We will now turn to another figure--the first English translator of Modena’s _Riti Ebraici_. This was Edmund Chilmead, who was born in 1610 and died in 1654. He was a good scholar and an accomplished musician. Up to 1648 he resided in Oxford, but as a result of the troubles between Charles I and the Parliament, he was expelled from the University because of his royalist opinions. Two things, however, speak well for Cromwell’s toleration. Chilmead was not only allowed to live unmolested in London to the day of his death, but had no hesitation, on the title-page of his translation of Modena, to describe himself still as “Chaplain of Christ Church, Oxon.” The date of the translation gives the clue. “The History of the Rites, Customes, and Manner of Life of the Present Jews throughout the World” was printed “for Jo. Martin and Jo. Ridley, at the Castle in Fleet Street, by Ram Alley” in 1650. By that time Cromwell was probably thinking of the Jewish question, and he must have welcomed this first-hand statement on the Jewish religion. Chilmead’s edition, one must confess, is badly printed, and is not very creditable to the printing capacity of the “Castle in Fleet Street.” One might pardon the many misprints in the Hebrew, but it is hard to overlook the numerous faults in the English. It is not wonderful that, in the following century, Ockley thought it necessary to issue a new version. Modena’s own original was not, as the title suggests, a history. It does not so much give sources as facts. But this circumstance, that it is mainly _descriptive_, confers on it a permanent value. For it thus becomes a document. It helps us to realize several aspects of the Jewish position at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The author uses the term _history_ in the sense of narrative; as he states in his Prefatory Epistle, he is concerned with the _what_ and not with the _why_ (“Quod sunt,” not “Propter quod sunt,” as he expresses it). He deals with his present, not with the past, and for that very limitation we may be grateful. He claims, too, that he is a “Relater,” not a “Defender.” That being so, it is of peculiar interest to find what we do in his work, arranged in five books, “according to the number of the Books of the Law.”