I'm going to begin reading from Romans 11, starting at verse 25. The apostle Paul here says, For I do not desire, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own opinion, that blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved as it is written. The deliverer will come out of Zion and he will turn away ungodliness from Jacob for this is my covenant with them. When I take away their sins concerning the gospel, they are enemies for your sake, but concerning the election, they are beloved for the sake of the fathers for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. For as you were once disobedient to God, yet have now obedience, even so these also have now been disobedient, that through the mercy shown you, they also may obtain mercy. For God has committed them all to disobedience that he might have mercy on all. Let's pray. Father, as we again look at a portion of the history of your church, we pray your help and blessing upon that labor for the sake and glory of Jesus Christ. Amen. All right. So this morning we're going to begin with a medieval folk story. So a servant, a simple servant, who worked under a miserly master for many years, was poorly paid. And eventually, he asked for his payment and the master gave him just a few coins. And the servant was sad but he trusted in the Lord and he wandered into the world. Now, as he was wandering, he met a little man who promised to grant him wishes because he was such a grateful servant working for this master. So the servant asked for a fiddle that he could play. And that fiddle, every time that he played it, those for whom he was playing would dance. So that was granted to him, and he got his fiddle. And the story goes that he came upon a Jew who was counting money under a tree. And he began to play his fiddle and the Jew was forced to dance. So he's forced to dance against his will. And as the music played, the Jew stumbled into a thorn bush and got tangled and bloodied and could not stop dancing. even though he begged the servant to stop dancing and the Jew was quite caught up and eventually the Jew offered the servant a bag of gold if he would quit playing the fiddle. So he took the bag of gold and then eventually the Jew sued him, took him before a judge. And the judge sided with the servant rather than with the Jew. At the trial, the servant played the fiddle again and everybody in the room danced and the servant was able to take his bag of money and escape the court. Now, what's the moral of the story? The moral of the story is that Jews are greedy and dishonest and their greed and dishonesty leads to their physical punishment. That's a medieval story that is found in the first and second edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales, not one that's included in current editions. Now today, as I mentioned, we're going to talk about the Jews in medieval Europe. And I want to give some caveats because I think it's really important to note some caveats. One is that last year in the United States, there were reported 9,354 anti-Semitic incidences in the United States and that Antisemitism in the U.S. began to be tracked in 1979. And since that time, antisemitism, according to those that study these things, is up 893% in the U.S. right now. So it's on a rise. And that in part is because on October 7, 2003, Hamas attacked Israel. And those on the political left, have risen against Israel in ways that we haven't seen at least in my generation. And in many ways, anti-Semitism is being mainstreamed and legalized. You all read the news, so you know some of those stories. But that doesn't get us off of the hook either. The theological right and the cultural right is also not in the clear. There's been a large anti-Jewish movement in thinking and writing and blogging and preaching under a term called race realism that has been pretty bad in conservative and Christian circles. So, you know, those on the left, those on the right, and then also we're in medieval church history. This topic is way bigger than 45 minutes. This is like, you know, master's thesis, PhD stuff. There's many books written on this by major publishers like Oxford and Cambridge that you could read. Medieval Christendom expands over a thousand years and it goes in very diverse places. Christendom in Germany versus Christendom in Spain look very different. We have to speak in some broad categories but we have a thousand years of church history related to Jews and Christendom. And then also documentation on Jews in Christendom, there's two main sources that are found for the documentation. One is in the papal library and then there's a time frame of English monarchy that was super obsessive with keeping records and those are two big main sources. A lot of Jewish sources for what was going on in medieval Christendom is gone because Jews were frequently moved to other cities and lived a rather diasporic life. So, a lot of the documentation that we have is from just a few sources. So, let's talk about this. Jews in Christendom, the relationship between Jews and Christians has a very long and complicated history. So for the most part, the West as the West developed and Christianity developed away from what we would call the Middle East, a lot of that contact with Jews was lost very early on. You