Collect enough one-sided views of history, and the resulting mosaic might, with its lacunae, parallels, and contradictions, begin to convey the spirit and essence of medieval life in Southern France. Take Bernard Gui, ( b.-1261) to start. The words of Bernard Gui themselves furnish the proof of a collision of worlds especially in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. “The Conduct of the Inquisition of Heretical Depravity,” composed near the end of his life( Wakefield 375) records, in its fifth part, Gui’s perception of “the separate frauds, devices, and wiles.., (Ibid. 376) [of the ] Manichaeans, Waldenses, Beguins and Beguines, Jews, Apostate Jews, sorcerers, demons, “whose noxious influence is exceedingly harmful to the purity of the faith.” (Ibid. 378). As ” Languedoc lay at the end of a main trade route that ran through Italy and into the east….new ideas and new peopled settled in Occitania, bringing diverse religious practices. In addition to the Cathars, the area was home to Jews, Mohammedans, and Waldensians…” [i] If only on the basis of his handbook, it would be possible to consider Gui a pioneer in his field. Gui was a cleric who officially integrated religious intolerance and hatred, sanctioned violence and anti-Semitism into foundational Christian doctrine and practice in order extinguish heresy through the elimination of heretics. But he was also a pioneer in applying historiographical methodology to the study of heresy, Ironically, the heretical groups he sought to exterminate outlived him: the Cathars, by a couple of hundred years ( not counting their New Age resurrection); reforming Christians, the Waldensians and the Jews, still.
Yet it is not possible to account for the array of religious pluralism Gui despised, or comprehend the scope of medieval ferment ( social, intellectual, political, and spiritual ) which characterized Provence and Languedoc during Gui’s lifetime, as well as before and after, in his work alone or from any single source. Gui’s labels tell little about what issues were significant to the heretics themselves, the diversity of thought of members of each group, their spiritual realities and the simultaneous the political, social, geographic, and economic realities which governed their lives. He is interested in their theologies and practices only to the degree that such knowledge will enable the Church to entrap them. While heretics and believers coexisted with each other in the same towns, villages , and cities, their awareness and ideas about each other theologically varied, as did their ways of dealing with the political and religious establishment and what they themselves considered most important.
What observations can yet another twenty-first century perspective add? What can be known from historical evidence about the lives and works of heretics and believers is fulsome in some cases, scanty in others; there are many historical documents which represent a single aspect of life in Languedoc ….but few scholars address worlds in tandem. Talmudists and troubadours and bishops and Beguines are rarely, if ever, on the same page of the same history book. A contrapuntal examination of documentary and other historical material, following Gui’s methodology, vivifies the thirteenth and fourteenth century in Southern France. Like the dangerous excitement of a medieval fair –theological and political jousting, random violence, exotic and homely sights, human passion, longing and pleasure are in evidence. Let us see what emerges through their juxtaposition and decontextualization. Decontextualization, in this case, means examining the most local of histories —the immediate cultural context –in a cross-cultural and broader historical context.
Languedoc: regional themes, character, and history
What is now the south of France, was, during most of the medieval period, more culturally and politically aligned and identified with Spain than northern France. It was an area discrete in its language, its openness to diverse cultural and international influences such as urbanization, trade, secular, and religious ideas, and in its predominantly tolerant and casual attitude to religious pluralism. Over the course of several centuries, its interior political boundaries were a dynamic patchwork– drawn and redrawn as church and feudal lords vied for control, only to be ultimately preempted by royalty. In such medieval cities of Nîmes, Montpellier, Béziers, Narbonne, ( formerly Roman cities), Carcassone, and the great Toulouse, “surpassed in size only by Rome and Venice in ….1200″ ( O’Shea 2000: 18), and places like Albi, Lunel, Posquières, Lyon, Montségur, Jews and Christians and heretics worshipped, wrote, sang, studied, traveled, traded, argued, fought, and died, or were massacred or expelled. “In the twelfth century, there were synagogues in Béziers, Lodève, Lunel, Mende, Montpellier, Nîmes, Pamiers, Pèzenas, Posquières, Toulouse and St-Gilles, and Narbonne had some three hundred Jewish families in the second half of the century, suggesting a population of 1200-1500 people.”[iii] There were an equal number of Cathar leaders in Languedoc and maybe ten times that of believers, the leading population of Christian reformers-heretics. (Costen 1997: 74). The bishoprics of Narbonne and Toulouse dated to the third century. (Costen 18). There were over 160 Cluniac monasteries by this time (Costen 21) and nineteen Cistercian monasteries had existed before 1150 (Costen 40). The courts of Foix, Comminges, Béziers, Toulouse and Narbonne ere patrons of the troubadors[iv], who sang of their ladies’ love, unfullfilled, but thrilling, while the populace of the nearly eighty towns were entertained by the great fairs at St. Gilles, Moissac, and Carcassone and Nimes. There, Italian merchants came to exchange spices, alum, dyestuffs, silk, carpets and perfumes for cloth. (Costen 37). If it was a time of deep piety, it was also one of controversy — rational (Aristotelian) and mystical thought challenged traditional religious conceptualization and interpretation for Jews as well as Christians.
