflicting assessments
in Tommaso Leoni, “Against Caesar’s Wishes: Flavius Josephus as a Source for the Burning
of the Temple,” Journal of Jewish Studies 58 (2007): 39-51, which credits the report of
Josephus that the destruction was an unpremeditated action undertaken by rank and file
soldiers, and James Rives, “Flavian Religious Policy and the Destruction of the Jerusalem
Temple,” in Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome, 145-166, which argues that the destruction
476
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brief allusions in second-century Greek and Latin sources to the cultic
implements from the Jerusalem Temple, Roman historians and propagandists are almost entirely silent on this matter. By contrast, the Jews of late
antiquity did evince an ongoing interest in the fate of the Temple vessels,
a theme that was likewise taken up by Christian historians and chroniclers
in the Byzantine period.40 Both Jewish and Christian writers thus kept
alive the image of the sacred vessels hidden in Rome, transmitting it to
their medieval literary heirs in the twelfth-century city.41 As we shall
demonstrate below, the landscape of cultural memory preserved in rabbinic and related Jewish literature, on the one hand, and in Byzantine
histories and chronicles, on the other, continued to be promoted in lateeleventh and, more particularly, in twelfth-century Roman texts, both
Christian and Jewish. And, in this same century, the claims of the Lateran
to possess the Temple treasures had their counterpart in the local traditions recorded by Benjamin of Tudela.
Benjamin’s Itinerary provides an extensive description of Jewish communities around the Mediterranean, extending as far to the East as western
Iran.42 His account of Rome, however, indicates the importance that the
history of the Jerusalem Temple and the fate of the sacred vessels occupied
in the cultural memory of the city’s Jews. Although their Temple had
ceased to exist nearly eleven centuries before, the Jews of the diaspora continued to follow the practice of praying in the direction of its former site
in Jerusalem.43 They fasted and prayed on the Ninth of Av, the traditional
of the Jerusalem cult was a Roman strategy intended to subdue the rebellious population
of Judea.
40
Boustan, “Spoils of the Jerusalem Temple,” 337-339, 356-362.
41
The Descriptio Lateranensis Ecclesiae, in Valentini and Zucchetti, Codice topografico,
3:319-322 and 335-342, emphasizes the unique association of the Lateran with ancient
Judaism, and uses that claim to support papal authority during the Investiture struggle and
other political and ecclesiastical conflicts, on which see de Blaauw, “Solitary Celebration
of the Supreme Pontiff,” 126. The Historia Imaginis Salvatoris (ca. 1145) of Nicolaus
Maniacutius, printed in Wolf, Salus Populi Romani, 321-325, is another twelfth-century
Christian text claiming that the sacred vessels of the Temple were contained in the Lateran
Basilica.
42
Jacoby, “Benjamin of Tudela and his ‘Book of Travels,’ ” 149-150, notes, however,
that, while Benjamin included information on communities as far east as Tibet and China,
he apparently traveled no further east than Isfahan.
43
On the origins of this practice in Late Antiquity and its enduring impact on synagogue liturgy and architecture, see especially Lee I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First
Thousand Years, 2nd edn. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 326-330, esp.
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477
date for the destruction of both Temples, the First by the Babylonians and
the Second by the Romans.44 Thus, before discussing the location of the
Temple vessels, Benjamin first reports that the local Roman-Jewish community believed that some part of the structure of the Temple was actually
in Rome:
There are in the church of St John in the Lateran two bronze columns, which had been
in the Temple from among the handiwork of King Solomon, peace be upon him; and
on both is carved “Solomon son of David.” The Jews in Rome reported (to me) that
every year on the Ninth of Av they found sweat running down them like water.45
The practice of commemorating the anniversary of the Destruction was
widespread throughout the communities of the diaspora. Yet its observance in Rome seems to have carried the added weight of local history—
enhanced, as the Jews of Rome believed it was, by the presence of the two
actual columns and the sacred vessels from the Temple itself.
Benjamin’s report dovetails significantly with contemporary Christian
discourse regarding the distinctive bronze columns in the Lateran basilica.
The connection between the Lateran and the Temple as exemplified
through physical artifacts may well reflect local Roman perceptions reaching beyond the Jewish community. Indeed, this link also pervaded
Christian representations of the Lateran basilica, the Lateran palace, and
the pope’s private chapel of San Lorenzo, known as the Sancta Sanctorum.46
327 nt. 56, for relevant rabbinic sources; also Isaiah M. Gafni, Land, Center, and Diaspora:
Jewish Constructs in Late Antiquity (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 58-73.
44
For the development of the fast-day of the Ninth of Av and the various “tragedies”
attracted to that date over the course of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, see now
Shulamit Elizur, Wherefore Have We Fasted? “Megillat Ta‘anit Batra” and Similar Lists of Fasts
(Hebrew), Sources for the Study of Jewish Culture 9 (Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish
Studies, 2007), 154-155; and, more generally, the classic essay by Judah Rosenthal, “The
Four Commemorative Fast Days,” in The Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Volume of the Jewish
Quarterly Review, eds. Abraham A. Neuman and Solomon Zeitlin (Philadelphia, PA: The
Jewish Quarterly Review, 1967), 446-459.
45
Adler, Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, *8.
46
See Jack Freiberg, The Lateran in 1600: Christian Concord in Counter-Reformation
Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 112-158; and De Blaauw, “Solitary
Celebration,” 136, which only briefly touches on the Roman material in Benjamin of
Tudela’s Itinerary. See also Richard Krautheimer, Corpus basilicarum Christianarum Romae,
5 vols. (Città del Vaticano: Pontificio instituto di archeologia Cristiana, 1977), 5:10;
Kessler and Zacharias, Rome 1300, 39-40. For the broader Frankish perceptions of Rome
as the New Jerusalem, see Herbert L. Kessler, “Rome’s Place between Judaea and Francia in
478
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The association of the Lateran basilica with biblical Judaism may be dated
to the building program of the Emperor Constantine.47 In later Christian
sources, it was recorded that, among the many adornments Constantine
deposited in the Constantinian (Lateran) basilica, the seven brass candelabra were uniquely decorated with images of Old Testament prophets,
rather than with Christian saints and martyrs.48 The Jewish association
seems to have persisted: by the tenth century, a mosaic inscription decorating the apse of the Lateran compared the Church’s rituals to the law given
to Moses on Mount Sinai:
This house of God is similar to Sinai, bearing the sacred rites, as the law demonstrates,
the law which once had been brought forth here, which went forth from here, which
leads minds from the lowest places, and which, having become known, gave light
throughout the regions of the world.49
Pope Sergius III (904-911) directed the creation of that inscription as part
of a restoration program to recall and enhance the basilica’s venerable
Carolingian Art,” in Roma fra Oriente e Occidente, Settimane di studio del centro italiano
di studi sull’alto medioevo 49, 2 vols. (Spoleto: CISAM, 2002), 2:695-718.
