A few rabbis intrigued to obtain rabbinical office, and involved their several communities in much unseemly strife, as, for example, David Negro and Judah, Isaiah ben Abba-Mari and Jochanan in France, Solomon Zarfati and En-Vidal Ephraim Gerundi in the Island of Majorca, and Chasdaï ben Solomon and Amram Efrati in Valencia, but it must be acknowledged that such incidents were of rare occurrence. To the majority, the rabbinate was as a holy priesthood, the duties of which they sought to discharge in all purity of heart and deed, with devotion and self-denial. They were generally examples to their communities, not only in learning and piety, but in high-mindedness, conscientiousness, and the purity of their morals. Even the less worthy cannot be charged with anything more serious than a desire for place, and a certain degree of irascibility. It would be a gross libel on their memory to compare them with the servants of the church during the same period. At no time in its history had Christianity more reason to be ashamed of its representatives than during the fourteenth and the succeeding century. Since the papacy had established itself at Avignon, it had become a perfect hot-bed of vice, the contagion of which spread over the clergy down to the lowliest friar. Besides, there arose passionate strife between pope and anti-pope, between one college of cardinals and another, dividing the whole of Christendom into two huge, bitterly hostile camps. It was only natural that the clergy should infect the lay world with their immeasurable dissoluteness and vice. Yet these degenerate, inhuman and degraded Christian communities presumed to treat the modest, virtuous, pious Jews as outcasts and accursed of God. Although superior in everything save wickedness and the virtues of a robber chivalry, they were denied the commonest rights of man. They were baited and slaughtered like beasts of the field. In Nördlingen the entire Jewish community, including women and children, was murdered (1384). All over Suabia they were persecuted, and in Augsburg they were imprisoned until a ransom of 20,000 florins was paid. A characteristic illustration is furnished by the following occurrence: The rabbis and communal leaders of central Germany had determined to hold a synod at Weissenfels, in Saxony, for the purpose of deliberating upon certain religious questions, and adopting resolutions of public utility (1386). They had provided themselves with safe-conduct passes from the Saxon princes, it being unsafe for Christians to travel on the public highroads, and, of course, much more so for Jews. Nevertheless, a party of German robber-nobles, anticipating rich booty, waylaid the travelers on their return journey, and, having plundered and ill-used them, threw them into prison, and liberated them only on the payment of a ransom of 5,000 groschen. The rabbis and their companions complained to the princes of this attack, and the latter, indignant at the