Dr. Marie T Champagne

"The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) was groundbreaking for having introduced to medieval Europe a series of canons that sought to regulate encounters between Christians and Jews and Muslims. Its canon 68 demanded that Jews and Muslims wear distinguishing dress, in order to prevent Christians from entering into illicit sexual relations with them, restricted the movement of Jews in public spaces during Holy Week, and exhorted secular authorities to punish Jews who in any way "insult" or blaspheme against Christ himself. Other canons sought to exercise greater control over moneylending, to provide relief to Christian borrowers, to extract tithes from Jews who held Christian properties as pledges, and prohibited Jews from exercising power as public officials over Christians. The canons condemned converts who preserved elements from their former religion, promoted a fifth Crusade to the East, exempted Crusaders from taxes and from interest payments to Jewish moneylenders, restricted trade with Muslims or Saracens, and condemned Christians who provided arms or assistance to Saracens. The Council's canons affected the missionary efforts of the late medieval Church and its attempts to convert Jewish and Muslim minorities, and established essential guidance on minority relations not to be surpassed until Vatican II in the 1960s."-- Publisher's website.

In mid-twelfth-century Rome, one clerical scholar, Nicolaus Maniacutius, honed his philological skills as he endeavoured to return the text of the Psalter to the original. Maniacutius met the challenge of editing Scripture in an unusual manner as a Christian Hebraist, consulting with Jewish scholars to compare the Vulgate Book of Psalms with the Jews’ Hebrew text. In doing so, he followed the example set by his scholarly predecessor, St Jerome, centuries earlier, as well as his contemporary, Hugh of St Victor. While scholars have acknowledged that Maniacutius consulted with Jews and learned Hebrew, the identity of the one or more Jewish scholar(s) remains obscure. The Sephardic scholar Abraham ibn Ezra lived in Rome c.1140-1143, and while there wrote a commentary on the Psalms. Nicolaus also revised the Psalter and wrote of a ‘learned Spanish Jew’. This article explores the phenomenon of Christian Hebraism in mid-twelfth-century Rome through the life and work of Maniacutius, and presents evidence that supports Cornelia Linde’s suggestion that Abraham ibn Ezra was the ‘learned Spanish Jew’ with whom Maniacutius worked. In addition, textual evidence supports Maniacutius’s work within an informal, cross-confessional discourse community of Jewish and Christian scholars.

Within European manuscript culture in the twelfth-century, a vast network of monastic and cathedral scholars circulated texts between their institutions, copying them, incorporating them into other manuscripts, and, in turn, preserving them. This study of the early circulation of two texts by Nicolaus Maniacutius († ca. 1145), a Cistercian scholar in Rome, reveals that they were incorporated into other codices in Rome, London, and northern England through different types of scholarly networks, and suggests some of the modes of transmission. How these texts were circulated clearly indicates how each text was valued, and demonstrates how “intellectual property” was valued in twelfth-century Europe.

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.

The distinctive contribution of Roman Jewry13 to the ceremonial of Easter Monday derived from the obligation of its members to render specific and very public rituals to the pope, including the displaying of the Hebrew Bible and their offering of both acclamations and customary pepper tributes, all of which Cencius,14 chamberlain to Celestine III, recorded in his Liber censuum or Book of Taxes of c. 1192:15

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.16