47
Krautheimer, Corpus, 5:9-10. See also Peter C. Claussen, Die Kirchen der Stadt
Rom im Mittelalter, 1050-1300: San Giovanni in Laterano, Corpus Cosmatorum 2.2,
Forschungen zur Kunstgeschichte und christlichen Archäologie 21 (Stuttgart: Franz
Steiner, 2008), 25-28.
48
“. . . candelabra auricalca VII ante altaria, qui sunt in pedibus X cum ornatu ex argento
interclusum sigillis prophetarum” (Liber Pontificalis 1: 77-79); Raymond Davis, trans.,
The Book of Pontiffs (Liber Pontificalis): The Ancient Biographies of the First Ninety Roman
Bishops to AD 715, Translated Texts for Historians 6 (rev. ed.; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 17. Furnishings donated by Constantine to other Roman Churches,
including the basilicas of Santi Pietro e Paolo and Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in the
Sessorian Palace, were all decorated with Christian images.
49
“Aula Dei haec similis Synai sacra iura ferenti / ut lex demonstrat hic quae
fuit edita quondam / lex hinc exivit mentes quae ducit ab imis / et vulgata dedit
nomen per climata saec(u)li” (Ciampini, De sacra aedificiis, 16). Other editions of this
inscription and brief analyses can be found at Giovanni Battista de Rossi, Inscriptiones
Christianae Urbis Romae septimo saeculo antiquiores, 2 vols. (Rome: Ex Officina Libraria
Pontificia, 1861-1888), 2:149-150 no. 17, 305-306 no. 4; Philippe Lauer, Le palais de
Latran, étude historique et archéologique (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1911), 49, 138; Ursula
Nilgen, “Texte et image dans les absides des XIe-XIIe siècles en Italie,” in Épigraphie et iconographie: actes du colloque tenu à Poitiers les 5-8 octobre 1995, ed. Robert Favreau (Poitiers:
Université de Poitiers, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Centre d’études
supérieures de civilisation médiévale, 1996), 153-164, at 157.
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479
“ancient” reputation, in part reflecting the medieval belief that the Lateran
altar contained Jewish relics (including the “Tablets of the Law”) in contrast to the “new law of Christ.”50
In the twelfth century, the connection of the Lateran to “biblical
Judaism” persisted. This association served as the basis for a poem by Petrus
Mallius, a canon of St. Peter’s (ca. 1145-1181), who in a decidedly derogatory manner addressed the Lateran as “Synagogue.”
Here let the people venerate the throne of Peter,
Let them honor the church of the Prince [of the Apostles],
Let them revere the head of the world and of the city.
I was established as the first parent, the mother, the head of churches,
For Peter held the primacy over all companions
And God conferred it upon me so that the illustrious people
Should consider me the cathedral seat of the Prince,
As the sole mistress and teacher of the world.
I glory in Peter and Paul but you, Synagogue,
Rejoice only in signs and ancient anointings.
I consider those men at the same time Jews and followers of Moses
Who believe the old Synagogue to be the head of the Church.
For that old figure says nothing about the Prince without equal.51
50
Liber Pontificalis 2:236; Lauer, Le palais de Latran, 138; Nilgen, “Texte et image,”
157-158.
51
“Hic cathedram Petri populi venerentur, honorent / Principis ecclesiam, caput orbis
et urbis adorent. / Tunc ego prima parens, mater, caput ecclesiarum / Constituta fui; socios
cum Petrus in omnes / Primatum tenuit, Deus et mihi contulit illum, / Ut clarus populus
cathedrales Principis aedes / Me solam dominam teneat orbisque magistram. / Glorior in
Petro Paulo, sed tu, synagoga, / In signis tantum gaudes vetustisque [veterisque] lituris. /
Hos ego iudaeos reputo simul et moysistas, / Qui caput ecclesiae veterem credunt synagogam:
/ Principe [principi] absque pari taceat vetus illa figura” (Petrus Mallius, Descriptio basilicae
Vaticanae, in Valentini and Zucchetti, Codice topografico, 3: 375-442, here 379-380). The
first half of the translation is ours, while the second half (from “I glory in . . .”) is from
Freiberg, Lateran in 1600, 205 n. 101. Valentini and Zucchetti, Codice topografico, 3: 380,
also record a second poem, probably also by Mallius, that carries a similar sentiment: “Cum
Petrus ecclesiae det pallia, non Lateranum, / Linguosi tacitam ponit in ore manum, /
Et caput et princeps Laterani Petrus habetur, / Ut fidei pietas omnibus una detur. / Hic
Vaticanum fuit antea quam Lateranum, / Cum Petrus esset ibi tractus ab ore canum, /
Raptus et inde fuit, rediit tamen, ut locus idem / Per stabilem toto praesit in orbe fidem.”
For an extensive manuscript history of these poems and of the Descriptio basilicae Vaticanae
of Petrus Mallius, see Valentini and Zucchetti, Codice topografico, 3:375-381. On the similarities between the Descriptio basilicae Vaticanae and the Descriptio ecclesiae Lateranensis,
see Cyril Vogel, “La Descriptio Ecclesiae Lateranensis du Diacre Jean: Histoire du texte
480
M. T. Champagne, R.S. Boustan / Medieval Encounters 17 (2011) 464-494
The tone of Mallius’s poem suggests that the on-going animosity between
the canons of St. Peter’s and the Lateran for primacy in Rome must have
been particularly acute during his lifetime.52 The poet’s polemical application of the appellation “Synagogue” to the Lateran reflects—and inverts—
the intimate association between the Lateran basilica and Judaism. The
claim to the prestige of the ancient Jewish past, which was so dear to the
Lateran canons, is here explicitly framed within Christian supersessionist
discourse to powerful rhetorical effect.
