slaves by Jews in their dominions was a scandal to the Church. Fourteen years later Clotaire II. adopted the recommendations of the Clermont and Maçon Councils, that Israelites should not occupy positions in the State service, which would give them authority over Christians, and during the following year the Council of Paris resolved that they should be dismissed from all State employment altogether. Charlemagne and Louis le Débonnaire prohibited the Jews from buying or selling sacred Church vessels, from receiving Christian hostages for debt, and from dealing in wine and cereals, and Charles the Bold ordered in 877 that whilst Christians paid one-eleventh of their earnings to the king, the Jews should pay one-tenth. During all the time that these efforts were being made to render life more of a vale of tears to the Jew, simply on account of his religion, it must be mentioned that the principal, if not the only merchants were Jews, and that not only was their commercial morality above suspicion, but by many their value to the community at large was reckoned deservedly high. There was consequently not the slightest justification for harassing them; and in the gradual restriction of Jewish enterprise, and the proportionate development of Christian aggressiveness, its material and moral disadvantages became speedily evident. Already pointed at, as the bearers of an hereditary reproach, their position was not improved by the celebrated Eucharistic controversies which broke out about this time. The disputes of Paschasius Radbertus with Ratramnus, and of Berengarius with Lanfranc, tended in an important degree to revive the bitterest issues at the basis of the mutual hostility of Jew and Christian, and when these and other similar influences-particularly the theory put forward in Anselm's Cur Deus Homo-joined to form the mighty confluent of the Crusades, the position of the Jews of Europe as the hated and despised of every class was settled. The first blood drawn by the Crusaders was Jewish blood. Dean Milman says:

When the first immense horde of undisciplined fanatics of the lowest order, under the command of Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless, and under the guidance of a goose and a goat, assembled near the city of Treves, a murmur rapidly spread through the camp, that, while they were advancing to recover the sepulchre of their Redeemer from the Infidels, they were leaving behind worse unbelievers, the murderers of the Lord. With one impulse the Crusaders rushed to the city and began a relentless pillage, violation, and massacre of every Jew they could find.

...

This was the definite commencement of a history of persecution which, for its long duration and calculated malignity, its sustained barbarity and complete injustice, is unexampled-persecution which, whatever the outcome of the conflict of creeds, will never cease to cast a shadow upon the history of Christianity. The physical and moral corruption of the Jews was now rapidly proceeded with. Whilst the perpetual imminence of personal attack was destroying all the manly qualities that they possessed, their systematic exclusion from

honourable walks in life drove them speedily to those contracted habits of thought and action

Deep, hollow, treacherous, and full of guile.

which have not unnaturally lingered in their posterity. They were driven from the possession of lands and the membership of trade guilds; Gregory the Seventh in the throes of his conflict with Henry the Fourth of Bavaria, thundered his fiercest Bulls against them, and then, having no place in the prevailing feudal system, they became the disposable property of the various monarchs, and were bought, sold, pledged, and plundered, as so much merchandise.

At the fourth Lateran Council, when it was resolved that all here sies against the doctrine of Transubstantiation should be dealt with by the secular arm, Jews were specially mentioned as worthy whetstones for the zeal of a zealous Christianity, and in 1257 Alexander the Fourth, fearing that this suggestion of Innocent the Third was not religiously enough followed, issued a Bull in which he particularly exhorted the King of France and other potentates to see that the Jews wore a dis tinctive garb, and recommended them also to burn all the copies upon which they could lay their hands, of the books 'qui Thalmuth vulgariter appellantur, in quibus continentur errores contra fidem catholicam ac horribiles et intollerabiles blasphemie contra dominum nostrum Ihesum Xpum et beatam Mariam virginem matrem eius.'

According to Kiesselbach the Jews soon found themselves compelled to deal only in used or second-hand articles, as their exclusion from markets prevented them from buying sufficiently advantageously to enable them to compete with Christian merchants; and others, having a little capital and no means of employing it, resorted to money-lending. It may be interesting to those Anti-Semites who now so glibly charge the Jews with a natural tendency to usury, to know that the earliest Jewish money-lender, of whom we have any record, was not a common type of Jew, but a learned French Rabbi--R. Jacob Tamwho so far from finding anything congenial in the placing of monies at interest, bitterly complained in public of the harsh necessity which prevented him from earning his living in any other way.

