1 Jews and Muslims in Christian Law and History John Tolan [This is the author’s pre-publication version of an article published in in Adam Silverstein & Guy Stroumsa, eds., The Oxford handbook of Abrahamic religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 166-88.] How does Christianity explain the existence of the two rival Abrahamic faiths, Judaism and Islam? What place does it allow in Christian society for Jews and Muslims? The responses to these questions are many, and in this brief article it will only be possible to examine a few prominent examples. Rather than a survey of Christians’ attitudes towards Jews (or Judaism) and Muslims (or Islam), we will examine how Christian law accommodated Jews and Muslims as residents of Christian societies and at the roles that Christian thinkers assigned to Judaism and Islam in a Christian scheme of history. The emphasis will be on a few salient examples from the fourth century (when Christianity obtains social and intellectual predominance in the Roman Empire) to the nineteenth (when Christianity loses that predominance in Europe). During the life of Jesus, various apocalyptic movements within Judaism anticipated the imminent arrival of the Messiah and the instauration of the new Jewish kingdom. Jesus himself seems to have taught that the end of history was near and certainly many of his followers, in the first generations following his death, taught that the end was near (Matt. 25:31-46; Luke 24:49); the extent and nature of Jesus’ apocalypticism continues to provoke scholarly debate (Aune 2006: 7-8). The apocalyptic predictions of the prophets, in particular the book of Daniel, revisited and revised in the New Testament (above all in the book of Revelation) assured Jesus’ followers that the persecutions they were experiencing would soon come to an end, the pagan Roman empire (cast as the new Babylon) would be crushed, and a new era of justice and peace would dawn. Yet when Constantine proclaimed the edict of Milan in 313, the persecutions ceased and Rome turned from persecutor to ally of the Church. Churchmen had to rethink apocalyptic schemes of history and Christian legislators had to define through law the confines of the Church and its relationship to Roman society. 1. JEWS AND CHRISTIAN ROME A. Jews in Roman and Byzantine Law In the fourth and fifth centuries, as Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman empire, imperial decrees outlawed pagan sacrifices and ordered the closing of pagan temples, yet at the same time