proper mode of dealing with a race so refractory as the Jews. His protest was not made in Sisebut's lifetime; and in one passage he speaks with something like exultation at the success of the edict in winning sheep for the fold. He was however, as Mr. Finn concludes, on the whole an estimable character; » and we do not like him the worse for the following specimen of his ingenuity as a commentator. On Leviticus" xi. 3. he observes,

Whatsoever parteth the hoof, and is cloven-footed, and cheweth the cud, among the beasts, that shall ye eat. Thus the Jews ruminate, indeed, the words of the law, but part not the hoof, since they do not receive two testaments, nor take for bases of faith the Father and the Son: therefore they are unclean.»

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Our limits will not allow us to follow Mr. Finn through his examination of the acts of the successive Councils of Toledo from the 4th to the 17th. A brief summary of these accumulative edicts will however illustrate the state of the Spanish Jews from the year 633 to the Mohammedan invasion. in 710 The influence of Isidore is perhaps to be traced in the 57th canon of the fourth Council of Toledo. holy Synod, it says, has resolved to compel no one hereafter to accept our faith; » since persons are not saved without consent, but willingly, that the attribute of justice may be kept secure, Yet with singular inconsistency the Council likewise decreed that those already forced into Christianity in the time of the most religious, prince Sisebut must be constrained to adhere to the church, lest the name of God be .blasphemed, and the faith which they have assumed be accounted worthless and despicable. The gleam of mercy and reason that appeared in the 57th canon was speedily obscured. The sixth Council of Toledo indignantly disclaimed the tolerant spirit of its predecessor; it declared that,

By inspiration of the Most High God, our most excellent and Christian prince, inflamed with ardour for the faith, together with the clergy of his kingdom, has resolved to eradicate to the uttermost the prevarication and superstition of the Jews, not suffering the residence of any one in the land who is not a Catholic, »

In the preamble to this canon, which anticipated by more than eight centuries the most Catholic sovereigns» of Castile

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and Arragon in their famous decree of March 1492, it is announced that the inflexible perfidy of the Jews comes at length to be subdued by piety and the divine grace; » and in its Codicil it is enacted that every king on his accession should swear to execute these laws, and that every sovereign should be anathema' who neglected this indispensable part of his royal duty. The eighth Council is principally memorable for the curious address of the Jews to king Reccesuinth, to which its enactments gave rise. They were threatened with inquiry into their opinions, usages, lives and conversation; and they anticipated the royal or ecclesiastical commissioners by a voluntary resignation of their national customs and law. The only indulgence they requested, after consenting to abjure the Passover, the Sabbath and circumcision, was exemption from swine's flesh," a diet they describe as revolting, and impossible to disguise by cookery." After such liberal concessions even the bishops of the seventh century appear to have relented, and with one consent decreed twelve canons " by which the Jews were bound to truly keep and sincerely embrace all the articles and usages of the Christian religion, but were licensed to abstain from pork. The submission of the Jews appears to have laid asleep for a time the vigilance of the church; for in the interval between the reign of Reccesuinth and the accession of Ervig in 681, they openly professed their religion, held public offices, purchased slaves even of the clergy, and, it is added, were sufficiently zealous or prosperous to practise a species of retaliation by making converts to Judaism. The twelfth and sixteenth Councils, however, atoned for any past negligence of the spiritual powers. There is indeed some ambiguity in the terms of their enactments; they may apply to all Jews, but seem especially directed against conformists to the church. Taking for their basis the renunciation of the Jews themselves in their address to Reccesuintb in 653, the canons of 684 revived all former prohibitions with a mitigated penalty; but the mitigation was not in mercy. The preamble complained that the Jews, by their execrable perfidiousness, had eluded all former laws, and attributed the failure of these statutes to their

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undistinguishing severity in enacting death in all cases. This the twelfth Toledan Council pronounced to be contrary to the Holy Scriptures, and it substituted scourging, chains, exile and confiscation. But the most remarkable feature of these new enactments was their complete and ingenious intrusion into every circumstance of the ceremonial and social life of the Jew. The peculiar Jewish festivals were abolished: baptism was made imperative on all masters of families, and on every member of their households, whether children or servants. The circumcision of a child was punished, on a male offender by mutilation, on a female by the loss of her nose, and the seizure of her property. The ordinary penalties of stripes, imprisonment, forfeiture of property to the lord of the soil, and banishment, were pronounced upon a long catalogue of Jewish crimes,-upon marriages within the sixth degree of relationship, no less than upon blaspheming the name of Christ or the Trinity, and rejecting the sacrament. No Jew could travel from one town or province to another without reporting himself to the bishop or judge of the place. They were forced to eat, drink, and communicate with Christians, nor could they stir without a certificate of good behaviour and a passport. And, that no motive for connivance nor any practicable outlet for transgressors might be left, it was decreed that the spiritual person who took a bribe to relax his vigilance was to be degraded and excommunicated, and in certain • cases burnt; and that the whole office of distinguishing Jews belongs to the priests alone. Our readers will hardly thank us for any further detail of these Toledan canons; yet? their dreary uniformity is somewhat relieved by the reflection that their number and repetition betray their imperfect execu-) tion. The Councils might enact, but the people, except im seasons of excitement and alarm, would tardily and reluctantly second, their decrees. Wealth, nothwithstanding the stringency of the penalties, would purchase concealment and connivance, and expediency sometimes supply the place of humanity. Egica, Ervig's successor, found it necessary to relax the laws! so far as to allow baptized Jews the full privileges of citizens and the next monarch, Witisa, connived at the return of the