Over a century later, another mosaic inscription in the Lateran apse
again reminded viewers of the special relationship of the Lateran basilica
to biblical Judaism, reinforcing these long-standing local associations.
Created around 1291 under Pope Nicholas IV, this inscription catalogs
the Jewish relics supposedly deposited underneath the high altar of the
Lateran, including the Arc of the Covenant, the staffs of Moses and Aaron,
the golden menorah, the golden censer, and the golden urn filled with
manna and the showbread; the inscription further notes that, along with
these sancta, the four bronze columns still present in the church were
brought back from Jerusalem to Rome by Titus and Vespasian.53 While
the other vessels lay concealed beneath the altar, the four columns were
manuscrit,” in Mélanges en l’honneur de Monseigneur Michel Andrieu (Strasbourg: Palais
Universitaire, 1956), 457-460.
52
On the rivalry between the two basilicas in the medieval period, see Michele Maccarrone, “La cathedra Sancti Petri nel medioevo: da simbolo a reliquia,” Rivista di storia della
chiesa in Italia 36 (1985): 349-447; reprinted in Pietro Zerbi, Raffaele Volpini, and Alessandro Galuzzi, eds., Ecclesia Romana: Cathedra sancti Petri, Italia Sacra 47, part 8, 2 vols.
(Rome: Herder, 1991), 2:1249-1373. For the continuation of the rivalry into the CounterReformation period, see Freiberg, Lateran in 1600, 11-12.
53
The relevant section of the inscription in Claussen’s expanded transcription reads:
“Sub isto nempe altari est Arca Federis in qua sunt due tabule testamenti, virga Moysi et et
virga Aaron; est ibi candelabrum aureum et thuribulum aureum thymiamate plenum et
urna aurea plena manna et de panibus propositionum. Hanc autem arcam cum candelabro
et hiis que dicta sunt cum quatuor presentibus columpnis Titus et Vespasianus a Iudeis
asportari fecerunt de H[i]erusolima ad Urbem, sicut usque hodie cernitur in triumphali
fornice qui est iuxta ecclesiam sancte Marie Nove, ob victoriam et perpetuum monumentum eorum a Senatu Populoque Romano positum” (Claussen, Kirchen der Stadt Rom, 344).
Freiberg, Lateran in 1600, 134-136, argues that, with the rise of the legend regarding
the deposit of the Temple vessels in the Lateran, the bronze columns gradually became
identified with those from Solomon’s Temple and thus displaced earlier traditions
offering alternative explanations for their origins. See also the brief discussion in Kinney,
“Spolia,” 35-36.
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481
visible to all, clergy and laity alike.54 The inscription crystallized longstanding Roman perceptions of the unique affinity of the Lateran basilica
with the Jerusalem Temple in its role as a sacred repository.55 Benjamin of
Tudela thus recorded a reflex of this local tradition, though expressed in a
distinctively Jewish register that linked the columns to the commemoration of the destruction of the Temple on the Ninth of Av.56 In the process,
a common Roman cultural memory came to be preserved well beyond the
bounds of the city of Rome for Jewish posterity.
The sights of Roman antiquity and other memories fill Benjamin’s
narrative, especially those intimately connected with Jewish history. While
he does mention generally that “. . . there are eighty palaces belonging
to eighty kings who lived there, each called Imperator, commencing from
King Tarquinius down to Nero and Tiberius, . . . ending with Pepin,”
he particularly emphasizes the three emperors who had been most closely
connected with the Jews in Rome and with the fate of the Temple and
sacred vessels.57 Significantly, Benjamin begins his list of imperial palaces
54
As Kinney, “Spolia,” 35, explains, the bronze columns seem to have originally formed
part of the supporting structure of the Constantian fastigium, a permanent structure that
may have spanned the nave in the early Lateran Basilica. These columns were subsequently
moved during the renovation program carried out under Gregory XIII (1572-1585) and
were re-used to support the altar structure within the SS. Sacramento (Chapel of the Blessed
Sacrament) in the south transept.
55
In this same period, two other apse inscriptions referring to the Jewish Law were commissioned, one for the Abbey church of Montecassino (late-eleventh century) and one for
San Clemente in Rome (early twelfth century). But these inscriptions do not explicitly
mention the Jerusalem Temple or its spolia, nor are they found in institutions that carried
the exceptional standing of the Lateran. For discussion of these inscriptions in relation to
ones in the Lateran, see Nilgen, “Texte et image,” 153-164; also Stefano Riccioni, Il mosaico
absidale di San Clemente a Roma: exemplum della chiesa riformata (Spoleto: Fondazione
CISAM, 2006), 65-75; Riccioni, “La décoration monumentale à Rome aux XIe et XIIe
siècles: révisions chronologiques, stylistiques et thématiques,” Perspective: la revue de
l’institute national d’histoire de l’art 2 (2010-2011): 319-360; Mary Stroll, “The TwelfthCentury Apse Mosaic in San Clemente in Rome and its Enigmatic Inscription,” Storia e
Civiltá 4 (1988): 20-34.
56
It is worth noting that Benjamin reports that there were two—and not four—bronze
columns, which would have been identified by his Jewish readers with the sentinel columns
from the Temple of Solomon, Jachin and Boaz. Benjamin’s text thereby molds the tradition
regarding the Lateran columns to its biblical referent.
57
The palaces of Julius Caesar, Titus, and Vespasian are all briefly mentioned in another
twelfth-century travel narrative of Rome, the Mirabilia urbis Romae (ca. 1143), which
included an extensive list of “palaces” of past Roman emperors and officials. According to
482
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with that of Julius Caesar. Jews in the late Roman Republic and early
Empire had respected Caesar, both during his rule and afterwards. In early
44 BCE, Caesar had demonstrated his appreciation for the Judean leaders’
loyalty to him by granting several decrees that benefited them, including
one in particular that allowed the rebuilding of their Temple walls,
destroyed nearly twenty years earlier by Pompey.58 Indeed, the Jews favored
Caesar in large measure precisely because of his enmity toward Pompey.