know, Jews maintained a rather particular place and Christianity moved west very quickly. A lot of the Jews during the time periods that we're looking at, say around the year 1000, a lot of the Jews were in the Byzantine Empire, so they stayed in the east more than they went into the west. And as that occurred, it wasn't until about the year 1000 that the Christian West really begins to struggle and wrestle through what that relationship with the Jews is going to look like. And we also need to be honest about this as we consider the Jews among Christendom. It's not always a rosy history. We haven't always done well. There's extremes and there are reactions and When there's a reaction, there's often a counter reaction and you can follow those through the history of the church and its relationship to the Jews within Christendom. But what's interesting about this whole story of Jews in the midst of medieval Christendom, the story doesn't begin with us. It doesn't begin with the church. It actually begins with Islam. So the story begins with Islam, even though we would not necessarily go there in our mind. Robert Chazon is a Jewish medievalist, and he says, well, it may seem somewhat strange to begin with the Muslim legacy as part of the necessary background of the study of Jewish life in medieval Western Christendom. There are a number of justifications for So we really need to really think about Jews in Islam before we think about Jews in Christendom. So most of Jewish communities were in Islamic places pre-1000. So you think of where Islam first spread. You think about the east, the Byzantine Empire. You think of the Middle East and the areas around Israel. As Islam spread, it spread into areas first off that were Jewish areas. And then secondly, Jews lived as second class minorities in Islam. They had some protections. The protections are called dhimmi. And in order to get those protections, they paid very high taxes which were called jizya. And that provided them some protection. Now, an example of jizya, that's the paying of the tax, I've read several things, accounts of that. And one example, the person paying was required to appear before the Muslim officials who were going to receive the tax. The one paying the tax has to lower his gaze. He's not allowed to make eye contact with the official. He has to come in with a humble appearance and are unable to look at the tax collector directly. And then they approach the tax collector slowly, head bowed, and then there's something of a ritual in some places We're told that the collector would sometimes strike the neck or back of the dhimmi, that's the person giving the tax, with his hand as a symbolic sign of submission. And then the payer would hand over the money, often kneeling, sometimes placing it on a plate on the ground. Some chroniclers record that officials made the payer endure insults like being called enemies of God. before accepting the jizya. So Jews that were trying to live in Islamic communities, these are the sort of relationships that they had. And the Jews were able to, in a part, live somewhat relatively unsuspected. in some of these Islamic communities. But within Islam, there are major shifts in toleration that occur. So those shifts in toleration led to persecution of the Jews. There's several that are recorded in the late 900s. In Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, there's major persecution that comes. In the thousands, in the Almohad dynasty, which is North Africa and then the very end of, tip of Spain, there's the Berber dynasty that's living there and they're forcing Jews to convert to Islam. In the thousands, there's the Megraheb and the Al-Andalus. conquests, Jews fleeing from North Africa and trying to get into Christian lands. There is the expulsion of North Africa where Jews are just removed from areas like Morocco and Algeria and Tunisia, all countries that were historically Christian countries very, very early on. And then Muslim Spain, Jews fleeing the Islamic part and trying to get into Christian parts like Castile and then into places like Southern France. So, as Islam decided that they were done playing nice, Jews had to make a decision. Are they going to come under extinction as a people or are they going to, go into other lands. The last is the Mamluk oppression, which is later, that's Egypt and Syria. And in Egypt, they're facing oppression as well. So all of these things left the Jews with a decision to make. And that decision, if you think about the map and these areas around the Mediterranean, but on the east, so, you know, sort of Syria and then flip down to Morocco, they have a decision. Are they going to go east? Are they going to go south into Africa? Are they going to work their way to central Africa? Or are they going to go northwest into Europe? And they, the decision that is made is that each of these groups, these communities, it's not a big decision that's made together, but the communities are migrating into Europe And in that European migration, we see that there is an increase of persecution in that former Eastern empire, in Muslim lands, and the Jews are driven into Western Christendom. Sometimes that drive is literal, like they're driven into Western Christendom, and other times it's proverbial greener pastures, where