As noted early on, the Jewish experience in medieval western Christendom left negative recollections in the memory of both the Christian majority and the Jewish minority. For the Christian majority, the Jews of medieval Europe have been recollected as a hostile, disruptive, and harmful minority community. For subsequent Jewish memory, the medieval European experience has been recalled as an unending cycle of persecutions and expulsions.

Hopefully, the present account has served to complicate these folk memories. While it is true that the Jews of medieval western Christendom were widely perceived by their Christian contemporaries as disruptive and harmful, the realities were far more complex. The Jews were welcomed by elements in the Christian population for the contribution they might make, and warm human contact between Jews and their Christian neighbors is recurrently documented. Equally important, the Jews of medieval Latin Christendom posed significant questions that have still not been resolved by European societies. The most fundamental of these questions involves openness to diversity. This question was answered by and large negatively during our period. As we have seen, the more advanced areas of western Christendom expelled their Jews, in effect opting for homogeneity as a principle of societal organization. That, however, is hardly the end of the story. Subsequent to the year 1500, Europe has continued wrestling with the issue of diversity, first as a result of the disintegration of the medieval Roman Catholic synthesis and more recently as a result of modern population movement and globalization.