In many respects, it was as difficult to separate local from global issues as cause from effect. For example, the Crusades, the Diaspora, the rise of an urban middle class, the growth of cities, the demise of feudalism and its attendant consequences, ecclesiastical and political reorganization, weather and climate, methods of agriculture and trade, developments in the Islamic Empire, changing roles of women, and, later, the Black Death overlay the particular and local experience of all the inhabitants. Those common actors would be experienced differently by each religious persuasion; each group’s cultural behavior would be differentially influenced by them. The domination of each group’s society by religion was another of the shared characteristics; heresy/ religious purity was a concern common to each community.
In the thirteenth century, the following widely known historical events constituted the backdrop against which less familiar events in Languedoc unfolded : the Fourth Crusade in 1202-1204, the Children’s Crusade in 1202, the three years of the Fifth Crusade in 1218, the short-lived Sixth Crusade, the Seventh Crusade around the middle of the century, the defeat of the Moors in Spain by the Christian armies, the embrace of the south of France by the crown, expansion and building of cathedrals and cities, the lives and influence of Thomas Aquinas, the expanding influence of Sts. Francis, Dominic, Maimonides, and the Kabbala, the commercial revolution and the question of ursury[v]; the transition of anti-Jewish sentiment into anti-Semitic practice; the publication of the Zohar and the burning of the Talmud; the creation of the Inquisition; the early career of Bernard Gui. Less widely known, (except by those more directly affected) but also characteristic of the period, are the massacres for heresy in France, such as the Albigensian Crusade, and those in Germany, ( the Blood libel of Troyes, the Rindfleisch persecutions) and in England, (the ritual murder charge at Lincoln) (Seltzer 1980: 316)., the expulsions, dispersions and migrations of the Jews , the proceedings of the Fourth Lateran Council and its effects, the controversial / heretical/ mystical thought of Meister Eckhart[vi].
The Church, whose evolution was a product of a rural society, lacked tools to address social problems in an urban terrain and among a rising middle class. The promiscuous and worldly practices of many clerics impressed the laity with the failure of Church morality more than an example of the Church’s moral authority. During the late medieval period, both Christian populace and Church increasingly felt the need for reform of the Church, but the Church, adamant about retaining and expanding its power, did not intend lay reformers as agents of change. It focused its reforming zeal on their elimination. In addition to a rethinking of a theological stance towards the Jews, economic and political considerations combined with the spiritual to channel the Church’s anti-Jewish activity into a new direction.
The Church’s thought and authority was not, in fact, monolithic: Pope, bishops, and mendicant friars did not operate in a hierarchical, consistent, or coordinated manner. For example, in the north, despite papal fiats of protection for ” their” Jews, bishops allowed church sanctuaries to be overrun and Jews massacred.
Innocent III, whose Legate in Languedoc, Peter of Castelnau, would be murdered in 1208 in an attempt to purge the region of heresy, became Pope on January 8, 1198[vii]. The new pope was invested with policy along with his new office. Innocent had inherited an anti-Cathar program from earlier times; Pope Calistus II preached against the Cathars in 1119 in Toulouse, and Bernard of Clairvaux was rudely rebuffed for his efforts by townfolk. The church would occasionally be joined in its anti-heretic movement by secular lords. For example,” in 1249 Count Raymond VII of Toulouse…”would cause “…eighty confessed heretics to be burnt in his presence (newadvent.org). Church councils had proclaimed against the Cathar heresy in Lombiers in 1161, in Tours in 1163, and at the Lateran council in 1169, anathema was pronounced against it and all Cathar believers.[viii]
The innovative expanding authority of the mendicant orders was frequently shaped by the personality and religious zeal of its leaders such as Dominic Guzman, later St. Dominic, rather than the papacy. As a young priest, he had been dispatched by Innocent III to preach in the south of France, to counter the growing influence of the Cathars, though the attempt proved unsuccessful. A decade later, at the end of the Albigensian crusade, he organized the world-wide and influential order of preachers. St. Thomas Acquinas was a Dominican; so was Bernard Gui. The Dominicans were also noted for confiscating and burning Maimonides Guide to the Perplexe in 1232.[ix]
Lay preaching and vows of poverty were common characteristics of both mendicant friars and some Christian reformers. But that was the end of the similarity. Heresy was conceived by the church to mean deviation from revealed truth as taught by itself. But “revealed truth” to heretics such as Cathars, Beguines, Waldensians, and Jews [x] was text based, not church based. And, apparently, many inhabitants of the region had inhaled , to varying degrees, the atmosphere of mysticism which hovered over the shores of the Mediterranean before moving inland and had understood revelation in its own way.