the Christian West brings Jews into Christendom. Now, the way that scholars divide these times, there's three major time periods that are studied. It's the year 1000, the year 1250, and the year 1500. And you can see different events that happen around these times. Now, something interesting, even when we talk about the phrase Jews in medieval Christendom, we see that they're not a part of that conversation. The whole idea of like a medieval world is between an early Christian world and a later Christian world. That's our language. So as Jews make their way into Europe, they're coming into a world that's not theirs, not as majority people as people that are suffering, as people that are persecuted. Now, why would they choose to come to Christendom knowing that among Christians there are going to be minorities, they're going to be not necessarily allowed to do all of the religious things that they want to do, and they're living as people that are fleeing, that are wandering. And there's several reasons for that that we can read about. The first is that as the Jews look to Christendom, they saw political stability. The political stability of Europe around the year 1000 found stronger kingdoms that were stable, like the Holy Roman Empire. And they could offer protection to minorities if if they wanted to offer that. There were shifts in technology. Now, there's a few in the room that, you know, like to study economics and technology and those sorts of things. And technology shifts often lead to big changes in the world. And the technology shifts around the year 1000 saw an agricultural and a commercial revival. So there's farming techniques that improved dramatically in the year around the year 1000. Trade networks expand quite dramatically. Towns begin to grow. Remember a few weeks ago when we talked about London and how small London was and You know, Oxford is just this backwater little thing. So after the year 1000, we begin to see cities actually growing which leads to greater economic life and trade and finance and in artisan work as well. There's migration. We mentioned that Jews living under Spain, North Africa, parts of the Middle East, Jews migrating towards Christian Europe because that Islamic land was putting great pressure on them. So they're being driven, but they're driven to places where there's stability and where there's abilities for them to flourish economically. There's also favorable policies by Christian rulers. The relationship between Christendom and the Jews was always a different conversation than Christendom and other religions that were not Christian. You know, if the question was what do we do with the Buddhists versus what do we do with Islam, those are very different answers than what do we do with the Jews in Christian society. And those local rulers, even bishops as well as kings, often would make charters that would bring protection to Jewish people which would allow them to live relatively free in exchange for things that were valuable within Christendom. And then also there is a shift in demographics. So there are safer environments, opportunities for Jews to flourish as a people, you think about birth rates in places where there's a lot of persecution versus not a lot of persecution. If there's stability, families are able to have larger families than places where there is persecution. So the migration into Western Christendom begins to happen and we see that communities begin to be established. Now, when we think about the establishing of communities, we do need to be honest and realize that Jews within Western Europe and Jews within the area west of Israel has been something that has been with us for a long time. If you look at your New Testament, every one of the cities represented in the names of the books within your New Testament. are cities where there are Jewish communities. That's the Apostle Paul's approach to evangelism. He goes to a new city and it's a city that is in the Roman Empire. And he goes to the synagogue and he preaches at the synagogue. And then when he's told to leave the synagogue, he goes to the marketplace and he goes to other places where he can have conversations. So there were always settlements of Jewish pockets. And then after 70 AD, when the temple is destroyed, Jews are scattered. It's called the diaspora and they're scattered throughout the Roman Empire and some make their way already into Western Europe by that time. So in the 400s, there are in parts of Germany, there's small pockets of Jewish communities that are able to be studied and looked at their settlements that early on. Now, because of this Muslim conquest of the Eastern Empire, many of the Jewish communities had a choice. They could either leave Muslim lands or they could face extinction. Those are really the options and you see this piece of medieval art on the wall. The Muslims represented as the people in the lower part and you see what they leave behind. these kings who are a different skin tone than them, and they are literally cut in pieces. So this conquest, as it makes its way through Europe, this is the opinion of those that are recording in art what is going on. As Muslims move through a nation, your king will lose his arms and his head and other body parts as well as they conquest. So, the Jews were