Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/79

 APOSTATE JEWS. 63 Sundays and feast-days to denounce as excommunicate all who should impede the business of the Inquisition and all notaries who should wickedly draw up revocations of confessions for heretics. This could not effect much, nor was anything accomplished by a Parlement held April 14, 1293, at Montpellier, by the royal chamberlain, Alphonse de Ronceyrac, of all the royal ofScials and inquisitors of Toulouse and Carcassonne to reform the abuses of all jurisdictions.* Shortly after this, in September, 1293, PhiMppe went a step fur- ther and threw his aegis over the unfortunate Jew. Although Jews as a class were not liable to persecution by the Inquisition, still, if after being once converted they reverted to Judaism, or if they proselyted among Christians to obtain converts, or if they were themselves converts from Christianity, they were heretics in the eyes of the Church, they fell under inquisitorial jurisdiction, and were liable to be abandoned to the secular arm. All these classes were a source of endless trouble to the Church, especially the " neophytes " or converted Jews, for feigned conversions were frequent, either for worldly advantage or to escape the incessant persecution visited upon the unlucky children of Israel. f The bull Turbato corde^ ordering the inquisitors to be active and vigi- lant in prosecuting all who were guilty of these offences, issued in 1268 by Clement lY., was reissued by successive popes with a pertinacity showing the importance attached to it, and when we see Frere Bertrand de la Roche, in 1274, officially described as inquisitor in Provence against heretics and wicked Christians who (Vaissette IV. Pr. 9). t In 1278 the inquisitors of France applied to Nicholas III. for instructions, stating that some time previous, during a popular persecution of the Jews, many of them through fear, though not absolutely coerced, had received baptism and allowed their children to be baptized. V^ith the passing of the storm they had returned to their Jewish blindness, whereupon the inquisitors had cast them in prison. They were duly excommunicated, but neither this nor the ""squalor carceris " had been of avail, and they had thus remained for more than a year. The nonplussed inquisitors thereupon submitted to the Holy See the question as to further proceedings, and Nicholas ordered them to treat such Jews as here- tics — that is to say, to burn them for continued obstinacy. — Archives de I'lnq. de Carcassonne (Doat, XXXVII. 191).
 * Arch, de ITnq. de Care. (Doat, XXXII. 251). — Chron. Bardin ann. 1293