In 1179, ten years after the Cathars had been anathemized, Peter Waldo (Valdes, in French) would approach Pope Alexander III to approve his vow of poverty and confession of faith. But as his message took hold, he shared the Cathars’ fate; the Archbishop of Lyons condemned him and, in 1184, the papal bull of Lucius III excommunicated him and his followers, the Waldensians. “From surviving Waldensian literature, a ‘theology of the two ways’ can be discerned. Life… will be marked as good or evil, ruled by sin or gra the idea of purgatory, transubstantiation, prayers for the dead, and submission to the Pope and prelates, believing instead in the priesthood of all believers; they were pacifists, and refused to take oaths. The importance of oaths at that time did not lie in establishing the credibility of the individual so much as obedience and consonance with a hierarchical system; to refuse to swear and oath was to reject law. Waldensians believed in the Bible alone as the ultimate authority, as an object of study and meditation for everyone which Valdes had arranged to have translated into the vernacular ( to democratize access to it.) Gui says, “…in order to give their words greater weight among their listeners when they preach from the Gospels, the Epistles, and the exempla and sentences of the saints, they say by way of proof, ‘That is found in the Gospel, or the Epistle of St. Peter……also they tell and teach their believers that true penance and purgatory for sin come only in this life, not in another…”( Wakefield 397). They were pacificistic, accepted women as preachers, and in the early days, placed an emphasis on good works, poverty, and celibacy. The movement originated ” in Lyons, where there was also a strong Jewish community.” Rebecca Anderson notes[xi] that places that accepted Jews were also tolerant of Waldensians. “It is known that later Waldensians were able Hebraicists; quite possibly earlier members of the sect learned Hebrew from Jewish teachers as well….like the Jews, they were strongly opposed to the creation and worship of icons and images. There is evidence that in the region of Provence, Jews and Waldensians lived peacefully side by side for many years.” (Ibid.) The persecution of other heretics adversely affected Waldensians in France–seven were put to death in 1214 at Maurillac.[xii]
A second mendicant order, the Franciscans, took shape following the death of St. Francis in 1226. The order experienced a split with the less materialistic branch breaking away to form the Spiritual Franciscans based in Provence. The correlation between this group and the Beghards, and the Beguines, (primarily a Christian women’s movement active in the low countries) is dependent upon the scholar who is analyzing it, but all agree that in the thirteenth century, followers whose ideas originated with the Francisans were classified as heretics. as such, they were prosecuted, especially at Montpellier, one of the handful of cities of Languedoc where multiple faiths were centered. A group of Spiritual Franciscans would defy Pope John XXII, and in 1318 be tried by the Inquisition at Marseilles; twenty five would be burnt alive.[xiii] The Inquisition records the confession of (Na)Prous Boneta, imprisoned at Carcassone, on August 6, 1325. Her words reflect her knowledge and awareness of the pluralistic environment. She held the authority of the Dominicans and Franciscans to be more authentic than authority exercised by the Pope speaking for the Church. While her words don’t necessarily indicate particular knowledge of specific Jewish beliefs and practices, they do reflect a disgust with the Church’s persecution of the Jews. “Again this pope matches the evil of Herod, for Herod killed the innocents and in a similar way this pope kills many innocents….” She included people of all religions in her prayer, ” Lord, may you have mercy on all the sins of the Jews, the Saracens, and all the peoples of the world..” and elsewhere in her confession stresses repentance, not coercion as the key to God’s mercy. “Just as Abraham’s sons by the free woman had twelve sons who were patriarchs, so this new order of Preachers, if it observes its discipline as before, will have twelve sons by this spirit and these are called the twelve gates in holy scripture and God will rehabilitate the Jewish people through this order….” and “Again she says that all men and women, whether Christian or Jew, Saracen or anything else, who believe in the work of the Holy Spirit will be saved…”[xiv] While she shared the general view that Jews crucified the body of Christ, she indicts the church for crucifying the spirit of Christ.
