The Jews in Christian Europe: Aspects of the Process of Religious Tolerance

Abstract

The position of the Jews in the European societies in the course of history is taken as an indicator to confirm the thesis that tolerance is not the product of the rational development of mankind, or heritage of the enlightenment, but the product of a concrete constellation of circumstances in a society, the consequence of the dominant attitude of the majority community in regard to the benefit or harm to their own wellbeing that a minority community might bring, in this case the Jewish one. In this article we have adopted Dimont's categorization of the history of the Jews in medieval Europe which is divided into three periods: the first, which began to crystalize in the sixth century and lasted until the eleventh; the second, encompassing the two centuries of the Crusades and the ensuing two centuries of the Renaissance; and the third, starting with the Reformation and stretching for a period of three hundred years, from 1500 to 1800.

Key words: Jews, Christians, tolerance, non-tolerance