According to Suetonius, the deep respect of the Roman Jews for Caesar led
to demonstrations of public grief at his funeral pyre in the Forum.59
While traditionally revering Julius Caesar, the Jews despised Vespasian
and especially Titus.60 Both men had commanded the Roman legions during the Jewish War and Titus had overseen, passively or actively, the
destruction of the Temple.61 In his narrative, Benjamin strikes a rather
Gardiner, Marvels of Rome, xxv, Rome was filled with ruins of ancient buildings and
“when the function of a structure was in doubt, it was often simply called a palace and
associated with the name of one of the great emperors.” Benjamin was drawing on a common Roman cultural memory in mentioning the emperors’ palaces, but he focused on
those sights most notable to his Jewish audience.
58
See Smallwood, Jews under Roman Rule, 127-128, 136, and the primary sources cited
there.
59
Suetonius, The Lives of the Caesars, 1.84.5.
60
On the historical development of Jewish attitudes toward Roman imperial power,
especially the figure of Titus, see Ra‘anan S. Boustan, “Immolating Emperors: Spectacles
of Imperial Suffering and the Making of a Jewish Minority Culture in Late Antiquity,”
Biblical Interpretation 17 (2009): 207-238, at 227-231.
61
On the question of whether the Roman armies under Titus intended to destroy the
Temple, see footnote 39 above. It is worth noting that the negative depiction of Titus in
Jewish texts contrasts starkly with the view promoted by Christian writers, who for centuries had interpreted the Destruction of the Temple and the subsequent dispersal of Jews as
God’s vengeance against them for their faithlessness and especially for their role in the
death of Christ. This particular understanding of the Destruction of Jerusalem and its
Temple enjoyed a very long history in Christian culture, beginning in the fourth century
with Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea (esp. Historia Ecclesiastica, 3.7-8) and the Latin paraphrase of Josephus’s Jewish War by “Hegesippus” (ca. 370) preserved among the writings of
Ambrose (Pseudo-Hegessipus, De excidio urbis Hierosolymitanae 2.12.1; Vincenzo Ussani,
ed., Hegesippi qui dicitur historiae libri V, CSEL 66.2 (Vienna: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky
a.-g., 1932), 163-164). A brief, but excellent discussion of this theme in Eusebius and
Pseudo-Hegesippus is given by Heinz Schreckenberg and Kurt Schubert, Jewish Historiography and Iconography in Early and Medieval Christianity (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press,
1992), 71-73. For a powerful echo of this Christian claim within late antique Jewish culture, see Israel J. Yuval, “The Myth of the Jewish Exile from the Land of Israel: A Demonstration of Irenic Scholarship,” Common Knowledge 12 (2006): 16-33. This polemical theme
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matter of fact tone when identifying the palace of Vespasian: “There is the
palace of Emperor Vespasian, which is an exceedingly large and secure
building.”62 By contrast, his report of the palace of Titus expresses a
complex and textured view of that emperor:
There is the palace of Titus63 standing outside the city because the consul and his 300
councilors did not receive him (in triumph) since he did not fulfill their order, taking
three years to conquer Jerusalem rather than the two years they had decreed.64
While this brief report provides a faint echo of the long-standing animosity expressed by Jewish writers towards Titus, it is nevertheless significant
that Benjamin neither merely repeats nor alludes to standard rabbinic narratives regarding Titus’s punishment for having despoiled the Jerusalem
Temple.65 Rather, he gives expression to a distinctive tradition that seems
to reflect the pride felt by the local Jewish community over the ferocity
with which first-century Judeans had resisted Rome’s power.
In its depiction by Benjamin, the twelfth-century Roman-Jewish community appears deeply conscious of its role as guardian of those traditions
that it viewed as both ancient and local. But this particularly “local” knowledge is inseparable from the circulation of Jewish traditions in sources that
reached far beyond this one community. Traditions regarding Rome and
remained central to Christian historiography into the twelfth century, as for example in the
writings of Nicolaus Maniacutius (ca. 1145), on which see Wolf, “ ‘Laetare filia Sion,’ ” 423.
62
Adler, Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, *7. Compare the reports in Josephus, The Jewish
War 7.158-162 and Dio Cassius 65.15.1 regarding Vespasian’s palace as a repository for
some of the Temple vessels. Significantly, Benjamin does make explicit the connection
between the Temple vessels and Vespasian’s palace. For discussion, see Millar, “Last Year in
Jerusalem,” 101-128; Krautheimer, Rome, Profile of a City, 10.
63
The phrase “the palace of Titus” ( )היכל טיטוסis absent from Adler’s base-text, MS
British Museum Add. 27089, but is supplied in MS Epstein as well as in Asher’s text (Adler,
Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, *7 n. 24). Since without this specification the textual unit
makes little sense, we follow the reading in MS Epstein.
64
Adler, Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, *7.
65
This narrative is found in a wide variety of forms in rabbinic literature: Sifrei Deuteronomy §328; Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana 26; Leviticus Rabbah 20:5, 22:3; Deuteronomy Rabbah
21 (Lieberman); Avot de-Rabbi Natan A and B 7; Genesis Rabbah 10: 7; Ecclesiastes
Rabbah 5:8; Tanhuma, Huqat 1; Tanhuma Buber, Huqat 1; Pirqei de-Rabbi Eliezer 48;
Numbers Rabbah 18: 22; BT Gittin 56b. For a brilliant analysis of this much-discussed narrative, see Joshua Levinson, “Tragedies Naturally Performed: Fatal Charades, Parodia Sacra,
and the Death of Titus,” in Jewish Culture and Society under the Christian Roman Empire,
ed. Richard Kalmin and Seth Schwartz (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), 349-382.
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its emperors would have certainly been reinforced by rabbinic literary traditions embedded in such corpora as the Babylonian Talmud. It is difficult
to determine how local (perhaps oral) traditions interacted with written
sources, but we can detect in Benjamin’s account both general themes
common throughout the Jewish world and a distinctive local perspective.