I may also be permitted to say a word on the subject of high interest. At the time that Jews first resorted to money-lending there was but little security for the lender, and interest was consequently very high. Instead of letting its fluctuations take their own course, the rates became fixed-generally equitably fixed-by Royal and municipal edicts, and sometimes they were as high as 864 per cent. These rates not changing with the times, the money-lenders naturally became used to large profits, and so the evil indulgence stuck to them through the entire period of their social ostracism.

It would be tedious to recount all the various phases of the Jewbaiting of the subsequent seven hundred years; every student of history is sufficiently acquainted with at least its broad lines. This, however, must be said: whatever notable act of persecution took place, whether it assumed the form of wholesale massacre or wholesale expulsion, whether the Jews were forbidden to emerge from their Ghettos, to don an ordinary dress, or to exercise honourable professions, it could always be traced, not indirectly but directly, to Christian ecclesiastical influences, although it was certainly enthusiastically carried out by the trained bigotry of the people. I may then boldly ask who is primarily responsible for that demoralisation of the Jews of which the Anti-Semites now complain if not the ancestors of their present opponents? 'Each of the great changes,' says Dean Milman, 'which were gradually taking place in the state of the world seemed to darken the condition of this unhappy people, till the outward degradation worked inward upon their own minds.' It is not quite clear what is meant here by 'great changes,' but there can be no doubt that Milman clearly appreciated-although he did not definitely expound it-the demoralising influence of the persecution to which the Jews were exposed. On this head the eminent historian was evidently confused by his desire to place in a favourable light the few apologies for the Jews which, for various political reasons, were issued from the Vatican, quite oblivious of the fact that these apologies were but poor compensation for the ordinances which had primarily subjugated the legitimate aspirations of the Jews. However, there can be no question that it was solely in consequence of Christian persecution, brought about by authoritative Christian encouragement, that Jews were made gradually to imbibe all the vices of servitude.

It is then in the highest sense indecent for Christians now, so shortly after our emancipation, and when, too, we have already made such astonishing progress, to reproach us with evil qualities generated by their own cruelty. Nay! in face of our unmurmuring patience, it is the vulgar cowardice of the bully to endeavour to reawaken a persecution on these disingenuous charges. If the Jews, instead of being so full of vitality and intelligence, so ready to forgive the injuries of the past, and so cheerfully prepared to bear their share of national burdens and responsibilities, were a by-word for depravity and crime, Christians, so far from blaming them, should blush with a consciencestricken shame whenever a recollection of their existence crossed their minds. Had they, under the fearful tortures which they have endured, become a nation of idiots, they would only have formed a fitting monument to the brutality and infamous uncharitableness with which through the ages they have been wantonly persecuted by the soi-disant votaries of a Gospel of Mercy.

Schlegel, in referring to the miseries of Jewish ostracism, remarks that 'it is a problem whether any other people placed in a similar situation would have done better; or whether mankind in general subjected to similar trials would have come off more success

...

fully.' I quote this generous reflection of the by no means biassed son-in-law of Moses Mendelssohn, because it is a text from which I may review the miscellanea of the arguments of the AntiSemites, which are all of a somewhat kindred character.

To the problem I have quoted I answer emphatically that no other people could have done so well or could have come off so successfully, for the simple reason that no people exists which possesses the method of consolation and the staff of hopefulness of which the Jews were and still are the sole possessors. Their method of consolation they found in their peculiarly domestic religious ceremonial; their staff of hopefulness was the optimism which was bred of the simplicity of their theology and the never-ceasing demonstration of the practical superiority of their religion. Now, what the Anti-Semites, and even their abettors in England, ask of us-of course not on religious grounds! is that we should abandon, by intermarriage with the Gentile, this faith which has preserved us so marvellously. They say that whilst the Jews do not adopt this course they are virtually foreigners in whatever land they may reside, and that their exclusiveness and distinctiveness must earn for them suspicion and dislike. This is the comparatively moderate view taken by the Spectator on a recent occasion: Professor Goldwin Smith and the German AntiSemites go further, and say they cannot be patriots whilst they retain such distinctiveness.

