156 THE LIFE OF SCIENCE 



open to them without effort. But in the twelfth century the scien- 

 tific life of Judaism began to move from Spain across the Pyrenees, 

 and in the following century it began to decline in its former 

 haunts. By the middle of the thirteenth century a great many 

 Jews had already been established so long in France, Germany, 

 and England, that Arabic had become a foreign language to them. 

 Up to this period the Jews had been generally ahead of the Chris- 

 tians, and far ahead; now for the first time the situation was 

 reversed. Indeed, the Christians had already transferred most of 

 the Arabic knowledge into Latin; the translations from Arabic 

 into Hebrew were naturally far less abundant, and hence the 

 non-Arabic-speaking Jews of Western Europe were not only in a 

 position of political inferiority (the Crusades had caused many 

 anti-Semitic persecutions and the Jews of Christendom were 

 everywhere on the defensive) but also — and this was perhaps 

 even more painful — in a position of intellectual inferiority. To be 

 sure, this was soon compensated by the fact that many of them 

 learned Latin and could then read the Arabic texts in their Latin 

 versions, but even then they no longer held an intellectual mo- 

 nopoly with regard to the Christians; they came but second. 

 While the early Jewish physicians had possessed "secrets" of 

 learning which were sealed to their Christian colleagues (this was 

 especially true with regard to eye-diseases which were thoroughly 

 investigated in Arabic treatises) , the later ones had no such privi- 

 leges. The gravity of the change is well illustrated by the appear- 

 ance in the fourteenth and following centuries of an increasing 

 number of translations (e.g., of medical works) from Latin into 

 Hebrew. Thus the stream of translations which had been running 

 from East to West was again reversed in the opposite direction. 

 Note that a curious cycle had been completed, for the source of 

 these writings was Greek; their Arabic elaborations had been 

 translated into Latin and had inspired new Latin treatises; these 

 treatises were now translated into Hebrew. From East to East 

 via the West! But other cycles were even more curious. In the 

 fourteenth century and later, Arabic, Persian, and Latin writings 