Indeed, we might say that the traditions in Benjamin are over-determined
as, in the increasingly textualized Jewish culture of the twelfth century,
local knowledge had assimilated those written traditions, thus reinforcing
long-standing ideologies and interests.66
This dynamic interaction between local and general Jewish traditions is
particularly visible in Benjamin’s discussion of the fate of the Temple vessels, which he reports had been placed in a “cave” in Rome by Titus:
There is the cave in which Titus son of Vespasian hid the Temple vessels that he
brought back from Jerusalem. And there is (another) cave in a hill, on the side along
the banks of the Tiber River, where the righteous ones are buried, the ten martyrs
(ve-sham qevurim ha-tsaddiqim ‘asarah harugei melukhah).67
This juxtaposition between the Temple vessels and the remains of the “ten
martyrs,” both hidden in caves in Rome, is especially noteworthy. Neither
motif is a strictly local tradition. Earlier we have seen how widespread was
the tradition regarding the Temple vessels in Rome in late antique and
early medieval Jewish sources. In the case of the ten martyrs, the text fails
to specify the identity of these figures. Are they perhaps the famed rabbinic
martyrs executed, according to tradition, during the Roman persecutions
of the second century?68 Or are they instead the group of more local Italian
martyrs, mentioned in Shabbetai Donnolo’s Sefer Ḥ akhmoni, and put to
66
On the textualization of Jewish culture in Northern Europe, but with important
implications for Jewish culture generally, see Talya Fishman, “Rhineland Pietist Approaches
to Prayer and the Textualization of Rabbinic Culture in Medieval Northern Europe,”
The Jewish Studies Quarterly 11 (2004): 313-331.
67
Adler, Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, *8 (MS British Museum Add. 27089). This
phrase varies very slightly in MSS Casanatense 3097 and Epstein, which read עשרה הרוגי
( מלכותrather than )מלוכה.
68
Many late antique and early medieval sources explicitly refer to this group of ten
martyrs as “R. Akiva and his colleagues,” though other specific forms of nomenclature were
also available. See Ra‘anan S. Boustan, From Martyr to Mystic: Rabbinic Martyrology and the
Making of Merkavah Mysticism, Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 112 (Tübingen:
Mohr Siebeck, 2005), esp. 51-97.
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485
death at the hands of the Fatimid army in Oria in Southern Italy in 925?69
Or finally, are they yet another group of ten, otherwise unknown, Jewish
martyrs from the local community in Rome, as Marcus Adler insists?70
The text remains fundamentally ambiguous. But it is this very lack of
clarity that demonstrates how traditional motifs could function both
locally and trans-locally. The themes of the “Temple vessels” and of the
“ten martyrs” seem to have circulated between these two levels, entering
the lore of the Jewish community of Rome from the wider Jewish culture
and returning again to general Jewish lore, in this case re-embedded within
Benjamin’s text. Whatever their ultimate origins, these traditions remained
active and meaningful within the immediate discursive context of twelfthcentury Rome.
With the ruins of ancient Rome, unexcavated and interwoven into the
fabric of the medieval city and confronting visitor and Roman resident
alike, many erroneous, yet traditional, beliefs had sprung up over time to
enter into local Roman cultural memory.71 The two caves mentioned in
Benjamin’s account, one containing the Temple vessels and the other the
Jewish martyrs, may be a reflex of local traditions regarding entrances to
ancient spaces lying beneath the city, often formed by ancient subterranean ruins.72 The Lateran basilica, for instance, had been constructed atop
the castrum equitium singularium, the former barracks of the imperial
David Castelli, ed., Il Commento di Sabbatai Donnolo sul Libro della creazione
(Florence: Successori Le Monnier, 1880), *3: “Ten wise and righteous rabbis, of blessed
memory, were slain ()ונהרגו עשרה רבנים חכמים וצדיקים זכרם לברכה.” For discussion of this
event within the context of Shabbetai Donnolo’s life, see Andrew Sharf, The Universe of
Shabbetai Donnolo (New York, NY: Ktav, 1976), 7-13.
70
Adler, Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, 7 n. 1. Adler, however, fails to appreciate the
fact that the technical phraseology used by Benjamin ()עשרה הרוגי מלוכה, which is conventionally applied to the ten rabbinic martyrs of the second century, differs from the language
used in Shabbetai Donnolo’s report (see previous note).
71
See Bloch, “The New Fascination with Ancient Rome,” 630-633; and Gardiner,
The Marvels of Rome, xxv-xxviii.
72
Of course, the motif of the sacred cave is not unique to the Roman portion of Benjamin’s text, but is repeated later in context of the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron (Adler,
Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, 25-26 and *26-*27). Benjamin reports there that while
Christians were visiting the tombs restored by Crusaders, Jewish guards showed Jewish
pilgrims the “actual Tombs” of the Patriarchs that lay deeper within the same cave complex.
For discussion, see Maribel Dietz, Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims: Ascetic Travel
in the Mediterranean World, A.D. 300-800 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press,
2005), 218-219.
69
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bodyguard.73 The motif of the sacred cave housing supernatural power or
presence also appears in the ninth-century description in the Liber Pontificalis of a “serpent of a dire sort called basilisk in Greek,” which the people
believed inhabited a cave near S. Lucia on the Esquiline Hill.74
Most significantly, Benjamin’s descriptions of the monuments that stood
before the Lateran Palace bears striking resemblance to Christian inventories of this space and thus to the common interest among Jews and Christians in the built environment of Rome and its ancient statuary. Benjamin
reports:
Across from St. John in the Lateran are carved (statues) of Samson in marble holding
a ball as well as Absalom son of David. Likewise, Emperor Constantine, who founded
Constantinople and lent his name to the city, is caste in bronze and his horse caste
in gold.75
Similar local identifications, disseminated through the Roman community
and transmitted through pilgrims and visitors, are also to be found in
Christian “guides” to the city of Rome, including those produced during
the twelfth century. Most notably, Canon Benedict, the likely author
of the popular Mirabilia Urbis Romae (ca. 1143), also mentions the
antique sculptures standing before the Lateran basilica. According to the
Mirabilia,
At the Lateran there is a certain bronze horse called Constantine’s Horse, but it is not
so. [. . .] The Colosseum was the Temple of the sun. [. . .] Besides this there were the
supercelestial signs and the planets Sol and Luna, which were drawn along in their
proper chariots. And in the middle dwelled Phoebus, who is the god of the Sun. With
his feet on the earth he reached to heaven with his head and held in his hand an orb
Krautheimer, Corpus, 5: 24-28.21
Liber Pontificalis 2:110. Davis, Lives of the Ninth-Century Popes, 118, nt. 28, suggests
that this account of the basilisk and Pope Leo IV’s “exorcism” of it by means of a miraculous
Lateran icon in ca. 847-855 was motivated by the sound of escaping methane gas from
decaying organic material underneath current Roman buildings. In the Historia Imaginis
Salvatoris, Nicolaus Maniacutius repeats the story (transcribed in Wolf, Salus Populi
Romani, 323). An opening into the “Cave of Latona,” beneath the Basilica of Constantine
and Maxentius on the Forum, led to a medieval belief that the cave housed a “dragon” that
had been defeated by Pope Sylvester in the fourth century (Kessler and Zaccharias, Rome
1300, 103-105).
