In the absence of trustworthy statistics, all estimates of the number of victims must be more or less a matter of guess-work and consequently they vary with the impressions or imagination of the annalist. Bernaldez informs us that Rabbi Mair wrote to Abraham Senior that the sovereigns had banished 35,000 vassals, that is, 35,000 Jewish households, and he adds that, of the ten or twelve rabbis whom he baptized on their return, a very intelligent one, named Zentollo of Vitoria, told him that there were in Castile more than 30,000 married Jews and 6000 in the kingdoms of Aragon, making 160,000 souls when the edict was issued, which is probably as nearly correct an estimate as we can find.[410] With time the figures grew. Albertino, Inquisitor of Valencia, in 1534, quotes Reuchlin as computing the number of exiles at 420,000.[411] The cautious Zurita quotes Bernaldez and adds that others put the total at 400,000, while Mariana tells us that most authors assert the number of households to have been 170,000, and some put the total at 800,000 souls; Páramo quotes the figures of 124,000 households or over 600,000 souls.[412] Isidore Loeb, after an exhaustive review of all authorities, Jewish and Christian, reaches the estimate[413]-- Emigrants, 165,000 Baptized, 50,000 Died, 20,000 ------- 235,000 and this, in view of the diminished number of Jews, as shown by the Repartimiento of 1474 (p. 125) is probably too large an estimate. [Sidenote: _CONTEMPORARY OPINION_] Whatever may have been the number, the sum of human misery was incomputable. Rabbi Joseph, whose father was one of the exiles, eloquently describes the sufferings of his race: "For some of them the Turks killed to take out the gold which they had swallowed to hide it; some of them hunger and the plague consumed and some of them were cast naked by the captains on the isles of the sea; and some of them were sold for men-servants and maid-servants in Genoa and its villages and some of them were cast into the sea.... For there were among those who were cast into the isles of the sea upon Provence a Jew and his old father fainting from hunger, begging bread, for there was no one to break unto him in a strange country. And the man went and sold his son for bread to restore the soul of the old man. And it came to pass, when he returned to his old father, that he found him fallen down dead and he rent his clothes. And he returned unto the baker to take his son and the baker would not give him back and he cried out with a loud and bitter cry for his son and there was none to deliver."[414] Penniless, friendless and despised they were cast forth into a world which had been taught that to oppress them was a service to the Redeemer.