To the Archbishop of Sens and the Bishop of Paris.

Although Christian mercy receives the Jews, whom their own guilt has subjected to perpetual servitude, since they crucified the Lord, whom their own prophets had foretold would come in the flesh for the redemption of Israel, and although it tolerates their living among Christians, even though the Saracens, who persecute the Catholic faith and do not believe in the one crucified by the Jews, cannot tolerate them because of their unbelief but have rather expelled them from their territories, nevertheless the Jews should not be ungrateful to us.

They cry out against us all the more fiercely because they are tolerated by us, who truly confess our Redeemer, condemned by them to the gibbet of the cross. They ought not repay Christians with insult for grace and contempt for familiarity. Admitted, as it were, by mercy into our society, 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 learned that the Jews whom the favor of princes has admitted into their lands have become so insolent that they commit offenses against the Christian faith which are not only shameful to describe but even wicked to think about.

For they make Christian women who nurse their children, when it happens that those women receive the body and blood of Jesus Christ on the day of the Lord’s Resurrection, pour their milk into a latrine for three days before nursing them. They also commit other detestable and unheard-of acts against the Catholic faith, because of which the faithful must fear that they will incur divine anger if they allow them to do unpunished things that bring confusion upon our faith.

We have therefore asked our beloved son in Christ, Philip, illustrious king of the Franks. We have also commanded the noble Duke of Burgundy and the Countess of Troyes to restrain the excesses of the Jews in such a way that they may not presume to raise their necks, submitted to the yoke of perpetual servitude, against the reverence due to the Christian faith.

They are to forbid them strictly 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 in their conduct that they are servants of those whom the death of Christ made free, while it made them servants. For since they have already begun to gnaw like a mouse and sting like a snake, it is to be feared that the fire received into the bosom may consume what it has eaten away.

Therefore, by apostolic letter, we command your fraternity to take care to warn the aforesaid king and the others on our behalf, and to urge them effectively and diligently in this matter, so that the faithless Jews may in no way grow insolent from now on, but may always show, under servile fear, shame for their guilt and reverence for the honor of the Christian faith.

But if the Jews do not dismiss their Christian nurses and servants, then you, supported by our authority, are to forbid all Christians strictly, under penalty of excommunication, from daring to have any commercial dealings with them.

Given at Rome, at Saint Peter’s, on the Ides of July, in the eighth year of our pontificate.