75
Adler, Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, *8.
73
74
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487
that signified that Rome ruled over the whole world. After some time the Blessed
Sylvester ordered that temple [the Colosseum] destroyed and likewise other palaces
[. . .] But he had the head and hands of the aforesaid idol laid before his Palace of the
Lateran in remembrance of the temple, and they are now falsely called by the vulgar
Samson’s Ball.76
The identification of one of the imperial sculptures as Sampson, found in
both Benedict and Benjamin, demonstrates the tenacity of such local
Roman traditions. The author himself claims to have drawn his information from multiple sources, “. . . as we have read in old chronicles, have
seen with our own eyes, and have heard the ancient men tell of.”77A local
cleric who was writing about his own city would undoubtedly have
plumbed the local sources. Both Benjamin, the Jewish visitor, and Benedict, the Roman cleric, related not only what they learned from the physical and textual evidence available to them, but also from that most
important repository of local history, the inhabitants of Rome.
It would thus seem that Benjamin’s rich and textured report on the
built environment of Rome, even if informed to some degree by traditions
drawn from wider Jewish literary culture, reveals a highly local landscape
of Roman memory. That the landscape was populated with sites and meanings adopted by all inhabitants of the city as part of their own local history
shows that the Roman Jews could make it very much their own.
Jewish Participation in the Twelfth-Century Papal Adventus:
The Intersection of Ritual with the Roman Landscape of
Cultural Memory
The Jews and Christians of twelfth-century Rome shared not only a Roman
landscape crowded with cultural memories, but also navigated a concrete
social space within which their economic, political and religious activities
intersected. Like the other scholae that constituted Rome’s civic body, the
Jewish community served as an essential participant in adventus ceremonies on those occasions when a pope entered Rome for the first time,
76
Nichols, Marvels of Rome, 9 and 28-29. Regarding this passage, Krautheimer, Rome,
Profile of a City, 193, writes: “Popular belief, from before the 1100s and into the thirteenth
century, viewed the fragments as remains of a giant Samson.”
77
Nichols, Marvels of Rome, 46. See Kinney, “Fact and Fiction,” 252.
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returned to the city from exile, or processed through the city on specific
festivals such as Easter Monday and the anniversary of the pope’s consecration.78 While scarcity of direct evidence from the Jewish community of
Rome makes it difficult to discern precisely what specific meaning the
ceremonial held for the Jews, Roman chronicles and ordines provide valuable information. Thus, contemporary (or near-contemporary) records
provide us an oblique glimpse of the highly symbolic choreography
through which the Jewish community of Rome and the papacy negotiated
the terms of their finely-tuned relationship, especially as the protocols of
the papal adventus assumed their canonical form over the course of the
twelfth century.79
The perception of Rome as a repository of the sacred past, of which both
Jews and Christians were acutely conscious, was reinforced by a dense network of civic and economic ties. We argue in this section that, although
the papal adventus enacted and made visible the boundary between
Jew and Christian, the Jews of Rome did not cultivate a separate or oppositional approach to these rites, at least in the specific context of twelfthcentury Rome. The theological meaning of the adventus, as an assertion of
Christian supersessionist ideology, did not nullify its other civic and economic dimensions. Rather, the Jews of Rome treated the adventus ceremony as an occasion for reaffirming their place—as a distinctive religious
minority—within Roman civic life.
According to custom, the popes encountered the seventeen Roman
scholae at various stopping places along the processional route. Representatives of the Jewish schola played a vital part within this broader ceremonial
structure, uttering carefully scripted verbal acclamations and actions that
made visible the unique social, political, and doctrinal relationship between
Liber Censuum, 1:297-298 [32-36]; Champagne, “Celestine III and the Jews,” 271272; Twyman, Papal Ceremonial, 186-189.
79
For an extensive study of the origins and development of the papal adventus, with an
emphasis on its distinctive twelfth-century history, see Susan Twyman, Papal Ceremonial at
Rome in the Twelfth Century, Subsidia (Henry Bradshaw Society) 4 (Woodbridge: Boydell
Press, 2002). On Jewish perceptions of this ritual, see especially Amnon Linder, “ ‘The Jews
too were not absent . . . carrying Moses’s Law on their shoulders’: The Ritual Encounter of
Pope and Jews from the Middle Ages to Modern Times,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 99
(2009): 323-395, though see our reservations to Linder’s approach presented below.
