The Other European Views of

All early-twenty-first-century world religions, especially Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, are predicated on the exclusivity and absoluteness of their own religion and the truth of their faith, since the monotheistic concept negatively determines the relationship with all other religions, rejecting them as other and hence as false. By contrast, people in ancient Greece and Rome recognized many different gods and easily tolerated representatives of other religions as long as they demonstrated loyalty to the secular authorities and obeyed the rules of public mores (Assmann).

Since the early Middle Ages, factions of all three major religions have demanded absolute adherence to their own faith and have not hesitated to persecute and execute members of the other religions, unless the latter voluntarily submitted to the dominant religion. The history of the Western world is deeply influenced by constant, bitter struggles among these three religions, whether in the form of Arab conquests in the seventh and eighth centuries, or Christian crusades between 1096 and 1291. In antiquity and the Middle Ages, these conflicts and tensions were often addressed with violence (crusades, pogroms, expulsions, imperialistic warfare, and hostile persecutions), victimizing the Jewish population above all. There were a number of attempts by Christian philosophers and theologians from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries to enter into critical discourse with Jews (Paris Disputation [1240], Barcelona Disputation [1263], Tortosa Disputation [1413–1414]; Maccoby), but these were intellectual experiments and ultimately yielded no positive changes in the relationship between the religions; the situation for Jews became increasingly worse (expulsion from Spain in 1492). Although Augustine (354–430) had firmly argued for a tolerant attitude toward Jews, insisting that they were "living testimony to the antiquity of the Christian promise" (Cohen, p. 33), and although Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) had emphasized that Jews were the "living letters of the law" (Cohen, p. 388), anti-Semitic attitudes grew in intensity throughout the late Middle Ages and were promulgated even by prominent theologians and philosophers including Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), who argued that Jews willfully rejected the true faith and could be compared to recalcitrant heretics. In the early sixteenth century, the Christian convert Johannes Pfefferkorn, who had been a Jew, became one of the most vicious enemies of Jews and made highly controversial allegations against them, allegations that even some Christian thinkers, such as the Hebrew scholar Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522), severely criticized (Kirn).