"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

Abstract

This study describes and analyzes the ritual encounter between Pope and Jews as it was performed in Rome between the high middle ages and the mid-nineteenth century. An interfaith ceremony, it acted out the paradox of an officially tolerated religious minority within a self-declared homogeneous Christian society as well as the officially authorized solution to that anomaly. The forms and meanings of this ceremony, in its three main types – the entry-type, the Eastertide type, and the Coronation/Possesso type, are studied diachronically and synchronically on two interconnected planes – those of the Christian and the Jewish establishments and publics which cooperated in the production of this ceremony. It highlights the different types of motivations – from the religious and the sociopolitical to the legal-constitutional – as well as the governmental/communal structures and cultural traditions (e.g. imperial ceremonials, urban guilds' celebrations and ecclesiastical and Jewish liturgies and customs) that came into play in its course, the explicit messages of a multimedia rhetoric of subjection and dominance broadcast to the public at large – Christian and Jewish actors and spectators, as well as the implied equivocal and even subversive messages it occasionally transmitted to the Jewish public. Several primary sources are published in this study for the first time.