Abstract - Roy Ben-Moshe

Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) is often noted for his tolerance of Jews and his castigation of Jewish persecution, evident in some of his twenty-eight letters to secular leaders concerning Jews. This paper attempts to demonstrate that Gregory's Jewish policy was largely dictated by apocalyptic anticipation of a new world order and a unified Christian collectivity, which was used to legitimize Roman law concerning the Jews. Many scholars, such as Jacob Marcus, ascribe Gregory’s Jewish policy to his desire to uphold the principles of Roman law, which already defined Jewish status in such a way that the Jews were restricted yet simultaneously protected. Bernard Bachrach, in his book Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe, also subscribes to this viewpoint, however he notes the influence of Jewish power on Gregory's decision to relax such Roman laws as that prohibiting Jews from owning Christian slaves (he allowed Jews to utilize the work of Christian slaves so long as they did not live in a Jewish home). To Bachrach, Gregory's Jewish policy was conceived within the nexus of Roman law and the reality of Jewish society, and he ultimately dismisses what he labels the “theological argument,” that is, that Gregory viewed Paul the Apostle's prophesy that the Jews shall willfully convert when “the full number of the Gentiles has come” to the Christian faith (Romans XI:25), as a theological basis for his Jewish policy. However, what is evident from Gregory’s letters is that he deeply believed the catastrophic state of sixth-century Italy signaled that “the end of the world is at hand” and believed that the actualization of proper Jewish-Christian relations, as defined by Paul the Apostle in the Book of Romans, would end this miserable state of affairs and usher in the Second Coming, an era in which the Christian elect would be unified under “a new heaven and [in] a new earth” (Revelation XXI:1).

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