given that choice, leave Muslim lands or face extinction. And so, they make their way into parts of Christian Spain, primarily, you know, that's the first stop if you're leaving the Mediterranean into Europe. So, Castile and Aragon and Navarre and Southern France, Giona and Venice. All have large Jewish communities that begin around the year 1000. And those communities are treated differently at different times in Christian history. But there's always this attempt within Western Christendom to figure out what does the Bible require of us? How would God have us to handle these people that are both unbelievers as well as the ancient people of God? How do we deal with them? And, you know, we opened our class with reading from Romans 11. Romans 10 and 11 deal with this tension. You know, there are people that are cut off and Gentiles are grafted in. Is that the end? Is that how this story ends? You know, should, you know, the Jews just be wiped off the face of the earth as the New Testament would want? And the answer is no, that's not what the New Testament wants. The New Testament says there is this tension that we're going to live with until the fullness of the Gentiles come, until all of Christendom expands to its full expansion. And then through the prompting of jealousy, the Jews will be grafted back in to that relationship that they once had with God. So, that tension is there. And one area where these communities are established is in along the Rhine, in Rhineland, in Germany. So, this is really one of the wealthiest trading routes of all of Europe. If you talk to Germans and you ask them, what they think of the Rhine River, it's the best river in the world. It's the most important river in the world. And it's the most important because it is so central to German economics for much of its history. So there's Jewish communities that start to develop around the Rhine because it's a trade route and they're able to flourish there. trade going on with Northern Europe and Italy and the Mediterranean. And these merchants and these artisans are gathering around the Rhine. And the Christian leaders in those areas, they look at this relationship, you know, the symbiotic relationship where the Jews are scratching the backs of the Christians and the Christians are scratching the backs of the Jews. And they say, this is good. This is actually really important that we maintain this. And what happens is that there are declarations that start happening. So here's in Speyer, Germany. the Bishop of Speyer in 1084 says, I thought to myself that the glory of our town would be increased a thousandfold if I should bring in Jews. Therefore, I came to an agreement with them that if they move here and I have arranged for them to have a district of their own, I've given them a cemetery, I've permitted them to sell legally whatever they wish to sell and I've granted them legal rights and liberties according to the wishes of their community. Okay, there's other statements like this. The Bishop of Worms 1074, we grant the Jews dwelling in our city the right to own property, to trade freely and not be judged by their own land in law, to be judged by their own law and matters internal to their community. No one shall harm them for they are under our protection. King Frederick 1157, the Jews are under our special protection and guardianship. No one shall injure them or their goods. They shall enjoy peace and security under our authority, and those who harm them shall be punished. So there's these legal statements that begin to grow where there's special protection given to the Jewish community so that this relationship is able to happen between Christendom and the Jews. So they become what we would call a protected minority. within Western Christendom. And those protections, if you look at all the sort of the corpus of all of those different statements of protections that come throughout all of Western Christendom, there's basically eight things that these can be boiled down to. By the way, this is a photo from Munich, Germany, or no, it's from Erfurt, Germany. This is the synagogue that was built in the year 1000. So this is a museum, a Jewish museum in Erfurt that you can go and visit in Germany. So there's about eight protections that come to the Jewish community. They have the protection of life and property. So they are to be protected in those things and their property is to be protected. They have a right in medieval Christendom for self-governance. That means that internal affairs, Jew versus Jew problems can be decided within their own court system. They don't have to come to our court system to figure these things out. They have freedom to trade and to lend. We'll speak about this in a minute, but Christendom needed Jewish money. And that right to freely lend was something that was very important. They are exempt from harsh trials. Medieval period is not known for its scientific trials. I'm sure some of you know stories about ways that you find out if someone's a witch. You know, there's all sorts of really ridiculous ideas that come as to how trials happen. So Jews are exempt from those trials. They have a right to self-defense. They're allowed to hold weapons and own weapons to defend themselves. They have a right to have their own cemeteries. and their