The secular lords tended to treat the Jews as personal property, to be farmed; not only their incomes but, in case of necessity, their capital too were there to be plundered. The ecclesiastical lords, as the rulers of cities, appreciated the economic value of the Jewish presence; as churchmen they abhorred it. Pope Gregory the Great (reigned 590-604) protected the Jews of Rome; but at the same time he created the ideology of a Christian anti-Judaism which was to lead directly to physical attacks on Jews. What he argued, in effect, was that the Jews were not blind to the claims of Christianity.
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