The Waldensians and the Beguines were operating in an essentially conventional Christian frame of reference, and for that reason, their attempts at reformation could evolve and did. In the following example, from A Profession of Faith by Waldes of Lyon in 1180[xv], italics represent Waldes’ addition to the standard formula.
“We believe that the devil was made evil not by nature but by his will…. We believe in heart and confess in words the resurrection of this flesh which we bear and no other. We firmly believe and affirm that judgment is still to come and that each person will receive either reward or punishment for those things committed in this flesh. We do not doubt that alms, and the mass and other good works can be of benefit to the faithful who have died. And since according to James the Apostle, ‘faith without works is dead’ we have renounced the world; whatever we had we have given to the poor …….We wholeheartedly confess and believe that persons remaining in the world, owning their own goods, giving alms and doing other good works out of their own and oberving the commandments of the Lord , may be saved.. .” (Wakefield 1969:208).
The essential Christian credo is maintained, amplified, and qualified.( usually in terms of addressing clergy power.)
However, the essence of their heresy was dissimilar to that of the Cathar and Jews. The soul of those groups’ doctrine was irreconcilable with the Church’s. The dualist basis of Cathar belief — and its subsequent reinvention of Christianity– and the Jewish insistence on traditional monotheism and an unfulfilled messianic promise (thus rejecting Christianity in its entirety ) doomed both groups. Inquistor Gui’s notebook was intended to record and evaluate societal dissonance from his(the Church’s ) religious point of view. Heresy, as the obverse of extreme piety , always coexists with it, in the opinion of some historians, says Wakefield.[xvi] He offers a couple of additional popular interpretations of that phenomenon. Certainly times were hard and times were changing; to attribute such ferment as a protest against material conditions, or a class struggle seems as rational as any other explanation.
These particular populations active in Languedoc during this period catalyzed responses from the church which would persist far into the future and far beyond Southern France. One Languedocian group was predominantly indigenous and changed only its religious practices and beliefs without changing other cultural aspects of its life; the other, predominantly immigrant, (even if their settlements dated to Roman times), together with its alien beliefs, arrived simultaneously. Yet the guiding principles of both groups were not new. Cathar dualism could have been an innovation, but its dualist thought could also have derived from Zoroastrian teaching, Hellenistic thought, especially Neo-Platonism, even Gnosticism, the dualism of Marcionite and Manichean communities, or the comparatively recent relative Bogomilian dualism. (Wakefield 1969: 16-19). Jewish monotheism predated Christianity. It was conceiving of human responsibility, good and evil , ( especially the origin and nature of evil, ) differently from Gui’s peers and progenitors which hurtled Jews and Cathars into collision with the Church. It is in the cities themselves where opponents confront each other, both as communities and as individuals. What is remarkable is that though history books generally give the impression that these confrontations were continual (sieges notwithstanding) or sharply demarcated comprehensive events, primary source material contradicts that reality. To use the popular medieval image of a joust, the encounters, though fierce, were pulsed, sometimes ritualized– and in between, the adversaries waged war on other fronts, dallied in romances, toiled over scholarly works, traveled, told stories, wrote poetry and songs, and taught.
