objects were sold at a ridiculously low price. At the appointed time (September, 1306), they were banished, about 100,000 souls, from the country which their ancestors had inhabited, in part at the time of the Roman republic, long before Christianity had spread into France. Some who could not separate themselves from their property and the country which they loved went over to Christianity. The whole congregation of Toulouse is said to have been guilty of this cowardice, which scarcely seems credible. The celebrated seats, at which so much intellect had been displayed, the colleges of Rashi, Tam, and the Tossafists: Troyes, Paris, Sens, Chinon, Orleans; the places in which a higher culture had had its temple: Béziers, Lünel, Montpellier, whence the combatants for and against science were plunged into common misery,--all these schools and synagogues were sold to the highest bidder or given away. A German or an English king might have destroyed the holy places of the Jews--King Philip le Bel made a present of a synagogue to his --coachman. An approximate idea can be formed of the sums which the expulsion and robbery of the Jews brought in to the king, if it is kept in mind that the sale of the Jewish goods in the house of the prefect of Orleans alone brought in 337,000 francs. How many of the refugees, reduced to beggary, fell victims to the hardships of their journey cannot be known. The bitter plaints of those oppressed by the heavy affliction sound mournful and touching even at this distance of time. Estori Parchi, then a youth of many accomplishments and noble heart, a relative of Jacob ben Machir, whose parents had emigrated from Spain to southern France, thus describes his sorrow: "From the house of study have they torn me; naked was I forced as a young man to leave my ancestral home, and wander from land to land, from people to people, whose tongues were strange to me." Parchi at length found a resting-place in Palestine. Another fugitive, the learned Aaron Cohen of Narbonne, poured forth this elegy: "Unhappy me, I saw the misery of the banishment of the sons of Jacob, like a herd of cattle driven asunder. From a position of honor I was thrown into a land of darkness." The sudden turn of fortune which changed rich men into beggars, and exposed the delicate and those used to the comforts of life to bitter privation, filled the bombastic poet Yedaya Bedaresi with gloomy reflections. In vivid colors he painted the trouble and pain of life, and man's helplessness and nothingness. His "Trial of the World" (Bechinath Olam), suggested by personal observation and bitter experience, consequently makes a depressing and mournful impression, and reflects faithfully the melancholy feelings of the ill-starred race.