The specific forms of antisemitism with which the modern world is acquainted - ranging from genocide to social exclusion - emerge out of the distant past of Western culture. Although it is customary to ascribe the birth of modern antisemitism to the rise of urban, commercial civilizations in the late Middle Ages, it has in fact an older history. To dix the origins of antisemitism it is necessary, argues James Parkes, to begin with the Jews in the Roman world, and to trace their passage through Roman pagan and Roman Christian civilization into the beginning of the Middle Ages. 'The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue' unfolds the history of Jewish Intellectual and religious interaction with the pagan world, with nascent Christianity, and later with Byzantium and Visigothic Spain, exploring the legal, social, political, and theological underpinnings of Christian antisemitism and Jewish response.