The Cities
To the list of the previously mentioned cities, it is important to footnote Albi which is universally most centrally identified with the twenty year long Albigensian Crusade, (having given its a baptismal name,) and St. Gilles, in respect to the lesser known Jewish Synod of 1216, which had impact only on a local level. The synod was convened in response to the Fourth Lateran Council; representatives from Marseille and Narbonne hoped to prevent implementation of some of its draconian provisions.[xvii]
Since the sixteenth century, it has been possible to visit, by traversing canals, practically all of the cities which are living monuments to medieval persecution in the South of France. The details of the horrible massacres carried out by the Church –torture, bloodletting, destruction- are currently gleefully sanitized and poly-wrapped for the economic cause of historical tourism today, in which religion is just another marketing angle. Within a day or two of each other by barge are places which were also on Benjamin of Tudela’s itinerary, recorded in parasangs.[xviii]
Southern France was notable for other aspects of culture. ” From distant Cairo, Maimonides singled out Provence as one of the greatest centers of study in a period of general eclipse.”(Twersky: 1961: 24). Take, for example, Béziers. Béziers, a major center of Languedoc, on the river Orb, had been a bourgh since 1100, and its synagogue dated to the same time. Romans planted the first vineyards here and it had been a wine center since. For Jews, Béziers was a center for Talmudic scholarship, part of a “network of flourishing schools and academies…”(Twersky 24) The relationship between Jews and Christians were complex. The viscounties of Béziers, Carcassonne, and Nîmes[xix] belonged to the house of Trencavel (Ibid. 36). Attacks against Jews were a regular ritual; during Holy Week, Jews were traditionally stoned on Palm Sunday at the bishop’s urging. (Twersky 1961:21)., Under Raymond Trencavel, in the twelfth century, they were allowed to pay Easter fines instead of face the usual beating and humiliation. (For this, and for his tolerance of support of heretics, Raymond was later excommunicated.) And later, as Jews had not taken part in a plot against Raymond, the feudal lord, they were exempted from a massacres of the inhabitants in 1169 when his son, Roger Trencavel, Viscount of Bézier-Carcassone, recaptured the city. Roger also elevated Jews to influential administrative and notarial positions. ” …Nathan, another Jew, was one of Roger’s stewards.”( ibid.) However, Roger’s Jews were required to pay a special tax.(Costen 38).
Twersky’s analysis indicates a large prevalence of “intensely pietistic, partially ascetic tendencies among the learned ” in the academies of the Languedoc cities as well as a certain independence of thought. Two Bézier scholars are singled out in the in the rhymed dedication of the Sefer ha-Shem of Abraham ibn Ezra, and are identified with those contemporary trends in Jewish mysticism– two hasidim, Abraham b. Hayyim and Isaac b. Judah. Also, a group of scholars at Béziers were recipients of a rebuke from Rabad, Rabbi Abraham ben David, for “questioning and rejecting his decisions” (Twersky 38); apparently they sided with the majority of Provencal Talmudic scholars in how they regarded Maimonides.
By the end of the twelfth century, Catharism, also, was well established in Languedoc among the general public and the nobility as well, with even its own church organization. By 1177, new Cathar bishoprics were established at Toulouse[xx] and Carcassone, in addition to the previous one at Albi. (Costen 61). Contemporary commentators (Costen 70) could confirm the spread and nature of its followers. “Guilhem de Puylaurens remarked that ‘even the nobles, scorning authority and of their own accord and without any opposition, followed one or other of the heretics’ (Duvernoy 1967g:25) Pierre de Vaux-de-Cernay “…..said ‘the lords of the Languedoc almost all protected and harboured the heretics, showing them an excessive love and defending them against God and the Church (Guébin et Maisonneuve 1951:5) “(Costen 70) Costen describes some of the Cathars among the nobility: “vassels of the Trencavel lords of Carcassone and B’ziers…Blanca, wife of Sicard II, he daughter Mabila, who became a perfecta,” …. another, Geralda, wife of the lord of Lavaur and killed in Simon de Montfort’s attack, a third, Esclarmonde, wife of the lord of Niort, who, with her children, was condemned for heresy. (Costen 70)..” The count of Foix attended the …consoling[xxi] of his sister in 1204 and appointed his wife as head of a Cathar convent he founded at Dun and his sister, leader of his convent at Pamiers.” (Costen 70).
There may be less known about Jewish women of Languedoc than their Cathar counterparts.[xxii] Cathar women in medieval French society, who did not choose to live as married women found places in the Cathar convents, and girls as little as nine, from impoverished families, might be placed there. (Costen 74). Costen suggests that the Church’s controlling attitude on sex and marriage ( which benefited its coffers, as the number of property heirs diminished) might have been a force in the attractiveness of Catharism to the local inhabitants, who resented the Church’s mandates. The Cathars’ very indifference to marriage contributed to a relaxation of marital consanguinity considerations. However, Catharism appealed not just to the nobility, but to the pressured minor aristocracy and the new and insecure “urban proletariat” (Costen 76). Languedocs ‘s large cloth industry employed many weavers (a predominantly Cathar occupation) and other industries produced ancillary dry goods, with evolving trade associations among its workers.
