The Jews reaped the fruit of Italian tolerance. By one of those wonderful paradoxes with which history loves to surprise the student, the people that had crucified Christ, the people that was held guilty of the sufferings of His disciples at the hands of the Pagans, the people that was execrated as a perpetual source of heresy, had from the first dwelt and prospered in the very city which had witnessed the most terrible of those sufferings, and which had early claimed to be revered as the capital of Christendom and the Supreme Court of orthodoxy. While their brethren in France, Germany, and England underwent martyrdom, the Jews of Rome enjoyed comparative, if not uninterrupted, peace. The fury of the Crusades, which stained the waters of the Rhine and the Moselle with Hebrew blood, found no parallel on the banks of the Tiber. The calumnies which stirred up a tempest against the Jews in Norwich, aroused no responsive echo in Rome. The Bulls which doomed the “accursed people” to persecution in those distant realms remained unheeded in the very place where they were framed and signed. The Popes, who denounced and proscribed the “unclean and perfidious race” abroad, with few exceptions, cherished, protected, and trusted individual members of it at home. ♦1162–1165♦ Pope Alexander III., the great antagonist of the German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and of Henry II. of England, had a Jewish Minister of Finance, or treasurer of the household, and on his return to Rome, after his voluntary exile in France, he was met by a jubilant procession of Jewish Rabbis. The Roman Jews were not subject to any special tax, nor was their evidence against Christians considered invalid. Even greater was the liberty enjoyed by the Jews of Southern Italy and Sicily, where they chiefly abounded. The Norman Kings confirmed to them the ancient privilege of trial according to their own laws. ♦1198–1250♦ In Sicily, under Frederick II., there were Jewish administrators and Jewish landowners. A favourite minister of King Roger of Sicily frequented the Jewish synagogues and contributed to the expenses of the Jewish community. Broadly speaking, until the end of the fifteenth century, such ill-feeling as existed towards the Jews in Italy proceeded entirely from their own aloofness and eccentricity, and was in no way fostered by priests or pontiffs. Nothing is more eloquent of the general prosperity of the Italian Jews in those days than the silence of history concerning any religious activity amongst them.