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susceptible Saracen, the grave and inflexible Goth, the alternately proud and passive Sephardim, gave new intensity to her religious contests. As the Christian kingdoms gradually absorbed the Moorish provinces, the Moors themselves resumed much of their earlier fanaticism; and the Jews, who, as subjects to both, might respectively betray their immediate rulers, were by both regarded with increasing jealousy and alarm. The Crusades, familiarizing the European mind with the idea of military apostleship against infidels, though directed primarily against Islamism, could not fail to re-act unfavourably on Judaism; and both the Ashkenazim and Sephardim felt the presence of the « red-cross » harmless without the power of retaliating, like their Eastern brethren, the evils they endured. The terrible cry of « Hep, the signal for the massacre of the Jews supposed to be an abbreviation of Hierosolyma est perdita »— was raised in the Spanish cities as well as on the banks of the Rhine. In February 1218 the Crusaders of the West, an immense host, were encamped in the royal parks on the banks of the Tagus.

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Conceiving that the first-fruits of their valour would be an acceptable offering to heaven, if waged upon the unarmed Jews, they proceeded most religiously to plunder that race of infidels.. There was no massacre, for the nobles of Castile armed themselves to defend the synagogues; but the terror inspired in the victims was so great, as to cause the emigration of immense numbers. >>

In the former half of the fourteenth century, says Mr. Finn, a rabble crusade was preached among the shepherds in the South of France, by one Roar, likewise a shepherd, who gave out that he had received revelations from a dove, which changed itself into a beautiful virgin, charging him to extirpate the infidels, and, for a token, wrote the terms of his commission, or, as some said, the form of a cross, upon his arm. Thousands flocked to the novel champion, and proposed to march immediately on Granada. One however, more prudent than the rest, represented the difficulty of overcoming welltrained and well-armed warriors, or walled towns, with an undisciplined multitude in want of arms; and was of opinion the commission would at first be sufficiently obeyed by assaulting the Jews. His advice was adopted; and after a massacre of 120 synagogues in Languedoc, despite the royal proclamation, the arming of the barons, and the pope's excommunication, they crossed the Pyrenees into Arragon, but were repulsed by the king just in time to rescue the

city of Huesca. They marched into Navarre, entered Pamplona; but at Montreal, three leagues distant, were driven back by the Jews themselves.»

The temporal powers on both these occasions maintained the laws, the rights of humanity and the public peace. But with the progress of Catholicism in the Peninsula, the spiritual powers asserted their privilege of enforcing orthodoxy, and the edicts and temper of the Toledan Councils revived. Bigotry was so congenial to the Spanish character, that Lope de Vega expressed the general feeling when he gave his poetical applause to the enactments of the Gothic synods:

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And unfortunately for the Jews, the influence of the clergy with the rabble at command was set entirely and perseveringly against them. At the beginning of the thirteenth century the Hebrew colony in Toledo alone was 12,000 strong, and their wealth and intelligence were in proportion to the protection they had long enjoyed. Roderick, the archbishop of the city, was eminent for his popularity as a preacher and for his intrigues as a statesman. An indefatigable agitator for the Crusades, his frequent harangues were so many invectives against the Moors and the Jews, till, on one occasion, heading his flock, he rushed into the synagogues, routed the congregations, and pursued them to their houses for plunder. Since the time of Sisebut, indeed, papal authority and the general sentiment had discountenanced compulsory baptism; but besides the licence assumed by bishops and friars to pillage and murder recusants, civil restrictions and penalties were again multiplied. The laws affecting the marriage, property, and peculiar customs of the Sephardim were gradually revived, and the Siete Partidas» of Alonzo X., passed between the years 1250 and 1280, added new circumstances of degradation. By the eleventh law of the sixth Partida, it was enacted that

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"every Jewish man and woman shall wear some certain mark of dis tinction on the head, such as shall manifestly designate the different people; and for every appearance in public without it, the offender shall be fined ten maravedis of gold, and, in default of payment, shall receive one hundred lashes. >>

In the middle ages Crusaders and Templars were known by their coloured crosses, as the monks and nuns by their peculiar habits :

«Still, Mr. Finn adds, "to affix a mark upon any class of men already hated, was to expose them to certain destruction in a country like Spain, where the practice of private revenge has always been common, where the proclamations of kings are obeyed but at a short distance from their own immediate superintendence, and where popular outrages have rarely been checked by the national govern

