306 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



by fire. The princes were also ready, in ease no Court of Inquisition 

 was in existence, to execute this punishment. The Emperor Frederick 

 III caused a young man, who was valuable to him as a servant, and 

 who, after being baptized out of fear turned back to Judaism, to be 

 conducted to the stake, to which he went singing psalms. In Spain 

 and Portugal the observing of some Jewish rite, on the part of a new 

 convert, sufficed to subject him to imprisonment and torture. It was 

 not realized that by this means the Church was being filled with hypo- 

 crites, and that numberless profanations, otherwise sought to be avoided 

 in every possible way, unavoidably took place. In her better days the 

 Church regarded an entrance of her walls, accomplished by the influ- 

 ence of slaughter and terror, a disgrace and a sacrilege ; but now all, 

 bishops, priests, and laity, worked harmoniously together to imprint 

 this stigma on their Church above all, in Spain. 



A more painful existence than that of a Jew in the middle ages 

 is scarcely thinkable, and, if he had had a knowledge of history, with 

 what longing would he have looked back to the happy time of the 

 Roman Empire ! Every day the Jew must be prepared for some act of 

 extortion, or the loss of all his goods, or imprisonment or banishment. 

 Emigration was often impossible, and was in most cases not permitted, 

 so long as the Jew had any remaining possessions which could be taken 

 from him ; and when he did undertake it his condition hardly ever 

 improved ; it was often " falling out of the frying-pan into the fire." 

 Moreover, he had to pay a high price for permission to live elsewhere, 

 even if it was only for a few years. On the highways of the country 

 his person was as insecure as that of an outlaw. 



The whole external history of the Jews for almost a thousand years 

 makes up a succession of elaborate oppressions, of degrading and de- 

 moralizing afflictions, of violence and persecution, of wholesale slaugh- 

 ters, with interchanges of banishments and recallings. It is as if the 

 European nations had vied with each other in trying to create the double 

 delusion that the Jews were condemned till the end of time in the de- 

 crees of Heaven to the severest helotism, and that the sons of the Gen- 

 tiles were ordained to act the part of jailers and hangmen to the chosen 

 people of God ! Christians knew not how to dispense with them ; they 

 were serviceable in many ways ; and yet they could not be endured. 

 Their countenances worked like a challenge upon the believer, who 

 was touched by no scruple, and thought it possible to explain the Jews' 

 fixed attachment to their ancestral faith, under the clear light of the 

 gospel, only as a species of wicked obstinacy. 



Nevertheless, one feature is striking in the great mass of abusive 

 discourses, arraignments, and declamatory outbursts against the de- 

 tested people a feature which, along with endless repetition of the 

 customary phrases, characterizes the ecclesiastical literature of those 

 centuries: and this is, that their moral life, so far as the family, chas- 

 tity, temperance, and fidelity to obligations go, is never attacked. Along 



