In two things only did Joseph's conduct differ from his father's; he promoted his co-religionists too conspicuously to positions of state, and behaved haughtily to his subordinates. A near kinsman of his was installed in the office next beneath his own. By these acts Joseph aroused the hatred of the Berbers, the ruling population in Granada, against himself and the Jews. They envied his truly princely splendor. He had a palace which was paved with marble. Certain occurrences during his administration transformed the hatred into fierce anger. Between the heir-apparent Balkin and his former secretary Joseph there was mutual antipathy. Suddenly Balkin died, it was thought by poisoning. King Badis thereupon had some of the servants and wives of the prince executed as guilty of his death. The remainder fled in fear of a similar punishment (1064). It was popularly believed, however, that Joseph had administered the poison to the prince. An incident, in which Joseph revealed himself at once as a humane man, and as a diplomatist devoted to his master, appears to have lost him the favor of Badis. Between the Berbers who held the sovereign power in Granada and other places in Spain and the original Arabs, there raged so fierce a racial hatred that every town of mixed population was divided into two camps. On one occasion King Badis learnt that the Berber ruler in Ronda had been slain in consequence of a conspiracy of the Arabs organized by the king of Seville, and on this account he was filled with mistrust towards the Arabs of his capital. He feared at every moment that he, like his kinsman, would fall a victim to a conspiracy. He thereupon concocted a fiendish plot; he ordered his army to massacre all the Arabs of his capital during divine service on a Friday. This plan he communicated to his Jewish minister, without whose advice he did nothing, adding that his determination was so firmly made that no objections would avail to cause him to desist from his purpose, and that he expected Joseph to maintain the deepest silence about his project. Joseph, however, considered this murderous plan as a baleful political mistake, and omitted nothing whereby he might persuade the bloodthirsty monarch to abandon his design. He asked the king to consider that the plot might miscarry, and the Arabs of the town and of the suburbs might rush to arms in self-defense, and that, even if the whole Arab population were destroyed without resistance, the danger would not disappear, but rather become magnified; for the neighboring states, which, like Seville, were wholly Arab, would be excited to deadly fury, and enter upon a war of revenge against the murderers of their kinsmen. "I see them even now," said Joseph with energy; "even now do I behold them hurrying towards us, burning with rage, each one brandishing his sword over thy head, O king. Foes, countless as the waves of the sea, hurl themselves against thee, and thou and thine