Mark placed on the dress of Jews to distinguish them from others. This was made a general order of Christendom at the fourth Lateran Council of 1215. At the instigation of Innocent III., the decision of the Council ordered the Jews, in the following terms, to bear a Badge:
"Contingit interdum quod per errorem christiani Judæorum seu Saracenorum et Judæi seu Saraceni christianorum mulieribus commisceantur. Ne igitur tam damnatæ commixtionis excessus per velamentum erroris hujusmodi, excusationis ulterius possint habere diffugium, statuimus ut tales utriusque sexus in omni christianorum provincia, et omni tempore qualitate habitus publice ab aliis populis distinguantur."
From this it would appear that the motive of the order was to prevent illicit intercourse between Jews and Christian women; but it is scarcely doubtful that this was little more than a pretext, the evidence of such intercourse being only of the slightest (see Abrahams, "Jewish Life in the Middle Ages," pp. 93-95). It was no doubt the general policy of the Church to make a sharp line of demarcation between the true believer and the heretic; and the Badge came as the last stage in a series of enactments in the twelfth century, intended to prevent social relations between Jews and Christians, the chief of these being the prohibition of Christians becoming servants of the Jews. The Badge had a most deleterious effect upon their social relations; and the increasing degradation of the position of Jews in Christendom was due in a large measure to this outward sign of separation, which gave the official stamp of both Church and state to the discrimination of social status against the Jew. The idea of such a discrimination seems to have been derived from Islam, in which the dress of the Jews was distinguished by a different color from that of the true believer as early as the Pact of see Omar (640), by which Jews were ordered to wear a yellow seam on their upper garments (D'Ohsson, "Histoire des Mogols," 1854, 3:274). This was a distinct anticipation of the Badge. In 1005 the Jews of Egypt were ordered to wear bells on their garments and a wooden calf to remind them of the golden one (S. Lane-Poole, "History of Egypt," 1901, 6:126). Later on, in 1301, they were obliged to wear yellow turbans (ib. pp. 300, 301). It may have been some sort of retaliation for a similar restriction placed upon the Christians in Islam, since the order of the Council applied to Saracens as well as to Jews.
The contents of the 12-volume Jewish Encyclopedia, which was originally published between 1901-1906. The Jewish Encyclopedia, which recently became part of the public domain, contains over 15,000 articles and illustrations.
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