cemeteries are to be protected by law. They have a right that is conditional on worship spaces. They are allowed under certain circumstances and with limitation to worship freely. Now the whole idea of freedom of religion or liberty of conscience, which means that you can do whatever you want, however you want, that is all super modern ideas. Those are not ideas that the world is talking about at this point. So within Christendom, Christianity is to flourish and the worship of God is to flourish. So if there's a false religion, they're not allowed to worship. Their buildings are burned down. But there's some sort of protection given to the Jews where there's conditional worship that is allowed. And then they are exempt from some duties as well, such as fighting in wars that they find unjust or being a knight. So there's these protections that come throughout medieval Christendom. But just as it happened in Islam, it happens in Christendom as well, where there is shifts in toleration. So those shifts in toleration happen after the fact that Christians realized that the Jews served a great need. in medieval Christendom. There is this relationship. Now, part of that need had to do with within the medieval world, Christians were not allowed to charge other Christians' interest. It was called usury. The Bible speaks against usury. Exodus 22-25, Deuteronomy 23, 19-20. And the church said, charging interest to another Christian is immoral. And that requirement that the church imposed upon the society led to people saying, well, then where are we going to borrow money? Like if I need $100,000 and I go to Jonathan and I'm like, Jonathan, I need $100,000. You're my brother in Christ, and we serve on the session together. You're sort of morally obligated to lend me $100,000, Jonathan. And you say, well, how will that benefit my family? Because that $100,000 has to be taken out of my 401k, which is earning interest out there in the world. And I'm like, well, brother, you're a Christian. You don't need interest. Oh, here we go. Mercy fund future right there, folks. So we say, Jonathan says, well, what am I going to get? You're not going to get anything except the good deed that you lent me $100,000. And so the Christian world starts saying, this is not really a great way to do economics, but I can borrow money from somebody who's not baptized because they're not Christians. And within the Jews, among the Jews, they're also not allowed to charge interest to each other. But they can lend and borrow, or they can lend and borrow from those who are uncircumcised. So the Jews can borrow from the Gentiles, the Gentiles can borrow from the Jews. There is, it's called the Decretum Graetiana. Whatever is taken beyond the principle is usury and condemned by ecclesiastical law. The third letter in council said, we declare that notorious usurer shall not be admitted to communion, nor if they die in their sins shall they receive Christian burial. So this is very serious, and the church takes this very seriously. And because the Jews are not lending to themselves with interest, and the Christians are not lending to themselves in interest, there is a symbiotic relationship that begins in medieval Europe, where they sort of need each other. Remember, we talked about the First Crusade. That costs money. You've got to borrow money to go to war. That's generally how it works. So who's funding that war? You know, I'm not, I don't mean it in like a conspiracy theory sense. I mean it in an economic sense. The Jews are funding that war because you're not borrowing money from other Christians to be that. So what happens is the Jews become this source of banking in medieval Europe, but banking usually expands into other areas of economics. You don't want a thousand pounds of gold sitting in your home. You want to use that gold for other economic purposes so that you can expand in your abilities to make money. So the Jews of medieval Europe, now remember, if you think about this and you have, maybe you have that like super right wing antisemitic friend that talks about the Jews and their money and all that stuff. We did that. We did that. We started that with the Jews. So the Jews expand from banking into fur trading because Christians didn't tan furs. It was considered just subpar Christian behavior but the Jews would tan furs and sell furs. Metals, luxury goods, and all of these expansions led the medieval Jewish community to expand in wealth. Now here's a rule of thumb. If you ever start your own empire, the rule of thumb is that when minority groups grow in power, you will grow in fear. And this is what happens in medieval Christendom. And I might even say it's what is happening in the empire called the United States as well. As minority groups grow, people who have held power for a long time grow in fear. And you can look at the history of the world in that way. Now, because of that grow in fear, there's times of blow up over the wealth of the Jews. And there are stories that go around about the Jews' greed and their covetousness. and the ways in which Jews managed money. And again, it was because of a symbiotic relationship that the church imposed on Christians that led to that happening in the history of the church. Now, there's also matters of suspicion concerning some