Moses ben Tibon Marimon, Rs. Joseph and Moses Kimchi, and R. Abraham ben Chasdai,* compose the venerable company of the twelve great doctors who adorned and formed the golden age of Hebrew literature. And as after David's three mighty men there came other three, more honourable than the rest of the chiefs, but who yet attained not to the first three, so, toward the end of the thirteenth century, there arose twelve other Hebrew scholars who, though none of them equal to the first twelve, were yet great in their generation, and competed successfully with the most learned Arabian ulemas, and (less difficult task) with the most distinguished Salamancan doctors. The respect in which they and their predecessors, as well as the rest of their learned brethren of this period, still are held by the Jews themselves, is best understood by the universal acknowledgments among all educated Jews throughout Europe, that after their departure Hebrew literature was in a state of decay till another Moses, Moses Mendelsohn, in the last century, once more imbued the Jewish mind with the spirit of true philosophical inquiry. From the intermediate position which they occupied between the Mohammedan and Christian populations of the Peninsula, now contending for the faith of their fathers against the Imauns of Islam, and now against the priesthood of the Catholic church, who were alike followers of creeds both daughters of the Old Testament, the Jews naturally were familiarized with the Arabian learning, and became the channels of its transmission, and with it of some of the wisdom of the ancients, to their illiterate Christian masters. Jewish astronomers were employed by Alfonzo X. the Wise, of Castile, to construct the famed Alfonzine tables. Jewish physicians were found at the courts of almost all the early Castilian and Aragonese monarchs. Jewish financiers administered the royal revenues, and farmed the taxes. Jewish sagest assisted as counsellors in the formation of new codes of law; of which "Las Siete Partidas" *"Qui primus philosophiam Aristotelicam oppugnare, teste illustri Francisco Pico Mirandulano" (alluding to his work, Examen Vanitatis Gentium,) "adgressus est." S. Luzzati. vide sup. + There is extant a curious poem, addressed by a wise Jew of Carrion to Don Pedro (the Cruel), on his accession to the throne. In the MS. of the National Library of Madrid it is called "The Book of the Rabbi Don Santi," and its purpose is to give moral counsels to the new king. It begins thus: Señor Rey, noble, alto, Oy este sermon, Judio de Carrion. Communalmente trebado, Legunt que va syquiente. And afterwards, as an apology for being a Jew, he says (in the MS. of the Escurial, which differs slightly from the Madrid MS.):— Por nascer en el espino La rosa y a non siento, of the same Alfonso X.,* (confirming to the Jew the protection of person and property and the free exercise of religion,) is a signal instance. We have, it is true, no proof that they ever sat in the Cortes; but this only shows the more plainly how great their influence must have been, thus to procure, without assisting in person, the passing of such important enactments in their favour. And as the Jewish Rabbins long ranked in Spain as an intellectual hierarchy, so the Jewish people, at the same time, formed there an "imperium in imperio."t But, with the beginning of the 14th century, the tide, which had so long carried them in prosperity, set strongly against them; and, in ceasing to speak of their literature, we must at once begin the narrative of their sufferings. Spain has ever been the fruitful mother and nurse of religious persecution; and the fanatic St. Vincent Ferrer might find many precedents, recorded in the annals of the church in Spain, for persecution and attempted extermination of the hated people. Under the Arian Visigoths they had lived in peace; but from Recared, the first Catholic king, (who, with all the zeal of a new convert, showed by persecuting edicts his orthodox Christianity,) down to Roderick, the last of the Goths, each successive generation of Hebrews suffered more severely than the preceding one. The canons of seventeen councils of Toledo, then the national assemblies of Christian Spain, contain, with scarce any exceptions, clauses against them of increasing severity; till, shortly before the Moorish invasion, Gascony and Narbonne," and the North African shore, became the refuge of numerous compulsory emigrants from the Jewish body in the Iberian peninsula. Still their attachment