To medieval European Jews, Esau and Edom meant Christian and Christendom, and Jacob & Esau evoked the messianic vision of Christendom's downfall. "Christian Esau" became an enduring Jewish topos. Spanish (Sephardi) Jews thought of the Jewish Diaspora as living “under Edom and Ishmael" – Ishmael was deemed the Arabs' ancestor – and interpreted the vision of the Four Empires in the Book of Daniel as presaging liberation from Christian and Muslim rule alike. Historically, the Christian–Jewish confrontation was traumatic in ways the Jewish encounter with Islam never was. While the Holy Roman Empire inherited the Roman imperial title, the Crusades shifted the target of Jewish hatred from the Empire to the Church, as the Pope appeared "the king of kings." With late medieval persecutions, the kabbalistic Zoharliterature signaled a shift from triumphal historical eschatology to cosmological tiqun(healing). Jacob & Esau became cosmogonic forces and the "Kings of Edom" represented a cosmogonic disaster. As Christians became increasingly familiar with rabbinic literature, they polemicized against the Jewish concept of Edom, but late medieval Christian biblical commentary reflected Jewish views of Edom. Medieval Jewish European history appears as a confrontation of intersecting Jewish and Christian cultures, and the Jews left their imprint on Europe even as they were expelled.