THE JEWS IN EUROPE. 217 



In addition, the physician's calling was as a rule closed to the Jews, 

 although in Mohammedan countries it was precisely as physicians that 

 they won high distinction ; for the councils forbade a sick person, on 

 pain of excommunication, to take medicine from a Jewish physician 

 it being better, as they declared, to die than to be healed by an infidel ? 

 They were further excluded from all schools, high and low. Whoever 

 had a desire for knowledge must become a rabbi, and if, as a very rare 

 exception, a prince, like Alfonso X of Castile, made use of Jewish 

 mathematicians and astronomers, the education of these men was ob- 

 tained in lands where the Koran ruled. The taking of interest on 

 loans from strangers was permitted to the Jews by their law, and the 

 supposed prohibition by Christ was believed at first by both parties 

 not to be binding upon the Jews. The matter changed, however, 

 after Innocent III. At the end of the twelfth century, theologians 

 and canonical writers taught that, in accordance with natural law as 

 well as the divinely revealed law of the Old and New Testaments, the 

 taking of interest in general is forbidden and is a sin. Innocent III 

 ordered, therefore, that the Jews should be compelled to give back the 

 interest they had collected, and to this end introduced an expedient that 

 had not been used before, viz., that Christians should be compelled, 

 on pain of excommunication, to break off all intercourse with those 

 Jews who refused to make the returns. This amounted, in case the 

 programme was strictly carried out, to delivering them over to death 

 by starvation. Hence arose sad confusion and conflicts of many kinds. 

 The bishops, whose duty it was to pronounce excommunication, were 

 disposed often to execute their task in good earnest ; and the synods 

 (for example, that at Avignon in 1209) urged them to do so. The 

 princes, on the other hand, in whose interest and as whose servants 

 the Jews carried on their money-lending, protected them ; or, on the 

 other hand, as happened in not a few cases, confiscated their entire 

 property for their own use, on the plea that it had been gained by 

 taking interest. Sometimes they even compelled Christian debtors to 

 pay the outstanding interest into their own treasury. 



Interminable confusion to clergy and laity was the result of the 

 action of the hierarchy in forbidding the taking of interest, and the 

 canonical writers vexed themselves to invent distinctions and find ways 

 of escape out of the labyrinth. In innumerable cases they found them- 

 selves helpless in face of the actual circumstances and practically aban- 

 doned the principle, although in theory no one could attack it on pain 

 of death. In real consistency, the Christians should have been forbid- 

 den to borrow on interest, since by so doing they enticed the Jews to 

 sin. But Popes, bishops, clergy, were themselves often in a situation 

 in which they must seek for a loan and pay the interest ; in fact, the 

 whole organization of the curia, the management of the system of 

 benefices, the taxation of the clergy by the Popes, were calculated to 

 make bishops, clergy, monasteries, and chapters liable to the payment 



