The more the authority of the Merovingian _fainéants_, as they have been called, declined, and the more the power of the politic and cautious stewards, Pepin's descendants, rose, the greater was the exemption from persecution and torture enjoyed by the Jews. The predecessors of Charlemagne seem to have felt that the Jews were a useful class of men, whose activity and intellectual capabilities could not but be advantageous to the state. The slave trade alone remained a standing subject of legislation in the Councils; but in spite of their zeal they were unable to abolish the traffic in human beings, because their condemnation applied to only one phase of the trade. The Jews of Germany are to be regarded merely as colonies of the Frankish Jews, and such of them as lived in Austrasia, a province subject to the Merovingian kings, shared the same fate as their brethren in France. According to a chronicle, the most ancient Jews in the Rhine district are said to have been the descendants of the legionaries who took part in the destruction of the Temple. From the vast horde of Jewish prisoners, the Vangioni had chosen the most beautiful women, had brought them back to their stations on the shores of the Rhine and the Main, and had compelled them to minister to the satisfaction of their desires. The children thus begotten of Jewish and Germanic parents were brought up by their mothers in the Jewish faith, their fathers not troubling themselves about them. It is these children who are said to have been the founders of the first Jewish communities between Worms and Mayence. It is certain that a Jewish congregation existed in the Roman colony, the city of Cologne, long before Christianity had been raised to power by Constantine. The heads of the community and its most respected members had obtained from the heathen emperors the privilege of exemption from the onerous municipal offices. The first Christian emperor, however, narrowed the limits of this immunity, exempting only two or three families. The Jews of Cologne enjoyed also the privilege of exercising their own jurisdiction, which they were allowed to retain until the Middle Ages. A non-Jewish plaintiff, even though he were a priest, was obliged to bring his suit against a Jew before the Jewish judge (bishop of the Jews).