According to Wakefield, the Cathars, or Albigenses, the more common name, “regarded themselves as the true Church of God…”(Wakefield 1969: 45). The world, matter, was not God’s handiwork, but the ” creation of the forces of darkness.” (OShea 10) God/Good ruled the invisible spiritual domain. Human souls, therefore, could be released through baptism, or by rejection of “the wicked world, [to] do penance until the death of the body and the final release of the spirit. Those who did not attain purification in one life might pass, by metempsychosis, from body to body, even through animals. . At the final judgment day, the good would be separated from evil.” (Wakefield 47)The Old Testament was rejected by some Cathars on the basis that it recorded the devil’s work; others accepted the wisdom of the prophets. Some Cathars believed Jesus’ life took place in another world; others, that Jesus had only been a spiritual being and human only embodied in Paul. These beliefs were concretized by universally rejecting the Church, its hierarchy and sacraments, its authority, as belonging to the realm of matter and they replaced its tenets and leadership with its own.. (Ibid. 44-49). Cathars were divided into two groups, the Perfect, [xxiii] and believers, or credentes, who supported the Perfects, but lived in the world without the extreme aceticism of the spiritual leadership. Like the Waldensians, they refused to take an oath. [xxiv]
Pope Innocent III, whose passion lay in reestablishing Christ’s dominion on earth, by Crusades in the Holy Land, or elsewhere, was frustrated by his bishops’ inability to unify Christendom, i.e., ridding Europe of heresy,( which entailed excommunication and the confiscation of heretics’ property. ) First he attempted to reform the bishops. The bishop at Béziers who had been replaced by the papal legates, had been suspended, and was subsequently killed. [xxv] By the time of the murder of Peter of Castelnau, the papal legate, in January of 1208, Innocent had conceived of a new, or rather old, solution- -another crusade. Christian mercenaries would be hired, for the new Holy war in Languedoc, for the same two year remission of sins offered to knights headed for the Holy Land. The remaining legate, Arnald-Amaric was to organize and lead it. Wrote Peter Venable, “…Well, who deserves to be attacked more by you or your people, the pagan who does not know God, or the Christian who acknowledges God with his words, but who fights against him with his deeds? (Houseley 1965:24).” (Costen 118) The humiliated and, to all appearances humbled , anathemized Raimon V, the Count of Toulouse reconciled with the Church and along with a group of mercenaries, acquiesced to the persecution of heretics and Jews, and attempted to join the crusade entering the Trencavel lands of his nephew, and camping outside the walls of Béziers. Forseeing disaster, Roger left for Carcassone, taking the whole Jewish community with him.
On July 22, 1209, in the cathedral of St. Mary Madelaine in Béziers, the Pope’s legate arranged the slaughter of “more than fifteen thousand (Cathar and Catholic together) unarmed clerics, women and children.”[xxvi] ( some say 100,000; some say fewer– the numbers vary in both directions. [xxvii]) and in the rest of the town and church, looted, and burnt, and massacred the remaining inhabitants, in addition to confiscating the property of the Béziers’ Jews. It was the first conquest of the Albigensian Crusade. From there, the crusaders moved on to Carcassone, with the same intent, but under new leadership, Simon de Montfort, a Parisian upper-class soldier who re-named himself the new Viscount of Béziers-Carcassone. The Fourth Lateran would give Simon de Montfort control over all the heretics’ land, which he was to hold as vassal of the King of France, (Costen 144 ) the same Fourth Lateran which would require Jews to wear a certain badge of identification a red and white circle on their chests; ( to eliminate sexual relations between Christians and Jews/Saracens) establish that Jews were to be prevented from usury, had to pay tithes on any of property which had belonged to Christians,could no longer hold public office, and had to return interest on crusader’s debts.[xxviii] Simon de Montfort’s elevation, and the Jews’ debasement coincided with the devastating persecution of the Cathars at Carcassone. The three great Cathar forts were beseiged, credentes spared,” but 140 Perfecti were burnt….the first of the mass executions …”(Costen 130). After Carcassone, an attempt on Toulouse[xxix], short-lived encounters, but with devastating local effects. Then a new pope and a new crusade. Many Cathars died, but heresy didn’t; in one form or another, it spread.
Religious and philosophical ideas also faced off. From Béziers, says Benjamin of Tudela,
“it is two days to Har Gaash which is called Montpellier[xxx]….scholars of great eminence. They have among them houses of learning devoted to the study of the Talmud. Among the community are men both rich and charitable, who lend a helping hand to all that come to them…..From Montpellier, is is four parasangs to Lunel( approximately 24 km). Here lived Rabbenu Meshullam,(Rabad’s teacher along with Rambi of Narbonne[xxxi])(Twersky(10)) the great rabbi…and his five sons…the students that come from distant lands to learn the Law are taugh, boarded, lodged,and clothed by the congregations, so long as they attend the hours of study…. and from there two parasangs to Posquieres..”[xxxii]
Meshullam, says Twersky, “helped the methodical transmission of the philosophic and scientific learning of Spanish Jewry to French Jewry.(Twersky 13.) A footnote comments that Abraham bar Hiyya, disparaged the French scholars’ ignorance of geometry and algebra, there being no Hebrew books or translations, thus documenting both the hunger for scientific knowledge, and an elite monastic society whose inner life seems not to reflect the worldly chaos of the times. Posquieres appears on the Jewish medieval map of the world as the primary locus of Rabad.
