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The Good of the Church, The Good of the State: The Popes and Jewish Money

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Kenneth R. Stow
Kenneth R. Stow*
Affiliation:
University of Haifa
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Extract

In the early thirteenth century the papal cardinal legate in France, Robert of Courson, painted the business of lending in wholly Utopian colours. Should the pope decree, he said, that lending must cease and all men must earn their sustenance by the sweat of their brow, ‘Thus would be removed all usurers, all factious men and all robbers; thus would charity flourish and the fabric of the churches again be builded; and thus would all be brought back again to its pristine state.’ The prospect that acting to eliminate lending would so smoothly result in social perfection, one might expect, should have propelled the Catholic Church, led by the popes, to have made a frontal assault on lending, especially that carried on by Jews. It did not. Only more than four centuries later, in 1682, did the papacy decide to end a policy of actually condoning Jewish lending, and only then did it irrevocably close down the Jewish loan banks in the Papal State.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 29: Christianity and Judaism , 1992 , pp. 237 - 252
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1992

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References

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50 J.T.S., mic. 9486, fol. 98: ‘Ne quis autem existimet dieta duntaxac recte procedere secundum Politicam Christianam, quam Pseudo politici vocant politicam de trivio, crassam, communem, omnibus obviam, ideo examinanda sunt edam secundum Politicam Ulani, quam ipsi vocant politicam de penetrali, subtilem, nobilem…. Apud pseudopoliticos scientia regnandi seu ratio status nihil honestate metitur; sed quicquid ad consequendam, tuendam, augendamque potentiam principis utile est, illud unum duntaxat est bonum, iustum, licitum atque honestum.’

51 J.T.S., mic. 9486, fol. 98. Oncejews worked ‘in fodinis, in agris, in mechanicis… [but] at hoc tempore divites facti ob transitum ab honesto corporis labore ad otium turpissimi questus, eo evaserunt, ut Hebraeorum gens quoad personas, sit statui non minus quam principi prorsus inutilis et infructuosa mane neque in aula, neque in magistratu, neque in militia, neque in mercatura, neque in mechanicis, neque in agricultura auget civile corpus huiusmodi artium et officiorum… unde … papa iudaeos ad laborandum manibus cogat.’

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