of their customs. Jews in the medieval period wore hats that were pointy. Some of the pictures that I've shown have pointy hats. Guy up in the corner has a pointy hat. The others have like a yarmulke on. The pointy hat, Christians would say, do you remember when we talked about Moses and Michelangelo's Moses and how he had horns and the way that was mistranslated from the Septuagint? The point was to hide the horn. So the pointy hat hides a horn. Jews have horns. Obviously, they don't. So anyone that's wondering. So there's these stereotypes that grow, including things like the Jewish rule that you have to walk to church. You can't ride your horse to church. You have to walk. Well, if everyone had to walk that goes to this church, where would you all live? You'd live as close as you could. And when you live as close as you can and everyone that goes to that synagogue lives in a tight community, it becomes a neighborhood that is known to be Jewish. You know the word ghetto. The word ghetto comes from Venice, Italy. It's an Italian word and it means the foundry, the place where the metal is smelted or whatever the term is for that. the Jewish ghetto in Venice was around the foundry. That's where they lived and that's where that term comes from. So, when you live in a community that's tight-knit and people don't know what's going on in that community, suspicion grows. And this is what happens as well. And then, of course, there's times of great sickness that come through Europe, medieval Christendom. We'll talk about sickness later. But as plague came through, the Jews were often the scapegoats and they're often the scapegoats because their Talmud requires so much ritualistic washing and their homes have to be ritualistically clean that plague doesn't affect them at the same rates that it affects the Christians. So, of course, you look at the Jewish communities and you say, we're dying a lot faster than they're dying. They poisoned our water. And that's what happens. One of the popes, Pope Clement V, says, It has come to our ears that in these days a perverse report has been spread by certain Christians that the cause of the plague is the Jews. We speak gravely against this rumor. The plague came from God. So these persecutions come. There's also religious reasons for shifts in tolerance. Christians knew that Jews were not believers. There was enough of the scriptures that were known where they're blinded, even by God, as we read in 1 Corinthians also talks about that. But there's certain laws that protect them. They're not allowed to be forced to be baptized. They're not allowed to have forced conversions. They're allowed to own land. They're allowed to be protected as we've said. But the idea is that within Christendom, there's this people that the New Testament says is cursed of God. It causes this tension to rise. And in that tension that rises, There's also Matthew 27, 25, where Pontius Pilate asked the question, do you want this man or do you want this man? And the New Testament says, and the Jews said, give us Barabbas. And then they point at Jesus and they say, let that man's blood be upon us. And what's the next line? And our children. So Christendom begins to think about the Jews in that way. And what happens is from time to time, there would be edicts of expulsion. Paris kicked the Jews out in 1182. They were to be expelled from the realm and their goods were to be confiscated for the benefit of the crown. London expelled the Jews in 1290. And the statement there is, we, considering the grievous complaints made to us against the Jews by great men and other subjects, we do with the counsel of our barons, ordain that all Jews are banished from our realm. You know when Jews are brought back into London for the first time? Under Oliver Cromwell. And the written record is that Oliver Cromwell said that after the English Civil War, they needed funds. So they brought the Jews in to lend money to the English. Basel or Basel, 1349, they burnt the Jews on an island in the Rhine and the city council swore to never allow a Jew to settle in Basel again. Time for reparations. So tolerations shift from time to time. I'm not sure how I'm going to answer that. So tolerations shift from time to time. And at times, you leave the Jews to themselves. At times, you pull them out of Christendom. At times, there is that symbiotic relationship that works really well. But we can say that through medieval Christendom, the relationship is tense. And it is tense purposefully. Isidore of Seville says the Jews who killed the author of life ought to understand their position as wanderers is a just punishment and their continued existence is a testimony to the Christian faith. I'm going to give a few stories and then I'm going to end. The first is the story of the wandering Jew. The story goes that when Jesus was carrying his cross through Jerusalem, He rested in the doorway of a shoemaker, and the shoemaker's name was Ahasuerus. And Ahasuerus scowled at Jesus, and he struck him on the back, and he said, go on, move faster. And Christ turns, and he looks at Ahasuerus in the eyes, and he says, I go, but thou shalt tarry until I come again. And from that moment, the shoemaker wanders throughout time, untouched by death, centuries pass, kingdoms rise, kingdoms