Posquieres, says Tudela, is the home of the rich and beneficent Rabbi R. Abraham, son of David, or Rabad, as he is identified in scholarly studies, who teaches, and pays the expenses of his students who come from great distances to study with him. The twelfth century Talmudist, is the subject of a comprehensive biography by Isadore Twersky[xxxiii], which incidentally is a spiritual and intellectual portrait of the life of Jewish men in those towns of Languedoc. In the records of Rabad’s peregrinations and that of his students, we see that Jews moved with relative ease and frequency between these cities; ideas traveled with the wandering scholars, around the Mediterranean and to the North. It is in such a way that ideas of Kabbalah reached Languedoc. In around 1200, the Sefir Yetsirah, (which arose from Maaseh Bereshith between the third and sixth century) began to appear in Provence and Spain. Never intended for the public, the secret knowledge was passed from master to disciple by mouth; Rabbad’s son, R. Isaac the Blind, is more closely asociated with kabbalah,( though there is no writing from Rabbad on the subject) and he himself mentions that there are things learned from his father.( Twersky 287)[xxxiv].
A contemporary of Maimonides, Rabad was one of the first to try and follow a statement back to its original source, revealing the different layers of talmudic argument.(www. Jewish Gates) and he was deeply involved in the implications of Maimonides’ scholarship. Previously, we have seen how others viewed the Jews; in considering Languedocian Jewish scholarship, in how it speaks, not just what it speaks, we observe instead what was of significance to Jewish scholars and community leaders. In that respect, Rabad’s work and that of his contemporaries is a good illustration of the diversity of Jewish thinking.
In the Jewish world “controversy ” frequently means different world views; in this case, the “Maimonidean Controversy” is a basically Askenaz (pietist, fundamentalist, isolated , Christian influenced, mystic, traumatized) in opposition to Sepharad (assimilationist, Greek and Muslim influenced) division. It first began when the Maimonides’ Mishnah Torah got to France and Germany. Rabad attacked it on the basis of style –the Greek categorization instead of Jewish form of argumentation. He and the French scholars were outraged that Maimonides didn’t give halachic sources for all his decisions, a lack which improperly diminished the importance of the rabbis in the eyes of his critics. So Rabbad wrote a systematic critique of the Mishnah Torah in the twelfth century. He included the customs and rituals as practiced in Provence. About the same time Meir Abulafia, the most outstanding Spanish Talmudist of the times, who had written his own commentary, felt there was both a philosophic and halachic gap– Rambam hadn’t included a belief in the resurrection of the body… these were minority opinions on Rambam though….most people were impressed by his scholarship. Abulafia tried to swing the opinions of the French Jews in Lunel, unsuccessfully.
When Samuel ibn Tibbon translated Tthe Guide for the Perplexed into Hebrew, this French group saw Greek thought plus Torah revelation was heresy. Solomon ben Abraham and his student Jonah ben Abraham Gerondi denounced Aristotelianism. Allegory? Outrageous. Interestingly, the viewers and views were divided according to class; the upper classes in France, who weren’t so observant, were supportive of Rambam. The other northerners banned writings of Maimonides, even banned some halachic works. Northern Jews all thought Provence and Spain were lax because they responded to “foreign influence” i.e.,secular studies, science and philosophy.( who, of course, thought the northerners were superstitious, insular and provincial.)There were attempts to compromise, to rationalize the divergence: David Kimchi in Provence and Christian Spain, and his opponent, Judah ibn Alfakhar, who critiqued its basis and intention. Nachmanides got into the fray but wasn’t any more successful in finding common ground. The Church, which did not usually discriminate among Jews, stepped into the situation in a predictable way. In 1232, Dominicans in France grabbed all the copies to the Guide and burned them, which horrified everybody–the pro’s accused the anti’s of informing on them to the Dominicans.
