(Convoked by Pope Innocent III with a papal bull
April 19, 1213 CE)
November 1215: Rome:
Present: 71 patriarchs and metropolitan bishops
412 bishops
900 abbots and priors
The council approved the decrees submitted to it by Pope Innocent III.
Included in the seventy–one decrees were commands that all Jews
–wear distinguishing labels on their garments.
–be confined to ghettos.
The politically dominant Vatican was in position to enforce its decrees.
Prior council: Third Council of the Lateran
Next council: First Council of Lyon
Rosemary Ruether writes:
“The final expression of the Church’s effort to segregate the Jew from any social contact with Christian society was the ghetto and the wearing of Jewish dress, conical hat, and “Jew badge” (usually a yellow circle, symbolic of the Jew as betrayer of Christ for “gold,” an image which fused religious with economic anti–Semitism). These regulations were passed at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), although the Church only succeeded in enforcing them universally after the Council of Basel (1434).*A These marks had the effect of making Jewish ignominy visible and singling the Jew out for physical attack as never before, destroying further the ability of the Jew to travel the open roads as a merchant. Other canonical rules, such as those that insisted that the synagogue must be a low and miserable building, that Jews must not enter churches or come into the streets on holy days, especially during Passiontide, or work on Sunday, were intended to enforce the visible superiority of Christianity.*B But it also reinforced the popular idea that Jews secretly desired to mock and profane Christian symbols, even though the popes officially tended to discount the myths of ritual murder and host profanation. Finally, the Talmud itself was declared illegal. Successive inquisitions condemned it, despite the defense put up against Christian accusations by Talmudic scholars.*C The Talmud and Jewish works were burned publicly in France in the mid–thirteenth century, bringing to an end an important center of Talmudic scholarship. Like Justinian, the Church seems to have believed that without the rabbinic exegesis, the Jews would quickly come to acknowledge that the Christological exegesis of the Church was the correct one.” (Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, pp. 209–210).
*A Poliakov, History of Anti–Semitism, p. 65. Also Grayzel, Church and the Jews, pp. 59–71.
*B Poliakov, History of Anti–Semitism, pp. 33–36.
*C Ibid., pp. 29–34.