Influence of the Semitic Race on Civilization--Enterprise of the Ancient Jews--Their Eminent Talents--Their Power during the Middle Ages--Their Universal Proscription--Their Condition under the Moors of Spain--Their Extraordinary Attainments--Their Devotion to Letters--Their Academies--Rabbis as Ambassadors of the Khalifs--Learned Men--Poets, Physicians, Statesmen, Philosophers--Maimonides: His Genius and His Works--His Character--Preponderating Influence of the Spanish Jews in Government and Society--Their Necessity to the Ruling Classes--They are driven to Usury--Their Prosperity--They are favored by Alfonso X. and Pedro el Cruel--Their Proficiency in Medicine--Obligations of Mediæval and Modern Science to the Jews--Their Wonderful Survival under Oppression--Their Exile from the Peninsula--Their Sufferings--The Taint of Hebrew Blood in the Aristocracy of Spain and Portugal. The preponderance of Semitic influence is one of the most remarkable phenomena in the annals of human civilization. The progress of those nations, which in ancient times attained the highest rank of intellectual culture, is directly traceable to that influence. The success of the Semitic element in modifying the character of every people with which it had been brought in intimate contact, either by conquest or through commercial intercourse, is one of the most striking and instructive incidents of history. From the days when the Phœnicians controlled the trade of antiquity, profiting by their thorough knowledge of humanity, whose avarice they stimulated by the introduction of unknown luxuries, and whose fears they excited by the invention of portentous fables; through the Middle Ages, whose tyrants and inquisitors plundered and oppressed the Hebrew bankers and merchants of Europe, down to our time, when the Jew is not only the possessor of a large proportion of the wealth of the globe, but also a dominating force in the business community of every city and village of the Old and New Worlds, the enterprising genius of the Semitic race has been paramount in its control over the minds and the fortunes of men. And not merely in a mercantile but in a religious point of view is this influence manifest. The Scriptures and the Koran monopolize the pious reverence of the civilized world. The successors of Mohammed in Hindustan alone changed the faith of forty-one million souls. The most important dogmas of the Church, the leading maxims of kingly government, are of Semitic origin; the majority of the popular legends and tales which compose the folk-lore of France, Germany, Scandinavia, and Britain are indigenous to the Valley of the Nile or the plains of Arabia. Asiatic ideas, which dominated the comparatively insignificant geographical area of the continent of Europe whose appreciation of the advantages of literary and scientific investigation made it so conspicuous amidst mediæval ignorance, have