The propagation and improvement of a people under circumstances which indicated their speedy and inevitable extinction is one of the most curious problems in the annals of ethnology. Not only is it anomalous, but it is absolutely inexplicable under any scientific and logical hypothesis which can now be advanced. It would ordinarily be conceded that a race affected with congenital leprosy, whose habits were uncleanly, and whose members constantly intermarried, must certainly perish in a few generations. It would also not be denied that such a race would be especially liable to visitations by epidemics, and that its reduced capacity for resistance would induce an extraordinary fatality. Not so, however, with the Jews. They grew stronger by intermarriage. They threw off the disease which had once made them odious in the sight of men. The plague and the typhus which desolated the homes of their neighbors passed them by. They not only survived, but throve under persecution which would have exterminated any other branch of the human family. Their tenacity of life, the persistence of their institutions, the boundless power they wield in the commercial world, their versatility of character, their success in the most difficult undertakings, their national and religious organization maintained in the face of appalling obstacles, tend to confirm the ancient tradition that they are the Chosen People of God. The Hebrew, whatever his capacity or experience, was in the eye of the law immeasurably inferior to the most humble and ignorant of those who ruled him. He paid higher taxes than any one else. His testimony was not competent in a court of justice. He was excluded from the enjoyment of office. If, having become an apostate through force or policy, he addressed a word to one who was loyal to the faith and traditions of his people, even though of his own blood, he was condemned to slavery. He was not permitted to abstain from food which his ordinances declared unclean. The practice of the rite of circumcision, a rite pronounced by the rabbi more meritorious than all others, and enjoined by the Talmud, brought with it confiscation and death. The ancient national records--the books of the Law, the chronicles of bygone dynasties, the treatises of Hebrew physicians already prominent in the world of science--were diligently sought for and destroyed. Every effort was made to separate wives from their husbands and slaves from their masters, by the edict that the ceremony of baptism, when solicited by consort or bondsman, produced, according to circumstances, _ipso facto_, divorce or emancipation. All Jews were enrolled upon the public registers, and at stated times were mustered by the bishop. They were also required to report to the magistrate at every town they visited, to be examined as to their business and destination. The Seventeenth Council of Toledo, by a sweeping decree, seized the property of all the Jews in the kingdom