Thus, poor in worldly possessions, but rich in hope; defenceless, yet strong in faith, they journeyed from all parts of the country to the frontiers: the healthy and the sick, old men bending over their staffs, little footsore children tottering by their fathers’ sides, and infants clinging to their mothers’ breasts. Venerable Rabbis and scholars, delicately nurtured maidens, young gentlemen, yesterday proud cavaliers, to-day penniless and broken-spirited paupers--they all dragged their weary limbs in various directions: some north, others south; one group to the east and another to the west. Many a wet eye followed the melancholy processions, and many a warm Spanish heart melted to pity, but no hand was held out to the wanderers, no word of comfort was addressed to them: the fear of God restrained many; the fear of Torquemada more. The time of year added to the sadness of the spectacle. Andalusia was bathing in the exuberant beauty of a Spanish summer; the sky smiled blue and bright overhead, the earth was spangled with flowers beneath, the birds warbled blithely in the trees and bushes, the air was sweet with the scent of orange blossoms; Nature seemed to hold a carnival of joy in mockery of the misery and heartlessness of man. The banishment of the Jews from England at the close of the thirteenth century was mere child’s play compared with their expulsion from Spain at the close of the fifteenth. The Jews who left England had only been in the country for two centuries; those who now left Spain had lived there more than twelve. The English exiles had borne small part in England’s greatness; the Spanish Jews had served the state in the highest capacities, had won universal fame in art, science and literature, and had become to the rest of the world’s Jewries an exemplar of that harmonious combination of piety with culture which was nowhere, outside Spain, so prominent a feature of mediaeval life. And in quantity as in quality the Spanish banishment far surpassed its English prototype. The exiles from England amounted at most to sixteen thousand; those from Spain were computed at least as one hundred and sixty thousand. Some accounts even raise them to five times that number. It was a movement on a scale comparable only to that of the exodus of Israel from Egypt, with the sole difference that, whereas the Jews had dwelt in Egypt as strangers and bondsmen in the land, in Spain they had become in many respects Spaniards. But the crime, augmented by a similar crime against the Moors, brought its penalty with it. Even accepting the lowest estimate as nearest the correct one, the price in skill, industry and intelligence, which Spain--despite her recent military achievements and her budding power beyond the seas--had to pay for the gratification of her religious fanaticism cannot easily be calculated; but it can be seen to this day. The same yoke which crushed the alien and the infidel could not but cramp the native and the Christian.