The ten centuries which passed between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the discovery of the New World are commonly known as the Middle Ages or the Dark Ages. They were, on the whole, very dark indeed for most of the inhabitants of Europe, as well as for the Jews who were scattered among them. It was a time of the fermentation of religious and national ideas, a formative period for the mind and the body politic of the races from which the great nations of the present civilized world were evolved. It was a period of violent hatreds, of cruel persecutions, of that terrible earnestness which prompts and justifies the extermination of enemies and even of opponents; there was almost constant war between nations, between classes, between creeds and sects. The ordinary man had no rights even in theory, the truths “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” were not self-evident then; they were not even thought of until a much later era. The treatment accorded to the Jews in our own times in the countries where the general conditions are nearest to those prevailing in the dark ages, gives a clear idea of what the Jew had to undergo when the average degree of culture was so much lower than it is in the least developed of the Christian countries at present. The records of the times are so filled with pillage, expulsions and massacres, that they impress us as having been common occurrences, though they happened further apart to those who lived through the peaceful intervals which distance of time makes to appear short to us. There were, of course, some bright spots, the most shining of which was the Iberian peninsula during the earlier part of the Moorish domination. Sometimes a kind-hearted king would afford his Jews protection and even grant them valuable privileges; a clear-headed prince often found it to his own interest to utilize them for the advancement of the commerce of his dominion, and in a rare period of peace and prosperity there also happened a general relaxation of the severity which characterized the time. But if we view the entire thousand years as a single historical period, we find the condition of the Jews slowly deteriorating; with the result that while the modern nations were welded together and came out of the medieval furnace strengthened and developed, the Jews were pushed back, segregated and degraded, ready for the numerous expulsions and various sufferings which continued for more than two centuries in Western Europe and are not yet over in other parts of the Old World.