Rambam’s son compared the detracters to idol worshippers, somebody desecrated his father’s tomb in Tiberius. Then in 1242, ten years later , the French took Talmuds by the cartful for burning in exactly the same square where the Guide had been burnt. Controversy simmered quietly while northerners became kabbalists and fundamentalists….so by end of 13th c/ beginning of 14th centuries, under Abbab Mari Astruc, Solomoben Abraham Adret, a student of Gerondi, they took up where they left off, and Jews in northern France banned secular studies-science, medicine, math and philophy. Jews in Provence said that especially math and science provided a key to understanding the Talmud. so there was an impending split in the Jewish community if people didn’t follow Adret’s rulings. With Asher ben Yechiel, he worked out a compromise. July 26, 1305, Adret banned anyone under the age of 25 from studying secular science or metaphysics, though medicine and Jewish philosophical works were allowed. Jews of northern France included scientific studies and the Guide within the ban and enforced the 25 year old limit.(Jewish Gates)[xxxv]
As a consequence of the battle against heresy, the Church evolved a different kind of organizational structure. Over the course of the twelfth century onwards, the bishops’ courts had begun to rely on written evidence and witness statements under oath in trials for heresy. Decisions had been made through a judge, (the bishop) or someone he appointed, and the pronouncements of Popes had given them new laws to enforce. Consequently, heresy had received a legal definition, and penalties: “loss of property, physical punishment, and death. (Thouzellier 1968)”(Costen 164) The refinements of these structural mechanisms lay the groundwork for what would become standardized in the Inquisition. The order, which initially was so associated with the Cathars and other heretics, the Dominicans, was given the search and destroy mission. The Prior of the Dominicans in Provence was ” to choose brothers to carry on the work and told the newly appointed inquisitors to get on with their work with the aid of the civil authorities and without allowing any right of appeal.”( Costen 164) There was opposition to this, so rules were further modified and codified in written form. St. Dominic hardly exemplified an attitude of Christian love and forgiveness towards heretics. In his sermon in 1217 he said, “….But , as the proverb says in my country, ‘where fine words don’t help, clubs prevail’. So we will call up against you the princes and the prelates. They will gather nations and kingdoms together against [you]…”Costen 168) First inquisitors were placed in the seat of heresy, at Albi and Toulouse[xxxvi]. There was revolt and resistance in some towns, e.g., Narbonne, but, inevitably, it was futile. The thought police, to use Costen’s expression, dominated the landscape of southern France.
To say the Dominicans/the Church was successful does not account for the either the nature, character, tragedy of the human encounters, the depth of the societal upheaval, or the implications for the dynamics established in the tension between Church and state, or the foreshadowings of the persecutions of the next centuries. Bernard Gui, who was introduced at the beginning of this paper, collected seventeen years worth of material from his own proceedings; they are clinical and cool, the writing of a coroner. Yet, his intelligence and dedication to the task set before him by Clement V are clear in the breadth and scope of his thought. His analyses and insights were much too profound to be ignored. In his discussion of Jews, he divines, in the Hebrew prayers he quotes, an expectation that God is invoked by Jews exclusively to destroy Christians, and deny Christ. His interpretation is authoritative, and it endures.
The outcome of the Albigensian Crusade was multifold. It yielded Languedoc into the kingdom of France, the Church retained its monopoly in liason with the French state, the Cathar heresy was stamped out, the Jews were even more visible as a target, and the Church now had plenty of live theological ammunition to deal with the future, as the blueprint of the Inquisition had given way to a working model.
In the following words, Gui is acknowledging the necessary diversity of thought and approaches to catching a heretic, but his methodology could as be applied to the study of medieval religious history,”..just as no one medicine is for all diseases, but rather different and specific medicines exist for particular diseases, so neither is the same method of questioning, investigation, and examination to be employed for all…..So the inquisitor, like a prudent physician of souls….should not impose or force all the following interrogatories upon everyone without distinction ….no single and infallible pattern can be set…” (Wakefield 378)
Afterword
If an archaeologist finds shards, it is possible, if there are enough, sometimes to reconstruct a vessel or at least sense significant aspects of the form-the curvature or the edges may indicate that there is only one possible position for that particular piece. In the medieval mosaic, there are only information fragments, remnants of historical documents, which can fit in lots of different places; each new configuration and juxtaposition can present a different picture. There isn’t room for all the pieces that exist. Nor can space be left for missing fragments; only when they are found do we discover they had been missing. In this retrospective exhibit on medieval heresy, on display are the mechanisms of intolerance which were initially incorporated into the religious body politic; it takes little imagination to construct the history of the rationalization of persecution through a contemporary lens, even if the body politic is a secular theocracy.