These arguments are evidently conceived in an entire ignorance of the more practical differences between Christianity and Judaism. Whilst the former is, so to speak, a Sabbath religion, the latter is an everyday religion, exercising a purifying influence over every detail of domestic life. The Christian who has never lived in a Jewish family, or studied its mode of life, can have no conception how intimate, so to speak, is the Jew with his God; how to this day, even, he observes in every arrangement of his household, every act of his home life, some wise ordinance, of either a hygienic or moral nature, which has been handed down to him as a consecrated peculiarity of his religious denomination. These observances are only discretionary with Christians; on Jews they are obligatory, and their wisdom is so universally acknowledged that they form an indissoluble link between the Jew and his religion. It is then not an abstract theological question which divides the two creeds, but practical difficulties, for the solution of which Christians will not make any permanent sacrifices and Jews dare not. It has occurred to me that a curious apology for the social distinctiveness of Jews might be made in the spirit of that metaphorical interpretation of the Scriptures which is so much in vogue with a certain class of polemical disputants, although it would be at variance with the curse which the Israelites are supposed to realise by their homeless state. In an earlier portion of this article I have referred to the origin and meaning (according to its philological history) of the word 'Semite.' Now there can be no doubt that the meaning of the blessings which Noah foretold for the descendants of his sons Japhet and Shem was that in the case of the former his posterity should enjoy all the advantages of temporal dominion and wealth, whilst spiritual supremacy should be the destiny of the issue of the latter. 'God shall enlarge Japhet,' said Noah, whereas of Shem he said, 'Blessed be the Lord God of Shem.' Shem was then to have been, according to the commentary of Delitzsch, the bearer of the Divine Name, the repository of the religious tradition, and there is further evidence that in this capacity, and for the purpose of carrying out a mission of religion and enlightenment, his descendants were to have been a wandering people, wandering too amongst the sons of Japhet. Noah himself says, 'and he (Japheth) shall dwell in the tents of Shem,' showing that the former in the course of his worldly enterprises would require the spiritual ministrations of the latter. Again at Exodus xix. 6, we find the confirming passage: 'And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests and an holy nation; and in the sixth verse of the sixty-first chapter of Isaiah is a most extraordinary foreshadowing of this destiny of the Jews in the words 'Ye shall be named the priests of the Lord: men shall call you the ministers of our God; ye shall eat the riches of the Gentiles and in their glory shall ye boast yourselves.' It would therefore appear that the Jews remain distinct for the purpose of preserving in their integrity certain theological teachings and a certain enlightening influence, which it will one day be their mission to impress upon the world. This theory I advance, of course, only as a literary curiosity, but it is one which might be used with effect when so many preachers are intent upon justifying the persecutions of the Jews and the missionary enterprises of Christians with casuistical interpretations of more or less obscure passages in the Scriptures.

And now as to the political bearing of the distinctiveness of the Jews. Here again we meet with an extraordinary illustration of the contradictory character of the arguments of Anti-Semitism. Presuming that the argument of natural depravity has been answered, and the perfectibility of the Jews established by numberless instances of the eminences to which they have risen during the short period since their emancipation, the restless and chameleonlike hatred of the Anti-Semites breaks out in this form-I quote from an article in the Reichsbote:

Foreign nations should know that the German people allows its Press to be written and its public opinion formed by Jews, that our authors and artists sigh under the censorship of a Judaistic literature, and that the real beat of the national German pulse cannot be felt because the Hebrew critic hampers it. In England rules the Englishman; in France the Frenchman; and all we want is that in Germany the German, and not the Jew, shall give the tone. We wish the world to be influenced with respect not only for German arts, but also for German civilisation; but this