78
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489
the Jews and the pope.80 The adventus ceremony marking Calixtus II’s
entrance into Rome in 1120 seems to have been the first of the century,
and included the Jews’ acclamation in Hebrew as the papal procession
moved by. A contemporary account records that the pope, “[n]ot only
proceed[ed] past the applauding of the Greeks and Latins, but also the
confused cheering of the Jews . . .”81 Significantly, however, such trilingual
acclamations in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew had long been performed for
secular rulers as one component of their reception by their subjects. In
fact, less than a decade earlier, the Roman Jews had offered such praises in
Hebrew at the entrance of Emperor Henry V into the city.82 This evidence
suggests that acclamations in Hebrew by the Jews were meant as a demonstration of their loyalty to their Gentile ruler, who in the case of
Calixtus II’s entrance in 1120 happened to be the pope.83
The very next papal adventus held in Rome, in 1145, replaced the
laudes with a different ritual performed by the Roman Jews, one that would
endure across the centuries, namely, the presentation of a Torah-scroll to
the pope.84 Accounts of the entry-type papal adventus ceremonies celebrated in 1145, 1165, 1192 and 1198 indicate that the Jews presented the
Torah to the pope, in some cases accompanied by the laudes and in some
not. The record of Clement III’s entry-type adventus in 1188 notes that
the Jews participated “according to custom,” but does not specifically indicate whether the Torah was presented.85 Throughout its long history, the
Linder, “Ritual Encounter of Pope and Jews,” 325; Twyman, Papal Ceremonial, 201206; also Salo W. Baron, “ ‘Plenitude of Apostolic Power’ and Medieval ‘Jewish Serfdom,’ ”
in Ancient and Medieval Jewish History, ed. Leon Aryeh Feldmann (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1972), 284-307.
81
“Nec defuere Graecorum et Latinorum concentibus confusi Iudaeorum plausus . . .”
(Uodalscalcus de Egino et Herimanno, ed. Philipp Jaffé, MGH SS 12 (Hannover, 1856;
Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1963), 446, lines 34-37). See discussion of this passage in
Twyman, Papal Ceremonial, 93-94.
82
“Ante portam a Iudeis, in porta a Grecis cantando exsceptus est” (Annales Romani,
340; Twyman, Papal Ceremonial, 155).
83
Noël Coulet, “De l’intégration à l’exclusion: La place des juifs dans les cérémonies
d’entrée solennelle au Moyen Age,” Annales, economies, sociétés, civilisations 34 (1979):
672-683.
84
Twyman, Papal Ceremonial, 203-204.
85
“Quem Romani tam maiores quam minores, clerici ac laici, Iudei etian, magno cum
gaudio, cum canticis et laudibus ut mos est, eum benigne susceperunt” (Annales Romani, in
Liber Pontificalis 2:329-350 [349]).
80
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presentation of the Torah remained a prominent feature of the ritual
encounter between the Jews and the pope.
Drawing on an abundance of later sources, Amnon Linder has recently
suggested that, in addition to the mutually recognized elements of the
adventus, the Jews also cultivated a “covert” reading of the semiotics of this
ritual.86 In Linder’s sweeping structural account, this ritual encounter
between the Jews and the pope—from its very beginning in Rome and
throughout its long history in various locales—gave expression to a
coherent and singular ideology of Christian triumphalism against which
its Jewish participants positioned themselves. Yet, evidence from earlier
centuries outside of Rome, or from later centuries in Rome, should not
be applied to the Jewish community in twelfth-century Rome, where
the Roman Jews thrived in a distinctive and distinctively protected
environment.87 As a review of the available sources shows, from 1145,
when the ritual of the presentation of the Torah first became embedded
within the Roman adventus ceremonial, and throughout the twelfth century, no evidence exists that the Jews perceived in their own actions any
hidden or subversive meaning.
In December 1145, Eugenius III entered the city for the first time as
pope, and the Roman scholae came out to greet him.88 Boso recorded the
Jewish role in Eugenius’ adventus thus:89
The banner-bearers led the way with banners, they followed the scribes and judges;
also, that the Jews might not go astray, they carried on their arms the law of Moses,
with so much joy; yes, the entire Roman clergy sang psalms as one, saying: “Blessed is
For Linder’s discussion of the twelfth-century evidence, often interpreted in light
of later sources or evidence from outside Rome, see “Ritual Encounter of Pope and Jews,”
esp. 331-335, 336-342, 356-360.
87
Linder, “Ritual Encounter of Pope and Jews,” 328-331, interprets the performance of
the laudes as a key example of the “covert equivocality” that characterized Jewish participation in these papal ceremonies. But the evidence he offers for this reading relates to Ashkenazi communities in the 1180s and does not reflect the specific situation in Rome itself.
88
Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, ed. Philipp Jaffé, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Veit, 1888), 2:21
and 27. Eugenius had been forced into exile only three days after his election. He completed neither the coronation nor possessio rituals, including adventus, until he re-entered
the city and took possession of it on 21 December 1145.
89
As a Curial official holding various positions, Boso served from 1149 until at least
1181. His vita of Alexander III (1159-1181) is especially valuable for the eyewitness material on this pope’s two adventus processions (Twyman, Papal Ceremonial, 38).
86
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491
he who comes in the name of the Lord.” And so, with great joy and a shout of the
people, the pope merited to ascend to the Lateran Palace.90
Two decades later, on 23 November 1165, the same ceremonial was
re-enacted by the people for Alexander III, as he entered the city after
a lengthy period in exile:91
And then, with olive branches they escorted him with honor all the way to the Lateran
gate, with the joy and delight of all; and where the entire city clergy, solemnly putting
on vestments according to custom, already longing for him for a long time, were waiting for the adventus of the same pope; then the Jews arrived, in accordance with custom, bringing down their law on their arms; then the banner-bearers rushed together
with the banners, the grooms, the scribes, the judges, with the advocates and with a
not small multitude of the same people.92
In the Liber Censuum ca. 1192, which included a compilation of Roman
ordines, Cencius, Cardinal Boso’s successor and papal chamberlain to both
Clement III and Celestine III,93 recorded the customary contribution that
the Roman Jews offered to the pope, which they presented either at the
consecration of the pope or on the Monday following Easter:
The Jews present the Law to the Lord Pope on the road on the day of his coronation
and acclaim him; and they carry three and a half pounds of pepper and two and a half
pounds of cinnamon to the Chamber.94
90
“Precedebant signiferi cum bannis, sequebantur scriniarii et iudices; Iudei quoque
non deerant tantae letitie, portantes in humeris suis legem Mosaycam; universus etiam
Romanus clerus psallebant in unum, dicentes: Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.
Sic itaque cum magno populorum gaudio et clamore idem pontifex Lateranense palatium
conscendere meruit” (Liber pontificalis 2:387).
