Erasmus’s ideal religious world was homogenic, just as his perfect Europe was devoid of the Other. A hierarchical conception of faith existed in Medieval Europe and in Erasmus’s mindset. Christianity was at the top, Islam was second best, and Judaism was considered the lowest of the three religions. The shift from a religious hierarchy to an ethnological one occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Erasmus did not explicitly present a fully worked-out theory of how humankind is to be classified, however a graded conception of the human race is embedded in his thought. For Erasmus, a particular group (European Christians) constituted the pinnacle of God’s creation; a second group (Turks/Muslims) was defined as half-Christian; a third group (converts from Judaism to Christianity) was also considered half-Christian; on the last religious echelon were the Jews.