“Now Spain was something more to them than this. It was no foreign soil, passed and repassed with the indifference of a stranger. They had lived there for twelve hundred years. They had seen the Teutonic forest‐creeds moulded and melted into the new faith of Rome. They had seen the Ishmaelite sweep that faith away. By him they had been welcomed as brothers. With him they had lit the lamp of science when all the world was dark. Then they had seen the Cross rise from the northern mountains, and the Crescent wane and wane before it. By the kings of Christian Spain their worth had been acknowledged; they had fostered their trade; they had called them to their councils; they had befriended and loved them. Persecution and jealousy had driven many of their brethren to accept another creed; but the new Christians were Jews still; they had married their daughters to the proudest nobles of a race where the peasant was proud; and not a duke in all Spain could despise them without despising his own mother’s blood. Spain, too, was the land where Jewish wisdom had unfolded and blossomed. Their physicians and their astronomers were the first in Europe. Their poets and their philosophers were eminent among their nation. The psalms of Jehuda Halevi were sung in the synagogues of the Rhine. Aben Esra had eclipsed the fame of the great Eastern school of Pombeditha; above all, Spain claimed the son of Maimon, the great prophet of the Exile, famed from the Seine to the Euphrates as the second Moses. “Such, besides escape from utter ruin, were the temptations to apostacy. And those who issued the decree fully hoped that apostacy would have been its result. Every means was taken. ‘In the public squares, in the synagogues, Catholic preachers thundered forth invective against the Hebrew heresy.’ They might thunder—they were not heard. “ ‘Come,’ said their priests and elders, ‘let us strengthen ourselves in our faith and in the teachings of our God, against the voice of the oppressor, and the scorn of the enemy. If they destroy us—well; if they will let us live—well; but we will not depart from the Covenant, neither make our hearts froward; but we will go forth in the name of the Lord our God, who saved our fathers from Egypt, and brought them through the Red Sea.’ “The spirit of Moses and of Joshua rested on the aged rabbis, and their words prevailed. Few in number and bold in cowardice were those who yielded. They made ready for this second Exodus where no Canaan glistened in the distance. Forced to sell their possessions in three months, forbidden to sell them for gold, they were glad to exchange large houses or estates for an ass or mule, or for such trifling articles of travel as the wish to be first at the spoiling might induce purchasers to supply.