Innocent III to the Archbishop of Sens and the Bishop of Paris.

Although Christian piety receives the Jews, whom their own guilt has subjected to perpetual servitude, and tolerates their living among Christians, they nevertheless must not be ungrateful to us by repaying Christians with insult for grace and contempt for familiarity. Having been admitted, as it were, mercifully into our community, they give us the kind of return that, according to a common proverb, a mouse in a bag, a snake in the lap and fire in the bosom usually give their hosts.

We have received word that Jews make Christian women nurses for their children, and that, something not only shameful to say but even wicked to think, when it happens that on the day of the Lord’s Resurrection those women receive the body and blood of Jesus Christ, the Jews make them pour their milk into a latrine for three days before they nurse the children.

In addition, they commit other detestable and unheard-of acts against the Catholic faith, because of which the faithful must fear that they will incur divine indignation if they tolerate them committing, unworthily, things that bring confusion upon our faith.

Therefore, we strictly forbid them from having Christian nurses or servants from now on, so that the children of the free woman may not serve the children of the slave woman. Rather, like servants rejected by the Lord, against whose death they wickedly conspired, they should at least recognize through the effect of their actions that they are servants of those whom the death of Christ made free, while it made them servants.

But if they do not dismiss their Christian nurses and servants, you are to forbid all Christians strictly, under penalty of excommunication, from daring to have any dealings with them.