to what had now become their native land, to the family hearth-stone and to the graves of the household, as well as their extensive commerce, and the productive returns of the soil which they industriously cultivated, were ties strong enough to bind to Spain the great mass of the Hebrew population, ready to welcome, if not to invite, the more tolerant Moslem. From the era of the Mohammedan conquest, to that of the Crusades, their peace and prosperity met with few interruptions. Once indeed, in 1068 A.D., we read of an unprovoked massacre of 1500 families by the Saracens of Granada, after three centuries and a half of rest; and at another time we find pope Gregory VII. writing to restrain Ferdinand of Castile from attempting to extirpate the Jews, as he had been advised to do by his queen Donna Sancha, in order to sanctify his war with the Moorish sovereigns. In striking contrast with this letter of Hildebrand, an epistle of pope Innocent III. to Alfonso IX. (1205) is still extant; in which he reproves his liberality to the children of Abraham, and more than hints at the lawfulness of their entire extirpation. The enthusiastic frenzy of the first crusaders manifested itself in Spain, as in other European countries, by shedding torrents of Jewish blood; and in the Jewry of Toledo, the Jerusalem of Spain, were enacted, when the archbishop Barnard took the Cross (A. D. 1108), scenes which called to remembrance the horrors of the fall of the Holy City. But, as the extravagant zeal of the soldiers of the Cross declined, so happily was quenched the thirst for the blood of its enemies; and we find the Jews for the most part protected and honoured in Castile, Leon, Aragon and Navarre, till the close of the 13th century, and of the golden age of their literature. Many causes co-operated at this period to deprive the Jews in the Castilian monarchy of their immunities, rites, and privileges; and the same causes for the most part worked the same results about the same time in the rest of the Peninsular kingdoms. Considered as the peculiar property of the sovereign, this nation of scrfs was entirely dependent on the will and caprice of their master; and he was continually exposed to numerous influences hostile to the well-being of the hated race. The high nobles were jealous of the position and credit of the Jews at Court, and were ever endeavouring to supplant their rivals in the employment and confidence of the king. The lower nobility, proud, indolent, and needy, were at once the enemies and debtors of the wealthy and industrious Israelites ;* and when unable to pay the old, or to contract new loans, they were ready to raise the cry of usury, and cancel the obligation by murdering their creditors. The small land-holders, poor and improvident, were frequently unable to cultivate the soil without borrowing from their wealthy Jewish neighbours; and were equally ready with the nobles, when their credit wholly failed, to wash out the account against them with the blood of the importunate money-lenders. But, above all others, the clergy were the bitter and inveterate foes of the race of Abraham, Beside their old cry against the Jews as the enemies of the Cross, they accused them of attempts to make proselytes; a charge *The rate of legal interest was then 33 per cent. per annum. never brought against them elsewhere, and one to which their religion is opposed. They hated them too with the bitter. hatred with which the charlatan and imposter regard the man of knowledge and skill. The Jews surpassed the monks in the arts of healing, and the Christian sovereigns preferred heretical practitioners to cloistered quacks. It was not strange, therefore, that these last felt all the malicious jealousy which animated Demetrius and the craftsmen of Ephesus against St. Paul, when, like them, they found that their "craft was in danger to be set at nought." Many opportunities of enriching the church and the convent were lost to the Catholic clergy, because the Hebrew physician and the natural heir kept the empirical monk from the bedside of the sick and dying. More than all this, they were often themselves deeply in debt to the monied Israelites, even going to the length of pledging to them the sacramental plate; and they regarded persecution as an easy way to wipe out the score. The people, lastly, bigotted and subservient to the will of the priesthood, were always prepared to do their pleasure, and enrich themselves by the massacre and plunder of the Jewries: a spark would at