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In 1335 the Council of Salamanca confirmed and extended the principle of the Badge, by ordaining that henceforward the Jews of every town be enclosed within an appointed quarter called the Jewry.» At the same time it, perhaps providentially, directed that Jews should be inhibited from practising among Christians as physicians, << since their « wickedness was such, that under the pretext of surgery and medicine, they craftily insinuated themselves, and did injury to faithful people. Penal edicts and tumultuary violence, however, were not the only resources of the clergy in their domestic war with the infidels. The populace were kept in a ferment by the untiring propagation of falsehood to the detriment of the Jewish character. The sephardim, it was asserted, by their ingenuity in mechanical trades, were robbing the true church of their livelihood, and by their numbers and consumption of food-enhanced its price to the injury of Christians. Monstrous fictions of diabolical malice and cruelty were circulated among all classes of society, and the more these legends were preached and believed, the more deep became the rancour of both narrator and hearer. A huge controversial book, entitled the Fortress of the Faith in the fifteenth century, teems with narrations, which, like similar stories propagated in northern and central Europe against the Ashkenazim, were calculated to excite horror and dread

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of the Jews. The Prioresse's Tale' in Chaucer, the ballads of Sir Hew of Lincoln' and the Jew's Dochter,' the groundwork of Marlowe's Jew of Malta,' and Shakspeare's Merchant of Venise,' find their counterparts in the Fortress of the Faith. For a few years before and after 1400 A.D. a pestilence raged throughout Europe, so fearful in its phænomena and effects as to be commonly denominated the black death.. During the general panic a notion was rapidly propagated, that the mortality was caused by the Jews poisoning the springs and fountains. Some averred that they had beheld the Jews by moonlight muttering incantations, and casting deleterious drugs into the rivers and running streams. Thousands of lives were sacrificed to this rumour in Catalonia alone. The customary profanation of the eucharistical elements by the Jews, their sanguinary passovers celebrated with the blood of Christian children, their mockery of the most awful event of Christian history, are fables too well known to require notice, and were a repetition of the calumnies with which, centuries earlier, the various sects of Christendom had assailed one another, and which were originally invented by the pagan hierarchy and populace. We shall pass over this chapter of Mr. Finn's volume, because such accusations were not peculiar to the Spanish church. The Ashkenazim suffered equally with the Sephardim from the inflamed imaginations of the multitude and the active malevolence of the ecclesiastical orders. The following anecdotes are however sufficiently curious to extract, since they tend to show that the government was sometimes uninfected by the phrenzy that possessed its subjects in church and state.

«In the reign of one of the Alonzos, the crowd assembled with a complaint to the king, that they had discovered a dead Christian in a Jew's house, who had doubtless killed him for the sake of his blood to drink. But at length the king got them to acknowledge that they had placed the corpse there in order to raise an insurrection which might take vengeance for the death of Christ.>>

In the time of good king Alonzo the Great, some men reported that they had seen a Christian enter a Jew's house on the first day of Passover, and presently afterwards heard a cry for help. The magistrates sent to examine the place, but found no Christian there; they therefore blamed the people for bringing such idle tales before

them. Appeal was made to the king; he summoned the accused Jew, who denied all knowledge of the circumstance, and Alonzo was of opinion that the accusers were morally guilty of the murder, if there were any, for not having gone immediately to the rescue. The next day they returned with witnesses to swear to the allegations; so the king resolved to investigate it thoroughly. The Jew's name and residence were written down. The Christian's name was given as Pedro Guzman, and his features were described; the wife of the deceased was Beatrice, a servant to a certain bishop. When sent for she deposed that her husband was from home, having gone to make some enquiries of a Jew. The others declared that they had conversed with him; but the Jew coming home, took him into an inner room, and they presently heard his screams for help; that they leaped in at the window, but found not their friend in the house, only the floor was wet with blood. Then it was thought proper to apply the torture. The accused, after enduring great suffering, confessed that he had killed the man, and thrown him into the river. He was sentenced to be burnt alive; but just as the warrant was being read over, the aforesaid bishop chanced to enter, and he enquired into the business. But so far from Guzman having been killed on the first day of Passover, he had seen him alive yesterday in a suburban village. A party was sent to bring him forward, including one Jew, lest the others of the party should induce Guzman to abscond; and the man was produced alive. The king was surprised that the Jew should have criminated himself, so as to incur the penalty of death; but the latter declared that he had done so that an end might be made to the tortures, by which he was treated worse than a murderer.»

Does not this story, coupled with the late frightful scenes at Damascus, lead one to exclaim, Verily there is nothing new under the sun!

The remaining pages of Mr. Finn's work will probably appear to our readers, should we have induced them to peruse it, the most interesting portion of the volume. They contain the history of the Sephardim in the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella, when the Catholics, flushed with repeated triumphs over the Moors, and aided by the Inquisition, summed up the oppressions of centuries by the expulsion of the Jews from the Peninsula. But this period is fully and ably treated in other works of general access, and especially in Mr. Prescott's excellent history of those sovereigns. Our object in the foregoing pages has been rather to collect and illustrate the less known portions of the annals of the Sephardim as an instruc

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