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exiles in such numbers, that a few years afterwards the Arabs found Granada a Jewish town; an impossible circum stance, Mr. Finn observes, if the late canons of Toledo had been perseveringly enforced. »

The people thus oppressed were the descendants of the Maci cabean armies, and the countrymen of Josephus. In the sixth century the Jews of Naples were distinguished for their obstinate resistance to Belisarius, when their national religion was not called in question. But the Spanish Jews had lost the use, and even the remembrance of arms; and in a land abounding with mountain-passes, and celebrated in all ages for the fierceness and obstinacy of its guerilla wars, 100,000 men bowed their necks unresistingly to the oppressor. Yet if the Jews awaken our surprise or contempt at their want of valour, their fortitude in suffering and fidelity to their law must command our respect. It was, at least, as great an act of faith and courage to reject baptism, when offered by a barbarian in iron armour accompanied by his priests, as to refuse at the tribunal of a Roman proconsul to cast incense upon the altar of Jupiter

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The Toledan councils had exhausted every art of persecution, and consummated their work by an edict consigning the Jews to total slavery, and separating Jewish children of seven years old and upwards from all residence or association with their parents, when, in the year 710 A.D., the Mohammedans entered Spain, and speedily proclaimed, from Gibraltar to the Pyrenees, the toleration of all religions. The share which the Jewish converts or exiles took in the rápid overthrow of the Gothic monarchy is unknown; but the decrees/which compelled them to renounce their faith or their country placed within their reach the opportunity of revenge. In every place of their dispersion they were essentially an oriental people, and readily fraternized with the eastern warriors who now swarmed on the opposite shores of Africa. The party divisions of the Gothic court and nobles, the strength of the Spanish cities, especially the sea-ports where the Jews as merchants and brokers were numerous, were accurately reported to the invaders and Roderic Ximenes, a chronicler

and archbishop of the thirteenth century, expressly attributes the conquest of Toledo, Granada and Cordova to the active hostility or the secret treason of their Hebrew population.

It was a strange providence, » Mr. Finn remarks, which thus reunited the West with the East, after so long a cessation of familiar intercourse; and to the Jew the deliverance was inestimable. He was at once set on an equality with his ancient oppressor, having full license to pursue his own occupations, with the franchise of the Mediterranean insured to him by the Mohammedan conquests. Thus the interchange, through Jewish hands, of Egyptian and Syrian produce for that of Spain and Mauritania, became rapidly more extensive than any previous age had witnessed.

«But, above all, his religion was protected. The synagogues had their trumpets blown at the new year; the oral law was no longer proscribed; the children were circumcised with rejoicing; the Sabbaths were sanctified; and each household could celebrate its annual banquet of liberty at the Passover. There was, moreover, that high enjoyment which is contained in the release from dissembling, and from the vicious tendency of self-depreciation.

And, together with religious toleration, there was within their reach a diffusion of the elegant arts and literature. Add to these oriental customs, dresses, and dialects, the very presence of which must, at all times, make a Jew feel doubly that he is a Jew, by creating impressions which harmonize with his own peculiarities, and enhance the effect of his religion and language. There was, moreover, the brotherly congeniality which he might feel for the Arab, inasmuch as both were sons of Abraham; both held to the covenant of circumcision, as from divine precept; and both were remarkable for a zealous abhorrence of aught that could infringe on the pure unity of the object of worship. The Moslem proclaimed, 'There is no God but God;' and the Hebrew rejoined, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one.'»

The general features of the Arab dynasty in Spain are well known; we shall therefore pass over this portion of Mr. Finn's volume, and avail ourselves of the interval of protection and prosperity enjoyed by the Jews under the Western Caliphates to take a rapid survey of the literature and social condition of this singular people at a period when their industrial and intellectual qualities were allowed a free and na tural development.

From a period that almost antedates chronology itself, the Jews had possessed an order of learned men and a literature

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