The late Mr. J. R. Green, in a delightful sketch on the early history of Oxford in his "Stray Studies," afterwards incorporated into the pages of his "History of the English People," seems inclined to give some support to the theory which would connect the origin of the University with the establishment of the Oxford Jewry. This theory, however, can hardly be accepted.[15] It is very probable indeed that the medical school, which we find established at Oxford and in high repute during the twelfth century, is traceable to Jewish origin; and the story is no doubt true also, which tells how Roger Bacon penetrated to the older world of material research by means of the Hebrew instruction and the Hebrew books which he found among the Jewish rabbis of the Oxford Synagogue. It is reasonable also to suppose that the history of Christian Aristotelianism, and of the Scholastic Theology that was based upon it, may have been largely influenced by the philosophers of the Synagogue. It seems, indeed, to be a well-established conclusion, that the philosophy of Aristotle was first made known to the West through the Arabic versions brought from Spain by Jewish scholars and rabbis. But it is undoubtedly "in a more purely material way" that, as Mr. Green truly says, the Jewry most directly influenced academic history. At Oxford, as elsewhere, "the Jew brought with him something more than the art or science which he had gathered at Cordova or Bagdad; he brought with him the new power of wealth. The erection of stately castles, of yet statelier abbeys, which followed the Conquest, the rebuilding of almost every cathedral or conventual church, marks the advent of the Jewish capitalist. No one can study the earlier history of our great monastic houses without finding the secret of that sudden outburst of industrial activity to which we own the noblest of our Minsters in the loans of the Jew."