any moment set fire to such inflammable materials, and the law was powerless against the popular fury. With the year A.D. 1300 began the downfal of the forlorn people before this powerful coalition; but it was only after the lapse of two centuries that they were finally swept from the Peninsula. During the first of these periods, we read with indignation the successive decrees of Cortes and Councils, all tending to annihilate the political existence, ncient rights, and partial toleration, hitherto enjoyed by them. Nor was this all. Estella, Toledo, Granada, Burgos, Seville, Palma, Barcelona, Cordova, and Valentia, witnessed the partial, and, in some cases, the entire extirpation of their Jewish inhabitants ;* who, by the testimony of their enemies, bowed their heads unresistingly in the silence of martyrdom for the religion and rites of their fathers. But the opening of the fifteenth century brought with it new enemies and new sufferings. Hitherto the Spanish church seems to have treated the Jews with the same apathy, so far as attempts at proselytism went, with which, as it would appear from Bede, the British church regarded the Anglo-Saxons in England; and made a conscience of leaving the hated race to die in their ignorance and their sins. Conversions by force or fear were the new engines of torment invented and applied by the popular saint, Vincent Ferrer, and his associates; more dreadful to the sufferer than death itself, because his tortures were more refined, and his agonies more prolonged. The"New Christians" abounded Zu * "Every Jewish city was a Troy."-Lozano, "Reyes neuvos de Toledo." niga, "Annales de Sevilla," pp. 252-257. Lopez de Ayala, Chron. del Rey Enrique III., A.D. 1391, c. v.—x. in Aragon, Valentia, and Majorca, and especially in Barcelona and Lerida; they were less numerous in Castile and Portugal. Most of them, while conforming outwardly to the creed and ceremonies of the Catholic church, still secretly lived as Jews, circumcised their children, and kept the Passover. The history of the disputation at Tortoza, before the soi-disant pope Benedict XIII. (Peter of Luna), between his physician, Jeronimo de Santa Fè, with two others, (one, like himself, an apostate from Judaism,) and the sixteen Rabbins appointed by the Jews to represent them, is familiar to every student of ecclesiastical history. The doubtful issue of a contest where each party claimed the victory proved even more disastrous to the Jews than an acknowledged defeat would have been; for it made the orthodox Catholics only the more anxious to silence adversaries whom they could not convince. Henceforward, till the union of the Spanish monarchies under Ferdinand and Isabella, the implacable hatred of the enemies of the Jews against them (especially of the renegade Jews) was gratified to the full. Biscayan Hidalgos, Castilian grandees, and Aragonese nobles, joined with the clergy and the rabble to pour out the blood of the seed of Abraham like water in almost every Christian city of Spain.* Though the fall of Granada, and the discovery of America, hold in the eyes of the world at large the first places among the events which signalized the reign of the Catholic sovereigns, the court of Rome at that time hailed as the great fact of their united sway the establishment of the Holy Office throughout the whole of Spain. Introduced by Ferdinand into Castile from Aragon,† in spite of its known unpopularity even there, and of the repugnance to it of Isabella and her subjects, it gave the last blow to the tottering fabric of Spanish Judaism. During the eighteen years of the Inquisitor-Generalship of Torquemada, nearly 115,000 heretics, chiefly "New Christians," Moors and Jews, suffered beneath its jurisdiction; and in A.D. 1492, within three months after the fall of Granada, Ferdinand and Isabella (at Torquemada's instigation) by an edict dated from that city, finally expelled the Jews from Spain. The emigrants took * Even now the cry "Judiada" is the prelude in Spain to a certain murder; as when his Spanish troops bayonetted the Italian general Filangieri, governor of La Coruna, in 1808, for pretended "Judiada."-Schepler i.404-412. Gieseler, Text-book of Eccles. Hist., Div. v. c. iv., § 147. Llorente, Hist. Crit. de l'Inquisition d'Espagne, t. i. Marians, Hist. Hisp. lib. xxvi. Jost, Geschich e der Israeliten seit der Maccabäer, tom. vii., § 31 Lindo, Hist. of the Jews in Spain and Portugal. Georg. Dated March 30, A.D. 1492.-Mariana, who tells us also that 800,000 Jews |