44. _Judaism in Islam._--Another force now appears on the scene. The new religion inaugurated by Mahomet differed in its theory from the Roman Catholic Church. The Church, it is true, in council after council, passed decisions unfriendly to the Jews. From the synod at Elvira in the 4th century this process began, and it was continued in the West-Gothic Church legislation, in the Lateran councils (especially the fourth in 1215), and in the council of Trent (1563). The anti-social tendency of these councils expressed itself in the infliction of the badge, in the compulsory domicile of Jews within ghettos, and in the erection of formidable barriers against all intercourse between church and synagogue. The protective instinct was responsible for much of this interference with the natural impulse of men of various creeds towards mutual esteem and forbearance. The church, it was conceived, needed defence against the synagogue at all hazards, and the fear that the latter would influence and dominate the former was never absent from the minds of medieval ecclesiastics. But though this defensive zeal led to active persecution, still in theory Judaism was a tolerated religion wherever the Church had sway, and many papal bulls of a friendly character were issued throughout the middle ages (Scherer, p. 32 seq.). Islam, on the other hand, had no theoretic place in its scheme for tolerated religions; its principle was fundamentally intolerant. Where the mosque was erected, there was no room for church or synagogue. The caliph Omar initiated in the 7th century a code which required Christians and Jews to wear peculiar dress, denied them the right to hold state offices or to possess land, inflicted a poll-tax on them, and while forbidding them to enter mosques, refused them the permission to build new places of worship for themselves. Again and again these ordinances were repeated in subsequent ages, and intolerance for infidels is still a distinct feature of Mahommedan law. But Islam has often shown itself milder in fact than in theory, for its laws were made to be broken. The medieval Jews on the whole lived, under the crescent, a fuller and freer life than was possible to them under the cross. Mahommedan Babylonia (Persia) was the home of the gaonate (see GAON), the central authority of religious Judaism, whose power transcended that of the secular exilarchate, for it influenced the synagogue far and wide, while the exilarchate was local. The gaonate enjoyed a practical tolerance remarkable when contrasted with the letter of Islamic law. And as the Bagdad caliphate tended to become more and more supreme in Islam, so the gaonate too shared in this increased influence. Not even the Qaraite schism was able to break the power of the geonim. But the dispersion of the Jews was proceeding in directions which carried masses from the Asiatic inland to the Mediterranean coasts and to Europe.