The Spanish Jews, by reason of the peculiarities of their situation, the hostility of their rulers,--which their pecuniary resources and natural acuteness often baffled, yet never entirely overcame,--and their successive domination by races of different origin, faith, and language, were impressed with mental characteristics and peculiarities not to be met with in their brethren of other countries. Their rigid formalism was proverbial, and the Hebrew of Toledo observed more conscientiously the precepts of the Pentateuch and the Talmud than the Hebrew of Damascus or Jerusalem. But their traditional reserve did not prevent them from soliciting proselytes; and it is stated that the rabbis, ignoring the prohibitory injunctions of the national Code, upon one occasion challenged the bishops to a debate, in presence of the throne, upon the merits of their respective systems; an act of audacity which does not seem to have excited even the surprise of the prelates of that age. The Spanish grandee prides himself upon his Gothic ancestry, the _sangre azul_, whose presence is presumed to indicate conclusively that in the ascending line can be found no progenitor of the despised Semitic race. The falsity of this presumption was, however, established by the councils convoked by royal authority at Burgos, Valladolid, and Madrid during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to settle the question of purity of blood. According to the statutes adopted by these Informaciones de Nobleza, as they were called, descent from a Jewish ancestor was solemnly declared to be no blemish upon a noble escutcheon, a decision which affected not a few of the oldest and haughtiest families of Castile and Aragon. There are to-day few of the great houses of Portugal and Spain which have not an admixture of Hebrew blood. Works have been published by ecclesiastics tracing this contaminated lineage to its source, which all the authority of a despotic government was not able to suppress. It is said that the Portuguese King Joseph I. once ordered every male of Jewish descent in his dominions to wear a yellow hat. The Marquis of Pombal appeared with three; and on being asked by the King for what use he intended them, he answered, “In obedience to the royal decree, I have brought one for Your Majesty, one for the Grand Inquisitor, and one for myself.” This anecdote, whose authenticity is well established, shows the extent to which the blood of a once proscribed and persecuted people, despite all attempts at its annihilation, had been infused into the veins of the proudest and most exclusive aristocracy in Europe. CHAPTER XXV THE CHRISTIANS UNDER MOSLEM RULE 711–1492