The Inquisition, which made life impossible for Spanish heretics, had no direct power over unbaptized Jews, since it could not convict them of apostasy in connection with a faith they had never professed. Some of their race, indeed, were summoned before the Holy Office, accused of subverting Christian neighbours to Judaism; but their pronounced reluctance to share the privileges of their religion with Gentiles prevented any widespread application of this charge. Nevertheless it was obvious that in a land where their converted brethren had been subject to torture, imprisonment, and death, they themselves could not long hope to escape the fury of popular fanaticism. Their wealth and their pride aroused envy and dislike so violent that their very qualities and virtues appeared to Spanish prejudice as though born of malignant design. The Curate of Los Palacios, enumerating the posts of responsibility and the openings in the skilled labour-market to which their talents and industry gave them access, declared that “they sought only comfortable berths, where they could gain much money with little toil”; as if the work of merchant, land-agent, weaver, tailor, or silversmith, demanded less capacity than tilling the soil or laying bricks. Similarly, their unsurpassed knowledge of medicine and skill in surgery were proclaimed, about the middle of the fifteenth century, by a Franciscan friar of high reputation, to have been acquired solely from a desire to harm their Christian neighbours. It was a suggestion to which the close connection at that time between medicine, astrology, and the black arts, lent some colour. In 1480, Ferdinand and Isabel forbade Christian patients to be attended by Jews; but it is significant that some years later the Spanish Dominicans petitioned for a dispensation from this decree, on the plea that doctors of their own creed were almost impossible to find. It was to a Jew also that John II. of Aragon, Ferdinand’s father, had turned for advice, when overcome by blindness in his old age; with the result that this physician successfully performed a double operation for cataract. Of all the professions and employments, however, to which the unpopularity of the Jew may be traced, it was the office of money-lender that most earned for him the hatred and suspicion of his fellow citizens. The Church had from very early days condemned any lending of money at interest as a form of usury; but since it was impossible to carry on business or trade on a large scale without borrowed capital, Christian financiers as well as needy spendthrifts were driven to have recourse to a people, whose moral code permitted them to effect the loan at a profit.