fall, and Ahasuerus is never able to find peace. And this is a story through medieval Europe. There's even a house plant that some of you probably have that's named after this story. Pilgrims swore they met him. Monks record his conversations. Crusaders said that they walked with him. The wandering is that he is doomed until the day of judgment and the story of the wandering Jew became symbolic of the fact that all Jews are wanderers. They don't have a homeland. They were unable to be in a place that was their own. The second story is William of Norwich. This is in 1144. William was an apprentice who was known for his piety. And one time during spring before Easter, he was lured away by Jews in the city who were asking him for his expertise as an apprentice. And in secret, they bound him and put thorns on him like the thorns of Christ and they pierced his side and they crucified him. And on Holy Saturday, that's the day before Easter, his body was found in what's called Thorpe Wood. And there's a chapel built in Thorpe Wood where you can go visit. And he's crowned and bruised, and his hands are bound. And he is in a cruciform position. And the idea was that the Jews did this to him as a blood liable. That becomes a medieval term, a blood liable. It's a ritualistic crucifixion of a Christian. And the townspeople mourned and his body went to the cathedral and eventually there's lights and there's miracles and all of the things that have come with that and there's Jews in Norwich that are punished for that as well. And then the next story is Little St. Hugh. This is in 1255 in Lincoln, a 2-year-old boy. Some of the accounts say he's 9 years old. He goes missing. Days pass, eventually his body is found in the well of a Jewish resident and rumors spread that he had been seized and crucified in similar fashion under this blood liable. And the man on whose property he was found in the well, his name was Kopin and Kopin was tortured. And under torture, he admitted that he crucified this little boy and he gave up all the names of his friends and they were persecuted or punished for this blood liable and the upper corner here, that is his grave which you can still visit within the cathedral. So these stories of blood liable and suspicion, these things spread and then, By very late medieval period, the relationship changes where some of the communities that have Jews, they require the pointy hats. They don't just allow them, they require them. And they also require, get this, a gold star on their clothing to show that you are a Jew. And that tension within medieval Christendom grows. Now, I know I need, I know I'm, running late here, but in medieval Christendom, there's some things that we need to understand. One is that Christendom is living under the reign of Jesus Christ. As they're living under the reign of Jesus Christ, the culture is seeking to be Christian. The law is seeking to be Christian. The magistrate is Christian. The church is to be Christian. It's called Christendom for a reason. So this is something that brings this tension. Also, this is a question we need to ask. Is the so-called Jewish problem of medieval Europe, is that because of religion or ethnicity? Now we live in a post-Darwinian age where we sort of filter everything through the idea of race. This is not how medieval Christendom thinks. They filter everything through religion. And we need to understand that. The Jews, as we think of them, we think of a race that's modern. There are two groups of Jews that develop through the medieval period. There's the Ashkenazi that are very much in line genetically with being European. And there's the Sephardic, which are very much in line with being Middle Eastern. very different genetics because of where they've lived for a thousand years. We think of, we need to think in terms of religion. And then also, we need to remember there are medieval expectations. So, non-baptized persons were excluded from civil life. They had restrictions on land ownership. They were not allowed to join guilds or have citizenship. They could not testify in court. They could not be buried in a Christian cemetery, and they were subject to special taxation. So this is across the board, non-baptized persons. But you remember that Jews were under special protection. There's eight pieces of protection that we talked about, and they go against the normal expectations for the non-baptized. The Jews were different, and this is the big takeaway. They were under what's called Augustinian toleration. This is the theological principle that is drawn from Augustine's book called City of God. And we've talked about City of God. City of God talks about how no one should be forced to believe, even the Jews. Jews should live among Christians as a testimony of their religion going away. That's Romans 10 and 11. Jews should be preserved as a witness to the truth of Christianity. Jews are, according to Augustinian toleration, the preservers of our Old Testament text, and we owe them something for that. Augustine called them the librarians of our faith. And the Jews may live with certain restrictions, but must be living in relative peace. So this is the theological principle under Christendom that allows for Jews and Christians to live together, even with the attempt of that tension.