THE JEWS IN EUROPE. 307 



with the charge of avarice and usurious money-lending, it is always 

 simply their religious belief that made the ground for charges against 

 them : they are continually accused of crime ; and the fact that they 

 did not recognize the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and Incarna- 

 tion was sufficient proof of their guilt. That they actually railed at 

 Christ and his mother before the ears of Christians was certainly very 

 rare, since they knew that a word of that sort sufficed to devote them, 

 and often also their families, to death. It could not occur to an Israel- 

 ite to wish to convert a Christian to his own faith. It is written in 

 the Talmud, " Proselytes are as dangerous for Judaism as ulcers on a 

 sound body." If one not a Jew had really a mind to become a convert 

 to Judaism, he must be told, "Do you not know that the Jews live in 

 sufferings and woes, that they are insulted and cast out, tormented and 

 put to the rack ? " At the same time, he was reminded of the oppress- 

 iveness of the statutes, and of the privations and sacrifices to which 

 he would have to submit. 



" The Christian brought the Jews to this pass," Shakespeare makes 

 his " Merchant of Venice " say, and history for thirteen hundred years 

 says the same. When the Jews in Spain were threatened with de- 

 struction and banishment, a rabbi is reported to have said to the Chris- 

 tian : " We are at once a people blessed and laden with a curse. Now 

 you wish to destroy us, but you will not succeed, because we are 

 blessed. The time will come when you will exert yourselves to raise 

 us up, but in this you will not be successful, for Ave are cursed." If 

 this was actually uttered, it is not clear whether the reference was to 

 the Spanish Jews, the Sephardim, or the curse was conjectured to rest 

 on the whole people. A retrospect of nine centuries of ignominious 

 treatment and misery might easily have awakened such a thought. 

 But since the Reformation the lot of the Jews has been steadily grow- 

 ing more favorable, and to-day no rabbi can any longer have the sense 

 of a curse resting upon his race. The number of Jews now living on 

 the surface of the globe has been estimated to be very nearly twelve 

 million ; should the number be less, it is none the less certain that 

 they are more powerful than they ever were in past time, not except- 

 ing the period of their political independence. The official (Christian) 

 interpretation of the word of the prophets, current in the middle ages, 

 is thereby proved delusive ; according to it, the Jewish people were to 

 be reduced by continuous mistreatment and persecution to a very small 

 handful of survivors. But in spite of all the heavy blows dealt upon 

 this anvil, and of the numerous proselytes to Christianity and Moham- 

 medanism, they have not lost but rather steadily increased in numbers. 

 For a hundred years Israel has struggled for political emancipation, 

 and at last has won it in all European states ; only Russia, Spain, 

 and Portugal have not as yet granted it. It has also not been granted 

 them in the Mohammedan world. But in Europe the larger half of the 

 Jews find themselves" in possession of all social and political rights. 



