of Toledo alone exceeded in numbers all the others of Christian Europe combined. The invaluable services they rendered to learning were not inferior to the ingenious methods by which they facilitated international communication and promoted the convenience and security of trade. When suddenly expelled from France by Philip Augustus, they left with Christians in whom they could confide their personal property, which, from its bulk or its value, they were unable to carry with them. After their arrival in Italy, they drew through Lombard merchants upon the custodians of their chattels, either for the goods themselves or for the cash realized from their sale. In this way Europe became indebted to the Jews for the general introduction of bills of exchange, previously invented by their countrymen at Barcelona, which from a benefit to mercantile transactions in the settlement of foreign obligations have now grown to be a commercial necessity. Popular prejudice against the Hebrew nationality was aggravated, not only because of the eminent ability in matters of literature and finance, implying superiority, which it displayed, but on account of its control of the markets of the world and of its possession of the greater part of the money in circulation west of the Bosphorus. From the tenth century, when the Moorish ports of Southern Spain had become the emporiums of the Mediterranean, to the sixteenth, when the discovery of Columbus and the passage of the Cape of Good Hope had opened a new field to the cupidity and ambition of Europe, the trade of three great continents was subservient to the enterprise of the Jews. The commercial heritage bequeathed to their allies by the Phœnicians had endured through changes of empire, through the wrecks of successive dynasties, through persecutions of incredible atrocity, for more than twenty centuries.