Eduard Gans never completed his plan to collect and analyze all the legislation pertaining to Jewish Diaspora status. Yet he appears to have known in advance what its final result would be. In his “Legislation on the Jews in Rome,” Gans employed the term “Halbheit” (“half-measure”) to explain the overall character of Jewish status as it had evolved in Christendom. According to Gans, over the course of many centuries Christian Europe had exhibited a profound ambivalence toward Jews and Judaism. It had sought neither fully to extirpate the Jews nor to incorporate them; it had accorded Jews a special status as sole tolerated dissenters while at the same time rendering them the peculiar objects of its wrath.

For Gans, it was Christianity's own intimate ties to Judaism that best explained this paradox. A part of Christianity's legitimacy depended on its own claims to Jewish descent. Christian doctrine, moreover, looked forward to the ultimate conversion of the Jews as the culmination of its spiritual mission. For these reasons, Judaism, in contrast with both paganism and heresy, could not be destroyed. “The destruction of Judaism would have involved the dual sin: against the legacy of the past, and against the promise of the future.” Yet for Gans, this same condition of dependency also best explained Christianity's animosity to Jews. That is to say, at its core, as well as in numerous of its particulars, Christianity viewed Judaism as being too close for comfort.