91
Twyman, Papal Ceremonial, 99.
92
“Mane autem facto senatores cum nobilibus et magna cleri ac populi multitudo
ex Urbe sibi honorifice occurrerunt, exhibentes sibi tanquam animarum suarum pastori
obedientiam debitam et consuetam reverentiam. Et exinde cum ramis olivarum usque ad
portam Lateranensem ipsum honorifice cum omni gaudio et letitia conduxerunt; ibique
totus Urbis clerus, de more sollempniter indutus, eiusdem pontificis iamdiu desideratum
prestolabatur adventum; ibi advenerant Iudei, ex more legem suam deferentes in brachiis;
ibi concurrerant signiferi cum bandis, stratores, scriniarii, iudices, cum advocatis et non
modica eiusdem populi multitudine” (Liber Pontificalis 2:413).
93
Liber censuum, 1:1-5, at 1: “. . .ego Centius quondam felicis recordationis Clementis
pape III, nunc vero domini Celestini pape III camerarius. . . .”
94
“Judei vero representant domno pape in die coronationis sue legem in via et ei faciunt
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Cencius’s report in particular highlights the mercantile function of the
Jewish community of Rome within the ritual as suppliers of rare and
expensive spices. Benjamin’s report that Rabbi Yeḥiel served as the steward
of the papal household likewise underscores the centrality of practical
considerations in the relationship between the papacy and the merchant
elite of the Jewish community.95 The economic dimension of the Jewish
role in the adventus ceremony and the religious meaning of formal Jewish
acclamation of papal authority co-exist and are mutually reinforcing.96
Although texts that describe adventus from later centuries may indeed
reflect the Jews’ “dual discursive competence” within the ritual,97 the
sources from the twelfth century do not support Linder’s claim that a
covert Jewish meaning had existed from the beginning. Sources from later
centuries should not be extrapolated back in time to explain events taking
place in the twelfth century. In fact, the Roman Jews had much to gain
from participating in a civic/liturgical ritual that acknowledged their
acceptance of the ruling authority and maintained their roles as legitimate
members of the civic community.
It must also be emphasized that, during the twelfth century, no fewer
than six popes issued Sicut Judaeis in an attempt to protect the Jewish
community.98 Evidence of a quid pro quo relationship between Sicut Judaeis
and the Jews’ participation in adventus is not found in the sources, although
certainly the popes of that century who conducted adventus rituals also
decreed Sicut Judaeis during their pontificates.99 Rather than point forward
to the increasingly vexed relations between Jews and the papacy in
laudes; et III libras et dimidiam piperis et duas libras et dimidiam cinnamoni afferunt ad
cameram” (Liber censuum, 1:306 [56]; Twyman, Papal Ceremonial, 193).
95
Adler, Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, *6.
96
Although Linder notes in his discussion of this passage the significant fiscal and mercantile roles the Jewish community were expected to play (“Ritual Encounter of Pope and
Jews,” 359), he downplays these functions in his overall interpretation.
97
Linder, “Ritual Encounter of Pope and Jews,” 356.
98
Solomon Grayzel, “The Papal Bull Sicut Judeis,” in Ben-Horin, Studies and Essays in
Honor of Abraham A. Neuman, eds. Meir Ben-Horin, Bernard D. Weinryb, and Solomon
Zeitlin (Leiden: Brill, 1962), 243-280; Kenneth R. Stow, “The Church and the Jews,” in
The New Cambridge Medieval History 5, ed. David Abulafia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 216; Champagne, “Celestine III and the Jews,” 273-275.
99
Twyman, Papal Ceremonial at Rome, 204, asserts that, if the presentation of the Torah
in later twelfth-century adventus was basically a “recognition of sovereignty, it seems highly
probable that its introduction was also related to the promulgation of Sicut Judaeis.”
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493
subsequent centuries, the gradual crystallization of both Sicut Judaeis and
the papal adventus ceremony in fact provide additional insights into the
perspective that the Jewish population of Rome had on their city in
the particular context of the twelfth century.
Conclusion
The distinctive nature of the Jewish community thriving within Rome, the
capital of Christendom, set it apart from other communities of the Jewish
diaspora during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Roman Jewish
community enjoyed particular prominence as a center of Talmudic study
and as the source of legal guidance and diplomatic assistance to the communities of Northern Europe. As a result of their long-standing settlement
within the city, these same Jews had also established a close relationship
with the papacy, enhanced by the patronage of the Pierleoni nobles. While
steadfastly maintaining their distinctive religious traditions and rituals,
these Jews also participated in papal ceremonial as a vital component of
their Roman civic duty.
The Christian landscape of twelfth-century Rome, layered with artifacts
that served as reminders both of its past in imperial antiquity and its present as a Christian city, was likewise saturated with Jewish cultural memory.
Christian tradition had long associated the Lateran basilica with Jewish
history, an association that was intensified by competition with St. Peter’s
for the coveted appellation of mater et caput. The claims of the Lateran to
possess the sacred vessels from the Jerusalem Temple played an important
role in this contest. Such public disputes reverberated beyond Rome’s
Christians into the local Jewish community. Benjamin of Tudela’s report
that the famous bronze columns from Solomon’s Temple survived in
Rome was reinforced by prevalent belief among Rome’s Jews that the city
had been a repository for various sacred relics following the destruction of
the Temple. Benjamin’s report on the Jewish community of Rome tapped
into widely disseminated Jewish traditions about the city. Yet, several of
its distinctive elements, especially its highly specific references to ancient
artifacts and their locations also discussed in Roman-Christian sources,
suggest a more local Roman perspective and thus attest to the salience of
these traditions among Roman Jews.
The Jews and Christians of Rome were organized into distinct communities, the boundaries of which were not only reinforced on a daily
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M. T. Champagne, R.S. Boustan / Medieval Encounters 17 (2011) 464-494
basis but were regularly performed on ceremonial occasions such as the
papal adventus. Nevertheless, these communities remained bound together
by a highly localized discourse about the past that suffused their shared
urban landscape with a surfeit of memory and meaning.
Acknowledgement
We would like to express our sincerest thanks to Patrick Geary, who
prompted us to initiate our long-distance collaboration on this project.