Preconditions, Highly Questionable In View of Forced Conversions and Expulsions, for Coexistence of Christians and Jews in Late Antiquity and in Early Middle Ages

Abstract

The article introduces the author’s expanded text, furnished by scientifi c apparatus, presented at the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts on October 19, 2005.In the introduction, the article presents different sources for the study of Jews in Italy, Gaul, Spain, and Africa in the period of late antiquity and Early Middle Ages. The sources include Jewish inscriptions, Christian literary heritage, and legal sources such as canons of ecclesiastical councils and state legislation. These sources indicate a continuity of Jewish colonization throughout Italy, in southern Gaul, Catalonia, and in Andalusia. The offi cial proclamation of Christianity as the state religion, with simultaneous restrictions on or direct interdiction of unorthodox Christianity, paganism, and Judaism (380/381) brought about an existential crisis for the Jews living in the Roman Empire. It was followed by destruction or expropriation of synagogues and by forced conversions to Christianity. The situation improved with the implementation of Roman Law, especially the Codex Theodosianus (the Theodosian Code, 438) and later the Codex Justinianus (the Justinian Code), which in spite of a number of restrictions protected the Jews from persecution, generated particularly by ecclesiastical circles, thereby creating the conditions necessary for further existence of Judaism in late antiquity and in the Middle Ages. Despite substantial losses at the turn of the 4th to the 5th centuries Roman Law helped Jews in the west to survive in Germanic kingdoms in Italy, in Gaul and in Spain. Periods of crisis in the late 6th and 7th centuries were followed by a renewed rise of Judaism in western and central Europe. It was based on fl ourishing long-distance trade ventures of Jewish merchants and on successful conversions of slaves and servants to Judaism.