. Anti-Semitism or, more properly for the Middle Ages, anti-Judaism, was the set of attitudes toward Jews that derived from regarding their religion as inferior to Christianity and themselves as the heirs of deicides. By their persistence in adhering to their religion, Jews, it was widely believed, convicted themselves as approvers of the killing of Jesus. Modern anti-Semitism, contrary to medieval anti-Judaism, is rooted in an ethnic notion of Judaism. Modern anti-Semites regard converts to Christianity from Judaism and their lineage as Jews or as having “Jewish blood” and, therefore, as objects of contempt. Yet there is little evidence that converts or their offspring faced such hatred in the Middle Ages, a few isolated incidents aside, until the huge wave of forced conversions in Spain in the late 14th century and after.
Medieval religious attitudes toward Jews were mediated by the political, social, and economic concerns of various segments of the Christian population in France. Consequently, neither governmental nor popular actions against the Jews should be ascribed merely to religious bigotry. It would nonetheless be naive to think that such actions can be explained without recourse to the fact of religious hostility.
As early as Agobard of Lyon, or even earlier in stories by Gregory of Tours, many of the higher clergy in France articulated theological positions stressing the inferiority of contemporary Judaism. One commonplace asserted that the wine of Sinai had degenerated into the vinegar of postbiblical Judaism. Some French theologians and canonists also shared with people untrained in formal theology cruder attitudes toward Jews and Judaism, attitudes rooted in the notion of the inferiority of Judaism and the corruption of morals that that inferiority was said to imply. The solidarity of the Jewish communities in the face of this contempt savored of clannishness to many critics, and the clannishness savored of a dangerous attraction to secrecy. By the end of the 12th century, many Frenchmen had come to accept the idea that the Jews ritually reenacted the crucifixion of Jesus by kidnaping innocent Christian children to torment in occulto. By the end of the 13th century, there is abundant evidence of the widespread acceptance of the notion that Jews indulged in secret curses and slurs of the Christian religion in their religious books, notably the Talmud; that they were required to ingest innocent Christian blood for secret rituals; and that they contrived to get their hands on and desecrate the consecrated host of the Christian eucharist. They were said to lead simpleminded people, particularly servingwomen and wet nurses in their employ, away from the Christian faith. The men were stereotyped as excessively wealthy and avaricious moneylenders and as occasional seducers of Christian women.
It is impossible to know what proportion of the Christian population in France, or anywhere else for that matter, indulged in these attitudes, whether urban anti-Judaism was more intense than rural, whether class or level of education worked effectively to mitigate or exacerbate attitudes. Many high churchmen and many kings did not take certain of the charges seriously. While Philip Augustus, for example, believed that Jews carried out ritual murders, Louis IX seems never to have countenanced the allegation. Nonetheless, actions taken by the royal government, by baronial, ecclesiastical, and municipal authorities, and by vigilantes point up the pervasiveness of these attitudes. Segregation of Jews from Christians became widespread and was increasingly stringent from the 12th through the 14th century. Judicial murders of Jews, tolerated by the count of Blois in 1171 and by ecclesiastics in Troyes in 1288, originated from charges of malicious murder against them. Philip the Fair himself permitted the execution of a Jew of Paris in 1290 for allegedly desecrating the host. And large-scale massacres in 1321 were founded on the rumor of a plot between lepers and Jews, supported by the Muslims of Granada, to poison the wells of France. Expulsion, the ultimate policy of governments hostile to Jews, secured to the lords who pursued it in France the seizure and liquidation of Jewish property to their profit.
Jordan, William Chester. The French Monarchy and the Jews from Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.
Langmuir, Gavin. “Anti-Judaism as the Necessary Preparation for Anti-Semitism.” Viator 2(1971):383–90.
Poliakov, Léon. The History of Anti-Semitism, I: From the Time of Christ to the Court Jews, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vanguard, 1965.
Trachtenberg, Joshua. The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Antisemitism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944.
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