ABSTRACT
Other than a few Muslims, the Jews were the only people in the Latin West normally permitted to hold a faith other than Christian, and the law dealing with them was an adaptation of late Roman and Visigothic legislation. Europe's Jews were few in number, the heaviest populations being along the Mediterranean frontier. Mediterranean Jews probably enjoyed an ampler culture than northern ones. From the south, one thinks of Maimonides, an Andalusian who mostly lived in Cairo in Egypt, came an influential Aristotelian natural philosophy. Formal education among Jews was limited to scripture and the Talmud, but philosophy and natural science flourished, especially among Jews in Arab lands. The Jews greatest enemies were the people and churchmen. This was because churchmen were the ideologues who voiced the passions of the age and because the people, the humble many, suffered poverty more than others and hence their feelings were virulent.
