304 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



labored conscientiously and with all their powers to convert the Jews. 

 This did not happen, however. The men who were capacitated for 

 such a work were completely wanting until the beginning of the thir- 

 teenth century, and even after the rise of the mendicant orders, a part 

 of whose work was to institute missions among the Jews, there was 

 very seldom a theologian who could lay claim to the education indis- 

 pensable to this end. An interpretation of the prophetical books (of 

 the Old Testament), which could have made an impression upon edu- 

 cated Jews, was beyond the powers of that time. That great flood 

 of allegorical interpretations, which ruled the Biblical literature of the 

 Christians, appeared to Israelitish Biblical scholars the empty play of 

 an arbitrary and unbridled imagination. The early Church stood, in 

 general, much nearer to the Old Testament people and faith ; the great 

 alterations and new formations of the middle ages had immeasurably 

 widened the gap. The worship of images, which, according to the 

 Israelitish view, contradicted the Decalogue, the whole scheme of do- 

 minion and compulsion which had been organized by Hildebrand, the 

 religious wars with the system of indulgences these were things that 

 made the conversion of a Jew uncommonly difficult ; and the pictorial 

 representations of the Trinity, that appeared in the latter part of the 

 middle age, must have seemed like a confirmation of the charges of 

 tritheism which they brought against the Christians. In many places, 

 indeed, the Jews were compelled to hear discourses aiming at their 

 conversion by the monks, but an effect opposite to what was intended 

 was unavoidably produced. It is told of the preacher-monk Yincenz 

 Ferrer, that his eloquence effected 30,000 conversions in Spain. But 

 these ostensible conversions took place in the midst of the horrors of 

 the slaughter of 1391 and of the ensuing occurrences, and the apostasy 

 that soon commenced of 17,000 new converts indicates how much the 

 conversions were worth. 



If a Jew voluntarily became a Christian, he lost everything that 

 union with a people holding so firmly and faithfully together had 

 hitherto secured him, and by no means did he win the favor of the 

 Christians ; rather did his condition in most cases become worse. For 

 the Church met him with suspicion. In Rome, indeed, it was regarded 

 as a rule, to which there was hardly any exception, that a baptized Jew 

 would relapse. If he had means, it was made a duty for him to return 

 all the interest he had taken, a sum often in excess of his present pos- 

 sessions ; and in France it was even the custom to confiscate all his 

 goods, and indemnify the king or baron for his loss of a bondsman, 

 and of the income derived from him. Two laws of Charles YII de- 

 stroyed this custom ; but this very monarch took from the Jews, who 

 avoided exile by embracing Christianity, two thirds of their property 

 for himself ; and his contemporaries thought this a softening of the 

 severity of the old statutes. If the converted Jew was poor, he ex- 

 perienced the lack of the means of subsistence ; for he had not learned 



