The comparative liberty enjoyed by the Spanish Jews, under the aegis of the Kings, brought with it opulence and luxury. The Spanish synagogues were renowned throughout Europe for their beauty, and the private dwellings of the Spanish Jews were not less noted for their magnificence. The Spanish Jews, as their brethren elsewhere, set much store by social distinction, and knew how to combine extravagance with economy. The stately names and expensive equipages of the Christian nobility were copied by them, not wisely but too well. Their profuse ostentation of wealth in domestic decoration and personal apparel excited the envy, and royal patronage the jealousy of their neighbours. These feelings, intensified by religious antipathy, laid up a fund of prejudice which only awaited a suitable opportunity for converting itself into active hostility. The same causes which brought about the eruption of anti-Judaism in other countries operated in Spain also. First, the Crusading spirit which, though it produced no immediate massacres in Spain, as it did in Central Europe, remained longer alive by the Spaniard’s undying enmity to the Jew’s cousin, the Saracen invader, whose invasion, it must be remembered, the Jews had facilitated, or, at all events, welcomed. Secondly, the hatred of heresy which, fostered by the monastic orders, found in Spain a more fertile soil than in any other Christian country. So strong and so pertinacious were these influences in the Iberian Peninsula that the Kings who favoured the Jews were often obliged to assuage public irritation, and to save their _protégés_ from the ebullitions of popular fanaticism by separating them from the Christians. Already in the eleventh century we hear of a “Jewish barrier” erected in Tudela. This separation was also countenanced by the Church, though from widely different motives. ♦1079♦ In Coyaca, in the Asturias, a Council decreed that no Christian should reside in the same house with Jews, or partake of their food. Persons caught transgressing this canon were sentenced, if noblemen, to one year’s excommunication, if of lower degree to one hundred lashes. Thus the normal isolation of Israel was encouraged by two powers which, acting with opposite intent, converged to the same dangerous result. But it was not until late in the thirteenth century that the gathering animosity came to a head, and declared itself in more methodical efforts at segregation and humiliation, conversion or extirpation. ♦1212♦