ii THE JEWS 265 



keeping of faith ; even promises made to the wicked 

 may not be broken. It was " a law of some Jew or 

 Saracen, brutal and barbarian, not of civilised and heroic 

 Greek or Roman, that sometimes, and with certain 

 kinds of people, faith might be pledged for individual 

 gain, and for an opportunity of deception, making it 

 the servant of tyranny and treachery.'* - 1 



The antipathy of Bruno towards the Jews is to be 

 explained by the same principle of social life and pro- 

 gress ; it is not, as Lagarde supposes, 2 an offspring of 

 his hatred towards the Church, regarded as a direct 

 descendant of Judaism. So far as it is not an expres- 

 sion of an unreasoning anti-Semitic wave of feeling, 

 such as occasionally overwhelms some of the European 

 peoples, it may have had three grounds : the reputed 

 avarice of the Jew : 3 his exclusiveness, unsociability ; 

 " a race always base, servile, mercenary, solitary, in- 

 communicative, shunning intercourse with the Gentiles, 

 whom they brutally despise, and by whom in their 

 turn, and with good reason, they are contemned" : 4 

 or his religion, which appeared to Bruno a corruption 

 of the nobler Egyptian religion. Thus in Spaccio 5 the 

 punishment of the children for the sins of the fathers is 

 said to be found only among Barbarians, and first among 

 the Jews, " a race so pestilent, leprous, and generally 

 pernicious that it should be effaced from the earth." 6 



Temperance, as a virtue, is rather the peace of mind Temper- 

 that goes with civilisation urbanity than the more ai 

 physical virtue : its opposites are intemperance, excess, 

 asperity, savagery, barbarity. " It is through intemper- 



1 Pp. 5 20 5 21 - 2 Op. tit. p. 794. 



3 Compare the picture of Avarice in Spaccio, pp. 477, 478, with Shakespeare's 

 Shylock. 4 Cabala, p. 576. 31. 5 P. 500. 40. 



6 Cf. p. 535- 4> an d 54 1 ' 35 u Escremento de /' Egitto" which may not mean more 

 than outgrowth or offshoot of Egypt, although it has been interpreted otherwise. 



